The Old Man and the Boy

Many times I have sat here and tried to write about looking down through a scope and seeing deer, or looking over a bead and seeing bird, trying to explain why and what it felt like to do so, but...

I've read the Green Hills of Africa by Papa, and thought, that was it. And it is a great work yet through the eyes of a grown man full of jealousies and wit. But this newly read book, this work by Robert Ruark, makes poetry of the hunt and tells of the whys and the hows that I haven't really been able to confer with you just so.

I can't tell you about it without reading it to you...

The gist of it is the author telling stories and memories of his grandfather when the author was a young boy. We see a glimpse of Brunswick County, North Carolina in the thirties, and how they made their way hunting and fishing and living before times had a chance to change.

Of course the Old Man is wise and the boy eager. So we learn about hunting from the Old Man just as the boy did. For those of us who hunt, we read things in print that we've only felt, or understood without ever having been told, yet recognize immediately when read.

And for those that do not hunt, there's the picture painted for you of how it feels, and what it means to be a sportsman and hunter and to take part in the ritual that still struggles on in the face of urban development and anti-firearm views that are pervading this over-crowded country.

I reckon I can't read it to you so I'll just grab and show you quotes that strike the "tuning fork" in my heart:


The boy on an early hunt gets schooled in gun safety. That too is an early subject for all hunters and the Old Man sums it up best with:

'The older you get the carefuller you'll be. When you're as old as I am, you'll be so scared of a firearm that every young man you know will call you a damned old maid. But damned old maids don't shoot the heads off their friends in duck blinds or fire blind into a bush where a deer walked in and then go pick up their best buddy with a hole in his chest.'

He writes of a problem most men still struggle with, most men who were boys too:

Like most boys, I was as bloodthirsty as a cannibal. I got my first air gun when I was just six years old, and the robins and the blue jays and the catbirds and the rain crows really took a pounding. I shot everything from English sparrows to the neighbor's cat. When we had nothing better to do, my cousin Roy and I went out into the woods and played Indians and shot each other from ambush. Why somebody didn't lose an eye will always be a source of wonder to me.

A big, old, sassy mocker lived in the magnolia tree alongside our house, and he used to sing late at night in the moonlight. He would scatter those notes around like a fisherman on Saturday-night payoff. He was a pet of my grandmother's; so it was natural when I took down the Daisy one day and removed him from the concert business, the Old Man took down my pants and applied a very limber lath to my behind. It was one of the few times I ever had a hand laid on me, and it made an impression.

'Hunting,' the Old Man said when my noise had slacked off, 'is the noblest sport yet devised by the hand of man. There were mighty hunters in the Bible, and all the caves where the cave men lived are full of carvings of assorted game the head of the house drug home. If you hunt to eat, or hunt for sport for something fine, something that will make you proud, and make you remember every single detail of the day you found him and shot him, that is a good thing too.

'But if there's one thing I despise it's a killer, some blood-crazy idiot that just goes around bam-bamming at everything he sees. A man who takes pleasure in death just for death's sake is rotten somewhere inside, and you'll find him doing things later on in life that'll prove it. I realize all young'uns get that first phase when they want to carve up desks and bust windows and shoot mockingbirds, but I aim to see you grow out of it, or I'll have every last inch of hide off your rear end.

'I want you to go to bed tonight and stay awake thinking about the mockingbird that sung so pretty and your grandmother loved, and then think of that little mess of dirty feathers even the cat didn't want. And then think a little bit about this nice air rifle that Santa Claus brought you to learn to shoot with, and wish you had it back again.'
Whereupon the Old Man took the little Daisy and busted it over his knee, and threw it over into the bushes where he had thrown the carcass of the mockingbird. That was Lesson One.

And I submit to you that another NC native, Andy Griffith, probably read this in Outdoor Life and thought it'd make a good episode.

Well, I can't keep stealing quotes or Henry Holt and Company, LLC are gonna have a cow. But I will close my mentioning that Ruark writes of fishing too, which though not as dear to my heart as hunting, fishing still makes me smile when my kids and I catch a mess of fish, then deep fry the hapless.

He says to the boy:

'Now, then, son,' the Old Man said, 'we ain't goin' to talk any, because fishin' is a silent sport and a lot of conversation scares the fish and wrecks the mood. What I want you yo do is set there and fish, and when the fish ain't bitin' I want you to listen and look and think. Think about heaven and hell and just how long is hereafter. Look around you and don't take nothing for granted. Look at everything you see and listen to everything you hear, just like you were brand-new come from another world, and think about all those things and how they got there. Now let's fish.'

See it seems the boy had been ditching Sunday school and had been caught shooting craps in the church basement, so the Old Man saw fit to take him fishing to jog the boy's perspective a little. And it seems to work, for the boy, Ruark, writes a little further on in the chapter:

...I got to thinking about eternity, and how long something that never ended would be, and I got to thinking about how much trouble Somebody went to, to make things like cocoons that butterflies come out of, and seasons and rain and moss on trees, and frogs and fish and possums and coons and quail and flowers and ferns and water and moons and suns and stars and winds. And boys. Especially boys.

I have a boy myself, and this summer he'll be working the pages of this beautiful book before he gets on the odious Wii or the PsP or leaves the house to shoot his friends with airsoft guns...yes, somethings never change.

-rbm