Old Man's Boy Grows Up by Robert Ruark

Author:Robert Ruark [Ruark, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Published: 2016-03-22T04:00:00+00:00

On this one we were in the high hills of the Masai country of Kenya, where the tame, wild lions keep you alert at night, the hippos splash in the Mara River, the tsetse flies engrave their initials on your hide, and the hyenas remind you of Saturday night in a madhouse. It was a happy camp until that day when one of the jeeps rolled in bearing a tale of tragedy of the highest order.

The Old Man had quite a few trenchant things to say about hunters, and one thing that sticks in my mind was, “No man can call himself a pure hunter until he has committed the damnedest mistake a man can make at a time when he least wants to make it.

“They laugh and carry on a lot about the big fish that got away,” he’d elaborate, “and they kid you about having buck fever or forgetting to load the gun or forgetting to slip off the safety catch. But if you will prowl into the life of any man who has spent considerable time hunting and fishing you will find that everybody, at one time or another, has made a mistake that caused him to kick himself in the behind for the rest of his natural life. And it’s never a big mistake. It’s some damn silly little blunder that the average backward child wouldn’t make, and it always happens to people that ordinarily know the hunting and shooting business backwards.”

I believe I mentioned at the time, with the arrogance of youth, that so far this boy hadn’t made any such stupid mistakes, and didn’t think it was likely that he ever would.

The Old Man grinned his shark’s grin and blew on the inside of his mustache. “You ain’t home yet, son,” he said. “You got another sixty years or so for the law of averages to catch up with you.”

It turned out he was right, but this is not my story. It is die story of this friend whom we are calling Mike.

Mike is a man of middle years, and most of those years, since he comes from the West, have been spent hunting and fishing when time allowed. He says he does not shoot until he knows he can kill, preferring not to shoot at all rather than wound. He also wears Apache moccasins to ensure quiet stalking.

As a matter of fact, Mike is more a maniacal fisherman than a possessed hunter, and one of our more adept dry-fly flingers. But he likes bird shooting, and he has killed his elk and his mule deer and antelope, and he has caught very large angry fish on very fine thread. Mike, largely because of me, became deeply bitten by the Africa bug, and this bite festered when his charming wife Jill expressed a desire for a leopard to spread in front of her fireplace.

This Jill is a very determined woman, being of Nordic extraction, and when she sets her mouth for something to happen it had better happen.

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