Old Man's Boy Grows Up

by Robert Ruark

  The Old Man yawned and scratched himself. “There are a great many fine things about hunting and fishing,” he went on. “You can look at a deer-foot knife handle and remember what time the sun rose, how late the dew lasted, what the camp was like, how the food tasted, how the dogs sounded, when the sun set, when the moon rose, how the owls hooted, all the sounds and sights and tastes and feels. There is that moment of triumph when you boat the trout or haul in the bass or shoot the deer or score a snappy double on the birds. But it is really anti-climax to the other stuff. The adventure is ended with the bird in the coat, the fish in the creel, the deer gutted and hung in the tree. It is sad, a little bit, because all the anticipation is gone, the fact accomplished, the sport over. And that’s where lying comes in.

  “It is a sin to call it lying. It isn’t, really. It’s taking a piece of nice, honest cloth and embroidering a pretty design on it. You can’t do the embroidery without you got the cloth first. You sit around and you remember and you talk in front of the fire, and gradually you swindle yourself into believing that the deer had eighteen points instead of twelve. You shot thirty ducks instead of fifteen. You only used half as many cartridges as you actually used, and all the fish were world records.

  “This is a highly healthy thing. When you are a man grown you are too old for fairy stories, for folk tales, but any man is only a little boy with creaky joints and a bald spot, a mortgage and dyspepsia. He still needs to be amused, and this excessive use of imagination which we call fish stories is just an old little boy telling himself fanciful adventures to keep the hobgoblins away. Without these little embroideries life is mostly a matter of getting up in the morning, staggering through the day, going to bed at night, and thinking about the bills you haven’t got the money to pay. When you get older,” he said gently, “I think you’ll understand what I mean.”

  “Where does it start and where does it stop?” I asked him. “Where does this embroidery leave off?”

  “A man can overdo it,” the Old Man replied. “I know a lot of bums who have managed to talk themselves into the idea that nothing’s their fault, that they ain’t lazy, and the world owes them a living. I know drunks that blame what’s wrong with them on the state of the cosmos or the boss is down on them or their wives don’t like ‘em, when all the time they’re drunks because they drink too much liquor. That is when you are really off with the birds.

  “But a little self-delusion is good for the digestion, aids sleep, and improves conversation. It don’t hurt a man to tell himself that things would’ve been different if the dog had a cold nose that day or the wind was right instead of wrong or that if he’d led it another foot he would have had it in the bag. And bimeby you believe it and are happy with it and it isn’t a lie or a self-delusion any more. It’s a fact, because you made it so by constant practice.”

  Of course, I see now that the Old Man was right, as he was mostly right. I have been to a war and I have written a great many words. I have hunted and fished and traveled the world. And I find that without any intent at real falsehood I have managed to embroider. So few true stories are letter-perfect. All need a little lacework, a little padding here, a little decoration there.

  Recently in Africa I shot a leopard and that was quite a feat, if I do say it myself, as it had eluded the best six white hunters I know for a matter of more than two years. It steadfastly refused to appear in daylight. More by luck than design I got it to come to the tree in shooting light, nailed it precisely through the shoulders, and celebrated for a week.

  In my mind that leopard is already becoming a legend. I did things to attract it that I really didn’t do, but almost did—if I’d thought of the things at the time. The leopard has already grown about a foot in length and is easily another thirty pounds heavier. We stalked it a hundred yards at most but the distance has moved up to half a mile, and the other difficulties, from the pig as bait to bees in the tree, have grown apace.

  A friend of mine shot another leopard, a big female, under most unusual circumstances on a recent safari. He shot it charging and growling and moving as only a hurried leopard can travel. Since that day I have heard the story about fifty times. (The exaggeration is mine—actually only about twenty-two times.) But the tale has changed as many times as he has told it. He is now referring to “she” as “he,” and the beast has doubled in size, ferocity, and noise. We went together to the taxidermist one day in Nairobi and inspected a male leopard whose hide was as big as that of a medium-size tiger.

  “I’d say mine was a little bigger, wouldn’t you?” the friend said, believing it.

  “I think yours was a lot bigger,” I said, compounding the felony and believing it.

  Back to the Old Man. I once declared my intention to hunt in Africa when I was a big boy, if the gods would so allow.

  “I hope to live to see it,” the Old Man said. “But most likely I won’t. But I will make you a bet right now: By the time you get through talking about it and thinking about it, all the lions will be as big as elephants, all the elephants as big as houses, and when you go to sleep at night you will count the ammunition and find you never missed a shot.”

  The strange thing is that the Old Man was right. There was one day when I shot at a buffalo with a .318 and killed him and another standing behind him. Or was that a .300 Magnum and did it happen to Harry Selby?

  8—Same Knife; Different Boy

  Every time I pick up a paper and read about the teenagers doing this and the teenagers doing that and some young maniac shooting people or beating them up for fun I have a hard time reconciling it with the fellows I knew when I was a teenager. In days not so dead teenagers meant somebody between twelve and twenty, but today it’s gotten to be a term that certainly connotes problem and may connote criminal.

  When I hear “teenager” today I almost immediately think in terms of switchblade knives, zip guns, gangs, rebellion, violence, and psychologic difficulty. The emphasis we put on certain examples of adolescence certainly far outweighs the indisputable fact that there are millions of good kids in jeans, who have a lot of fun with and without their folks, who know wind from water and how to build a campfire, run a motorboat, or catch a fish.

  The Old Man had a saying about young’uns. He said they were fit to bust with energy, and unless you let the energy loose they would bust. The trick, he said, was to channel that energy down some road that wouldn’t lead to window-breaking and car-stealing. He was a master at diverting energy and fetching the adolescent home so tired from the diversion that he didn’t feel like getting into trouble.

  I think today, even more than thirty years ago, that an interest in and knowledge of all dangerous weapons, including knives and pistols—brought out into the open and carefully supervised—is a healthy deterrent to misuse of those weapons. Possibly this does not apply to some social structures in the greater cities, but it never did really.

  As the Boy I owned a knife from the time I was six. “The knife,” the Old Man said, “is a tool, and a dangerous one. You ain’t supposed to carry it open, and when you cut, always cut away from you. Keep it sharp, because if it’s dull it ain’t any use for what it’s made for. But whittle away from you.”

  Thirty-five years later I still bear two magnificent scars on my left thumb. After acquiring those wounds I heeded the admonition and collected no more scars.

  We all carried knives—starting with the twenty-five-cent barlow and working up to things with really wicked ripping blades—for skinning animals and cleaning fish. There was also a special saw-toothed, fish-scaling-and-bait-cutting knife in the tackle box, and as we grew a little older a sheath knife that we wore proudly as a sign of our frontiersmanship. But I would rather have gone without my pants than my pocketknife.

  There wasn’t a day when that dangerous weapon didn’t come into use a dozen times—just plain whittling, cutting some cane to make arrows for the bownarrer, fixing a leader on a fishline, opening a can, cleaning fingernails (not very likely) or once, in
my case, performing a bit of impromptu surgery on my own foot. I expect if you asked a really expert outdoorsman to name the last weapon he would abandon in the wilds he’d say, “Knife.”

  With a blade of sufficient temper there is nothing you can’t do with a knife except shoot. And you can even make an acceptable substitute for that. The old Boers of South Africa used to kill zebra and wildebeest for their hides, meat, and tallow by riding in among the herds and stabbing them in the withers, a rather risky business if the horse stepped into a pig hole.

  You can make a bow and arrows with a knife. You can literally make a canoe with a knife, and you can make a shelter with a knife, merely by cutting down small trees and using anything from a strip cut off your shirt to some tough twisted bark to tie the saplings and the sheltering foliage—whether it’s palm frond or pine branches—together.

  I reckon the stone knife was man’s first important tool. It really became a weapon when he cut down a short sapling, whittled it smooth, and tied the knife onto the end of it, so he could throw it straighter. In a way, it was kind of a Stone Age zip gun.

  When I was last in New Guinea a benevolent gentleman of the modern Stone Age, a former cannibal, gave me a magnificent ax. The blade is of greenstone and sharp enough to fell a tree, split the skull of an enemy, kill a pig, or build a house. The handle is shaped like a big T with a curved top, and is made from a single root or branch of hardwood. The greenstone blade was whetted by a warrior sitting in a river and using sand and rushing water to bring it to an edge. It fits into one arm of the T and is balanced by the branch that forms the other arm. The whole thing is bound together by a decorative crosshatched sennit of the tough-barked pitpit palm, and is as tightly woven as cloth. The modern New Guinea Stone-Ager, discovered only in the mid-1930’s, depends on this ax as the foundation of his entire economy.

  Point is, it was put together with a knife.

  The greatest archers of modern time I know are the Kuku-kuku tribes of the New Guinea highlands. Their bow is a five-foot number made of black palm. It is strung with a fiber about half an inch wide. The arrows are unfletched, unnotched, untipped—merely fire-hardened. But they are deadly if only because of filth, and when fired in salvos they are something to see. I have watched one little black gentleman shove four into the air before the first one hit ground.

  I have a spear from New Guinea and a shield made from a root. That shield will turn a bullet, unless it is centered dead on, and you can throw that spear entirely through a man’s soft section. The spear is not tipped—just plain fire-hardened wood. And I have seen knives of tempered cane that cut beautifully.

  Here again the knife, whether of wood or stone, made the other implements and weapons.

  This is how I first came to regard a knife as something you used to keep the wolf from the knife-made door, not as something to stick into a stranger for fun. As far as I can remember us kids fought as kids will, but nobody ever drew a knife on anybody.

  The same respect applied to guns. We started out at about six with a Daisy air gun, and by the time we hit seven or eight we graduated to a single-shot .22, and at eight or nine we got a 20-gauge shotgun. The care and feeding of these weapons, as I may have mentioned before, was forcefully impressed by a stout, whippy stick on the seat of your pants. In a very short time we learned to respect the tremendous power for harm, as well as the tremendous power for fun and positive enjoyment. I think the worst hiding I ever got was when the Old Man caught me and some cousins playing cowboys and Injuns by shooting each other in the pants with air rifles. My stern tingled for a time, and not from a BB pellet either.

  Respect for what could kill you was hammered into our hides. Every summer, when the upcountry people came to the beaches, there was always somebody being hauled out of the water, drowned or half-drowned, because of being swept off-shore by the vicious currents that were formed by tide and two inlets to the major island. There is no such thing as undertow, but there are these currents, dictated by wind and tide and inlet, from sea to sound, and the wise guys always managed to die in defense of not appearing chicken, as they call it today.

  My tribe comes from a long line of seafaring folk, and the first thing the Old Man impressed on me when I was a nose-holding, feet-first-jumping moppet was that the big stretch of blue stuff out there could kill unless you kept an eye on it every minute.

  “Be frightened of it,” he said. “It’s a hell of a sight bigger than you are, and twice as ornery, twice as tricky.”

  Perhaps I am not very clear here, but what I am getting at is that my teenage group possessed, legally, all the death-dealing, injury-wielding weapons that are now owned clandestinely by the “bad” kids. There was a certain pride in being trusted. My cousins and friends and I used to go off on a Saturday picnic into the local wilds with enough armament to conquer the county—rifles, shotguns, knives, scout axes—and were not regarded as a serious menace to the community. Or to each other.

  It is perfectly true that we were free of the modern boons of child psychiatry, television, and progressive schooling. We denied ourselves much parental supervision, since we were out from dawn until dark. We cut Sunday school whenever possible, and the people we knew were rough—watermen, bush-rangers, and city toughs. Mostly we came from medium-poor to poor families.

  Why aren’t we all in jail? I confess I have raided other people’s watermelon patches and learned to chew tobacco at a very early age. I once jacklighted a deer and got into terrible trouble. But that seems a minor list of sins when you remember that I—and my chums—were all possessed of formidable killing machinery. And if it came to racial tensions, God knows there were enough people of another color around to work out on.

  We never traveled in packs. Cliques—yes. Three or four boys of an age group generally hunted and fished, and, when we were older and the sap began to rise, dated together. But the cliques never fought one another. Moonshiners and boot-leggers I knew by the score, yet they never taught me any nastiness. And then we came out of the teens in the teeth of the depression, which, Lord knows, showed a glistening set of fangs.

  A moral is not intended here. I know a flock of modern kids with a cut of jib similar to ours, and they have been handicapped by all the helpful aids to growing up that prevail in this decade. They still remain good kids, and do not run around killing each other for kicks.

  ...all of which leads me to the fact that during the summer they bagged John Dillinger in front of that Chicago theater everybody was making a lot of noise about this brave Robin Hood of the underworld and The Lady in Red and a lot of similar nonsense. You would have thought this thug was a combination of Davy Crockett and Mike Fink, and that his contemporaries—Pretty Boy Floyd and Ma Barker and her brood—combined the nobler portions of Dan’l Boone and Hannah Somebody, who stood off the Injuns in the blockhouse raid.

  I didn’t take much stock in all the hullabaloo. The Old Man’s memory was a bit too fresh—that and a dressing down he gave me one time when I did something bad. I disremember exactly what sin against the commonwealth I had committed, but the Old Man narrowed his eyes and sort of sneered.

  “Who do you think you are?” he asked. “Judge Roy Bean? The law west of the Pecos? You make your own rules?”

  “Who? What? No sir,” I said.

  “Your ignorance of your country’s folklore is lamentable,” the Old Man said, coming even closer to a sneer. “I don’t suppose you ever heard of Joaquin Murieta or Billy the Kid or even Jesse James”

  “I heard about Jesse James,” I said. “He was an outlaw. He robbed the rich to give to the poor, and he was shot down in a dastardly fashion.”

  “Oh my God,” the Old Man said, and clapped his brow. “In a dastardly fashion.’ A dastardly fashion. You know what dastardly means?”

  “No sir,” I said. “I read it somewhere.”

  “You get a dictionary for Christmas,” the Old Man said grimly. “But right now you get a little lecture.”

  I settled down for the
long winter.

  “I called you Roy Bean because there was a hanging Judge by that name one time, when the West was rough and they were building railroads with a lot of ignorant riffraff. There was so much murder and mayhem about that there was a saying: ‘No law west of the Pecos.’ So a scallywag named Roy Bean—a gunfighter, drunk, cowpoke, blockade runner, and saloonkeeper—set up shop in a place called Langtry, Texas. He opened a saloon called ‘The Jersey Lily’ after Lillie Langtry, and got appointed justice of the peace. He held court in the saloon, and announced that he was the ‘law west of the Pecos.’ In a way he was, because he would try you, fine you, and hang you all in the same motion. He set himself up as law, and justice didn’t enter into it.”

  The Old Man snorted through his mustache.

  “This bum was a hero when I was a boy,” he said “We are a peculiar people, us Americans. All a fellow has to do is take the law in his own hands and we make a hero of him. Like this Billy the Kid. A nasty little bucktoothed rat, who’d shoot his mother in the back, who wasn’t even a very good murderer, and who got killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett when he was twenty-one. Now they got songs about him.

  “And this California bandit, Murieta. He is still famous, since 1853, but they ain’t even certain it was him they killed and cut the head off of to exhibit around at the fairs. There was about five Joaquins—all bums, all rustlers and back-shooters—working at the time, and they seized onto the first Mexican they could bushwhack who looked like his name might of been Joaquin.