Old Man's Boy Grows Up

by Robert Ruark

  There was nothing to do but make the best of the mess I’d landed myself in. I clanked a couple of hundred yards off the main road, found myself a little bare patch of ground, and unslung about a hundred pounds of accoutrement. Cursing myself and the Old Man for not remembering the flashlight I lit some kitchen matches, and managed to scrabble up some pine cones, which made the beginnings of a fire. In the faintly flaring light I was able to pick up a few dead branches, and I found a fat pine stump that granted me a few slivers of lightwood. Then, with the fire blazing, I was able to accumulate a few dead logs. Well, I thought, I had man’s first friend—fire.

  I took the hatchet and went round the perimeter to the little longleaf pine saplings, and cut myself sufficient butts to make a springy basis for a bed. I spread one blanket over the pine branches, weighting its corners with stones, and pulled the other blanket up over the bottom covering. At least I had a fire and a place to sleep.

  But a sudden pang in the pit of my stomach told me that I didn’t have anything to eat. There was about half a pound of side meat in the knapsack, and that would have to do. I put the fat pork in the skillet and browned it, mentally deploring the waste of grease, and chewed on enough of the fat meat to quiet my belly.

  The stars were out now, and I lay down on my bed. The pine boughs were not nearly so springy as I remembered, and some of the butts gouged me in the back. Owls hooted, and there were the usual myriad night noises that are so terrifying unless you have company.

  Dew fell, and the blankets were stiff with it and my face was wet-cold with it. The fire was flickering low, casting eerie shadows into my imagination. I was a big boy. I was big enough to shoot a gun. I was big enough to run away to the West or to Canada. But I was not too big to cry. I cried myself into a semblance of sleep. It was just dawning when the rattle of a car stopping roused me from a nightmare-ridden slumber.

  In a few minutes I heard footsteps out in the brush, and an occasional curse. It was the Old Man, standing over me, looking down at a very lonely lad.

  “I wouldn’t of come back,” he said, “but when I was helping you out of the car I lost my best pipe. You see anything of it?”

  “No sir,” I said, scrambling out of my uneasy bed, “but if you like I’ll help you look for it.”

  “All right,” the Old Man said. “It’s a little dark yet. Where’s your flashlight?”

  “We—I forgot to bring one,” I said.

  “Well,” the Old Man said, “I didn’t. Suppose you use mine. And the next time you run away be damned sure you’re fully equipped for it.”

  Of course he never lost a pipe, and he did not insist that I strap myself back into my running-away kit.

  “I told your grandma you’d gone camping with some of the other boys,” the Old Man said. “If I was you I’d keep my mouth shut about this.”

  “Yes sir,” I said.

  This is the first time I’ve opened it, but since everybody’s gone but me it don’t make no difference now.

  12—It Always Rains on Saturday

  The rain sheeted against the panes. Recurrent blasts of wind shook the house, rattled the doors, struck wildly at the windows. A draft crept down the chimney to loosen the ashes, to drive smoke snaking into the room, and to spread a chill around the ankles.

  “It’s Saturday,” I said to the Old Man. “Why does it always have to rain on Saturday?”

  My voice was bitter. The good Lord above had betrayed me. Here it was Saturday, and the bird season freshly opened in midweek, and I had been to the wholesale grocery where my Pa worked, and had bought some shotgun shells, and now my mind was out in the country. The soybeans were velvety gray capsules on their stalks, and the black-eyed peas had succumbed to frost, and the field peas—the peanuts—were clustered lusciously on their stalks atop the moist red earth, lying helpless where the plow had torn them from the earth. A feast lying fallow for the birds.

  If it had not been for the rain—the dratted rain, the pounding, slashing, miserable rain—I would be out there on the back forty. I would be picking a handful of chinquapins and cupping a mouthful of sparkleberries, and it would just be a matter of where I sent the dogs. The quail season had opened, the dove season was still on, fall plowing was finished, and the birds would be pinpointed. All you had to do was wave at Frank, whistle in Sandy, or just nod at Tom, and you could predict to square yards where the birds would collect. Except for this rain—this I-wish-I-was-bigger-so-I-could-come-right-out-and-say-it rain.

  “I go to school all week,” I said to the Old Man. “Monday through Friday, I go to school. I study Latin, which nobody speaks, and algebra, which I will never understand, and read that Chaucer foolishness—you ever know anybody who went around saying, ‘Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote’?—and Miss Emma Martin says I’m goin’ to flunk English, and Miss Rachel Clifford says that I ain’t got the right interest in Charlie-Main and the Saracens. The sun shines bright all week and then it sets red and clear on Friday, and I got a pocketful of shells and three bird dogs, and look at it! Rain! “Aprille with his shoures soote,” my foot! It’s plain old rain—rain on the only day I got off! “

  “Here, here, calm down,” the Old Man said. “Take it easy. You ain’t Noah, and this ain’t an ark. It’s rained before and it’ll rain again. What do you want me to do, ask God to stop it so that one little microbe on the face of the earth can go bird huntin’? I thought you were bigger than that by now.”

  “Well, it just don’t seem fair. I don’t care if it rains from Monday through Friday and on Sunday, too. I don’t care if it snows or sleets. But Saturday is the only day I get off, and it just ain’t supposed to rain on Saturday!”

  The Old Man looked at me with his eyes sort of sleepy. He rubbed his nose with one finger. “Son,” he said, “when you’re as old as me you’ll realize that it always rains on Saturday. That’s the tragedy of bein’ alive. Saturday is for rainin’, like work is for doin’, like cryin’ makes up for laughin’. Believe me. From now until the day you die it’ll nearly always rain on Saturday. As far as I know, Noah couldn’t lick it, and he had the Lord and all the animals goin’ strong for him. When he cut loose that dove...”

  I was still mad. I had got to where I could handle the Old Man’s philosophy in small swallows, but just hearing the word “dove” made me sore as a boil. I thought about all that corn still standing, all those soybeans, all those peanuts and black-eyed peas, and all those doves I wasn’t shooting, and I didn’t want any lectures about olive branches. The rain kept pounding down, and I thought about how long it was going to be until next Saturday.

  The Old Man always enjoyed seeing me heated up, and he liked to keep it going. He had a lot of sayings that were just calculated to rile me. And he could make his voice kind of mincing, sissylike, like an old-maid schoolteacher’s.

  “Remember,” he was singsonging now, “April showers make May flowers. It isn’t rainin’ rain to me, it’s rainin’ violets. That ain’t really rain out there. That’s violets, daffodils, and maybe pee-tunias.”

  Then he snickered. I guess the word “pee-tunias” got him. “All right,” he said. “I’ll let you up. I don’t like rain no more than you do, because I got joints with aches you don’t know about; but if you’re ever goin’ to be big enough to call yourself a man you got to remember one thing: There ain’t any use developin’ ulcers over what you can’t help. Few things in this life ever work out the way you had them figgered. And there are certain things like wind and rain and high tides that you just can’t control, even if you beat your brains out. Might help you someday, when you’re older, to remember it. If you can’t beat it, join it—or least don’t try to fight it.”

  I’m not going to sit here and tell you that I felt any less mad at Providence for keeping me nailed to the hearthside on a day when I had my mouth fixed for bird hunting. I paced like a nervous puppy, and when the Old Man suggested I try a book I tried it, but I couldn’t concentrate, even though it was a book by a man named
Selous, a hunter who seemed to know an awful lot about what he was writing.

  And I didn’t feel any more kindly disposed toward Sunday, when the dawn broke clear and I took all the dogs out—without guns, of course, because I wasn’t allowed to shoot on Sunday—and we found every covey I knew we should have found yesterday, and put up enough droves of doves to have reassured all the Arks that ever was or ever will be. I guarantee that the sun shone all through the next school week, although somebody made a bargain with me and carried it over through Saturday. It rained real hard on Sunday, and I didn’t have to leave the country to go to town to Sunday school.

  “You can call that a bonus,” the Old Man said. “You see how everything works out for the best?”

  I was prepared to agree. I had indulged my blood lust to a limit on everything but people the day before. Coming back to the house I had even shot a coon, and was figuring to make myself a cap out of the hide, like D. Boone, who “cilled a bar” on that tree. That was the kind of day when I envied a man who had not been subjected to sufficient schooling to know how to spell “killed” and “bear,” and so could hunt seven days a week. At least, I thought, he could spell better than Old Man Chaucer, him and his “droghte of March hath perced to the roote.” I’ll take Dan Boone and that bar he cilled on that tree every time. “And bathed every veyne in swich licour,” Chaucer said. I bet Dan Boone just had him a drink of hard corn likker and went out looking for a fresh bear.

  Somehow I survived the educational processes, although some people would say you’d never know it, and went on to other things. I didn’t really start to think about rainy Saturdays and Noah’s arks and The Canterbury Tales until one day in Tanganyika, a great many years later, when a Mr. Frank Bowman and I got mixed up with nature the hard way. And believe me, getting mixed up with ordinary nature in Brunswick County, North Carolina, is one nest of eggs, and taking on nature in Darkest A. is quite another.

  Frank Bowman is a professional hunter, a slightly testy gentleman, and he has fought sufficient elements in Australia, where he came from, and in Africa, where he works, to know that you can’t do much better than you can do. But he’ll still quarrel with the process. In Swahili it’s “shauri a Mungu” or God’s will, and Frank’s willing to argue the point.

  Frank and I had been away up in Tanganyika in a place called Singida, shooting—or trying to shoot—greater kudu, a creature that is considerably larger than a quail or a dove. We had a variety of ornery vehicles: one jeep that eventually got put out of its misery and a big fat English truck that had a wistful habit of catching fire every time you spat.

  Through some arrangement with the hunters’ gods who control kudu I had shot me a nice heavy-horned fellow along about the same time a large black cloud suggested that if we did not plan to spend the rainy season in and around Singida we had better up-anchor and get the hell out of there right now. That Africa, as somebody once said, is a large chunk of real estate, and we were a fur piece away from where we were headed.

  There were certain obstacles before our arrival at the promised land. One was a greasy clay hill straight up the side of a mountain, that is so bad you are not allowed into the area if it seems dubious that you can make the climb. But once allowed in and up it, you still have to go down again, whereupon you are confronted with a desert. This desert is largely surfaced with cotton soil and lava dust, in which your happy little axles can sink. It’s only about sixty-five miles wide, the Serengeti, but I have heard tell of another time when one of the best hunters in east Africa spent an unhappy three weeks just simply bogged down and cussing.

  In an operation of this sort rain is your active enemy. And what makes it especially your enemy is that you can see it, see it in the black clouds speeding up on you, so that if you blow a tire, if your engine catches fire the rain is right on top of you and you can see the track turn to muck, turn to sticky goo; and all of a sudden, a profane sudden, you are just as immobilized, just as lost, just as planted as if somebody had stolen your wheels.

  Also, there’s precious little firewood. You are marooned, and what makes it doubly ironic you are not supposed to shoot, either to feed or to protect yourself, since it is a government park. The fact that it is a native poachers’ paradise does not concern you. You are not supposed to shoot, even to avoid starvation. The sixty lions over thataway, eating their heads off on the game that blacks the plains, are a thumbed nose at your integrity. The alkali lakes are also an insult to thirst.

  Certainly that last hill behind you, that one you just came slipping down, sliding slantwise from the greasy red clay to the greasier, more-suckingly clinging cotton soil, is a frightener, and then that menacing black cloud that hovers, that follows, that threatens ahead—rain? Man, nobody who ever got thwarted on a Brunswick County Saturday ever even heard about rain.

  In the case of Brother Bowman and me, we were lucky, just plain-out country lucky. We slid down the mountain backward, the truck slewing in circles, and beat that rain all the way across the Serengeti. I will permit Bowman a small knock against me about our spending one extra day shooting the guinea fowl, and all would have been well if we had left a little earlier on the way from Singida; but then Bowman must yield on the fact that we constantly had to send people back for extra motor parts because the lorry kept catching fire. Bowman kept cursing the Kipsigi driver for unwarranted use of overextended intelligence, such as throwing sand on the wrong side of the truck’s engine at about twelve thousand feet, with a rainstorm hotly pursuing us.

  Running a forced foot race with rain in Africa is one of the most unrewarding sports I ever got tangled up with. As we crossed the desert it would look for a minute as if we’d make it, and then something would happen and it would look as if we wouldn’t. If we didn’t...

  We did. We got to a river called the Grummetti just as the rains clashed, one behind, one ahead of us. We barely crossed the river with all the vehicles just before it went into flood—in flood behind us, in flood ahead of us in its other branches. Brother Noah, perched high atop Ararat, was never more precisely marooned than Frank and I. Fortunately, just as the cloudburst started, the boys managed to wrestle the tents up and hoe drainage ditches around them. Fortunately, too, shauri a Mungu touched my trigger finger and I accidentally managed to shoot an impala for camp meat. When I pulled the trigger the rain was coming down so hard that I couldn’t have seen through a scope with windshield wipers.

  We collected the poor critter and barely squished through the mud back to our dreary camp. There was no such thing as a real fire; the wood was sopping and the rain was coming down so hard that it was falling sideways. Somerset Maugham once wrote something called Rain. After a week in that downpour I am here to tell you I could write a series of clinical novels called Rain.

  Brother Bowman and I had a real good time, though. For some reason we never snapped at each other once. The cook made sufficient pathetic fire to feed us fresh meat until we ran out of impala, and then he started hacking at the tins with his panga, and corned willy is not really unpalatable. I got out the Swahili dictionary and increased my vocabulary by another six or seven words, and wrote some stuff on the rusty typewriter—stuff that I would have to write someday anyhow, even when the sun was shining. The radio didn’t work, but nobody cared much.

  Bowman had recently come back from crocodile shooting in northern Australia, and I was not so long out of duck hunting in Spain and tiger shooting in India. We managed to sit and tell lies to each other very profitably for a week.

  The rain hit that canvas like a giant slapping it with the flat of his hand, and you could hear the small roar as it went by the tent in runnels to spill into the almost raging stream below. (I will tell you a little more about African rain. In the lugga country of the Northern Frontier I have seen huge trees cast as high as thirty or forty feet above the banks of the river bed, and the whole Northern Frontier District is off limits, from Isiolo all the way to Ethiopia, during the wet season.)

  Finally the r
ains stopped and the sun came out and the river shrank and we could move the vehicles again, and I was almost sorry. Frank and I had both learned a lesson in temper control. We had both learned some sort of lesson about not fighting city hall.

  I know I tend toward the Pollyanna approach sometimes, after the temper’s done, but hunting and fishing are at least two things that you can’t do much about if the boss weather-maker decides adversely. And to sit in a soppy tent, with everything clammy damp—clothes, equipment, everything—is a thing to try a good man’s patience, soul, and cussing vocabulary. The only answer, which I believe the Old Man seeded in me at an early age, has been aptly phrased by sage counsel to a man just joining the Foreign Legion. The old Legion hand told the recruit, “When things are bad, bleu, try not to make them worse, because it is very likely that they are bad enough already.”

  If there is a moral in this tale it is that the sun came out in many more ways than one. For the next six weeks I never had more fun or better luck, and at the end of the safari there was no bitter recrimination to spoil the good-bye part. I suspect the Old Man would say it’s merely a matter of growing older, or just growing used to being wet on Saturday.

  13—The Trouble with Dogs Is People

  “The trouble with dogs,” the Old Man once said, “is people.” We had been through the dog business thoroughly—how a dog was like a boy, you had to wallop it with a stick once in a while to make it behave; how a dog could accumulate bad habits unless corrected; how a dog needed gentleness in its early months and stern discipline thereafter. Foxhounds, quail dogs, retrievers—I thought I had a graduate degree in dogs. Then he hit me with the people bit.

  One thing I learned as a kid: You must play your cards right with adults when they come up with a sweeping statement that exacts attention. No adult goes around muttering wise words on his own time. He demands a question, so he can make the answer run awful long.