Old Man's Boy Grows Up

by Robert Ruark

  His father and his uncle made no patronizing effort to explain him. Conversation was earthy, and none of it was curried because of Jerry’s presence. We drank and told men’s stories in camp, and there was none of this “not in front of the boy” business. Young Jerry performed a certain number of chores, in perhaps a little heavier ratio than the grizzled men; but apart from the utilization of his young legs for a little firewood fetching, apart from the fact that he was not invited to share the communal jug, he was one of the bunch, equal before the law and hunting society.

  The birds were not flying overmuch that weekend, and much of the hunt was conducted in the warmth of the shack. But young Jerry was off prowling on his lonesome with his gun on the odd chance that there might be some action, while parents, so to speak, slept. That struck a reminiscent chord too. One of my brightest young dreams was to slope off, while the grownups tackled the fruit jar and told stories, to come triumphantly back with the biggest gobbler, the hatrackiest deer in the entire history of hunting. This dream never matured into reality, but it was not for lack of sturdy legs and sturdier effort.

  I became interested in Jerry, who is an only boy in a family that includes three sisters. It seems he has been naturally accepted as a mature man since he was about six, and has known how to fly a variety of planes since he was eight or nine. There has never been any effort by his pa and his uncle to make an outdoorsman of him, apart from certain instructions in gun handling and hunting etiquette, and a full expectation that he’d carry his weight in the camp chores. Association with the hairy adults doesn’t seem to have damaged his character any, and though he is not profane I imagine his retentive store of colorful language is considerable.

  Mostly I was impressed by the way the adults kidded him, and by the way he returned the kidding without being either overbrash or what might be called smart-alecky. They joshed him as a man, and he joshed them right back on their own grounds, also as a man. He was polite to me as a guest, but not oversolicitous because of the difference in our ages. He was, in short, completely integrated to adult society and responsibility, and some credit must go to his father and his uncle for making a man of a boy in easy, exciting stages.

  Jerry Chisum’s world is a world of modern outdoor glamour, since his vehicle is the aircraft, as everybody’s vehicle in Alaska is the aircraft. Where I once saw quail and squirrels he sees ptarmigan and geese. My biggest game was white-tailed deer and an occasional wild hog. Jerry has been teethed on brown and grizzly bear, moose and wolves. He has seen perhaps the finest fishing in the world, where I perforce settled for smaller fry. But there is not much basic difference in the way we were raised.

  Perhaps it was luck that kept a lot of us country boys out of jail, but I like to think that a considerable part was played by the horny-handed adults who raised us as equals and imbued us with a love for the bush. Pool halls and corner gangs never interested us. A knife was not a weapon but a handy utensil that must be kept sharp and could cut you if you whittled toward you or otherwise used it carelessly. A gun was for killing, and at all times had to be considered a deadly weapon. It also had to be kept clean. Camps were to be left neat, and in a permanent camp a certain amount of basic supplies was to be left for the next occupants.

  All these rules still apply to young Jerry Chisum, but in addition, today, he knows that nobody but a fool will fly a plane with a screeching hangover or a snootful of booze. He checks the instrument panel as automatically as his pilot-father does. He knows that lack of meticulous maintenance of that aircraft will surely kill him, for he pilots in the strange and wonderful weather that makes Alaskan flying a science unplumbed by ordinary aviators.

  In my day we watched wind and weather too, but mainly for its effect on game. In Alaska wind and weather are active enemies, positive friends. There used to be a saying among the old bush pilots that you carried an anchor in the plane. When you were flying in heavy fog you dropped the anchor, and if you heard it splash you knew you were over water. Modern navigational aids—a full instrument panel—have changed that somewhat, but even today the standard plane for travel is a single-motored job which is little fancier than the old Tin Liz of my time.

  When I see a kid like young Jerry I have little use for the beat generation and not too much time for the massed delinquents of the cities. If such kids were subject to heady fare—a land where you wash gold out of the creek, wolves howl, bears rob the meat safe, tough people abound, and the close recall of the dog-sled, gold-rush days is something more than just a legend—I’m sure they’d get carried far away in the opposite direction from beat.

  There is as much temptation in a frontier nation as there is on a city street corner, and an incipient bum makes his own community. I am no psychologist, but I do think that a certain rule of thumb on child-raising can be made. Give a boy a sense of fitness, of belonging, and impress him with the responsibilities that go along with that belonging, and the transition from boy to man comes without a wrench.

  My early mentors—God bless them all, black, white, drunk or sober, educated or unread—never once diminished my enthusiasm because it had all been done by them before. My first deer was, in their eyes, bigger than a mastodon, and my first fox squirrel achieved the proportions of a black leopard. A coon was a tiger, a rabbit a lion. I remember being violently sick to my stomach when I shot my first quail over a pointing dog, but nobody laughed—and nobody ventured that I probably fired at the whole covey (which I undoubtedly did) and dropped a bird by accident.

  There was considerably more to my inclusion in adult hunting and fishing parties than an education in caution. A lot of practical conservation was hammered into my knotty skull because, as the Old Man used to say, if you shot it all there wouldn’t be any for next year, and if you were careless with fire and burned down the woods there wouldn’t be any forest to hunt in.

  Mainly, though—and here we depart from the modern “progressive” child and certainly from the delinquent—I think that good manners were as vital as any aspect of our training. You didn’t hog a quail shot. You didn’t loose off a gun across your partner’s bow. You didn’t deafen him in a duck blind by exploding a shell in his eardrum. The left-hand man took the first duck, and in case of a possible tie on a single bird or animal you honored your partner’s presence.

  “If a dog can be taught to honor another dog’s point,” the Old Man used to say, “there’s no reason for a man to be a game hog.”

  I like to think that the time and trouble my elders took with me on etiquette and caution, on conservation and just plain good manners may have kept this particular youth out of the Jimmy Dean set. It is not terribly difficult to translate the first basics of the woods and waters into drawing room or business behavior.

  As I mentioned earlier, the association needn’t be on a Fauntleroy basis. I could have cussed as good as any stevedore when I was ten, because I knew all the words. Whisky, I knew, was for drinking, but somehow it seemed a little impolite for me to be in a mad rush to cuss and drink in front of people until I had earned the right in terms of years. My hunting partners were often crude men, fisherfolk and sailors, but a certain gentleness pervaded and always a certain discipline obtained.

  I had a plain wonderful time with young Jerry Chisum and his folks in Alaska, although no trophies resulted from the weekend hunt. In this age of jets and rockets to the moon, of juvenile gang wars and what seems almost total confusion it was wonderful to see a modern rerun of what I remember so clearly as the Old Man and the Boy, even with the bird-dog homing device on the instrument panel replacing the bird dog on the ground.

  24—Nobody’s Too Old for a Physic

  A few years back, in the Central Provinces of India, yr. ob’t sv’t had just climbed up a tree in the black of night. He had walked through a few miles of cobras to achieve this tree, quaking in his boots all the way, because a jungle is scary at night, even without snakes. But there was a natural kill near the tree—a big domesticated buffalo that the biggest
tiger in the world had knocked off that afternoon. He had been driven off his kill before he had a chance to get stuck into it, and it was a cinch he’d return.

  They still do a lot of night shooting in India, sitting up for tigers and leopards over baits, shooting indiscriminately’ from cars, with lights, and I didn’t like it; even when hunting villainous varmints—and this particular tiger was a veteran cattlelifter that was decimating the Gond villagers’ herds and would certainly turn into a natural man eater when he got too decrepit to kill animals or eventually panic-kill a herdsman and develop a swift taste for man meat.

  I was crouched uncomfortably on a rough tree-branch machan, forbidden to smoke, scratch, cough, or think, but as the mosquitoes chawed me I broke one rule and began to think about the Old Man and why I didn’t care for night hunting and never would.

  “If you want to hunt, hunt,” the Old Man once said. “If you want to be a murderer, be a murderer. Buy yourself a cheap flashlight or a headlight for the car and drive easy through the rye fields or the corn. Pick up some green eyes with your light, fire between the eyes, and when the eyes go out pick up your deer—you won’t know whether it’s a buck, doe, or fawn—and sneak it home. Venison’s venison. Tastes the same to a hunter or to a murderer. Only don’t let me catch you at it. You might as well take up highway robbery. You ain’t too old yet for a touch of hickory physic.” Hickory physic was a whippy switch across the bottom.

  The Old Man was a fanatic on conservation of game and obedience to the game laws, which he said were the first three rungs on the ladder of conservation. Oh, maybe we might have committed a little indirect poaching, such as the calling of somebody else’s turkeys from across the road into legal no man’s land which I’ve already mentioned, and I used to be pretty handy poaching squirrels off some government property, but the squirrels weren’t doing the government any good just sitting there eating up the pecans. But by and large we were kind of model hunters, even to keeping a season tally of birds shot, and this at a time when the meat hunters thought nothing of exceeding the limit a dozen times over or murdering the best part of a covey of quail on the ground.

  But like all young’uns with enough pimples to rate a driver’s license I hit the nocturnal daredevil stage, and one night a bunch of us hellions decided we would go jacklight a deer, just to see what is was like.

  We rigged a big searchlight, which we “borrowed” from the pilot launch, onto the new Model A Liz, loaded the shotguns, and went on the prod. Not too far out of town there were some rye fields, fresh and green, where whole herds of deer came to graze the winter crop, and we told each other that we were really doing the farmers a favor; you know, St. Patrick chasing out the snakes, St. George knocking off the dragon.

  We cruised along, flashing the light across the level fields, and after an hour or so we hit onto a constellation of eyes that showed green and sometimes red under the lamp’s beam. A sizable herd of deer had come out from their lying-up beds in the swamps to take on the night’s provisions. They stopped grazing and stood transfixed, pinioned in the yellow trap of light. We drew alongside and I picked out the closest pair of eyes and fired between them. They went out like a suddenly extinguished bulb. At the sound of the shot the other lights disappeared and you could hear the crash of antlers as they hit the nearest brush.

  The flashlight showed us a nice young spike buck, stone-dead on the ground. The Model A coupé had a kind of luggage compartment in the back. We opened it up and slung the murdered animal into it. Then we drove back to town feeling like a bunch of thugs, who had stuck up a bank and killed the teller as well.

  As we hit the town we saw that the car needed some gas. Just as we pulled up to the pump the damnedest baaaa—blattttt! you ever heard came out of the hind end, and there was enough thumping and bumping and thrashing around to wake the dead. Baaaa—blattttt! Bump! Crash! Wallop! Baaa—blatttt! Obviously our corpse had been merely stunned and had just come alive.

  The filling-station attendant looked as startled as we did, and as for me the neck hairs stood up like tenpenny nails. Old refrains of “Birmingham Jail” and “Prisoner’s Song” and “In the Jailhouse Now” began to creep into my subconscious as we gunned that Model A out of there for the deep timber. Naturally we ran out of gas.

  Now here was the predicament: black night with no gas on a country road and a live buck deer threatening to tear the Liz to tin shreds, and suddenly the brave freebooters were three scared kids facing a life in jail plus an extra life of shame. But in the meantime, how do you get a live deer out of the tail end of a Model A Ford coop?

  When you are a criminal you seek a partner in crime. A case-hardened crook turns always to his own sort for comfort. I inspected the terrain and remembered that about a mile down the road there dwelt some gentlemen who lived by the manufacture and sale of an illegal specific against nervous tremors, namely, white mule. If one or both of the brothers were not off “working for the state,” as they called a jolt in jail, we might expect some criminal assistance, since their smokehouse generally contained venison that had not been acquired under the law’s strictest letter.

  Junius, a lean, lantern-jawed, bristle-chinned buccaneer, was cradling a jug on the front porch of his ramshackle cabin. Eph, he informed us, was off on a romantic errand involving the nearest neighbor’s daughter, Miss Sary Jane, aged sixteen, and “he’d be back when he got done.” We dispatched a courier to the tumble-down manse of Miss Sary Jane, aged sixteen, and tore Eph from the arms of his beloved, for this was a tricky, technical job. Junius loaded a spare demijohn of gas into his creaky old T model, and the task force proceeded toward the liberation.

  It was quite simple, actually. Eph crawled up on the top of our car with a noose in his hand. Junius opened the back end cautiously, and when the young buck stuck its head out Eph snagged it with the lasso, drew taut, and Junius dropped die compartment top back on the buck’s neck. For a split second—until Junius cut its throat with one slash of a clasp knife that had been so frequently honed that its blade showed an inner curve—the buck looked like a picture of a mounted deer head, only the wall was the tail end of a car.

  “You fellers want this critter?” Eph asked.

  Three of us hollered together, “No!”

  “We’ll take him, then,” Junius said.

  We drove silently, guiltily back to town, and dispersed without saying good night. I avoided the Old Man the next morning, after a sleepless night, but just after the noon meal—which I picked at—he collared me.

  “Any truth in this stuff about the deer you fellers jacklit that come alive in the car? There’s different versions all over town.”

  I saw there wasn’t any use trying to lie out of it, because the Old Man had a beagle nose for news. “I’m afraid it’s true,” I said. “It ain’t gonna happen again.”

  The Old Man gave me a look that would have put out a forest fire. “I’ll say it won’t,” he snapped. “Not unless you can manage to break jail to do it. Come on, murderer,” he said. “We’re going to see the warden.”

  We got in the car and drove off. The warden was in the poolroom. The Old Man waited until he finished his game, and then he said, “Jack, if you’d step outside a minute.”

  When the warden was outside the Old Man said, “I just caught a criminal for you. Do your duty. You got any handcuffs?”

  The warden said no he didn’t have any, but he could borrow some mighty quick if the criminal was dangerous.

  “I think he’s dangerous,” the Old Man said. “He’s an accessory to murder, car theft, night hunting, and the use of a stolen searchlight on the murder car.”

  “Maybe he’s repented,” the warden said. “This is a first offense, ain’t it?”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” the Old Man said, “unless you count them watermelons he stole a couple of months back—also at night.”

  “Well hell,” the warden said. “I got a bet on this next game. I parole him into your custody, Ned, and you can deal with him as
you see fit. All right?”

  “If you say so,” the Old Man answered. “It’ll save the state some money.”

  He never spoke all the way home. He said, when we got there, “You go back to the garage and wait for me.” Then he went into the house and came back with a whippy Malacca cane somebody’d given him. “Take down your pants,” he said, “and bend over.”

  Sitting in this tree, waiting for this tiger, my behind began to hurt double, and it wasn’t this makeshift machan that made it hurt. The Old Man really laid into me with that cane, but even that didn’t hurt as much as his icy contempt, which lasted three or four days until he figured I’d served my sentence and was due to be admitted to society again.

  That cured me of night hunting until now, when Khan Sahib punched me. The tiger had come silently to the bait. We let him feed for ten minutes, and then Khan Sahib snapped the flash on him. He had a head as big as a bushel basket, and his enormous ruff was bloody. He looked balefully into the light. I drew a bead on his neck, as he lay on the buffalo eating from aft to fore, and the .470 boomed. He collapsed without moving—a rug, with his head pillowed on the buffalo’s hindquarters. I started to shoot him again.

  “No,” Khan Sahib said. “Don’t spoil the skin. He’s dead, like the others.” He yoo-hoo’d for the distant boys to come let us down out of the tree.

  This was Tiger Three in ten days—all big, but this the biggest, and the only one shot at night. I forgot the Old Man. This was the biggest tiger I’d ever heard of, from his pug marks and the sight I had of his head. I had a flask in the tree. We celebrated.

  “Let’s look at him again,” I said, about twenty minutes later.

  Khan Sahib snapped on the light. There was a growl and I saw a tail disappear into the high grass. The tiger that had been dead twenty minutes had come to life. He’d been creased and only stunned.