Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/401545
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 1 9 i r s t L i g h t F Back then, the only really rich thing a man could afford was a shotgun and a couple of bird dogs. "She'uz an' ol' time, liver-an'-white pointer, an' she stayed in a little building there close to the back door she could go in-'n'-out of durin' the wintertime. In the summer she laid at the door, on the porch, where she could be near us. "I's too young then to go with 'em once they turned loose. But, Lordy, Mister, I wanted too." H is daddy was Lyman Albert Carraway, and his mama before she married him was Dorothy Johnson. They grew up and died together, not ten miles from where they were born. Lyman Carraway, folks said, lived 86 years, and loved a lot of things in his life. But mostly his wife, his dogs and bird huntin'. And when it came to the order of it, they said, it was a hard time tellin' which. Everybody 'round the farm town of Hookerton knew him, thought well of him. You had neighbors back then, not just people living near you, and Lyman Carraway was one of them. "But I remember one mornin' 'specially," he said. "It was durin' the war an' it was comin' Chris'mas. It didn't have to be. He'd a-gone anyway. But that time Mama asked 'im to go. "Our ol' house had slat walls, an' I slept in the room next to theirs. I could Mike Gaddis W hat you reckon it is about som'thin' so good you can never quit remember in' it?" he said. He was an old man by then. But he was young once, and he and his daddy before him were bird hunters. I like old men and the birds they hunted, so always I asked him about it. And that was the way he started. "Give a fellow an ol' gun, a couple o' ol' dogs, an' it was then and still the only really rich thing a poor man could afford," he said. "I mean you felt rich. "An' no matter how much you end up havin' down the road . . . a big house, or a new truck or a fine suit of clothes . . . it's never no better. You never get over it, right on to your grave. Even when you're so old and wasted you can't do it no more . . . an' you can't get it back, no matter how much money you got in the bank . . . you're wishin' you could, an' thinkin' 'bout how good it was when you did. "I mean, when you've got the one thing that remembers best in the whole world, that's rich, ain't it? No matter how poor you are. "You ask me 'bout the times I remember most? "I like to remember when me and Mama and Daddy went bird huntin'," he said. "'Cause that's where it all started. "Well . . . I mean Daddy went, but Mama had to take 'im and let him out . . . 'cause we only had the one ol' Chevy coup . . . an' pick 'im up ag'in when he was done. An' I'd git to ride along. With Queenie, in the rumble seat. 'Cause we only had the one dog, too.