Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/554642
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 2 2 at helping him be a boy, if they can wrangle clearance from his mom. And I suspect sometimes on the sly. I know there was a bit of collusion afoot sneaking him out of school a couple of times this spring to go turkey hunting. He'd found gobbler scat and hoof-prints; time was wastin'. 'They wuz duty-bound to go.' Good thing is, I get invited along. When it's too long between times, and the yearning spikes, I invite myself along. It's a holler in the haymow, helping Jack be a boy. Seeing him do the things I did, uncover the things I did, 60 years ago. We take him woodcock and quail hunting, out for turkeys; Jack hunts anything and everything. He looks for arrowheads and he looks for coon tracks, for feathers and antler sheds, and varmints of any type, large or small. Anything that crawls. He asks me if I've shot a mule deer, an elk, a kudu, a grizzler bear. Important sidebar stuff. With Jack, every trip's a success. Some just turn into bigger successes than others. to explore its every crook and cranny. Those others of us, to whom it was not bestowed paternally, or who have outlived its first era, must search diligently and borrow the pleasure. I look hard nowadays to find a boy with true need. A boy with the same singular, universal, and burning passion I felt for the outdoors as a kid . . . and revel in it, when infrequently but joyfully, it beams to light. Which brings me to young Jack Wrenn, recently come ten. From salamanders to sassafras, possum tracks to chubsuckers, he's et up with it: the wonder and adventure of the outdoors, in a radius of perhaps no more than 15 miles from home. The genes come honestly. Both his dad and gran'dad are sportsmen of cosmopolitan zeal. But obviously the line has been concentrated in young Jack, lifted to the power of ten. I love it. Jack . . . well . . . Jack reminds me of me. Ha! His dad consorts with mischief left. We did. No, it's not physically or substantively the same. But it's there. You just have to look for it through younger eyes, that can see it as we did, that burn with the insatiable incandescence ours did back when. Which brings us back to boys . . . about the time most of us begin earnestly to grasp and yearn for a man's true bearing in elder life. Delightfully discovering that it all comes down to this: you can't be a boy again, but you can help a boy at being a boy. And that's near close as good. D ads and granddads, of course, get a leg up on this revelation. That is, if they have lads with a lust for the sporting life. Truth said, there are a lot of disappointments, because not all do. Most youngsters will adopt it only casually, in fact, and never with need: the kind of "soulsome" need, as Festus Hagen used to say, that just makes you feel shiver-good all over . . . that makes it the consuming passion of their lives, that compels them before the journey is done