Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/617925
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 1 6 4 Hunting WitH tHe Maestro should have known that one day it would happen, that one day our trails would cross. As shooting editor of Outdoor Life for 38 years, Jim Carmichel had long ago earned his reputation as America's premier gun writer. I had been reading his words since long before I ever seriously considered becoming a writer myself. In fact, it was one of Jim's stories, "When A Lion Comes to Kill You," that I'd read when still an all-knowing and over-confident youth that had stopped me in my literary tracks and caused me to consider the fact that someone actually lives these stories before they are ever written—the kinds of stories that had thrilled me since I was a little kid with a pair of dime store six-guns strapped to my belt. How Jim and I finally came to meet is a story all its own, and maybe someday I'll share it with you. But not here. Not now. For this is a different story—a story of a very special hunt, with as fine a group of individuals as I have ever been privileged to know. T here were five of us in all—Larry Murphy, Marc Nachman, Tom Whitson, myself, and of course the inimitable Mr. Carmichel. It was Tom who years earlier had tagged us with the dubious moniker "The Thursday Thugs," a not-so-veiled reference to our habitual tendencies to meet each week for lunch, conversation, music, and misadventure. I