Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/742011
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S • 27 yearned for me the time he was gone. "When he returned, life was never sweeter. And we were never closer. "But then, on November 29, 1974, tragedy struck. Hunting in Johnston County, North Carolina, an hour east of Raleigh, we got the truck stuck on a backwoods farm path. The Boy worked mightily to get us free, but the muck would not allow. He had to leave and walk for help, to a country garage a mile away. "He hid me behind the front seat and locked the doors, locked the cab on the back of the truck, with Bess and Mutt safely inside. He would wish desperately afterward that he had carried me along. "Soon after he left, a dirty and disheveled black man crept to the truck. I could sense the evil in him. He smashed the driver's window and dragged me roughly from behind the seat. Ran back and threw me brutally into the trunk of his old Chevy sedan, causing me to bang off the metal rim of the spare tire. It put a deep dent in my left barrel and cracks in my forearm. "I believe he had been watching us. I have detested the bastard ever since. the case, and surely once again, I would be neglected. I was sorely downtrodden. "But then the Old Man said to the Boy, 'Maybe a ways down the road you will want and have some of the others. "'But, now,' he said, 'I think this is the one.' And he reached for me, and laid me in the boy's hands. And I may be but dead wood and cold steel, but I could see the wonder in his eyes, and feel the pride in his heart. "'It's an honest, old gun," Murray Hoover said, 'and it's all Parker. "'Fancy is as fancy does.' "And the old man as much as gave me to him. We left together, Me and the Boy, and Lord only knows, who was happier. In that moment, I could have been Invincible. "It was September of 1966. He was 24, and I was 60. "For the next eight years we were partners of the gladdest order, The Boy and I. Together, we killed the first quail over Bess, his truly first setter dog, his first wild pheasant, his first ruffed grouse, pintail, woodcock, and wild turkey. I fretted for him while he served his hitch in the Army. He Mostly, he took them. "I stood in great company, but, once again, I wasn't happy. "Until one day, two years later, imprisoned in the gun cabinet that now seemed my fate, the Old Man walked in, with him a middle- aged woman and a boy. The woman's name was Louise Walker, an Asheboro antique fancier, and, Michael, the lad who accompanied her, was her nephew. "All his life, the boy had pined for a Parker. His Aunt knew where to look. "I studied him through the glass as he stood there in front of the gun cabinet—looking at us, least to best—enthralled and speechless, as the Old Man and woman looked on too. "The boy would describe it later in a story of his own: 'It was as if he were standing in a cathedral,' he would say, 'under a stained- glass window, with the beautifully colored rays streaming in behind him, and falling together over his shoulders upon the grail.' "Old Man Hoover had opened the cabinet, and one-by-one, lifted each of us, all except me, to the boy's hands, and the boy had been mesmerized with the heft and beauty of our ranks. But it looked as if he would close