It can be hard being a boy, balancing growth, understanding, emotions and desires, without a guide to help you along. It’s even more challenging being a boy who loves the outdoors that surround him and lacks a mentor and a friend to enjoy it with. Legendary outdoorsman and writer Robert Ruark was that boy once, and his grandfather his friend, mentor and guide.
In “The Old Man and the Boy”, Ruark tells fictionalized stories of his early outdoor life with the old man, modeled after his grandfather Ned, in early 20th century North Carolina. Through their many exploits over the years, the old man helped shape Ruark’s understanding of the natural world, his ethics as an outdoorsman and conservationist, and of course, his skills as a marksman and angler.
There’s something about the outdoors, and hunting in particular, that helps a boy become a man. I’m not exactly sure it can be broken down into specific elements, but here are a few. A boy takes responsibility when he holds a gun. He’s responsible for everything that happens while the gun is in his hands. The boy is given decision-making authority to take the game he harvests, whether it be upland birds, waterfowl, squirrels, big game, or a variety of other wildlife. He joins other men in a hunting party, and becomes one of them. They suffer and celebrate together. He is accepted, and gains a feeling of self importance for his accomplishments. He learns to work with hunting dogs, how to treat them properly, discipline when necessary, and to oftentimes humble himself in their presence.
The relationship between the old man and the boy was two sided, really. The boy needed the old man, to share his wisdom and advice, teach him the ways of wildlife, and encourage him as he faced challenges. But the old man needed to the boy too. He was a good companion, and someone of a younger generation to pass a bit of himself and his accumulated experiences along to. The bond the two formed was something special, a friendship and sense of accomplishment we all might hope to experience at some point in our lives.
Ruark learned his first big lessons in gun safety when the old man took him on his first quail hunt. He learned conservation when they picked sea turtle eggs on the beach. Duck hunting taught him ballistics, and a bit of humility. Fishing taught him it’s okay to be lazy once in a while, but such laziness can require some serious work! On and on, the stories of the old man and the boy paint the picture of a boy’s progression, and showed how Ruark’s experiences shaped who he became as a man. If we were all so reflective, I suspect most of us could point to childhood experiences in the outdoors that shaped us as well. And if not, Ruark’s storytelling is a heck of a good substitute. “The Old Man and the Boy”, a collection of Field & Stream magazine articles Ruark wrote in the 1950’s was originally published in 1953, and has been reprinted numerous times. It’s readily available online, as is a similar book, “The Old Man’s Boy Grows Older”. Ruark was a noted outdoor writer. He wrote more than a dozen books, and died in 1965.
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