The Old Man and the Boy

Son...there is one thing I know that you might as well learn now. Nobody can kill the whole covey [of quail] - not even if they shoot the birds on the ground running down a row in a cornfield. You got to shoot them one at a time.

The little fellow [quail] doesn't weight but about five ounces, but every ounce of him is pure class. He's smart as a whip, and every time you go up against him you're proving something about yourself.

It was maybe the most beautiful gun a boy ever had, especially if he was only eight years old at the time and the Old Man had decided he could be trusted with a dangerous firearm. A little 20-gauge...

I told her that any time a boy is ready to learn about guns is the time he's ready, no matter how young he is, and you can't start too young to learn how to be careful.

After you've crossed the fence you go back and pick up the gun, and look at it to see if the safety is still on. You make a habit of this, too. It don't cost nothing to look once in a while and see if the safety's on.

The older you get the carefuller you'll be. When you're as old as I am, you'll be so scared of a firearm that every young man you know will call you a damned old maid. But damned old maids don't shoot the heads off their friends in duck blinds...

When I was eleven...I went back to my bedroom later, and on the bed was a 16-gauge double with a leather case that had my name on it.

It was the kind of day when a walk seems necessary...

He said curiosity was necessary to intelligence, and that curiosity never killed the cat. The cat died from stupidity, he said, or mebbe an overdose of mice.

When a duck is coming down, you aim at his tail. When a duck is coming up, you aim at his nose. When he is doing either one of those things but crosswise, lead him. Lead him twice as far as you think you need to lead him.

A man's first duck is an adventure.

The whole purpose of summer fishing," the Old Man, "is not to worry about catching fish, but to just get out of the house and set and think a little. Also, the womenfolk are very bad-tempered in the summer. The less you hang around the premises the less trouble you're apt to get in."

Summertime is an overrated time, I think today, full of sunburn and poison ivy and expensive vacations. But for a boy like me, at that time, summertime was a time of almost unbearable happiness.

If you are a very small boy, being close to water makes the summer a marvelous thing.

"Once in a while," the Old Man said, "a fellow wants to get away from everything that's complicated, and fishing is really the only way I know of to do it."

These trips were only on week ends, of course, because there was that business about education, which meant I was bespoken five days a week. But from Friday afternoon until Monday morning early, when the Old Man dragged me out of bed before light in order to check my fingernails and cowlick for respectability, I was a might happy boy.

A house belongs to have a roof, and is not supposed to get one for Christmas. When a boy gets a school suit or a new pair of shoes, they aren't a gift. They're a roof on a house.

"Well, sir, one thing more. I reckon that there ain't nothing anybody can tell a good dog that the dog don't know better than the man. I reckon it's the dog's business to know his business."

You take a dog and you train him right, and then leave him alone and you got a good dog. The same thing applies to boys. Spoil a dog early, and no amount of hollering will cure him. That also applies to boys. Beat him when he's bad, early, and you don't have to take a stick to him later.

But like I said, she [a boat he built] gave me some quiet adventure that you don't get out of the comic books, because none of it was vicarious, which means, I think, getting your thrills out of what somebody else has already done better.

I went back to school feeling a little more like a man and a little less like a boy. I reckon the Old Man knew what he was talking about when he said there was nothing like a boat to smooth the kinks out of a kid.

The summertime belongs to boys. Grown-up folks might play around at the beaches and the country clubs and take vacations, but summer truly belongs to kids.

It was one of those days when a boy figures he's got to pop if something doesn't happen to him - something big, something adventurous, something stupendous...

"Tell you what," he said. "A horse is too large an investment for unproven ability. We will just sort of try you out on a goat. Anybody that will look after a goat and cart will be a likely candidate for a pony, because nothing is quite as ornery as a billy goat."

"No man can do everything well. A lot of men spread themselves out, trying this, having a dib and a dab at that, never finishing what they start, and always trying to look for something new when they've failed. A smart man knows when he has a few things he can do well..."

"A sportsman," he said to nobody, "is a gentleman first. But a sportsman, basically is a man who kills what he needs, whether it's a fish or a bird or an animal, or what he wants for a special reason, but he never kills anything just to kill it. And he tries to preserve the very same thing that he kills a little bit of from time to time."

If they keep exposing you to education, you might even realize someday that man becomes immortal only in what he writes on paper, or hacks into a rock, or slabbers onto a canvas, or pulls out of a piano.

There is a time in the life of every Lilliputian when the gigantic grown-ups around him are very important. This is the time when the boy is not so very far away from being a grown-up himself, and the grown-ups are not so far away from being boys. What I mean to say, a certain politeness is indicated. There is a time when it is very bad to patronize a boy, just because he isn't quite a man yet.

I was surrounded by adults who were sensitive to what small boys needed in the way of companionship. Looking all the way back as far as I can look, I can't remember anybody who ever made me feel as small as I was.

The Old Man said once, "A boy has got to grow up to be a man some day. You can delay the process, but you can't protect the boy from manhood forever. The best and easiest way is to expose the boy to people who are already men, good and bad, drunk and sober, lazy and industrious. It is really, after all, up to the boy, when all is said and done, and there are a lot of boys who never get to be men, and a lot of men who never quit being boys."

"There is always one way to separate the men from the boys," he said. "That is to watch and see if a feller'll do a thing the hard way, when all the other fellers are sitting around grumbling and quarreling that it can't be done."

But when I'm by myself it seems as if it's almost impossible to shoot bad, because you shoot in any direction - backward, sideways, or whatever - without worrying about blowing somebody's head off.

"I made all my mistakes when I was young, which is the difference today between an old man and a boy. Youth is for making mistakes, and old age is for impressing the young with your knowledge."

"The only big duck I can absolutely certify is the pintail. And amongst the little ducks, I never ate a fishy teal so far. As a matter of fact, when all is said and done, for the dinner plate you can't beat a teal."

He never willingly took more fish or game than we could eat or give away, and he never shot a gun - or allowed me to shoot a gun - just to hear it go off and kill something useless.

That was the first day I really got into the texture of things. I mean, how big was a scuppernong grape, how much juice was inside it, what the moss on an old live oak looked like, the freckles on the leaves of an old cornstalk, the weight of a beefsteak tomato served with sugar and vinegar, the way a possum skin tacked to the weathered silver-gray boards of the smokehouse curled at the edges, the differing voice range of the bull hound when he was after a black swamp rabbit or was interested in a squirrel up a tree.

The Old Man used to say that the best part of hunting and fishing was the thinking about going and the talking about it after you got back. You just had to have the actual middle as a basis of conversation and to put some meat in the pot.

...when they [women] can't be boys they don't like it; so they declare war on the boys at a very early age, and win the final victory when they trap themselves a wild boy and turn him into a house pet. Or try to.

Boy, you know you're getting old when you start saying, 'Things ain't like they used to be.' But you're right, every time. Because things ain't like they used to be.

Everything in that house had been lovingly used for generations - the heavy, worn silver table service, the old Wedgwood plates, the boots, the saddles, the guns, and the books - especially the books.

"I forgot," Mister Howard said to the Old man, handing me the pheasant. "I forgot how big a first pheasant is to a boy. It's kind of like an early squirrel. He is a little bit larger than a later lion."