A bunch of the men from our church went out for a saturday together a couple of weeks ago. So many times the men at churches only get together for early coffee before work, or else in the spring to do repairs around the property, and it often seems we don’t get much chance to come together just for fun.
We all met out on the South Fork of the Boise River, east of Boise and north of Mountain Home for those of you familiar with the area. We had a few hikers, a few fishermen, and a bunch of shotgunners. Hot campfire breakfast first, then off we went to play. Some of the shotgunners left to find the elusive, usually invisible chukar. You can see the ground we were on in a picture I posted last week. After a couple hours of that terrain, with nothing in our vests to show for the effort, we hiked back to a large flat area and met the rest of our group as they set up for an afternoon of clay shooting.
One of the men brought his young son. They recently bought a couple of single shot combo type long arms, which had a couple of different barrels, one a .22 and the other a small bore shotgun (I don’t remember the make, sorry). The high point of the day was this young man taking the line with his single shot, calling “pull”, and then powdering the clay bird as it flew, then reloading and doing it again the next shot. How good does it feel to break your first clays? How much better does it feel to do it in front of your Dad and his friends, and hear them all cheering for you, and welcoming you into the fraternity of men?
I thought of this young man this afternoon when one of my readers sent me this newspaper report from the east side of the state.
An 11-year-old boy killed a bear at point-blank range last Wednesday night after it wouldn’t leave his family’s porch.
The boy was at his home near Driggs with his younger sisters and after seeing the bear on the front porch and not being able to get it to leave, the boy retrieved a gun and killed the animal.
Bravo, you Dads! Raise up real men, who understand that the hard things sometimes fall on us, and real men know how and when to take care of things. And teach ‘em early, before some bleedy heart fills their young skullfullamush with all kinds of looneytoons pablum about how wrong they were to build their house where the bear wanted to walk, or that if you just call 911 the government will come fix everything for you… bowing, apologizing, and singing Kumbaya doesn’t get the job done.
I’m glad we don’t do it like that in Idaho. Yet. Please God that we never do.
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