When I was about 12 or 13 years old I received a .22 gauge bolt action rifle for Christmas.  People who hear this little fact generally respond in one of two ways.  Some will be shocked that a child that young would be entrusted with a rifle, even a small one like a .22.  Others, usually men who came of age in households where hunting was a normal part of the family routine, are not at all surprised and will share similar stories about when their father gave them their first gun, too.

My rifle was the third gun to find a home in our house.  Several years earlier, my father and several of his work colleagues pooled their money for a hunting lease in North Texas, about 50 miles outside of Fort Worth.  My father, who worked long hours and was often away from home, believed hunting would be a good way to bond with his two sons.  He purchased a .30-06 deer rifle, and before long he and my older brother were spending hours bundled up in the frosty wee hours of December mornings waiting for an elusive deer to make its way into the clearing next to the deer stand. 

Deer hunting proved not to be an effective means of father-son bonding.  My teenaged brother was not thrilled with having to leave the house at 4:00 or 5:00 on a cold Saturday morning to be cooped up with his father in a rickety wooden tower that may or may not offer a deer sighting.  With deer hunting losing its appeal, my dad and brother moved to avian prey.  My brother received a .12 gauge shotgun the summer after he turned 17.  Alas, about the only things that gun ever hit were empty Dr. Pepper cans.  My brother turned out to be, if not an inept hunter, certainly an unenthusiastic one.

Which brings me to that Christmas of my 12^th or 13^th year.  The little rifle I received was the envy of many of my friends, or at least those who did not yet own a firearm.  Some of my friends were not impressed at all.  They were the ones who already owned guns far more powerful than mine.  I actually knew many 12 and 13 year olds who owned .20 gauge shotguns, and a few  owned guns even more powerful than that.  Hunting was a big deal where I grew up, even among us city-slickers.

Now all this talk of guns and hunting might lead one to believe my father was quite an outdoorsman.  That is far from the truth, however, which brings us to the real point of this story,  when I first discovered that my father was a regular human being, complete with human flaws and frailties that had hitherto remained unnoticed by young Procopius.

It was a hot, early summer day when Dad and I joined his friend Tom for a day on the hunting lease.  I brought my .22, but since game hunting was out of season, my father did not bring a gun for himself.  We were merely out to do a little target practice, and to hike the rocky, brushy mesa country of North Texas.  My father’s friend Tom, on the other hand, had more serious pursuits in mind, bringing his bow and a quiver full of arrows.  He left my father and me and quickly hiked up into the high country while we strolled along at a much more leisurely pace. 

I don’t remember much about the first hour or two of that day.  I suspect I shot at a few rocks or crooked branches sticking out from the mesquite trees.  I may have even taken a pot shot or two at unsuspecting small critters like lizards or toads hanging out by the stock tanks.  In those days my eyes were still reasonably good, and I was known to be a pretty decent shot.  (I would never hunt nowadays, not out of any ethical concern, but simply because my eyes are such that I with a high powered gun would represent grave danger to anyone within a mile of my presence!)

We had been out there a couple of hours when we started to make our way up a steep mesa.  I was about a hundred feet behind my dad.  Suddenly I heard something I had never heard before, but I knew immediately what it was.  Chshshshshsh…  It was the unmistakable and instantly recognizable sound of a rattlesnake.  I looked up the hill and saw my father running toward me faster than I had ever seen him run before.  His face was ashen, and his countenance was unlike anything I had ever witnessed.  As he approached me, he yelled, “Run!”  Without giving it a second thought I followed on my dad’s heels down the hill, fortunate not to have dropped my rifle.

A lot of things passed through my mind.  Had my father been bitten?  Had I mistaken the sound of what I thought was a snake for something else, perhaps a warning from a bobcat or wild boar ready to charge two human interlopers?  When we reached the bottom of the hill, I asked my father what happened and if he was OK.

“It was a rattlesnake,” he answered.  “We’d better go back to the car and wait for Tom to come back.”  I was a little disappointed.  I really wanted to hike up that hill.   I would have liked to see a rattlesnake in the wild.  Still, this was my dad, and his word was the law.  His judgment was unquestionably correct – for me at least, if not for my older brother.

We slowly made our way back to the car.  We stopped here and there to shoot at a few targets.  We waited for what seemed a very long time before Tom, my father’s bow-hunting friend, finally joined us.  “What are y’all doing back so early?” he asked.

“We saw a rattlesnake and came right back to the car!” said my father matter of factly.

“Did you kill it?” Tom asked with obvious envy and excitement in his voice.

My father was incredulous.  “Did I kill it?  No, we ran away from it!”

I looked at Tom, whose face betrayed first disappointment, then mirth, then pity. It wasn’t pity directed toward my father for having experienced a terrible trauma.  It was pity directed toward a man who fails to appreciate the thrill of the hunt and the excitement of coming face to face with one of nature’s legendary predators.  Tom shook his head and said, “Maybe I’ll come back next week and find that rattler.”

For the first time in my life, I was disappointed in my father.

Epilogue

This event should not have surprised me.  There had been many clues pointing to the fact that my father was no adventurous outdoorsman. 

He never owned a pair of jeans.  On more than one occasion he was seen mowing the yard while still wearing the neck tie he had put on that morning for work.

We had a little plot of land in the woods of East Texas.  Several times per year my mom and dad would take the kids there and allow us to play and explore on our own while they relaxed by themselves.  Often they would pitch a tent, but Mom and Dad never slept in it.  They would leave us kids to camp out on our own, and they would drive 10 miles or so to the nearest motel for the night.

Once my dad accompanied all the boys in our church on a campout.  While all the other dads pitched tents along with their children, my dad slept in the station wagon which was parked up a hill several hundred feet away.  He had no desire to sleep on the ground with nothing but a thin layer of fabric between him and the elements.

I should have been clued to Dad’s hunting cluelessness by the very fact that he took my brother out several times, but never brought home any game. 

I later realized that my father had a real phobia of snakes.  He took all the neighborhood kids to the zoo shortly after that embarrassing event on the hunting lease, and Dad would not even step foot into the herpetarium.  Once I was digging around in the back yard and found a garter snake.  I thought Dad would be interested, so I called him over to show it to him.  He told me to wait there, and ran into the garage and came back out with a hoe.  He was going to kill that little snake.  I wouldn’t let him, and I actually ran off with the snake and hid it from him.  His fear of snakes was so great that the thought of something as harmless, and indeed beneficial, as a garter snake filled him with utter dread.

Years later, after I had moved away, he took the children of one of his friends to see “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.  He closed his eyes through the entire scene where Harrison Ford is trapped in the snake pit, and he told me he would not have gone to that movie if he knew there were snakes in it. 

His aversion to snakes and ineptitude in the wild does not detract from my father’s many outstanding virtues.  Dad was truly a good man, loyal, humble, and kind.  He was a gentleman in the every sense of that word.  He was highly respected in his field, and even today, six years after his death, a Google search on his name will return hundreds of links.  As one who almost never touched a computer keyboard, the irony of that would have been a source of real amusement for him.  Dad was, and still is, a wonderful role model for me.  But to my adolescent disappointment, he was no outdoorsman.  He was, I discovered, just human.  The world would be a much better place if there were more humans like him, though.