Young hunter precisely hits mark with rifle, words

The secret to a successful hunt with a 14-year-old boy is no more profound than bringing along a large cooler stuffed with food.

Creating milestones, memories and traditions requires slightly more preparation.

His boot size has increased from 9 to 14 since we got together to get his first deer two years ago. His dad and grandfather were along, but I got the privilege of being BK’s partner for that initiation hunt.

He was a runt then, and not much heftier than the twigs that snapped under his uneducated feet as we headed into the woods.

Now he looks down on me, but he’s still skinny as a young buck at the end of a hard winter.

I carried only binoculars and the knife on my belt last week as we walked up the cow trail from the rancher’s house, much as we had on that first hunt two years ago. I crossed through the fence and reached over to take his rifle. His father bought the 6mm Remington Model 600 from me two years ago. It had been my first center-fire rifle, presented to me by my father on Christmas more than 40 years ago.

The Remington has its original stock. If I had notched it for each deer, antelope and coyote the rifle had taken in those years, there might not have been much wood left.

“I’d rather have this than a new rifle,” BK had said, beaming when is dad presented the gift. “It has history.”

You could hunt a lifetime for another 12-year-old boy with a perspective so far beyond his years.

Last week, after he’d negotiated the barbed wire fence in the gathering morning light, I give him back his rifle and turned, continuing to where we were going to sit silently and watch for whitetails.

“Thank you,” he said, not in a hunter’s whisper, but in a sincere deliberate voice meant for me to hear.

Of course, the sentiments also were probably heard by every deer in the draw we were planning to hunt.

He winced when I brought my finger to my lips. I smiled.

The voice was much deeper and surer than the tentative voice that needed to be coaxed out of him two years ago.

I still have the letter he wrote me after that first hunt.

Dear Rich,

Thank you so much for taking me on the hunt. It was one of the funnest adventures I’ve ever had. I loved being on the “testicle festival.”

To fully understand, you had to be there – and you HAVE been there if you’ve ever joined some men taking a young boy on a five-day trip for his first deer.

The “festival” involved several days to find the game and make a few inevitable rookie goof-ups that send bucks bounding into the next county.

It required laughing at the day’s mistakes over a belly-filling dinner with three other guys and then going to sleep early in order to get up early and try again.

It included another day of missed opportunity to conquer the jitters and indecision that prevent a novice from squeezing the trigger on the first legal deer to stand still in his crosshairs.

Ultimately for BK, that first festival peaked with a stealthy stalk. He won the battle with his doubts, steadied himself on a stump padded by my jacket and took a deep breath.

I don’t think he started breathing again until several minutes later when he walked up and saw for certain that he had made a perfect shot.

Then he rolled up his sleeves for a lesson in anatomy and the perfectly deadly relationship between predator and prey.

We toasted his accomplishment with a bottle of chilled sparkling cider. We sliced fresh tenderloin “dollars,” rubbed them with spices and dropped the venison on a portable grill.

The first taste should be as close as possible to the original thing. The meat was not overcooked. In fact, with a little treatment and care, the deer on the grill might have recovered.

But we ate it instead, with a toast, a muffled clink of plastic cups, and hot juices dripping off our fingers and out the corners of our mouths.

BK’s father gave him his first Buck Knife to consummate the hunt.

He butchered his own deer with that knife. He wrapped the meat in tidy packages and swelled with pride as they came out of the freezer and onto the family dinner table for months to come.

Well, it seems a buck happened to come into my house and, seeing it, I thought, ‘Well everybody deserves a buck and Rich didn’t get one,’ BK continued in the letter he sent me after that first hunt. I hope you like your new “buck.”

I looked inside the package and found a Buck Knife of my own.

P.S. Now you can be just like me, he concluded in a phrase to which I now aspire.