I delight in outdoor experts who appear in mysterious fashion without fanfare.
Like the kid who strolled up to the Midwestern Trap Club many years ago. A rep from one of the big ammunition companies had been giving a trickshooting exhibition and the kid was quiet but not particularly shy.
He allowed that he'd like to bust some of those clay pigeons with his twenty-two. This sounded like fun to the folks in charge so they told the youngster they'd throw him a few targets. He went back to his old flivver, got a well-worn twenty-two, and went to work. He didn't bust any 100 straight but he sure cracked a lot of them, and then he rattled off in his old car.
For the rest of his life the factory man wondered who the kid was. He'd been so surprised he never even got his name.
And there was this rancher-type rancher complete with flower pot boots, big hat, and dinner-plate belt buckle who took on a little fly casting instruction out West a few years ago.
With just a little direction he started laying out a tremendous length of line and seemed to feel that he'd do much better once he got the hang of it.
Since I am not a strong believer in natural-born wizards at such skills, I prodded the guy a little. Had he done fly casting before?
"Well, no," he said. "But I used to do a lot of packing, driving a string of mules ahead of a saddle horse, and as nearly as I can tell, rolling that fly line out there is exactly the same move as dusting a mule's rump with a stock whip."
And up in the Canadian canoe country, where the guides have to do some heavy portaging, they don't count on much help from most of the customers.
This city dude wasn't any great shakes with a paddle so the guides figured he'd be just a spectator when it came time to carry a canoe and a lot of other things over a rocky and up-ended portage track, but the dude just picked up everything he could reach and walked off with nary a slip.
Back home he was a hodcarrier.
Garry Vince, the famous British Columbia mountain sheep guide, got his client a nice ram and after the trophy was down and congratulations delivered, Garry swiped his knife across a stone and started dressing out the carcass. The dude fidgeted.
"Let me try that," he said.
Garry stepped back, a little impatient but figuring the customer is always right. He wanted to get the meat back to camp.
The client sort of flashed his knife a few times at the big ram and it was reduced to neat quarters and other parts, ready for transport. But then the guy had run butcher shops all of his life.
This turkey shoot with handguns was held back in the mountains where outsiders weren't exactly greeted with open arms and it was something of a surprise for the good-old-boys present to see a full-blooded Chinese approaching with a pistol in a paper bag. The Chinese quietly took his turn, collected a couple of gobblers, and went back to his car.
"I got out of there after that," he told me. "They were beginning to wonder what that inscrutable Oriental was doing in their midst."
He was Bob Chow, born in Texas and retired as a chief petty officer in the U.S. Navy. He also had taken his pistols to the Olympics.
This story originally appeared in Ridge Runners and Swamp Rats by Charles F. Waterman. Copyright (c) 1983 by Charley Waterman. All rights reserved.