It’s a life known to very few even my age, but if parents want to teach their children to be responsible and self-reliant give them a gun and turn them loose in some wilderness environment to make their own way. But then I remind myself we now live in a “civilized” America where the inner cities are given over to gang violence, and the wild animals are of the two-legged variety and civilized people are not able to cope or defend themselves against these while lawmakers and the ACLU seem determined to keep giving the advantage to the wild beasts marauding at will.

Now I don’t know why grandad thought it was a good idea to turn me loose with a gun to make my own way in the Sequoia National Forest near Kernville in the 40s when I was only a very young boy. But looking back, I realized this was the way grandad had been raised and he must have thought it a good way to raise me. He knew the world was a tough place and a man had to be tough and self-reliant to make his way in it, and grandad’s idea of early childhood development meant taking on responsibility at a very young age. I would learn later he had lied about his age to get into the army while only fourteen year’s old. Being quite large and raw-boned he got away with the deception. Much like recruiters for football players the army at the time was primarily interested in big, not being fussy about paperwork.

As a boy I had an old hound, Tippy, a mongrel Collie, that we inherited with the mining claim in Boulder Gulch here in the Kern River Valley. When I would get one of the guns and take off hunting, Tippy would traipse along. Tippy was not a hunting dog, it just seemed he wanted to keep me company at times and I was usually glad to have him come with me.

One morning I had taken the old .410 single-shot hoping for a rabbit, some quail or, if I was really lucky, a nice young tree squirrel. The young ones could be fried like rabbit or chicken, the older ones became squirrel stew with dumplings.

It felt great out there in the forest among the critters; but while making my way up a hill behind the cabin, I noticed Tippy had disappeared. Suddenly, not more than fifteen feet away from me, slowly trotting around a granite boulder up the hill was a mountain lion!

The lion saw me at the same time I saw it, its large, baleful, yellow eyes staring straight at me! Its ears were laid flat back against its huge head and its tail, all fluffed out and looking about four inches in diameter and six feet long, was hung low to the ground.

Now anyone who knows anything about pussycats knows when they are irritated. And this was one very large and very irritated pussycat. And here I was, equipped with a .410 single-shot loaded with number eight birdshot. Talk about being prepared! I knew how David must have felt about that slingshot against Goliath. But at least David had the advantage of knowing God was with him. And, I’m sure; David didn’t have to worry about becoming a Philistine Hors d’oeuvre.

Much to my intense relief and surprise, the lion made an abrupt 90-degree turn to my left and continued trotting on its way. And there came Tippy right behind him! Several thoughts immediately passed through my mind at the time: abject terror, anger at the fact that I didn’t have my .270 instead of the .410, anger with Tippy for chasing up the lion and sending it my way, relief that I had sense enough to know that had I shot the lion with a load of .410 number eight birdshot I would only have succeeded in arousing its interest in me, and so forth. I settled for grabbing Tippy by the scruff of the neck and running pell-mell back to the cabin.

I regaled my grandparents and school chums with the story of my close encounter with the angel of death, and the lion grew with the telling. It was probably only your average, run of the mill mountain lion; but it was an African giant up that close.

But didn’t grandad know there were dangers like that mountain lion or bears in the forest, and didn’t he know a .410 single-shot in the hands of a young boy was not exactly well-matched against such dangers? Well, if he did it was never mentioned, and I continued to go out on my own often carrying only that small-bore shotgun. Oddly enough, my great-grandmother and grandmother did not pay it much attention either. It may have been they all thought me so very capable it didn’t overly concern them; I had proven to be a very capable, self-reliant and responsible boy in many ways and I guess they just decided to let it pass. And maybe this is one reason parents lose touch with their children; expecting more of a child than they should reasonably expect. In the worst cases, the parents simply don’t care.

Children today are facing dangers even greater than those I faced here in the forest as a boy, and in retrospect notwithstanding that lion I was always safer in the forest environment than any child forced to live with the violence of the inner cities of America. In the forest, the wild animals will usually go out of their way to avoid confrontation with humans. In too many cities of America the wild beasts look for such confrontation.