A Total Outdoorsman - Is a Mentor

The following is an article that touches on the very soul of the true Outdoorsman.

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Mentoring our children is a natural extension of the love that creates them.  It takes little forethought or effort to place your hand over a boy's hand on the rod cork when he casts for trout, if the boy is your son, or to prop a backpack for a shotgun rest when a girl aims at a turkey, if the girl is your daughter.  But fewer Americans (*and in this case, Canadians) take to the outdoors each year, and for our connection to the earth to survive the 21st century, we must make a dedicated effort to extend the light of our passion for hunting and fishing beyond the circle of family.


The importance of passing the torch and becoming a mentor in this larger sense was driven home to me one evening when I rowed a friend of my son around in an alpine lake as he trolled a fly for cutthroat trout.  He was a tough kid who had endured a family situation that was far from ideal - I had picked him up at the battered-women's shelter - but water smooths stones, and the lake sanded the rough edges to reveal the smile underneath.  We may think of mentoring as giving, but its rewards go both ways, and the look on that boy's face when I scooped his first trout into the net is one I'll never forget.  Today, a photo of that kid at a fish fry the following day hangs over my desk.  It brings me joy every time I look at it.  But much more satisfaction is that the ripples those trout made have continued to spread as the boy, now a young man, teaches his own children to fish.


Had I fished alone that evening I might have caught more trout, but with only my eyes to see them they would have been long forgotten.

Source - Field & Stream May 2011