When we were still twerps, we could manage rather heroic views of ourselves. I grew up in northern Michigan in the 1940s and the landscape held everything a nascent sportsman could wish except the talent to take advantage of it. The simple fact that you had to develop fishing and hunting abilities can be discouraging to a youngster who has a vaunted idea of his potentialities revolving around 10-point bucks and 5-pound brown trout, especially when he’s catching smallish bluegills and perch and the single arrow shot from his 20-pound-pull bow on an early August morning fell about 50 yards short of the buck across the gully. My father taught me well but in rare moments of absolute honesty, I am still struck by the wide variance of my imagination’s vision of a sporting venture and what actually happens. I suspect this is partly due to the fact that I’m a novelist and my livelihood is my imagination, which is as uncontrollable as a 4-month-old English pointer. The key idea is always “not what I expected” when I flip back and forth in the sporting pages of my journals ...
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