Читать книгу Backlash: A Compendium of Lore and Lies (Mostly Lies) Concerning Hunting, Fishing and the Out of Doors - Galen Winter - Страница 7

Chapter One

The Sportsman

The Little & Jones Webster Dictionary defines “Sportsman” as: A person possessing the qualities attributable to a sportsman; a chivalrous, fair minded person; one willing to incur and prepared to suffer defeat in fair competition without complaining.

I don’t know who came up with that definition. You can bet your Thesaurus it wasn’t anyone who hunts or fishes. There are some magnificent liars in our fraternity, but none so steeped in perjury that he could write such a preposterous statement.

Maybe some sportsmen, like pool sharks, crap shooters or basketball game bookies, could fit such a description, but if you are considering hunters and fishermen, it misses the mark and by a wide, wide margin.

Anyone who has suffered the defeat of spending a full day crashing through tag alders, blackberry bushes and swamps without sighting a woodcock or Ruffed Grouse can be expected to devote 75% of his evening campfire conversation denouncing the hunting, damning the local terrain and complaining bitterly about anything even vaguely associated with the hunt.

You can begin to commence to start to consider the possibility of a pheasant hunter being chivalrous and fair minded when he fires twice, misses and then says: “Good move there, bird. I hope we meet again next season.” In real life, the ministers, ladies, children and, perhaps, career sailors home on leave would learn some new language if the actual comments make by the pheasant hunter were broadcast immediately after such a display of shooting.

If we limit the word to its application to hunters and fishermen, trying to define “sportsman” is a genuine test of vocabulary and imagination. It is a Herculean task similar to that of cleansing the Augean Stables. If you spend time associating with and listening to hunters and fishermen you will quickly develop the ability to recognize the material cleaned out of stables.