I killed my first deer in the Sierra foothills of northern California, one of the landmark moments of my still-young life, somewhat akin to Ralphie Parker opening up his iconic Red Ryder BB gun on that fateful Christmas morning.
Like the kid in the holiday classic, I had a wild imagination fueled by adventure stories and their archetypal heroes—in Ralph’s (slightly younger) case, Little Orphan Annie, and of course the eponymous range ridin’, rifle-totin’, comic-strip cowboy. In mine, the frontiersmen and trappers of Louis L’Amour novels, and Teddy Roosevelt’s African Game Trails.
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