This week I got word that Don Hardy had died. He was several years past 90 and lived in an assisted living facility near his daughter in Nevada.

 

Far too seldom I slow down enough to look back on a specific individual or individuals with whom I have had special outdoor experiences.

 

Don was one of those guys who never did you ill. All pluses; no minuses.

 

I met Don in about 1963. I immediately envied him because he worked in Montana, a place that to a young man eaten up with hunting and all the good outdoor stuff, was pretty close to heaven. And Don was laid back; cool; self-assured; reserved; all the things I wanted to be but was not. He also loved hunting and got to do it in the Rockies.

 

As we worked together in West Texas, I hung on Don’s every word, trying to learn what life was like in Montana where those giant mule deer bucks and bull elk and speedy antelope lived. My envy grew to jealousy and eventually covetousness as Don told of stalks through dense aspen thickets on snow-covered mountainsides.

 

I dreamed of one day living and working there in the mountain west, but I considered my dreams to be totally out of touch with reality. I was a newcomer to our agency and Don was an experienced professional. Had you told me that spring 52 years ago that one day I would live there in the mountains near enough to Don to hunt and fish with him and that I would have that very job that I coveted and that I would even be Don’s supervisor prior to his retirement, I would have accused you of delusional thinking. But all those things happened, which confirmed to me the saying that one should be careful of what one wishes for because those very dreams often come true. And the blessings I derived exceeded my dreams.

 

Don took me on my first successful antelope hunt in Wyoming. We crept up a ridge near Laramie at dawn and Don crawled up to the rim and spotted a trophy buck and a smaller one. He signaled me to crawl up quickly and take the bigger buck that was about to disappear from view. I shot the buck so fast that Don thought my rifle had fired accidentally. He didn’t know that my shots at whitetails in Mississippi had all been when they were flying ahead of hounds. “Shoot fast” to me meant firing before very many tenths of a second had elapsed. I would later learn that out west a hunter can usually take plenty of time to get off a shot.

 

When my buck dropped, Don took the smaller one on the run and we had our limits before sunrise. We finished the day shooting prairie dogs

 

Don was along on the hunt that yielded my first bull elk. He was there before the bull stopped kicking.

Perhaps my most cherished adventure with Don was a trout trip in the Medicine Bow Mountains of Wyoming’s Snowy Range. Each summer Don and his son, Donald, backpacked into the wilderness and fished Douglas Creek where few people have been. They liked to hike down the roadless mountain for eight miles, camp and fish a few days and hike another eight miles to the valley below where they would leave one vehicle for transportation out of the forest. One year Don honored me with an invitation to join their traditional father/son outing. We caught rainbow trout on almost every decent cast of our fly rods, sizzled some of them in butter, survived a minor flood, had an intriguing episode with a pine marten and slept under the stars in total silence. We hiked down the mountain perhaps on a trail Jim Bridger and Kit Carson had taken when they trapped the area some 140 years earlier. We ate bright red wild berries on the way back to civilization. We never saw another person on the entire trip.

 

Together, Don and I chased mule deer, wild turkeys, Rocky Mountain elk and doves. I called in his first gobbler and got him hooked on that sport; an addiction that lasted the rest of his life.

 

Stage fright or other nervousness in front of groups has never been a problem of mine. And I conducted large national meetings, taught classes of students with higher university degrees than mine and addressed radio and television audiences. But when I stood up that night in Cheyenne, Wyoming to say a few informal words about Don at his retirement dinner, my voice cracked, my throat was dry, I stammered and forgot my lines. There were either two or three tables of us in a small restaurant; fewer than a dozen people. (There are very few people in Wyoming, and most of Don’s friends in the agency lived hundreds of miles away.)

 

It quite surprised me that words wouldn’t flow like they always had before when I needed them. But I soon realized that the emotion that stymied my speech came from the deep feelings I had for this very special person who had introduced me to so much in the outdoors and who in fact had been my hero. Don Hardy; a soft-spoken, gentle man with the easy California accent who had left the West Coast for the mountains and never looked back, and whose image and deeds live among my favorite memories.