An Outdoor Sporting Life

by Scott Irwin

Scott Irwin grew up in a time when children did chores that instilled a hands-on work ethic, but there was still time to explore the wild things. Armed first with a slingshot carefully crafted from a forked box elder limb and powered by pre-WWII red rubber inner tube strips, he was soon using a Daisy BB gun to hunt backyard critters. He also enjoyed small-water fishing. By age twelve, he was stalking squirrels and cottontails, and it wasn't long before he'd mastered a tack-driving Remington 511 .22 with five-shot clip that thinned out the jackrabbits that swarmed southwest Kansas in the...