Many people think that my reputation as a great outdoorsman is a product of inherent athletic ability. Nothing could be further from the truth, which is that I have been cursed since birth with an extraordinary lack of coordination.

For years my fly-casting technique was compared, rather banally I might add, to an old lady fighting off a bee with a broom handle. My canoe paddling raised shouts of alarm among onlookers, who assumed I was trying to repel an assault by a North American cousin of the Loch Ness monster. My attempts to pitch the family tent terrorized entire campgrounds. As for marksmanship, any game I happened to bring into camp was routinely examined by my disbelieving companions for powder burns. ("The man has stealth," they would say. "Who else could place the muzzle of a rifle to the head of a sleeping mule-deer buck? Who else could still miss?")

For years I suffered the ridicule of my fellow sportsmen over what they perceived to be my ineptitude. Then one day I happened to recall a lovable old college administrator I had once served time under, Dr. Milburn Snodgrass. That casual recollection was to advance outdoor sports by a hundred years.

Doc Snodgrass had taken up pipe smoking as a young man and turned it into a highly successful career, eventually rising to the position of dean. Obviously, his success was not due merely to pipe smoking. No, he was also the master of two facial expressions: thoughtful and bemused. Those were the total ingredients of his success. The man was dumb. It is my considered opinion that if intelligence were crankcase oil, his would not have wet the tip of the dipstick let alone reached the add-one-quart mark. But he was an excellent dean.

No matter what problem was brought before Doc Snodgrass, his response was to sit back and puff on his pipe, alternating between thoughtful and bemused expressions. The effect suggested that Doc was bemused by a problem so ridiculously simple and was giving thought to firing the nincompoop who dared bother him with it. The problem-bearer would laugh feebly, to indicate it was all a little joke, and then rush off to find the solution himself. People thought Snodgrass was a genius and often wondered what great ideas he was mulling over as he puffed his pipe and looked thoughtful and bemused. Eventually, I would learn the truth: Doc Snodgrass was not smart enough to mull.

One example will serve to illustrate the effectiveness of the dean's approach to human relations.

During a campus uprising, the students demanded that the college administration do away with Poverty,War, and Mashed Turnips in the Commissary, although not necessarily in that order. Doc Snodgrass appeared suddenly on the steps of the administration building, seemingly to confront the chanting mob but more likely because he had mistaken the exit for the door to the restroom. (His thoughtful expression was probably due at first to his wondering why so many students of both sexes were in the men's room.) As he fumbled about in his pockets looking for his tobacco pouch--the search for the source of the Nile took scarcely longer--the students fell silent, no doubt saving their breath for the purpose of shouting down the words of wisdom they expected to be forthcoming from the dean. (Youths are not called callow for nothing.) The pouch at last found, the dean began to fill his pipe, tamping and filling, tamping and filling, and all the while looking extremely thoughtful. Then he began probing his pockets for a match. Finally, an exasperated student in guerrilla attire lunged forward and thrust upon him a disposable lighter, little realizing that the dean was confounded by all such modern technology. His efforts to ignite the lighter by scratching it against a brick wall produced a good laugh from the students and a consensus among them that anyone with a sense of humor like that couldn't be such a bad guy after all. The mood of the crowd lightened. A game of Frisbee broke out. Someone threw a football. A coed burned her bra.

Having solved the riddle of the lighter, and tortured the tobacco into a state of combustion, Snodgrass began sucking away on his pipe as he looked increasingly thoughtful. He was, as I say, a master of the thoughtful expression. Even the hardliners among the students seemed unable to resist the impression that the dean wascontemplating the eradication of Poverty, War, and Mashed Turnips. The crowd began to disperse, its members exchanging among themselves the opinion that the dean had not only a great sense of humor but a mind "like a steel trap." The truth was, he had a mind like flypaper, and not very good flypaper at that. His total intellectual arsenal consisted of his pipe and those two facial expressions.

The import of the dean's pipe did not strike me immediately, but when it did, I rushed out and bought myself a pipe and tobacco and began practicing my expressions. As a direct consequence of these efforts, I began rising through the professorial ranks as if by levitation. The ugly rumor that I had flunked three successive IQ tests (there were a lot of trick questions) was silenced once and for all. Faculty and students alike began referring to me as one who had a mind like a steel trap. And I continued to puff my pipe and look alternately bemused and thoughtful as promotion after promotion was thrust upon me. Still, not all was well. There was the problem of my ineptitude at outdoor sports.

Then one day I was struck by a marvelous idea. If my pipe and expressions had worked so well in advancing my career, why wouldn't they be equally effective in something worthwhile, such as hunting and fishing? The very next weekend, on a fishing trip with Retch Sweeney and Fenton Quagmire, I took along my pipe and tobacco and, of course, my ability to become bemused or thoughtful at the drop of a hat.

The fishing started out routinely, with Sweeney and Quagmire making snide remarks about my casting technique. For the most part, however, they confined their merriment to a few chortles, saving the belly laughs forthe embarrassing predicament that my lack of coordination invariably lands me in.

Presently, I spotted a promising patch of water, but it was made almost inaccessible because of thick brush and high banks on one side and a monstrous logjam on the other. For that very reason I guessed that the deep hole beneath the logjam probably hadn't been prospected recently by other anglers. As I studied the situation, I noticed a slender log jutting out through the brush on the bank, and I quickly calculated that by sitting on the end of this log I could cast over the hole and still remain concealed from the fish. Five minutes later I was perched somewhat precariously on the end of the log and, in fact, had already extracted a couple of plump trout from beneath the logjam. Sweeney and Quagmire, both as yet without a single strike, glared enviously at me and cursed my ingenuity. Now it was my turn to chortle. But right in the middle of my chortle, a huge rainbow zoomed out of the depths like a Polaris missile and detonated on my Black Gnat. This was exactly what I had been anticipating, and with lightning reflexes, I fell off the log and dropped fifteen feet into a bed of assorted boulders, none smaller than a breadbox. Even though my impact on the rocks caused me to wonder momentarily whether pelvic transplants had yet...