(As Published in Shooting Times Magazine, May 1972)
In The West Wing of a secluded, tile-roofed Spanish home in San Antonio, Texas is a room that is one of my favorite retreats. It’s a large room, carpeted with the rich hides of Polar and Kodiak bears and tigers. A long setee is draped with zebra hides that prickle your back when you sit down for a drink and some talk with the man of the house. Pairs of elephant tusks stand close to bookcases and a maze of racked rifles and shotguns of every description. The walls are spiked with such a forest of mounted heads and horns that the whole effect becomes blurred, and the guest concentrates on the host, who leans casually behind a big wooden desk.
He is a ruddily healthy man of indeterminate middle age, his compact body kept hard by constant physical activity, his hands those of a working man. He looks at you with a direct blue gaze that would raise your guard if it weren’t with a soft chuckle as he asks about your health, your family, and the advancement of your career. The smile that accompanies the chuckle is partially hidden by a drooping roan moustache, and overshadowed by the belligerent nose of a Roman centurion.
He is Col. Charles Askins, my longtime friend, and one of the most interesting – some say the most controversial – men you are likely to meet anywhere in this last of the 1900s.
