Twelve-year-old Dalton Penrod eased the rifle up to his shoulder and peered through the scope.
About half an hour earlier, Greg Flores, the adult leader of the hunt, had told Penrod and his 13-year-old hunting buddy to ask God for a deer. Now, the answer to their prayers - a whitetail buck with a seven-point rack - stood in the fading daylight about 69m away from their blind, grazing nonchalantly on corn that had been tossed by a feeder.
"Take one deep breath and let it out," Flores whispered to Penrod as he helped him steady the gun. "OK, hold it right in the middle of the shoulder."
With the muzzle of the .25-06 single-shot rifle pointing straight at the deer's "kill zone," the boy gently placed his finger on the trigger.
"Squeeze, Dalton," Flores said.
Dalton pulled the trigger, unleashing a 100-grain bullet powered by a deafening thunderclap that pounded eardrums in the tiny blind and echoed off the surrounding hills.
There are hunting clubs for kids and there are fishing clubs for kids. But Cross Trail Outfitters, a nonprofit organization based in San Antonio, might be the first and only one to combine youth hunting and fishing opportunities with Christian outreach and fellowship.
Mike Arnold, the charismatic founder and president of Cross Trail Outfitters - he prefers the title "Chief Outfitter" - says his organization's goal is summed up in its mission statement.
"Building men, preserving our heritage and sharing our faith," Arnold says. "That's what we're about."
On its face, the way the organization works seems like simplicity itself.
Get small groups of boys together with adult leaders for an outdoors experience. Create an environment where the kids feel comfortable talking about their lives, their problems and their faith.
It's not that easy. Most of the boys are at-risk kids. Some are the sons of single moms, with no father figures or other male role models. Others have lived with alcoholics, drug abusers or worse.
Arnold created CTO after a personal journey that included stops in politics, television production and business.
Arnold's last "real" job as an administrator at the Texas Trophy Hunters Association, a for-profit hunting organization, paid him a six-figure income in salary and benefits.
Besides giving him a thorough grounding in hunting and camp craft, his experiences in the field also taught him about the power of nature in human emotions and spirituality.
Love in the outdoors
"I had learned that the outdoors is the way to really reach people," he says. "You find them where they love, you find them where they live and find them in their passions.
"Instead of trying to hook them and drag them and sit them in a pew, get them around a campfire."
Arnold had found a temple, but it didn't have a minister. A devout Christian, he often takes his inspiration from the Bible.
God, the Bible and Christianity are the bedrocks upon which Arnold has built Cross Trail Outfitters. All participants pray before every hunt and every meal.
At night, after dinner, they typically gather and reflect on a "question of the day," such as "what kind of man do you want to be?"
"We don't accept Sunday school answers," Arnold says. "It's so easy to spit out an answer just like that. But, do you really know what kind of man you want to be? We really dig."
With the exception of the club's summer camps - where Arnold says the leaders frequently bring their wives and children in part "to show the kids what functional families look like" - the organization's outings are 99.9 percent male.
"We've found that the boys just turn goofy when there are girls around," Arnold says. "They just start being stupid."
Away from their Xboxes, television sets and other distractions of everyday life, the boys find plenty of time to discuss other things besides religion.
Starting with a single Cross Trail Outfitters unit in 2005, the organization has grown to a total of six units in Texas and one on the verge of opening in Shreveport, La. The seeds of each unit are sown by signing on a leader, called an "outfitter," who solicits donations. After a donation benchmark has been reached, the new unit "goes live" and uses its funds to help pay for outings and provide a salary for its outfitter.
No one at Cross Trail Outfitters is getting rich, at least not in the traditional sense. Documents required by the IRS for nonprofit organizations show that it took in about US$157,000 last year. Nearly all of the money went toward program expenses.
Arnold worked 70-hour weeks and got paid US$17,308. His wife, Amy, works as an unpaid Cross Trail Outfitters board member and secretary. She also home-schools their four children, who range in age from 1 through 11, and assists at summer camps.
"I'm the camp nurse and camp mom," she says.
The Arnolds run Cross Trail Outfitters out of their home in Northwest San Antonio. The walls of the family's living room are decorated with taxidermy mounts of whitetail deer and javelina. The furnishings range from a toddler's plastic slide to a gun cabinet loaded with shotguns and rifles, including one with a pink stock that belongs to Arnold's 9-year-old daughter. A Bible sits on a coffee table.
"The Lord provides what we need," Arnold says. "There's a lot to the story of the Israelites in the wilderness. We've had our wilderness period, but we've also been blessed to sort of cross the Jordan River.
"We're not rolling in dough by any stretch, and we've learned to be incredibly resourceful and do a lot with a little bit."
The slashing of the government’s proposed budget by the two China-aligned parties in the legislature, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), has apparently resulted in blowback from the US. On the recent junket to US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, KMT legislators reported that they were confronted by US officials and congressmen angered at the cuts to the defense budget. The United Daily News (UDN), the longtime KMT party paper, now KMT-aligned media, responded to US anger by blaming the foreign media. Its regular column, the Cold Eye Collection (冷眼集), attacked the international media last month in
On a misty evening in August 1990, two men hiking on the moors surrounding Calvine, a pretty hamlet in Perth and Kinross, claimed to have seen a giant diamond-shaped aircraft flying above them. It apparently had no clear means of propulsion and left no smoke plume; it was silent and static, as if frozen in time. Terrified, they hit the ground and scrambled for cover behind a tree. Then a Harrier fighter jet roared into view, circling the diamond as if sizing it up for a scuffle. One of the men snapped a series of photographs just before the bizarre
Power struggles are never pretty. Fortunately, Taiwan is a democracy so there is no blood in the streets, but there are volunteers collecting signatures to recall nearly half of the legislature. With the exceptions of the “September Strife” in 2013 and the Sunflower movement occupation of the Legislative Yuan and the aftermath in 2014, for 16 years the legislative and executive branches of government were relatively at peace because the ruling party also controlled the legislature. Now they are at war. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) holds the presidency and the Executive Yuan and the pan-blue coalition led by the
China has begun recruiting for a planetary defense force after risk assessments determined that an asteroid could conceivably hit Earth in 2032. Job ads posted online by China’s State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (SASTIND) this week, sought young loyal graduates focused on aerospace engineering, international cooperation and asteroid detection. The recruitment drive comes amid increasing focus on an asteroid with a low — but growing — likelihood of hitting earth in seven years. The 2024 YR4 asteroid is at the top of the European and US space agencies’ risk lists, and last week analysts increased their probability
RSS