a leadership position in the Boy Scouts of America. He remained faithful to the organization to which he owed so much in his own education and character development. He became scoutmaster of Mobile's Troop 43, holding meetings every two weeks in an annex of the First Methodist Church at Broad and Dauphin Streets. He counseled boys when they needed it. He approved merit badge awards, and individual advancements in rank. Not least, he took groups with him on occasional field trips to the Nokobee tract, and held the boys spellbound with accounts of its natural history.
Raff stayed fit by working out two or three times a week at the Mobile Executive Center Gym. Occasionally, at noon on long days in his office, he went over to Henry's Guns and Shooting Gallery on Oak Street for target practice. His favorite weapon was a .22 single-shot rifle.
It puzzled some of his friends in the environmental movement that a rising star among them enjoyed gun practice. The explanation he gave Bill Robbins was simple and he hoped convincing.
"Look, I sure wish people would understand that I grew up in a gun culture. I've been a pretty good marksman since I was a kid. Trust me, slaughtering helpless birds and animals makes no sense to me. On the other hand, let's be frank about it. Once in a while you've got to kill wild deer, for example. We've wiped out all their natural predators, and so now we have deer populations exploding. People in the suburbs will put up with hunters, but they're not going to tolerate wolves and cougars. Not yet anyway."
"Okay, but what about quail and ducks and turkeys?" Robbins said.
"That's just rhetoric, Bill. You and I wouldn't go out and use quail for target practice, but you know as well as I do that legitimate hunters are the best friends we've got outside the conservation movement. They want habitats preserved as much as we do. So face it, they're conservationists of another kind, with a mission just like ours. I don't think there's a lot of difference between, say, a Cooper's hawk taking a quail out or a hunter shooting it out, so long as we save the woods the hawk and quail live in."
But there was another reason Raff went to Henry's Guns and Shooting Gallery that he never tried to explain to Robbins or anyone else. For him target practice, and especially with a rifle, the most physically compatible and precise weapon ever invented since the bow and arrow, was a form of Zen. He relaxed completely when he put on ear guards and began to fire at a fixed target. It brought him into a little world consisting solely of gun and target, with a meaning all unto itself and private to Raff. The line of sight, the black dead center of the bull's-eye, the stopping of one's breath, the gentle pull of the trigger, these became the whole world and the only reality when he lay prone to shoot. Every other thought was banished, and every other movement ceased except the microscopic involuntary tremble of arm and hand and the trigger pull. The only variable was the distance, twenty yards or fifty yards. The discharge of the .22 was barely detectable. The mental purpose was to travel with the projectile to the dead center of the bull's-eye and touch it, perfectly. Although that happened rarely, the cognitive purpose was different and the more important. It was to bring all the senses together to focus on an object of extreme simplicity, and to shut out the chaotic remainder of ordinary existence.
From that out-of-mind experience and to show his appreciation of the environmental role of hunters, Raff joined the National Rifle Association.
Bill Robbins was alarmed. "You're sending the wrong signal, Raff. Would you please at least take that NRA sticker off your rear bumper?"
"You don't understand, Bill. It's a matter of honesty and keeping a clear conscience. The only things I know that come anywhere close to target practice with a .22 rifle are a deep massage and sex."
One day, as he stood up, lay the rifle down, and took off his ear guards, a voice behind him said, "That's pretty good shooting. Were you in the army?"
Raff turned to find a man standing there, arms akimbo. He was about forty years old, thin, dressed in an ill-fitting dark blue business suit with an American-flag-design tie that forced his collar flaps slightly up and out. He wore a plain