One is lucky in life to have mentors. Fathers and grandfathers make wonderful mentors if so inclined. Mine were. My father and both grandfathers were outstanding mentors and all in slightly different ways. But I had a third “grandfather” as well who was a wonderful mentor of outdoor lore.

Cephas was a black gentleman who lived in a tar paper shack on the shores of Lake Seminole in South Georgia. My father hired him every year as a fishing guide into the flooded Cyprus swamp where the big bass lived.

Seminole is a maze of tangled trees and water. A man could get lost out there among the alligators and water moccasins and wander in circles for days. Cephas knew his way into and out of that maze.

I met Cephas for the first time when I was six years old. My father had already known him for years. We drove down a sand trail off the paved road around the lake to his home where we picked him up for the week. My father never just sat in the car and waited for Cephas to get in. When he saw the screen door open, he got out of the car and met Cephas halfway with a warm handshake. I learned more about respect and honor with that simple gesture than I ever would in a classroom.

Cephas would spend the next week with us in our “fish shack.” Typical of fish camps in the Deep South in the ‘50s and '60s, it was a one-room affair, half wood and half screen, bunk beds and a stove and refrigerator, and a single sparse light bulb dangling from the ceiling.

Cephas always called my father “Big Mac,” which was fitting, as he was 6'2" and 240 pounds in a pair of size 36 slacks and even in his 50s could bench press twice his body weight. Black-haired and blue-eyed, he cut quite a figure, and when Big Mac was in town Cephas didn’t want to be anywhere else.

It became clear to me when I was 10 years old that Cephas and my father had a deep love and mutual respect for one another. After a day’s fishing that began at daylight and ended either at dark or upon reaching our limit of boated bass, we would clean the fish and fry enough up for a real feast. After dinner we would sit on the front porch drinking coffee, and my father and Cephas would tell generational hunting and fishing stories far into the night against a backdrop melody of crickets and frogs, and the roaring of bull alligators on the shoreline.

It was heady elixir for a 10-year-old boy.

It was this year that Cephas began mentoring me. The lessons were pure and simple: How to stay alive in the swamp by finding your way back by the stars; how to build a push pole and push the boat back if the motor quit — which two-stroke outboards of the day were prone to do; how to safely throw a water moccasin out of the boat in the predawn hours, or if one dropped in from an overhead tree for a surprise visit.

It was all stay-alive stuff…

Prior to that year, Cephas had just protected me. On chilly boat rides out on dark mornings, he would cup his big old calloused hands over my wind-blown ears to keep them warm. He got the hooks out of the fish I caught so I wouldn’t put a fish hook through my finger. He grabbed me by the collar when I nearly fell overboard when we hit a submerged stump.

But 1967 was different.

At the end of the day, Cephas would say: “Alright, Little Mac. You guide us back to the dock.” I have to admit to cheating. I had overheard my father say to one of his friends back home, “If something ever happens to Cephas while we’re out there, we might just be lost for good.” So I bought a compass and learned how to take headings on it. Cephas started letting me do many of the things he had always done for me in 1967.

All in all, I had 10 years of spring trips with Cephas — 80 glorious days with one of the finest outdoorsmen South Georgia ever produced.

My mentor. My third grandfather.