You know how it is. You think you know someone. You size them up by appearance, the way I sized up Mark Robison. A man's man, he wears a handlebar mustache and jeans, rides around in a big pickup or on the back of a horse, talks a lot about football and hunting and sells tires for a living.
I thought I had him pegged. Then I found out I didn't.
It started one day about four years ago when a young man in a wheelchair came to his store. He appeared glum and depressed. For reasons he can't even explain, Robison blurted, "You ever been hunting?!"
"Uh, no. But I'd like to," he said.
"Why don't I take you?"
After reciting all the reasons he couldn't go, Bret Remington, paralyzed from the waist down, relented. Robison took him out in the mountains for a day and Remington bagged an elk from his wheelchair. He's been hooked ever since.
Robison, I mean.
In the years since then, word spread and Mark befriended others who were disabled. Robison takes them hunting, sometimes even carrying them on his back. Who knew this guy was a softie?
Robison believes there are three stages in the life of a hunter — the hunter who hunts for meat, the hunter who hunts for trophies and the hunter who doesn't care much if he gets an animal because he just enjoys the outdoors and the challenge of a hunt.
"The older you get, the more you fall into the last category," he says.
Robison is the type of guy who will take his family to the mountains just to take pictures of wildlife and observe them. He gets goose bumps just hearing a bull elk bugle. His enthusiasm is infectious. For an anniversary present, his wife Tina's only wish was to go on a bear hunt.
So Robison shares his love of hunting and the outdoors with others who otherwise couldn't do it. He started a nonprofit organization and pays for the hunts either out of his own pocket and through donations from Hillside Tire or from fund-raisers at the Hunter's Expo. He has taken his disabled friends on eight hunts this year alone and plans three more this month.
"I didn't even know the guy, and he was willing to take me out," says Bret. "My friends wouldn't even do that. It wasn't practical."
It can be a lot of work. Robison and partner Mike Olsen carry their friends piggyback in places where a chair won't go and take care of all their special needs. This type of hunting presents new challenges, whether it's attaching a gun rest to a chair or rigging a cord through the trigger guard that enables a quadriplegic to shoot a gun.
"It's awesome to watch these guys have that experience," says Robison.
He once hid Bret in a dry creek bed, surrounded by trees, and left him alone, "so he would feel like you or I would, alone outdoors."
Then he and Olsen hiked up the mountain and scared animals back toward Bret. When they heard a shot, they dashed back down the hill, but all they found was Bret's chair and his rifle. Bret was so excited that he alternately wheeled his wheelchair and crawled over rocks and logs some 75 yards to where he had dropped a deer. Robison and Olsen wiped tears from their eyes.
"Mark's a good man," says Bret. "He talks big and come across as a tough guy, but he's got a big heart. He's just a big kid."
"I love these guys," says Robison, who gets together with his disabled friends over lunch or dinner at his house. "I call them my kids. That's how close we get."
Bret, 28, says the hunting experiences have given him more than stories and trophies. "It's given me the confidence that I can do other things," he says. "I hadn't thought I could do it."
Bret is attending college. He has skydived. And he is getting married soon. "Mark might be my best man," he says.
Doug Robinson's column runs on Tuesdays. E-mail drob@desnews.com.