The passing of my old fishing and camping friend Neil Duel, a/k/a “Old Hickory,’’ motivated me to write something about a bunch of people who have both inspired, often entertained me with humor and also have been a source of strength over the years.

Each have had some serious lifetime experiences that they gained a lot of faith and strength from. Lester Beaupre, a country boy from New Sweden, Maine, is one of several that come to mind. Lester spent several months on the sweaty and dangerous battlegrounds of Viet Nam. As a special weapons infantryman he often was chosen to be the lead man on nighttime patrols. And when he came back to his beloved home there was no doubt that he had a bad case of combat fatigue. He fought his way through it and became very successful in a design and building career. He had jobs as large as heading-up hospital construction.

Lester loved to hunt and fish and had developed a strong relationship with another country boy, Curt Lane, also of the same Maine locale. When you saw one of them out on field or water, you almost always saw both of them.

But he was a comedian first and everything else came second. Lester’s knack of knowing when to show up timed as you would get the last decoy set or have the boat in the water and launched was legendary. And his comments to that effect were rib-hurting-funny.

There was no doubt that with that duo, Curt was the serious comedy partner and Lester was the comedian. One day will always stand in my memory about these two characters. Both Curt and Lester insisted that in order for wild Canada geese to come to a set of decoys you had to be out in the middle of a field, laying down and covered with whatever ground cover there was. If it was a potato field then you used potato tops. In a grain field you would use the grain straw.

My hunting partner, Brad Conner, from Greenland, and myself found out that just the opposite was true. If you found some woods or hedgerow-cover alongside the goose-feeding fields that would hide you, the geese would drop into your decoys without even circling.

So Curt and Lester agreed to an afternoon hunt where we would hide in a woods-line and set the decoys just yards from where we would be hiding in the woods. Lester showed up exactly as planned after all the work had been done. He might have been hiding up the road to wait until the last decoy hit the ground. And he also showed up with a camera and no gun.

It seemed like only minutes when the first flock of geese visited us and guns went off and geese dropped like flies. There were six of us in all and Lester claimed that the geese knew he had no gun as they tried to land almost at his feet.

After the shooting, Lester stepped out into the field and made a serious declaration. “Flash bulbs don’t scare those geese at all.”

After another two great decoying flocks came in, all but Lester had their limits so we insisted that he go get his shotgun, which he reluctantly did. The next flock of geese almost put their feet in his footprints and Lester’s three shots never took a feather off them. Again Lester walked out into the field to make another declaration. “Boy, do those geese have big feet.”

After we got through rolling on the ground with laughter, we got serious again and continued to put flock after flock of geese into good shooting range for Lester and finally the second bird of his limit fell into the woods. Lester walked out into the field and told us that goose must have broken its neck on a tree limb.

About three years after that most memorable hunt he was a victim of the famous deadly coffee poisoning at the tiny church in New Sweden which Lester and his wife attended. He lived through it after several weeks in an induced coma but there was no doubt that combined with his extreme combat experiences, he was a different person, a change that only a very close family member or friend would recognize.

I love Lester and his family. Their effect on my life has been significant and things would never be the same for me without this friendship. His best friend Curt Lane’s story is almost as dramatic than Lester’s. Without going into a lot of detail, we’ll tell that story soon.

Dick Pinney’s Guidelines column appears weekly in the New Hampshire Sunday News. Email him at DoDuckInn@aol.com