Can you remember the best gifts you have ever received?

I pondered that as I watched the shiny, trendy, traditional and technological gifts under the Christmas tree being opened this year. I realized few would be remembered by next year. What I remember most are the gifts provided by a lifetime of being in the outdoors.

A few stand out in my mind.

It has been decades since my first golden trout catch, but that gift remains vivid in my mind: the late afternoon sunshine skimming across the still waters of Golden Trout Lake, illuminating the cloud of mosquitoes hovering just above the surface. My heart still flutters with excitement when I recall tossing my first fly and watching an eager golden explode from the water and inhale my offering in midair.

Can you just imagine the gift of sitting high on a Sierra mountainside and watching an eagle fly toward you at eye level with a squirrel in its talons?

As the huge bird gets closer, you could see a hawk circling and annoying the eagle in hopes of stealing an easy meal. Then the eagle releases the squirrel, flares back to drive away the nuisance hawk in a brief aerial dogfight and swoops down to catch the dropping squirrel in midair. That gift was given to my hunting partner and me on a blustery fall day of deer hunting east of Mammoth.

There are tiny gifts from nature, such as the inquisitive little hamsterlike Cooney that played hide-and-seek with me as I fished the crystal clear Sierra waters of Blue Lake. There was the hot summer morning when I awoke in the desert to the sound of clattering rocks and to the vision of a magnificent bighorn ram standing a few yards above me at Middle Willows in Anza-Borrego.

There have been the gifts of friendships made because of a mutual love of the outdoors.

I met Alice Alpers, who at age 91 still had a sparkle in her eye and a love of nature that filled her very soul.

There was Bob Sollima, the Sierra recluse who spent 17 winters tucked away in a tiny old cabin deep in the woods, often buried under more than 20 feet of snow. He became a legend for a rustic life that involved an 11-mile, uphill trip on skis for monthly mail. His faithful dog, Chief, received a Rescue Dog of the Year award for finding a lost snowboarder who was close to death.

I always have enjoyed trout fishing, but it wasn't until I met John Barbier that I really became addicted to trout hunting in the isolated outback of High Sierra wilderness places. Barbier taught me the joy of fishing wilderness lakes where you have it all to yourself and few people ever them see because they just won't walk a few miles. Those lakes and streams produce 40 or 50 fish a day to be caught and released.

My wanderings in the outdoors have led me to such people as Frank and Janice Mendenhall at Lake Henshaw. Frank is a giant man with a heart as big as he is, and Janice is an energetic redhead who just lights up any room.

I have spent countless hours in the open fields of Palomar Mountain with Gary Whyte, a man who loves the outdoors and shooting as much as Barbier loves fishing.

The gift of watching three sons grow up and now being able to share days in the field with them on an Arizona javelina hunt, a very cold White Mountain deer hunt or just slow summer fishing in a Palomar Mountain pond is priceless.

Perhaps some of the best gifts of all are the friendships made during long days in the field or cold nights in deer camp with good guys who share the love of nature, the challenge of the hunt and the satisfaction of filling your tag.

Those days outdoors teach universal lessons of responsibility, self-sufficiency, confidence, patience, dependability, camaraderie and teamwork. These are gifts I wish every child could receive,. And if more children did, I firmly believe, the world would be a better place.

Ernie Cowan is the outdoor writer for the North County Times. If you have an outdoor story of interest, call (760) 746-3901 or fax his outdoor line at (760) 741-2216. E-mail at alloutdoors@cox.net.

QUESTION: What is a Cooney? Should it be capitalized? (7th graf, too late for me to call him) - so