Teen outdoorsman knows what he needs

Craig Grace is just 14, but he’s already an experienced hunter.
“I first went hunting with my dad when I was 8,” the Dennis teen said. “I was too young to get a license, so I just walked through the fields, stirring up the pheasants.”
Last year he got that license, and went hunting as an adult, using a muzzle-loading rifle and shotgun.
However, his first deer was not brought down with either of those firearms. Nor was his second. They were with a bow and arrow—his 8th grade graduation gift.
“But I prefer using a muzzle-loader (firearm),” he explained. “The bow only has a range of about 40 yards.”
Craig’s lineage as a hunter and outdoorsman is a solid one. His father, Tim, taught him how to butcher a deer; the Graces don’t waste the food they hunt.
His grandfather, the late Arthur Lathers, Sr. taught everyone in his family how to hunt.
The family practices their marksmanship at the shooting range of the Tuckahoe Game Preserve, according to Craig’s mom.
“We’ve been there several times,” she said. “All the children shoot—22, 410, and 12 gauge.”
“Craig now goes to Vo Tech,” she said. “He has applied for the archery team. He has no interests in the other sports. He knows there is a technique needed for the bow, and he has it.
“And the New Jersey Department of Fish and Wildlife offers an annual ‘Youth Day,’” she said. “That’s when older hunters go along, but the youth has the gun—to get the benefit of the older hunter’s experience.”
Apparently, bow hunting is not Craig’s only field of expertise, since he also has landed a 75-pound drum fish.
He must have always had a certain confidence about those talents, dating back to kindergarten, his mother said.
“He told us then that they couldn’t teach him anything,” she said. “He said, ‘I already know how to fish, hunt, use a bow…I already know what I need to.’”