Happy Hunter

LittleChief's husband, Bub Owen, keeps the books for the company, which will do more than $30 million in sales this year. "Bo works his ass off," says Owen. "Out there sweet-talking, selling meat." Says LittleChief, "The thing that impresses me most about Bo is his cooking ability. When he comes here [to Scottsdale] and stays with us, he cooks breakfast, lunch and dinner. Cooks pies, everything. Does the dishes, cleans the kitchen. He's a joy."

As the spuds slowly become first fresh-boiled and then delicately seasoned mashed potatoes, Jackson prattles on about his career, gloriously amazing but sadly foreshortened. He never lifted weights, but he was so strong he snapped bats over his leg, shoulders, even his helmeted head. "I made a point never to break any of my corked bats," he says. His soon-to-be diners look up. Really? Bo grins. Dumb media.

In his basement he had earlier shown off the workroom where he configures his hunting arrows for deer, bear, even fish. Jackson hunts, he says, "because it's illegal to kill stupid people." There are tools all around in the tidy room, and nearly a thousand arrows. "A man can't have enough arrows," he pointed out, "like a woman can't have enough shoes."

But could he make an authentic Sammy Sosa-style corked war club down here?

"Sure," he said. "If I knew how."

A corked bat would be a joke for a guy like Jackson, the natural who won the Alabama high school decathlon after teaching himself to pole-vault in one day and after observing a kid throw the discus, then tossing it more than 140 feet himself, without a spin. Even now he has no limp from his thrice-repaired hip and can sit cross-legged without a wince. "You don't even know which one it is, do you?" he asks. "The doctor almost passed out when he saw me slide on the left side." Bo chuckles, now swiftly trimming fat from a dozen lamb chops.

Everybody likes Bo these days. You can see it down at the river where he puts in his boat, at the golf course, at the grocery store, on the neighborhood street where he goes out of his way to flag down a mother and say nice things about her gurgling infant in the shaded stroller. But there is always an edge to this huge man—-"Arms just like my mom," he says. "Ever seen my sisters? Them, too"—and it's what made him tough enough and audacious enough to hit baseballs and linebackers in the same years.

Once, when pushed too far, Jackson nearly laid out a Royals teammate. After Bo struck out three times against the Yankees, then tried to bunt for a hit in his last at bat, Hal McRae razzed him for the inept display. He kept it up in the clubhouse, the bus, the airplane.

"O-fer," he was saying. "Bo tried to lay down a bunt." Jackson finally approached the veteran and said, "Enough is enough. I'm serious." But McRae continued on. "He was playing cards in the back with Frank White and some guys, and I said, 'If you say one more word, I'm gonna knock your false teeth down your throat. I swear to God. I promise you!' " Brett grabbed Bo, then walked him up the airplane aisle, saying, "Bobo, what's going on?" Jackson liked Brett, calls him "one of the cooler guys." And the moment dissipated. But as Jackson says, "I am not to be played with."

That's all the raccoons needed to know. All that those animals whose stuffed heads line his basement walls needed to know. All anybody needs to know.