Like any kid at camp for the first time, Wesley Benson was looking forward to a week of canoeing, fishing, cabins. Maybe even talking to girls – if, of course, they talk to him first.

Unlike the other campers at the Vicksburg YMCA’s Warner-Tully campground in Claiborne County this week, however, Wesley knows what it’s like to not be able to run, jump, swim or throw.

Three years ago, in April 2003, Wesley, then 6, fell off a Yamaha four-wheeler driven by a friend in front of a house in Copiah County. The friend then turned the ATV around and accidentally ran over Wesley, breaking the child’s left leg and three ribs and leaving him with mild brain damage.

Sports and camp then, at the age when most kids were getting into these rites, were out of the question; his mental state was uncertain. In some ways, on occasion, it still is.

&#8220He still has crying spells sometimes,” said his father, Albert Benson, who is on disability but raises Wesley with a caregiver, Evelyn Benson – no relation – at a house on Old Mississippi 27. &#8220And sometimes he has memory problems.”

To the naked eye, though, the Beechwood Elementary fourth-grader-to-be has since largely recovered, turning in an honor roll report card, all A’s and B’s, for the past school year. And at camp this week, Wesley is indistinguishable from the other 10-year-old boys in Blackfoot Cabin, one of nine on the grounds divided by age and gender. All are named for Native American tribes. Already on Sunday, within hours of arrival, he and his fellow Blackfoots have established a cabin ritual: accentuating applause and other general din during assemblies by pounding on their folding table in the dining hall with such collective force that teenage counselors have to repeatedly catch the ends to keep it from collapsing under the boys’ fists.

&#8220Camp is really one of the last true communities out here,” said &#8220Big Chief” Casey Custer, in his 18th year associated with the camp at all levels and his sixth as its director. &#8220Everybody has to stay in close proximity together. There are no fences…everybody has to work out their problems with each other.”

For the most part, the kids have remained the same since Warner-Tully’s first crop 46 years ago, and so has the camp, said Custer, whose grandparents worked as caretakers on the land for years. The property has been in the control of the Vicksburg YMCA since it was donated by Anderson-Tully Lumber Co. in the late 1950s, he said, and a summer camp every year since 1960. Now, it hosts three weeklong camps for 7-13-year-olds in June and July, a weekend camp for younger children and Camp Silver Cloud for physically and mentally disabled campers, which Custer said hosted 20 kids earlier in the summer.

This week, attendance is &#8220maxed out” at 90 campers, from all over the South, he said. They’re supervised by 25 counselors, some in college but most local high-schoolers who attended Warner-Tully themselves. Sunday, after orientation, they oversaw basketball, volleyball, dodge ball, fishing and impromptu soccer – the kind of game where fences and a strategically placed ball served as goal markers and play stopped every few minutes to chase the ball down a hill toward the lake.

Yet to come was the riding of mudslides, a manhunt-inspired game called &#8220Mission: Impossible” and a 2- to 3-mile trek through the woods dubbed the &#8220Death March.”

&#8220We have a lot of counselors who grew up going here. I think I missed one year,” said counselor Olivia Hogan, 15, a student at St. Aloysius High School in Vicksburg.

&#8220I forced my mom to come up here,” said Paige Dussang, 10, a Warner-Tully veteran from Brandon who was the lone holdover from Olivia’s failed effort to organize a flying disc game with soccer nearby. &#8220I got here before the counselors came out to the cabins.”

As for Wesley – who is at least up to horsing around with a cabin mate while in line for pizza, if not with girls – he chose canoeing on the lake, and said the legs feel good, the shoulder feels good and his head is fine. Physically, he said the only thing he can’t do now he could before is jump on a trampoline. And, for obvious reasons, no more four-wheelers – for a while, at least.

In a few years, with a little money saved, &#8220My dad said I might get a small four-wheeler,” he said.