Deftly the old hunter let himself down into the skiff, kneeling in the stern. He then produced a double-ended paddle like the ones Eskimos used, and also two extremely short single-handled paddles. Adjusting his weight and testing the double paddle, he told Jake, ‘You can hand her down.’
When the two watermen struggled with the preposterous weight of the gun, the old man said, ‘It ain’t for boys.’ He accepted the gun into the skiff, dropped its barrel between the chocks, flipped a wooden lock, which secured it, then fitted the heavy butt into a socket made of burlap bagging filled with pine needles.
‘What you do,’ Twombly said, ‘is use your big paddle to ease you into position, but when you come close to the ducks you stow it and take out your two hand paddles, like this.’ And with the two paddles that looked like whisk brooms, he silently moved the skiff about.
‘When you get her into position, you lie on your belly, keep the hand paddles close by and sight along the barrel of the gun. You don’t point the gun; you point the skiff. And when you get seventy, eighty ducks in range, you put a lot of pressure on this trigger and—’
The gun exploded with a power that seemed to tear a hole in the sky. The kickback came close to ripping out the stern of the skiff, but the pine needles absorbed it, while a veritable cloud of black smoke curled upward.
‘First time I ever shot that gun in daylight,’ the old man said. ‘It’s a killer.’
‘You’ll sell?’
‘You’re Lafe Turlock’s grandson, ain’t you?’
‘I am.’
‘I had a high regard for Lafe. Gun’s yourn.’
‘You’ll get your fifty-five,’ Jake promised.
‘I better,’ the old man said ominously.
Caveny produced the two skiffs he had promised, and their mode of operation became standardized: as dusk approached, Jake would inspect his skiff to be sure he had enough pine needles in the burlap to absorb the recoil; he also cleaned the huge gun, prepared his powder and checked his supply of shot. Tim in the meantime was preparing his own skiff and feeding the two dogs.
Hey-You ate like a pig, gulping down whatever Caveny produced, but Lucifer was more finicky—there were certain things, like chicken guts, he would not eat. But the two animals had learned to exist together, each with his own bowl, growling with menace if the other approached. They had never engaged in a real fight; Hey-You would probably have killed Lucifer had one been joined, but they did nip at each other and a kind of respectful discipline was maintained.
Whenever they saw Jake oiling the gun, they became tense, would not sleep and spied on every action of their masters. As soon as it became clear that there was to be duck hunting, they bounded with joy and kept close to the skiff in which Caveny would take them onto the water.
Duck hunting with a big gun was an exacting science best performed in the coldest part of winter with no moon, for then the watermen enjoyed various advantages: they could cover the major part of their journey by sliding their skiffs across the ice; when they reached areas of open water they would find the ducks clustered in great rafts; and the lack of moonlight enabled them to move close without being seen. The tactic required the utmost silence; even the crunch of a shoe on frost would spook the ducks. The dogs especially had to remain silent, perched in Caveny’s skiff, peering into the night.
When the two skiffs reached open water, about one o’clock in the morning with the temperature at 12 degrees, Tim kept a close watch on the necks of the two dogs; almost always the first indication that ducks were in the vicinity came when the hackles rose on Hey-You. He was so attuned to the bay that one night Tim conceded graciously, ‘Jake, your dog can see ducks at a hundred yards in pitch-black,’ and Turlock replied, ‘That’s why he’s a huntin’ dog, not a lapdog—like some I know.’
When the ducks were located, vast collections huddling in the cold, Turlock took command. Easing his skiff into the icy water, he adjusted his double-ended paddle, stayed on his knees to keep the center of gravity low, and edged toward the restive fowl. Sometimes it took him an hour to cover a quarter of a mile; he kept the barrel of his gun smeared with lampblack to prevent its reflecting such light as there might be, and in cold darkness he inched forward.
Now he discarded his two-handled paddle and lay flat on his belly, his cheek alongside the stock of the great gun, his hands working the short paddles. It was a time of tension, for the slightest swerve or noise would alert the ducks and they would be off.
Slowly, slowly he began to point the nose of the skiff at the heart of the congregation, and when he had satisfied himself that the muzzle of the gun was pointed in the right direction, he brought his short paddles in and took a series of deep breaths. Then, with his right cheek close to the stock but not touching it, and his right hand at the trigger, he extended his forefinger, grasped the heavy trigger—and waited. Slowly the skiff drifted and steadied, and when everything was in line, he pulled the trigger.
He was never prepared for the magnitude of the explosion that ripped through the night. It was monstrous, like the fire of a cannon, but in the brief flash it produced he would always see ducks being blown out of the water as if a hundred expert gunners had fired at them.
Now Caveny became the focus. Paddling furiously, he sped his skiff through the dark water, the two dogs quivering with desire to leap into the waves to retrieve the ducks. But he wanted to bring them much closer to where the birds lay, and to do so he enforced stern discipline. ‘No! No!’—that was all he said, but the two dogs obeyed, standing on their hind feet, their forepaws resting on the dead rise like twin figureheads, one red, one black;
‘Fetch!’ he shouted, and the dogs leaped into the water and began their task of hauling the ducks to the two skiffs. Hey-You always going to Turlock’s and Lucifer to Caveny’s.
Since Tim’s job was to maintain his shotgun and knock down cripples, he was often too busy to bother with his dog, so the Labrador had perfected a tactic whereby he paddled extra hard with his hind legs, reared out of the water and tossed his ducks into the Caveny skiff.
In this way the two watermen, with one explosion of their big gun, sometimes got themselves as many as sixty canvasbacks, ten or twelve blacks and a score of others. On rare occasions they would be able to fire twice in one night, and then their profit was amazing.
As soon as the two skiffs reached Patamoke, the watermen packed their catch in ventilated barrels, which waited lined up on the wharf. There they purchased from other night gunners enough additional ducks to make full barrels, which they handed over to the captain of the boat running oysters to the Rennert, and at the end of each month they received from the hotel a check for their services.
One wintry February night the two watermen crept out to a spacious lagoon in the ice; there must have been three thousand ducks rafted there beneath a frozen late-rising moon. Caveny became aware of how cold it was when Lucifer left his spot on the gunwale and huddled in the bottom of the skiff. Hey-You turned twice to look at his cowardly companion, then moved to the middle of the bow as if obliged to do the work of two.
Jake, seeing this tremendous target before him—more ducks in one spot than they had ever found before—decided that he would use not a pound and a half of shot, but almost twice as much. ‘I’ll rip a tunnel through the universe of ducks.’ But to propel such a heavy load he required an extraheavy charge, so into the monstrous gun he poured more than a pound of black powder. He also rammed home a double wadding. ‘This is gonna be a shot to remember. Rennert’s will owe us enough money to pay for our boat.’
Cautiously he moved his lethal skiff into position, waited, took a deep breath and pulled the trigger.
Whoooom! The gun produced a flash that could have been seen for miles and a bang that reverberated across the bay. The tremendous load of shot slaughtered more than a hundred and ten ducks and seven geese It also burst out the back of Jake’s skiff, knocked him unconscious and threw him a good twenty yards aft into the dark and icy waters.
The next minutes were a nightmare. Caveny, having seen his partner fly through the air during the brief flash of the explosion, started immediately to paddle in the direction of where the body might have fallen, but the two dogs, trained during their entire lives to retrieve fallen birds, found themselves involved with the greatest fall of ducks they had ever encountered, and they refused to bother with a missing man.
‘Goddammit!’ Caveny yelled. ‘Leave them ducks alone and find Jake!’
But the dogs knew better. Back and forth they swam on their joyous mission, gathering ducks at a rate they had never imagined in their twitching dreams.
‘Jake! Where in hell are you?’
In the icy darkness he could find no way of locating the drowning man; all he knew was the general direction of Jake’s fall, and now, in some desperation—with almost no chance of finding his mate—he began sweeping the area.
Lucifer swam noisily to the skiff, almost reprimanding Tim for having moved it away from the fallen ducks, and threw two ducks into the boat. Then he swam casually a few yards and, grabbing the unconscious Turlock by the arm, hauled him to the skiff before returning to the remaining ducks.
When Tim finally succeeded in dragging Jake aboard, he could think of nothing better to do than to slap the unconscious man’s face with his icy glove, and after a few minutes Jake revived. Bleary-eyed, he tried to determine where he was, and when at last he perceived that he was in Caveny’s skiff and not in his own, he bellowed, ‘What have you done with the gun?’
‘I been savin’ you!’ Tim yelled back, distraught by the whole affair and by the mangled ducks that kept piling into his skiff.
‘To hell with me. Save the gun!’
So now the two watermen began paddling furiously and with no plan, trying to locate the other skiff, and after much fruitless effort Jake had the brains to shout, ‘Hey-You! Where are you?’
And from a direction they could not have anticipated, a dog barked, and when they paddled toward the sound they found a sorely damaged skiff almost sinking from the weight of its big gun and the many ducks Hey-You had fetched.
On the doleful yet triumphant return to Patamoke, Tim Caveny could not help pointing out that it had been his Labrador who had saved Turlock’s life, but Jake growled through the ice festooning his chin, ‘Granted, but it was Hey-You that saved the gun, and that’s what’s important.’
THE COLONEL AND GENGHIS KHAN
AN INTRODUCTORY NOTE
The tale that follows of a fighting man who subdued a vast army of Chinese Communists in the mountains and valleys of snowbound Korea but could not conquer a gray squirrel weighing less than a pound is based on the experiences of three men, good friends of mine, who suffered equal humiliation in their fruitless battles against the determined and resourceful breed.
Joe Shane, persuasive fund-raiser for Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, had his picture window facing a wooded area, and his campaign against squirrels was of the General Bedford Forrest school: ‘Git thar fustest with the mostest.’ He tried every device then known to keep his bird feeder inviolate but the enemy invariably defeated him. The description in the story that follows of the squirrel Genghis Khan caroming off the window-pane comes from the Shane battle reports, for I sat with him at breakfast one morning when his squirrel came ricocheting smack into his face, with only the glass of the window protecting Shane. It was awesome.
The second warrior I observed in this endless battle was my longtime editor, whose Connecticut house had a picture window overlooking a woods that sheltered his nemesis, a squirrel that frustrated every attempt Albert Erskine made to drive him away. Erskine, being a more bookish type, did not use Joe Shane’s blanket bombardment attack but a more cerebral one, which achieved the same results. His defenses were ingenious and sometimes brilliant but they accomplished nothing. As military tacticians, Connecticut squirrels are just as clever as those in Pennsylvania.
The third battle-scarred victim in this incessant warfare was I. On a wooded hilltop in Pennsylvania’s Bucks County, one of the choice areas of the United States, I specialized in attracting birds and spent much time and money in bringing to within eight feet of our picture window a host of lovely birds, including three pairs of cardinals and a family of evening grosbeaks, my favorites among all the creatures that fly. Squirrels destroyed my garden of Eden, and I determined to oust them.
I have loved animals and taken great care of them, but I have also been endlessly tormented by them. I cherish the colorful shrub pyracantha with its thorns and brilliant berries, and I have planted at least a hundred of them at various places from time to time, but deer like them even more than I do and prudently eat them down to the roots before big protective thorns have time to develop. I buy the plants, and they’re not cheap. I plant them. I fertilize them, and then sit back and watch the deer eat them. I run a rural restaurant, and I have no pyracantha. I tried erecting a high wire fence around them to bring them to the point where they have big thorns, but two days after the fence was built, I saw the deer leap nimbly inside and feed. I was irritated, but I had to admit that even expensive pyracantha are a small price to pay for having a deer in one’s garden.
Dogs can be just as offensive. One of our neighbors, who lived nearly a mile away, kept a large weimaraner to whom I was once friendly. Thereafter he migrated all that distance to defecate not on our lawn but, because the macadam had been warmed by the sun, right in the middle of our lane, and nothing I could do would deter him. When I tried to discipline him, the old bond of friendship would vanish and he would snarl at me so that I would have to retreat.
In Texas we had a family of raccoons that gave us great delight by taking residence in our backyard, but they also had an overpowering curiosity regarding the contents of our garbage pail and insisted on emptying it on the lawn and investigating every item. In Maine we would rise early on Friday mornings and keep careful watch so that we could run out and place the garbage where the truck could pick it up at seven. If we were thoughtless enough to put it out the night before, some of the most determined crows in the world would pick it apart before dawn and leave the remnants scattered over a huge area.
Mosquitoes cherish my wife and prove it by coming great distances to feed on her, and moths invade my study whenever I turn on the lights, but more dangerous are the ticks that attach themselves to me when I walk through the woods. In strange hotel rooms cats in heat have often kept me awake much of the night, and flocks of birds have twice flown into jet-engine air intakes of airplanes in which I was traveling, causing near crashes. On the island in the South Pacific where I was stationed swarms of virulent insects caused the death of men who lost their way in the jungle and had to spend the night there unprotected, and at a game preserve in Africa a monstrous crocodile almost swept me into a lagoon by attacking me while I was on land and swinging at me with his powerful tail.
In Alaska several of my acquaintances were mauled by supposedly friendly grizzlies, and when I explored in the jungles of Sumatra I learned that men in nearby villages were actually eaten by tigers. Nature can be extremely antagonistic.
But despite the dangers of associating with animals too closely, the rewards of knowing them and becoming familiar with their habits and, in the end, growing to love them are manifold and one of the pleasures of living on this earth. I have never in my life knowingly stepped on any crawling thing.
I once had a seven-foot black snake that lived under our kitchen. He and I were friends; I fed him things from time to time and always greeted him with joy when he came to see me whenever I returned home.
One afternoon I came back and saw, to my horror, his lifeless body stretched out before me. A visiting professor from Penn State who had come to see me about an art show had caught a glimpse of the snake, concluded that it was maybe a deadly copperhead, a boa constrictor or a fer-de-lance and, grabbing my hoe, hacked my friend to death. Even writing these words brings back the pain.
Like Colonel Cobb, whos
e story I tell in fictional form, I could not imagine myself shooting one of my ravaging squirrels, no matter how many of my sunflower seeds he had stolen.
I had met Colonel Cobb under distressful circumstances. New York had wired me: ‘Shenstone: Submit fullest explanation why Forty-eighth Artillery Unit hightailed in face of Chinese Communist breakthrough.’
It was a sad demoralized outfit to which I reported in those icy mountains south of the Hungnam Reservoir on the Yalu River in northern Korea. It was in the Christmas season of 1950, and our troops, having marched easily and sloppily up to the Chinese border, suddenly found 1.2 million well-trained, tough Chinese Communist soldiers coming at them. To make it brief but accurate, our troops broke and ran, none faster than the 48th Artillery.
During my first moments with the unit, which barely deserved that name, for there was no unity among the bunch of bedraggled individuals running south along snow-packed roads or across frozen rice paddies, I asked: ‘What in hell is going on here? Where’s the discipline?’
What I heard was a disgraceful story related by a young West Point captain: ‘From the start we were poorly organized. Even more poorly led. Composed mostly of big-city kids drafted against their will and commanded, if I may use that word loosely, by a cadre of the most pathetic colonels, majors and captains I’ve ever worked with. Hell, our outfit not only wilted under the first enemy fire we encountered, but when we ran we left our heavy guns behind. We did not retreat, we evacuated, each man for himself.’
In fleeing, they exposed a major sector of the line without heavy artillery of any kind, which allowed the Chinese soldiers to rush south with only token opposition. I was a mere scribbler, never an artilleryman, but as I talked with what amounted to a rabble even I could see that much could have been saved if the unit had had a resolute commander who had said and meant it when he said it: ‘O.K., men. We’ve run far enough. Here we stand.’ A colonel like that, supported by a handful of young West Pointers like the one who told me of the disaster, could have stabilized his portion of the line and perhaps given courage to the entire front.
Creatures of the Kingdom: Stories of Animals and Nature Page 26
