On the fourth evening an eight-inch cutt flashed up and gobbled the fly. She lifted the rod instinctively and caught her first dry-fly trout all by herself. I was glad that I was sitting back on the rocks watching instead of standing by her elbow whispering instructions. It was too dark to record the event on film. But the picture of her big brown-eyed grin remains clear in my memory.
Mike, Melissa, Sarah, and I spent a day in Ben Trebken’s Amethyst five hours out to sea where the horizon completely encircled us. We caught albacore and yellowfin and skipjack tuna, and when one of Amethyst’s engines quit on the way to port, we limped in under the stars. In recent years we’ve spent our Memorial Day weekends at Blaine Moore’s summer house on an island in Maine’s Great Pond—a more civilized version of my boyhood weeks at Sysladobsis and Upper Dobsis. We have yet to find a magic cove on Great Pond, but Sarah has caught smallmouths on Woolly Buggers she tied herself.
My kids love expotitions. But I think they prefer the spontaneity of ex-plores, just as Dad and I did.
Without the tell-tale channel of open water cutting through the weeds, the inlet to Warner’s Pond would have been nearly impossible to discover. It snuck in at a sharp angle through a curtain of thick pond-side foliage. Mike, up in the bow, had to push aside the trailing willow branches as we nosed the canoe into it.
We abruptly found ourselves in a wild woody tunnel. Foliage arched overhead, blocking out the sun. Redwing blackbirds and cedar waxwings flitted among the alder and blackberry that clogged the margins of the brook. Wild grapevines twined around the trees.
After a few minutes, I noticed that I couldn’t hear any traffic noises or see any suburban houses, and it was easy to fool myself into believing that Mike and I had entered a kind of magical wilderness island in the middle of suburbia.
Mike tried to make a few casts, but the brush grew too thick and the brook was too narrow and twisted for his level of Zebco accuracy. So he laid his rod on the bottom of the canoe and leaned forward in his seat.
I paddled us slowly through this dark natural tunnel. Painted turtles slipped off logs into the water. A black duck with half a dozen little ones strung out behind her disappeared under some trailing branches. We jumped a wood duck. A muskrat angled across the brook ahead of us, then abruptly dived. Here and there a bluegill spatted.
The brook forked, and I chose the more navigable of the two options. As I pushed up into it, it widened and became shallower, opening here and there into pools where we paused to make a few casts. Mike caught a couple of bluegills.
Then it narrowed so tight that Mike had to pull on the bushes to get us through. Then it opened up again into a slow-moving slough. It looked like marvelous bass water—fallen trees, steep banks, an irregular brushlined shoreline, patches of lily pads. Mike made a few casts and caught another bluegill.
We continued upstream, and although I knew better, I could almost believe that Mike and I were original explorers.
The foliage thinned out, and then the brook was winding through a marsh. The grass grew six feet tall along the sides. It looked like trout water.
Finally the canoe scraped, then ground to a stop on a gravel riffle. We had come, I estimated, two or three miles.
“End of the line, I guess,” I said to Mike, and as I spoke, I realized that we had not exchanged a word since we entered the brook.
“We can drag it up and go farther,” he said.
“Let’s save that for another day.”
He nodded. It was good to have new ex-plores waiting for us.
We swapped ends and I paddled us downstream. Mike fished steadily. He seemed to get the feel for short accurate casting toward likely targets. He caught a small pickerel, several bluegills, a yellow perch. When we returned to the slough, I expected him to nail a bass, but he didn’t.
He cast directly ahead of the boat to the place where the brook narrowed and quickened. Suddenly he grunted. His rod arched.
“What’ve you got?” I said.
“I don’t know.” There was an edge of panicky excitement in his voice. “Something big.”
“Keep your rod high,” I said, in spite of all my training in trial-and-error learning theory. “Don’t try to horse him in.”
Mike worked the fish close to the canoe. Then it flashed near the surface. “It’s a trout,” I said. “You’ve got yourself a trout. Your first trout.”
He grabbed the leader and hoisted it aboard. It was a rainbow of thirteen or fourteen inches, as silvery and fat as a fresh sea-run steelhead. It flopped once in the bottom of the canoe and threw the Mepps spinner.
Mike picked up the fish. “Shall we put him back?” he said.
“It’s your fish.”
“I’m gonna put him back.”
He leaned over the side and let the trout slide into the water. Then he straightened up, wiped his hands on his pants, and turned to me. “Grampa likes ex-plores, huh?”
I nodded.
“Too bad he couldn’t be here.”
“He would’ve like this one a lot,” I said.
FOR ALL THAT BILL LOVED TO FISH AND HUNT, HIS DEEPEST LOVE WAS FOR HIS FAMILY. PICTURED: BILL, VICKI, MUM TAPPLY, MIKE, MELISSA, SARAH, AND STEPSONS, BLAKE AND BEN
BILL HUNTS THE NEW HAMPSHIRE WOODS
INTO THE WOODS
I was born on the eve of World War II. I was little more than a toddler when Dad made me a wooden rifle and taught me the manual of arms. “A gun,” he said, “is a weapon. It kills things. It must be treated respectfully. Even a wooden one.”
Later, when I began to acquire a boy’s arsenal of cap guns, Dad told me, “Never—ever—point a gun—any gun, even a toy—at somebody else.”
Then came the magical Christmas when I found a Daisy air rifle under the tree. I caught Dad staring thoughtfully at me as I stroked its barrel, and I nodded to him. “I know,” I said.
“You could put out somebody’s eye.”
“Yes. I know.”
“If I ever find out—“
“Don’t worry.”
We took the heavy single-shot .22 target rifle into the woods behind the house and shot tin cans and paper targets. Dad showed me how to shoot from the prone position, and sitting and kneeling and off-hand. I learned how to wrap the sling around my left arm, squint one-eyed through the peep-sight, take a breath, let half of it out, and squeeze—never jerk—the trigger. But the real point of the lessons was not lost on me. Safety, I knew, was more important than accuracy. A .22 bullet could travel a mile through the air. It made an impressive hole in a tin can. Never load a gun until you’re ready to shoot it. And whether it’s loaded or not, always know where your muzzle is pointed. Always point it away from people.
Once when I was very young Dad took me into the woods, slipped a shell into his shotgun, and handed it to me. “Shoot that,” he said, pointing to a rusty oil drum fifteen or twenty yards away.
“How can I miss?” I said.
“Just shoot it.”
The shotgun felt heavy and outsized, and the barrel wavered across the target. “Press it firmly against your shoulder,” said Dad. “Just like the .22.”
I steadied the gun and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened.
“That thing by your thumb,” he said. “It’s the safety. When you’re ready to shoot, you push it up.”
I did. Then I aimed and shot. The oil drum collapsed in an explosion of rust.
“Wow!” I said.
Dad said nothing. He had made his point.
I was Dad’s fishing partner for many years before I ever went hunting. There was an element to hunting that was missing from fishing, and I understood it: Treat a fly rod heedlessly and it might break; mishandle a gun and somebody could die.
Fishing was for boys, or boys and men together.
Hunting was for men who trusted their lives to each other.
My time, I figured, would come.
So I waited. On October Saturdays I got up early so I could take Dad’s cased shotgun from the baseme
nt gun cabinet and prop it near the back door beside the picnic basket, Dad’s boots, and the canvas bag that held shells, Milkbones, spare bells, dry socks, and dog collars. When Grampa Grouse, his partner, arrived, I ate bacon and eggs with the men while the dogs whimpered and whined under the table. And when they returned on Sunday evenings I met them at the car to count the grouse they had brought home and help lug the gear inside.
Dad showed me how to clean his shotgun, and that became my job. After a successful weekend, I helped him clean the birds, too. Cleaning birds was not that different from cleaning fish.
In November Dad hunted deer in Maine. In December he arose in the dark to go for ducks.
In the cool of August and September evenings, Dad and Bing, our Brittany, held their bird-hunting version of spring training. They visited the local farms, secured permission of the landowners, and criss-crossed the field and hedgerows for newly fledged pheasants. Dad’s weapon was a loud police whistle with which he attempted to remind Bing of his proper behavior.
I generally went along. The mix of goldenrod and ragweed stood nearly head-high on me and invariably gave me a vile dose of hayfever, but I didn’t mind. This was hunting, and I was one of the hunters. When Bing pointed, Dad would grab his cheek cord and creep up behind him, whispering endearments and reminding him to hold steady. My job was to move ahead of the point and flush the birds and then try to mark them down so we could follow up the singles.
I had read plenty about Southern quail hunting. Northern immature-pheasant hunting was identical except for the fact that we didn’t carry guns, which seemed like an insignificant difference. The birds were small and brown and they exploded from the ground in coveys of six or eight and flew swiftly. To me, it was hunting, and so what if I ended up with watery eyes and runny nose.
But when October came around, I stayed home.
While I waited, I stalked milkweed pods and toadstools and dragonflies with my BB gun and remembered how that oil drum had disintegrated. I lost interest in hunting down my playmates with cap pistols. The gun games we played weren’t that much fun, because I had promised not to aim directly at the neighborhood soldiers, Indians, and crooks. One day, I knew, I’d hunt real game with real guns.
I figured that when that day came, it would be accompanied by solemn ceremony. I sensed, although I could not articulate, that my first hunting trip would mark a significant rite of passage from boyhood into the world of men, like my first drink of whiskey, my first drag on a cigar, my first sexual encounter.
A nor’easter blew in on Friday, driving before it sheets of hard rain that ripped the yellow leaves from the maples behind our suburban Massachusetts house. On Saturday morning the wind had subsided, but the rain continued hard, steady, and cold. Dad held a long and mournful phone conversation with Grampa Grouse, then announced that it looked like no hunting this weekend. He made a pass at assembling the week’s trash for a trip to the dump. He went down into the cellar and examined the stack of storm windows that would soon need to be hung. He drove downtown to the hardware store and returned an hour later, empty-handed.
Around noon he appeared in the kitchen clad in foul-weather gear and lugging his Winchester Model 21. Bing scrambled from beneath the kitchen table and began to prod the back door with his nose, whining and whimpering.
“You’re going hunting, aren’t you?” said Mum.
“Yep.”
“Oh, brother,” she said, failing to hide a smile.
“Want to come?” said Dad to me.
“It’s raining.”
“Sure. Coming?”
“You bet,” I said.
We drove to Lincoln, not ten minutes from our house. A road now cuts through the pine grove near where we parked that day, and a pod of cedar-sheathed contemporary homes presently snuggles into the hillside where we hunted. But forty-odd years ago it was just a bug field head-high in popple and birch. I tracked behind Dad as well as my ten-year-old legs would permit. The hard rain clattered on the hood of my oilskin slicker. My legs and feet were soaked in an instant. Head down, I trudged after him, intent on keeping up.
Suddenly he stopped. “Point,” he hissed.
Bing was stretched out, motionless, his head curved awkwardly sideways. My father walked passed him. I heard an odd whistle, glimpsed a brown ball of feathers rising from the ground, saw Dad’s shotgun move to his shoulder, noted the way the raindrops bounced off the barrels, heard a single report, and watched the bird plummet to the ground. Bing bounded forward and returned an instant later with a dead bird in his mouth.
Dad said, “Good dog,” and took it from him. Then he turned and handed the bird to me.
I held it in both hands. It weighed less than I expected. It was about half the size of the grouse I had helped Dad clean. It seemed frail, mostly feathers. I smoothed them with my fingertip. Two boggled eyes were perched oddly at the top of his head. He had a long, narrow beak. He looked, I thought, more like an insect than a bird.
“It’s a woodcock,” said Dad quietly. “A lovely little bird. The beak is for catching worms underground. They can move it around even after it’s in the earth. The eyes are placed up there so he can look around when his beak is in the ground. His ears are in front of his eyes and his brain is upside down.”
I handed the little bird back to him. He hefted it gently in the palm of one hand for a moment before thrusting it into his game pocket. “It’s a shame to shoot them,” he said. “Wish we could put them back, like trout.”
Three more times that afternoon Bing pointed. Three more times Dad’s twenty-gauge barked. Three more times Bing trotted in with a dead woodcock in his mouth. “Well, that’s a limit,” said Dad. He broke his shotgun and we cut back to the car.
Four shots in an hour. One limit of woodcock. It seemed like a very simple sport.
The rain ended that night. Sun drenched the autumn woods on Sunday. Hunting is illegal on Sundays in Massachusetts, but on Monday Dad unexpectedly came home early from work. “Want to go hunting?” he said to me.
“Yes, sir!”
We drove back to Lincoln, parked in the same place, and trekked to the birch and popple hillside. And that afternoon I learned my first truth about woodcock. We hunted for two hours. We flushed nothing.
“You must’ve shot them all,” I said to Dad afterward.
“Doubt it,” he said.
“Then where were all the woodcock?”
He shrugged, and when he gave me his answer, it was as if he were equating the mysterious comings and going of woodcock with good fortune, or life itself. “They migrate,” he said.
After that rainy woodcock adventure, I spent another two years watching Dad and Grampa Grouse head for New Hampshire on Saturday mornings in the fall and return on Sunday evenings. I continued to refrain from being heard, because I knew Dad already understood that I wanted to go along. But I made a point of being seen, just to be sure he wouldn’t forget me. I waited with as much patience as I could muster for my chance.
One Friday evening in October I noticed that he and Mum were whispering in the kitchen. Then he called me in. “Grampa Grouse is sick,” he said to me. “You want to come along this weekend?”
“Hunting, you mean?”
“Yep.”
This invitation fell far short of the solemn ceremony I had expected would accompany the occasion of my first full-fledged weekend grouse-hunting excursion to New Hampshire, but I took my cue from Dad. “Well,” I said, “sure. I guess so.”
“Good. Set your alarm.”
During the two-hour drive to New Hampshire, Dad explained that “coming along” did not mean I would carry a gun in the woods. “You’ll walk behind me. Always stay behind me. You’ve got to keep up. If you can’t keep up, you’ll have to wait in the car. When we flush a bird, go to the ground. Understand?”
I nodded.
“Grouse,” he said, “flush suddenly. We’d like the dog to point them, but he rarely does. Grouse are too nervous. So they usually surprise
us. They fly fast, and you can never predict what direction they’ll go in. I’ve got to know exactly where you are all the time. When a bird flies, you’d better be flat on the ground.”
“I understand,” I said.
We left the highway, and soon we were rolling over country roads past woodlands and meadows and dairy farms. The hills glowed in their autumn colors. Dad pulled into an overgrown dirt roadway. “First Chance Cover,” he announced.
He uncased his shotgun while Bing squirted the bushes.
“Okay,” said Dad. “Stay close.” He called the same thing to Bing. “Close, boy.”
Five minutes into the woods, I heard a sudden explosion. Dad yelled, “Mark!” A moment later he turned to me. “I told you to drop to the ground.”
“Why?”
“That was a grouse.”
“I didn’t know.”
“You’ve got to go to the ground. I don’t want to shoot you.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t wait to see the bird. When you hear him, or when I yell, you go down. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
A little farther along when I heard that startling Brrrt! of wings, I threw myself to the ground. Dad yelled “Mark!” and his shotgun roared almost simultaneously. And then he called, “Fetch, Bing. Dead bird.”
With my face pressed to the ground, I missed it all. I stood up in time to see Bing prancing to Dad with a grouse in his mouth. Dad knelt and the dog dropped the bird into his hand. Dad patted Bing’s muzzle. “Good work, boy,” he murmured. He stroked the bird’s feathers, then tucked it into his game pocket. He turned to me. “That’s what we’re after,” he said. “That’s what it’s all about. What’d you think?”
“Good shot.”
“Yeah?”
I shrugged. “Actually, I didn’t see anything. I was lying on the ground.”
He grinned. “Good.”
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