Sportsman's Legacy

by William G. Tapply

Dad hung his red hat from a bush. He called in Duke. “Dead bird,” he told him. “Fetch.”

  Duke cocked his head. “You trying to tell me that Bill hit a grouse?” his expression seemed to say.

  “Fetch,” Dad repeated.

  Duke seemed to shrug. He had proved to be too headstrong and wide-ranging to make a good grouse dog. He flushed more birds than he pointed, many of them out of range. Dad did a lot of yelling and whistle-blowing in the woods. But Duke was a superior retriever. He had an excellent nose, and he had often found birds that we didn’t know had been hit.

  He understood the command “Fetch.” So he went snuffling around in his ever-widening circles. He burrowed under blow-down, investigated thickets, and we followed the sound of his bell as he moved out of sight. A wing-tipped grouse could run a long distance from where it had come down.

  Dad and I kicked at fallen branches and clumps of brush. The snow began to fall thicker and darkness seeped into the woods.

  Duke wandered back to us. “Wild goose chase,” his expression said. “No bird down.”

  “Go on, fetch, dead bird,” insisted Dad, and in the urgency of his tone I heard for the first time what he had until then succeeded in withholding from me: That he wanted me to shoot my first flying grouse as much as I wanted to.

  So Duke half-heartedly went back to looking, and Dad and I continued to search, until finally I said, “Obviously I missed him.”

  Dad shook his head. “Sometimes they’ll fly a long way with pellets in them. I hate to leave a dead bird out here for the foxes.”

  “Sometimes,” I said, “you get feathers without hitting the bird.”

  He shrugged. “Sometimes that can happen.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Far as I’m concerned,” said Dad, “you hit that grouse.”

  “Far as I’m concerned, I missed him.”

  He looked at me for a moment, then nodded. We never liked the idea of leaving a wounded bird in the woods. We’d look for an hour or more for a bird that we thought had been hit, and if we had to quit, it left a sour taste in our mouths for the rest of the day.

  But to leave my first wing-shot grouse wounded in the woods was unthinkable. Now it was too dark to keep looking. We had no choice. We had to quit.

  “Guess you must’ve missed him,” said Dad finally. “If he was down, Duke would’ve found him.”

  I began to hit woodcock with somewhat greater frequency during my third season with my Savage. But the grouse curse continued.

  Dad and I hunted most Saturdays with Burt Spiller in his covers around Rochester, both in New Hampshire and over the border in Maine. Burt was seventy and could not take the thick routes where the birds hid anymore. He wore a hearing aid, which enabled him to converse with someone who spoke loudly and to hear the flush of a nearby grouse, although the hearing aid did not help him locate direction. He was forced to take the field edges and woods roads and hope for an occasional passing shot at a grouse or woodcock. If we flushed a bird in Burt’s direction, we would scram, “Mark! Burt! Your way.” I know he failed to see a great many birds that flew right in front of him. He might not have heard our screams, or if he did, he didn’t know where to look.

  So while Dad and I kicked up birds and shot at most of them, whole days sometimes passed when Burt never dirtied his gunbarrels.

  He never complained. He loved to be in the woods. And when he did shoot, he rarely missed.

  If he noticed my unblemished perfection at missing flying grouse, he never mentioned it.

  Once he and I were following a pair of overgrown ruts out of our Tripwire cover. It was a sun-drenched New England morning in early October. The beech leaves had not yet fallen from the trees that arched over the old roadway, so that we seemed to be strolling through a golden tunnel. Our guns hung at our sides, because the hunt was over. Dad and Duke were somewhere off to our left, returning to the car by their own route.

  Suddenly Dad yelled, “Mark! Grouse! Your way!”

  Burt heard Dad’s voice, although I’m not sure he even knew that Dad was to our left. I was a step or two behind him, so I saw it all happen. Burt’s little Parker twenty-gauge came up to port arms. His head swiveled from side to side. Then a grouse sliced silently through the screen of beeches and angled across the narrow roadway.

  It didn’t make it. In a motion too quick for my eye to follow, Burt’s gun came to his shoulder, swung on the bird, and shot. The grouse crumpled in a burst of feathers. It was one of the most incredible shots I have ever seen—lightening fast, oily smooth, and deadly accurate, and that is essentially what I said to Burt.

  He just shrugged. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should’ve let you take him.”

  Dad and I hunted the last weekend of that bird season around Hanover, New Hampshire, as guests of Corey Ford and his marvelous old setter, Cider, who got his name because he “worked in the fall.” Dan Holland, the hunting writer, and Hugh Grey, then editor of Field & Stream, were also with us.

  I diligently practiced being seen and not heard that weekend and was rewarded with wide-ranging tales of famous men and places and memorable hunts.

  The grouse also practiced being neither seen nor heard. All day Saturday we heard two wild flushes and saw nary a feather.

  Sunday gave us less of the same. It was one of those chilly gray New England November days, closer to winter than fall. We drove from cover to cover and tended to linger longer in the warmth of the car as the day wound down, compensating with good companionship for the poor hunting.

  Nobody had taken a single shot all weekend which, I realized, made me just as good a wingshot as the rest of them. I would rather we’d found lots of birds. But at least my dismal marksmanship hadn’t been exposed.

  Sometime in the middle of the afternoon, Dad said, “I think we’ll head home. We’ve got a long drive facing us.”

  “You can’t go yet,” said Corey. “We haven’t hunted the Field and Stream cover. It’s where we always finish up. I’ve been saving it.”

  Dad shrugged. He was too polite to point out that Corey’s covers had all been consistently unproductive, and there was no reason to believe that this one would be any different.

  So the five of us piled out of the wagon and walked down the long sloping woods-path, heading for the abandoned farm yard where Corey said the birdy part of the cover began. Cider snuffled along ahead of us, hunting diligently, as he had all weekend, in spite of the absence of bird smells in the woods.

  We had nearly reached the end of the path when Corey suddenly stopped.

  “Point!” he hissed.

  We looked. Fifty feet ahead of us, on the edge of an old apple orchard, Cider was stretched out.

  “There’s the bird,” whispered one of the other men, and then I saw it. The grouse was nonchalantly pecking fallen apples less than twenty feet in front of Cider.

  We all stood there for a moment, staring at the tableau. The grouse bent down, jabbed at a frost-softened apple, straightened, high-stepped a few feet, bent again. Cider quivered but did not move.

  “Bill, take him,” said Corey.

  I gripped my Savage with its one useless shotgun shell in the chamber. We didn’t have enough time to argue about who should take the shot. I stepped forward and moved up behind Cider. He rolled back his eyes, as if to say, “About time somebody got here.”

  The bird was plainly visible on the ground in front of me.

  “Shoot him,” somebody said. “Just take him on the ground.”

  I remembered what Dad had told me on those occasions when I’d shot a sitting grouse. “It takes a good hunter to get that close to a grouse. Nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “Quick,” said one of the other men, “before he flushed.”

  I can’t reconstruct all the thoughts that flashed through my mind. But I knew I had no desire to blast that grouse off the ground in full view of those four men. There was more shame in doing that, I believed, than in missing a fair shot at a flying bird.
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br />   Maybe it was all right for a kid, an apprentice grouse hunter, to shoot a grouse off the ground. It was not, I decided, all right for me.

  So I stepped in front of Cider. The grouse craned his neck, then bent and scuttled forward. I took another step.

  I didn’t actually see the bird flush. I heard him, and with that explosion of wings my Savage came to my shoulder and swung on the bird as he rose in front of me. Some instinct beyond conscious thought aimed my shotgun and pulled its trigger for me.

  The grouse fell. Cider pranced forward, picked up the stone-dead bird, and brought it to me. I knelt and accepted it from the dog’s mouth. “Thank you,” I said. I patted his muzzle. Then I stood, stroked the feathers of the grouse, and with careful nonchalance stuffed it into my game pocket.

  The men didn’t throw their hats into the air, or cheer, or pummel me with congratulations, for which I was grateful. For all they knew, I had shot plenty of flying grouse. “Nice shot,” one of them said, and another said, “That was a pretty point, wasn’t it?”

  I glanced at Dad. He gave me a quick grin and a nod.

  We hunted the rest of Field and Stream cover but found no more birds. And during the long dark ride home to Massachusetts, Dad and I talked about the end of another hunting season, the men we’d hunted with, the days we found our covers full of woodcock, and the days when they’d been empty. Dad allowed that we’d managed to end it on a positive note.

  He didn’t mention the fact that I had finally broken my streak. He said nothing about my decision not to shoot that grouse on the ground, or that I decided well, or that he was proud of me.

  He didn’t need to.

  I would like to report that after breaking my jinx I enjoyed a hot streak, or at least I began to hit flying grouse with greater frequency. But it wouldn’t be true. Oh, now and then I hit one. The law of averages did seem to operate, even in grouse hunting. But mostly I continued to miss. And I still do.

  But it doesn’t bother me at all anymore.

  GONE FISHIN’

  In the natural course of things I grew up, graduated from college, and embarked on a career. I got married, and after a few years, when it became evident that the union was doomed, I called Dad. He was an old-fashioned man, and I wasn’t sure how he’d respond. But I needed advice and understanding. It never occurred to me to seek it from anyone but Dad. “I need to talk to you,” I said. “Just the two of us. Can you meet me?”

  “Where and when?” were his only questions.

  We met in a Howard Johnson’s parking lot. We sat in the front seat of his car for several hours. I told him that he was right after all: Life sometimes could be stern and earnest.

  “Don’t blame yourself,” he said, reading my mind, and for the first time he told me about his father’s failed second marriage, his own harsh childhood, what a lucky man he was to have married my mother, and how raising a family is the most difficult and important thing a man has to do.

  If a marriage is to be forever, he said, it ought to be a good one. Good marriages are rarer and more precious than good jobs.

  I got custody of Bucky, my Brittany, and gave him up to his paternal grandfather for adoption.

  When Dad and Mum retired to New Hampshire, I remained behind in eastern Massachusetts. I remarried, begat children, and did my best to follow Dad’s example of devoting myself to their nurture. My kids and I walked the suburban woods and dangled worms for local bluegills. We took a few ex-plores and expotitions.

  I have never felt I have done as much or as well by my children as Dad did by me. His was a hard act to follow.

  Aside from the forays with my kids, I didn’t hunt and fish much during those years. When I did, it was mostly with Dad. Our excursions became ceremonial—a weekend of fly-casting for smallmouths on Winnipesaukee, an afternoon in the canoe on the Pine River or Beaver Brook, one October weekend a season in our old grouse and woodcock covers. These occasions had to be planned and plotted carefully. My life was filled with competing variables. We didn’t have the leisure for spur-of-the-moment ex-plores or elaborate expotitions. We fished and hunted when we could, which wasn’t often, and where it was most convenient, which was in Dad’s part of New Hampshire.

  When Bucky died, Dad stopped hunting entirely. Grouse and woodcock hunting, he said, was no fun without a bird dog. I urged him to get another dog. No, he said, he had too many aches and pains to hunt anyway. Besides, it wouldn’t be right to raise a dog who would outlive him. That was about fifteen years and two dog generations ago.

  When I began to write, I quickly realized that one ought to write about what he knew and understood best. So I found myself reflecting on my times in the woods and on the water with Dad. In various actual and fictitious guises, he was usually the central character in my stories. And as I wrote about growing up a sportsman, I began to appreciate the central importance of the outdoors to my life. It was my legacy. More than anything else, it defined me. Dad had given me the outdoors, and I understood that I owed it to him to perpetuate it—not only by sharing it with my own children but also by writing about it and arguing for its preservation and by continuing to experience it myself.

  So I began exploring the rivers that ran off the spine of the Continental Divide, and I found larger trout and more beautiful waters than I had imagined and land as nurturing to my soul as my New England. I hunted quail in Nash Buckingham country. I gained sporting companions of my own generation—Andy Gill, Keith Wegener, Elliot Schildkrout, Art Currier, Rick Boyer, Bill Rohrbacher, Cliff Hauptman, Blaine Moores, many others. And I wrote about these men and our adventures, and I showed my efforts to Dad. I gave him vicarious experience in exchange for his editorial red pencil.

  As I was leaving Pond Road from a recent visit, Dad pointed to a cardboard box by the door. “Take that with you,” he said. “I doubt if you’ll find anything in there you can use, but help yourself.”

  The box, I knew, contained old books, and when I got home and took them out I found signed first editions by Harold Blaisdell, Ray Bergman, Corey Ford, John Alden Knight, Arthur MacDougall, Edmund Ware Smith, Burton Spiller, Ted Trueblood, Lee Wulff, and others. Most of his books had been inscribed “To Tap.” They thanked him for his help on the manuscript, for his inspiration and support, for his friendship. They hinted at shared memories, partnerships cemented in canoes and woods, a common love and respect for the written word as well as for the outdoors.

  They are leisurely books, most of them, books as devoted to adventure and fantasy and philosophy as practical lore, and I had devoured them as a boy. They were part of my outdoors legacy. They were treasure.

  Most of these books, I realized with a kind of shock, had been written by men I had fished and hunted with who were no longer alive. They were men of Dad’s generation, not mine. It was a generation that has nearly passed. Dad is among the few who are left.

  It was a sobering realization.

  But I smiled, too. “I doubt if you’ll find anything in there you can use,” Dad had said, as if an inscribed first edition by an old friend had value only insofar as it had utility. But that’s always been his attitude to what he scornfully calls things.

  He has typed on the same clunky old Underwood for at least fifty years. “If it didn’t work just fine,” he says, and then shrugs, “I’d get another one.”

  My father is the least materialistic man I’ve ever known. He’s not a collector. If anything, he’s a divestor. He once owned dozens of bamboo fly rods, most of which had been given to him by their makers. He found two or three that felt good and fished with them. The others gathered dust and became priceless classics. When fiberglass came along, Dad proclaimed it an improvement, and set about cleaning out his old collection of the less-functional bamboo stuff. He gave those old rods to kids and casual acquaintances, anyone who expressed a mild interest in fishing. He never hesitated to help a potential fisherman get started, so he generally threw a old Hardy reel and a box of Tap-tied flies into the bargain.

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p; I suspect he gave away a lot of valuable stuff to shrewd bargain hunters who figured they knew a sucker when they saw one.

  When I accuse him of naivete, he shrugs. “I don’t give away anything I can use,” he says. “What good is it if you can’t use it?”

  He swapped the pick of his bamboo fly-rod litter for a dry sink my mother coveted. When he needed new archery gear, he exchanged the classic old .410 double with which I shot my first pheasant for a cheap metal bow. When I expressed dismay, he seemed surprised. “I didn’t think you’d want that old thing,” he said. “You can’t hunt anything with a .410. A most inefficient weapon.”

  “Yeah, well, I shot that pheasant with it.”

  “You shouldn’t have been hunting pheasants with a .410 in the first place.” Unassailable logic.

  He has owned six guns in my lifetime (apparently gun manufacturers were not as generous with their samples as rod-makers): A Winchester Model 21 twenty-gauge double, which he bought in the 1930s and was the only gun he ever used for upland shooting; an Ithaca twelve-gauge pump, his duck gun; a lever-action .30-.30 for deer; that .410 pheasant gun; a .22 revolver that he used for plinking rats at the town dump; and a single-shot .22 target rifle.

  When he shot skeet, he owned a skeet gun. When he stopped shooting skeet, he got rid of that shotgun.

  He had one gun for every purpose he could imagine. Each shot straight. He never needed any others.

  The .410 is gone. The Winchester and the Ithaca stand now in my gun cabinet. “I don’t hunt anymore,” said Dad when he gave them to me. “You might as well have them.” He has kept the .30-30, although he tried to get me to take it. “You hang onto it,” I said. “Just don’t give it to a stranger.” The .22 he keeps for woodchuck combat in his vegetable garden, although he doubts he will ever try to shoot the animals. “They’re just doing what comes naturally,” he says. “If they eat my lettuce, it’s my fault for planting it there.”

  He gave the revolver to somebody, he doesn’t remember who.