Upland Autumn

by William G. Tapply

  When I kick one of them up, it doesn’t seem to fly as fast as I remember, either. I’m an average wingshot at best, but I rarely miss one of these lumbering domesticated birds.

  Still, on those rare afternoons when dozens of bird dogs aren’t crisscrossing every field and swale and when hunter-orange isn’t the landscape’s dominant color, I can sometimes delude myself into thinking that I’m hunting. After all, there are the birds, and there’s the good cover, and I’m carrying a shotgun, and I’ve got my dog.

  The delusion never lasts. It’s not hunting, not really. It resembles hunting, but it’s fake.

  Southern quail hunters saw it coming a long time before we northern pheasant hunters did. Those of us who still prowl the uplands in the fall for ruffed grouse and woodcock—truly wild birds—are doing our best to ignore the ticking clock.

  Hunting on public land for stocked birds is the future, and we better get used to it.

  This new version of pheasant hunting needs some fine-tuning. In its public forms such as the Massachusetts WMAs, there are too many hunters chasing too few birds over not enough acres of not very wild terrain.

  Pheasant farmers, I understand, are now breeding hybrid birds, smaller, swifter fliers that give hunters a greater wingshooting challenge. This matters little to me. If the main point of hunting was target shooting, I’d give up flesh-and-blood birds entirely and shoot clays.

  Every November, Art Currier, in celebration of his own birthday, organizes a day of pheasant hunting for himself and several of his old friends. Some of us have hunted and fished since we were kids. Others take to the woods only once a year, on Art’s birthday hunt.

  Because this is a special occasion, a once-a-year celebration of the season, we spend the day at a hunting preserve, sort of a private WMA, a northern version of a southern quail plantation, where we are assured of finding birds and privacy.

  Over the years, we have sampled many New England pheasant preserves. We haven’t found much difference among them. We pay a bird-per-man fee, which guarantees that a prescribed number of birds will be put out for us. On the morning of our arrival, one of the preserve’s guides slips into our assigned fields and plants the pheasants, which have been rocked with their heads tucked under their wings so they will not fly or run away before we hunters get there.

  Then we are divided into groups of three and directed to our appointed fields. We know six pheasants have been deposited there. If they are still there, and if our dogs do their jobs, we will get some shots and perhaps bag a few birds.

  I always enjoy the comradeship of Art’s day. I enjoy watching the dogs work, and shooting an occasional pen-reared pheasant does not give me the twinge of regret that I get when I shoot a wild bird.

  We have the place to ourselves, we always find pheasants, the dogs point, and we knock birds out of the air. It’s more fun than a WMA, but I never confuse a day on a preserve with wild-pheasant hunting. For that, I have to conjure up some old memories.

  Chapter 20

  LAST HUNT

  Nick pulled his truck against the snowbank beside the mud-frozen road and turned off the engine. Last night’s snow layered the dark hemlocks, and the scattering of old Baldwin apple trees on the hillside were black and gnarly. Here and there a wizened fruit still hung from a branch.

  “Ah,” said Nick’s father from the seat beside him. “The Treacherous Owl. We had some fun here. I wondered where you were taking me.”

  “Looks different in the snow, huh?” said Nick.

  “We never had any reason to come here in January,” said the old man. “It was woodcock season when that owl showed us this place, wasn’t it?”

  Nick nodded. “October. The leaves hadn’t dropped yet. That was a long time ago. I was just a kid, still trying to keep up with you in the woods.”

  They’d been driving the backroads that day, headed from one grouse cover to another one. Nick had been sitting in the passenger seat and his father was driving slowly, as he always did when they traveled the New Hampshire dirt roads. In the backseat, Duke, their old setter, had his chin on Nick’s right shoulder and his nose poking out the open window. All three of them had their eyes peeled for road birds.

  When the dark shadow glided across the roadway in front of them, Nick’s father hit the brakes. “Did you see that?”

  “What was it?” said Nick.

  “Big old horned owl. Now what do you suppose he’s up to?”

  “Hunting,” said Nick. “Like us.”

  “You suppose he knows something we don’t know?”

  “Bet he doesn’t know the ten main exports of Bolivia,” said Nick.

  His father chuckled. “That knowledge wouldn’t do him any more good than it’ll do you. But I bet he knows where to find a good meal.”

  “You think he’s hunting for grouse in there?”

  “I think that I see alders, old apple trees, birch whips, and hemlocks, and I think I detect the ruts of an old cart path at that break in the stone wall,” said the old man. “I bet we’ll find a cellarhole in there where some old farmer made a nice grouse cover for us.”

  “We better take a look,” said Nick.

  His father backed up and pulled into the ancient roadway. Fifty yards in, at the top of a little round hill, they found the cellarhole. The farmhouse had collapsed into itself, but the fieldstone chimney still stood, and out back were a dozen toppled granite gravestones, so eroded by decades of wind and weather that Nick couldn’t read the dates on them.

  He hadn’t yet begun carrying a gun in the woods in those days. His father called it his grouse-hunting apprenticeship. Nick had learned a lot, slogging through the woods behind his father, trying to match his old man’s long-legged stride. He’d learned where grouse lived and how they flushed with a sudden explosion of wings, and he’d learned how his father’s shotgun came up to his shoulder and began swinging at the sound before he saw anything.

  When he thought about it, Nick realized he couldn’t begin to enumerate the things he’d learned from trailing his father through the woods.

  That owl had showed them a sweet little grouse cover. The apple orchard, which mingled with briar, juniper, thornapple, and patches of poplar, dribbled down the hillside behind the cellarhole to a boggy little brook bordered by alders. Duke busted a couple of grouse as they worked their way through the orchard. Nick’s old man yelled halfheartedly at the dog. They figured that, on balance, Duke did more good than harm, though it was a close call. The old setter never could figure out grouse, but he was death on wing-tipped birds and didn’t mind pointing a woodcock now and then.

  When the dog locked on point in the alders, Nick’s father handed the boy his shotgun. “Most likely a woodcock,” the old man whispered. “When he flushes, take your time, let him get out there. Make sure you keep your head down. And don’t forget the safety.”

  Nick nodded. His old man told him the same thing every time he let him try a shot. So far, Nick had never hit a flying bird of any kind. His father always said, “Tough shot” or “That bird zigged when he should’ve zagged” or “I thought you were right on him,” as though he actually expected the boy to connect. “The law of averages will catch up with you,” his father would say. “When it does, watch out birds.” Personally, Nick wondered if he’d ever hit anything.

  When woodcock flushed in thick alders, Nick had observed that the birds tended to helicopter straight up and kind of hang there for a minute before they darted off in some unpredictable direction. But this time, when Nick walked up behind Duke and the bird took flight, it stayed low. Nick’s gun came up to his shoulder and his thumb flicked off the safety and he remembered to snuggle his cheek against the stock, but the way the bird was weaving back and forth through the alders, Nick couldn’t get on him.

  His old man always said, “You can’t kill anything you don’t shoot at,” so just as the bird was about to disappear out of range, Nick pulled the trigger.

  “Hey,” his old man yelled. “You got h
im.” Nick could hear how he was trying not to sound surprised.

  A minute later Duke came back with the dead woodcock in his mouth. Nick’s father said, “Thank you,” and took the bird from the dog. He held it in his hand and stroked its head with his forefinger. “A lovely little bird,” he said softly. “Sometimes I wish we could put them back, like trout.” He handed the woodcock to Nick. “Congratulations. Good shooting.”

  “Thank you, law of averages,” Nick said on that October day more than 40 years ago when the horned owl flew across the road.

  “Look how tall those beeches are now,” Nick’s old man said as they sat there in the truck looking out at the snowy January landscape. “The Treacherous Owl’s way past its prime.”

  Nick found himself smiling. “Aren’t we all.”

  “We packed away a lot of memories here, though, didn’t we?”

  Nick nodded. “That’s why I thought this was where we should come today. To remember. My Bucky pup made his first point right in there.” Nick pointed into the woods.

  They both looked out the window of the truck. “That was a lovely sidehill of birch whips when we first started coming here,” said the old man. “Not much taller than a man’s head. There was always a woodcock or two in those birches. Look at ’em now.”

  Now they were grown-up trees as thick through the trunk as a strong man’s arm.

  “Bucky was what, 6 months old that season?” said Nick’s father. “Tiny little thing. All ears and enthusiasm.”

  “Right,” said Nick. “The birches had grown a little taller by then, but it was still a good spot for woodcock. That was the only time I remember feeling as though I absolutely had to shoot a bird. To reward Bucky for his point.”

  Nick’s father chuckled quietly, and Nick understood that he was remembering what Nick was remembering. Bucky had skidded into a point in the middle of the birches, and Nick had pushed in, flushed the woodcock, and missed it with both barrels, and then his father had shot once and dumped the bird. The old man had always been a better wingshot than Nick, even at the very end of his shooting days. He had never once gloated about it.

  When that woodcock dropped amid the birches, Bucky had toddled over to it, sniffed at it, then put his paw on it and stood there proudly. Nick had never been able to persuade Bucky to retrieve woodcock.

  “This was the place where you quit hunting for good,” Nick said after a few minutes. “It was the last cover you carried a gun in.”

  “I don’t remember it that way,” said the old man.

  “I do,” said Nick.

  It was one of those gray November afternoons, Nick recalled, 20 or 25 years after the day the owl had flown across the road. Bucky was an old dog by then. He’d slowed down a lot, and he’d finally begun to point grouse fairly regularly. So when he locked on a point in a brushy corner on the edge of the old pasture, Nick and his father had moved up quickly on either side of the dog.

  The grouse flushed on the old man’s side, and instead of darting through the thick stuff and heading for the distant stand of pines, the way any self-respecting grouse would do, this one chose to fly across the open field. Nick watched his father’s gun come up and swing on the bird, and in his head he uttered a little benediction for the doomed grouse. The old man never missed an easy crossing shot.

  “Bang-bang,” Nick’s father had said conversationally.

  The bird kept flying.

  The old man lowered his gun, blew imaginary smoke away from its barrels, and grinned at Nick. “Got him.”

  “Huh?” said Nick. “You didn’t even shoot at him. What happened?”

  “Safety stuck.”

  Nick rolled his eyes. “That’s a damn lie.”

  The old man smiled, then nodded and tapped his forehead with his fingertip. “Got him here, in my imagination. Then I put him back, like a trout.” He shrugged. “I’ve killed an awful lot of birds. More than my share, I figure. One more or less doesn’t matter to me. Now we know he’s still here.”

  “What’re you trying to say?” said Nick.

  The old man dismissed the subject with a flip of his hand. “Nothing very profound.”

  Bucky died the following spring, and Nick was in no hurry to replace him. When the bird season rolled around, Nick’s father kept turning down invitations to hunt with other men’s dogs. Nick didn’t push him. Grouse hunting wasn’t the same without your own dog.

  That winter the old man gave Nick his 50-year-old Winchester Model 21, the only gun he’d ever carried in grouse cover. “It’s the arthritis,” he said. “I just can’t get around the way I used to.”

  Nick didn’t believe that. But he knew his old man too well, and respected him too much, to argue with him.

  They sat there in the front seat of the truck, looking out the window at the way the cold afternoon sunlight angled in through the trees, not saying anything. Nick, for one, was in no hurry to get on with it, and he guessed his old man was feeling the same.

  Nick’s mind was whirling with memories. “That time you said ‘bang-bang’ to the grouse wasn’t the last time we came here together,” he said finally.

  “I remember,” the old man said quietly. “You talked me into it.”

  “I wanted you to see Burt work.” Burt was Nick’s new Brittany, barely 8 months old that fall, but already pointing woodcock like a veteran. “You finally agreed to walk through one cover with me. We came here.”

  “Burt was a precocious bird dog, all right,” said the old man. “The cover had grown up and gone to hell by then, though. It was sad to see. Made me feel old.”

  Nick smiled. “You were old.”

  They’d made a short hunt of it. The only part of the Treacherous Owl cover that looked any good was the alder run, and anyway, Nick’s father was pretty hobbled with his arthritis. Nick carried the old Winchester Model 21, Burt darted and pranced ahead of him on his short puppy legs, and the old man limped along behind. Nick tried to keep his pace slower than normal, and every now and then he looked back over his shoulder and said, “How you doin’?”

  “I can still keep up with the likes of you,” the old man answered.

  Burt pointed the only woodcock they found in the Treacherous Owl that day, and Nick missed it with both barrels.

  “He zigged when he should’ve zagged,” the old man said, still making excuses for him.

  Now Nick gazed out at the snowy landscape and said, “That day I brought you here to see Burt work—did it remind you of anything?”

  “Oh,” his father said, “it reminded me of a whole lifetime of things.”

  “I mean, you following behind me, trying to keep up,” Nick said. “Me carrying the Model 21. Me being the one who yelled at the dog.”

  Nick’s father was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “Full circle, huh? I was the kid that day, and you were the father.”

  “No,” said Nick. “You’ve always been the father.”

  “Well,” Nick’s old man said a few minutes later, “we going to sit here all day?”

  “I guess it’s time,” Nick said.

  They got out of the truck and crunched through the crusty ankle-deep snow on the old woodsroad to the cellarhole on the hilltop. A big old hemlock—it probably had been a sapling that day 40-odd years ago when the owl flew across the road—grew behind the garden of toppled gravestones, and under its lowermost boughs the earth was bare. The afternoon January sun came streaming in, and from the top of the hill you could see over the treetops to some distant New Hampshire mountains.

  “This okay?” said Nick.

  “This is perfect,” said the old man.

  Nick knelt down and spread his father’s ashes under the hemlock boughs. He thought he should probably say something, but he couldn’t think of anything that had been left unsaid between them. They’d finally and truly come full circle, and that was that.

 

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