Northern Borders

by Howard Frank Mosher

  Rob took the gun, turned it around, and hefted it. “How many shells left in this cannon? Three?”

  The shooter nodded. Some of the men squatting on their heels stood up.

  “Three eggs,” Rob told Clarence, and snapped off the safety.

  Clarence sighed. One, two, three eggs sailed into the air. Rob shot three times. A lone egg burst in the air. The others fell back into the garden. One landed intact on the pea vines, and the shooter went over and picked it up.

  “Fetch me a glass, will you, bub?”

  I went inside the store and got a clean coffee mug from the counter and took it out to him, and he broke the raw egg into it and swallowed it, yolk and white and all in two gulps. “Breakfast,” he explained to the crowd. “Only way I could ever get one of these down.”

  He stuck the shotgun back in its case, and we started for his Pontiac. Singly and in pairs, the spectators came along behind.

  “Sharpshooter!” Rob Roy called after him. “I’ll bet you my brand-new Hudson Hornet with ten gallons of Flying A gasoline in the tank against that fancy shotgun that I can shoot two birds in the woods for every one of yours.”

  The shooter kept walking.

  Rob ran up and overtook him by his car. “You hear me, mister? My vehicle against your gun I can outshoot you in the woods.”

  The shooter unlocked the trunk of the gray Pontiac. One by one, he laid the three canvas gun cases on the overcoat. He shut the trunk lid with a puff of dust and turned to look at Rob’s Hudson.

  “That your rig there?”

  “That’s my rig. Under four thousand miles on her, radio, doesn’t burn a spoonful of oil.”

  “Heater work good?”

  “Mister, that automobile kicks heat like a Round Oak stove in a one-room school.”

  The shooter walked around to the driver’s side and looked in through the open window. The keys dangled in the ignition. He rested his hand on the door. “You mind?”

  “No, sir. Go ahead and try her out. Take her for a spin down the country road, open her up wide. Whatever.”

  The shooter got in and rolled up the driver’s window. He leaned across the front seat and cranked the passenger window up tight. He switched on the key and stepped on the starter, and the engine popped right off. He gunned the motor a little. The Hudson idled smoothly.

  I expected the shooter to pull away from the store; instead he reached down and turned on the heater. In the packed dirt parking area in front of Clarence’s store it was a warm fall day. Inside the Hudson it was getting hotter. Beads of sweat stood out on the shooter’s forehead and slid off the tip of his sharp nose. He bent over and turned the heater on full blast and the sweat rolled off his face like water and he gave a small grin like Sam McGee from sunny Tennessee and shut off the engine and got out of the car.

  He took a round two-dollar watch out of his pants pocket and frowned at it like a hunter looking at his compass and wondering if he might be lost.

  “Be here at two o’clock,” he said to Rob.

  Evidently the shooter finished his run to Memphremagog early. At one-thirty Uncle Rob and I found him sitting on the porch steps of Clarence’s store, drinking from a new pint of Southern Comfort and looking as though he’d just been informed on good authority that he had six months to live.

  “Are we still on?” Rob said.

  “If you say so,” the shooter said unenthusiastically.

  My uncle pointed at me. “Austen wants to come too.”

  “No doubt,” the shooter said without looking in my direction. “You boys lead the way. I’ll follow along in my old icebox.”

  Rob drove up the Hollow to my grandparents’ place, and up the lane onto the ridge behind Gramp’s sugarhouse. When we hit the lane, I looked back and saw the chrome Indian Chief on the Pontiac’s hood bucking up and down like the figurehead of a ship in a stormy sea.

  We left the cars in the puckerbrush at the upper end of the lane, where it petered out into an old logging trace. The shooter opened his trunk and took out his shotgun. He got a pair of rubbers out of his valise and sat down on the rear bumper and pulled them on over his scuffed brogans.

  “The springs in your rig are shot all to hell,” I said.

  “No call for barbershop talk,” he said, yanking at the heel of a rubber. “You was my kid, you’d be cutting a switch about now.”

  “You ever have any kids?”

  “No, praise be.”

  He stood up and struggled into his overcoat and buttoned it up to the throat.

  My uncle stared at him. “Aren’t you going to be hot?”

  “I hope so,” the shooter said. “But I doubt it.”

  He loaded the shotgun and turned it upside down and shut one eye and squinted down the barrel with the other. I noticed that the safety was off.

  “How is it,” he said into the gun barrel, “that you ain’t off in college? A smart young fella like you.”

  “I might go next year,” Rob said.

  “He knows more than most of the professors do already,” I said.

  The shooter straightened up and gave a sardonic cough.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Ask him a question. Any question at all.”

  “I just did.”

  “Ask him another one. Baseball. American presidents. Whatever.”

  The shooter looked off through the fall haze at the hills. “All right,” he said. “Where are these so-called birds?”

  On the way up through the dying steeplebush and orchard grass, Rob and the shooter agreed on ground rules. As the shooter put it, they would shoot turn and turn about. He would take the first flush, Rob the second, and so on until one of them had his bag limit of four birds. No one mentioned anything more about two to one odds.

  The remnants of an old apple orchard straggled thinly along the fence line between the grown-up field and the woods. The few apples they still produced were wormy and shriveled; nobody bothered to pick them. Here was where my grandfather had first brought me to hunt birds. It was a good spot to see game.

  A dark, good-sized partridge flushed out of an ancient Red Astrachan tree a few yards ahead of the shooter. He fired twice after it had already disappeared into some thick softwoods to the left of the trace.

  “Man dear,” he said. “What in Ned was that?”

  “Grouse.” Rob grinned at me and winked.

  “Why didn’t you warn me ahead of time they made such a commotion? Sudden racket like that could give a man a stroke.”

  We continued up the trace into the woods. It was mixed hardwoods and softwoods, with most of the softwoods sloping off to the left toward a deep ravine and a brook. To our right, maples and birches and beeches spread out over the hillside. Here and there among the tall hardwoods were coverts of barberry, shadblow, hazels, and wild roses with bright orange hips. It was ideal terrain for birds, plenty of feed with heavy cover nearby.

  Rob didn’t have to wait long for his first shot. Twenty feet in front of us a partridge was dusting itself in the trace. It flew straight out ahead, the easiest wing shot there is; probably he could have gotten it with the shooter’s .22.

  “One of this year’s brood,” Rob said when I brought it in. “Poor little dummy. Easy shot compared to yours.”

  “Don’t be second-guessing yourself,” the shooter said. “You got him, didn’t you?”

  He took a drink, stumbled into a swaley depression, stepped over the tops of his rubbers, said “Ned” and “man dear,” fired three shots at a bird rocketing out from under a yellow birch into the softwoods and missed all three times. He looked down at his shoes and said with a certain degree of satisfaction, “Sopped through.”

  “I probably wouldn’t even have gotten off a shot,” Rob said, grinning at me again.

  The shooter was picking stick-me-tights out of his overcoat sleeves. Without looking up he said, “Let’s get on with this.”

  We climbed higher up the ridge. The woods grew denser, the trace fainter.

  “Good pl
ace to get lost in,” the shooter remarked.

  “A man can’t get lost in this country,” Rob said. “You just walk downhill, find a brook, and follow it out to a road.”

  “Some of us,” said the shooter, “might freeze to death before we hit the road. Are we getting up toward the tree line?”

  Rob and I had all we could do not to laugh out loud. It was so warm we’d both taken off our jackets and tied them around our waists.

  We came into a scattered stand of beech trees. The beechnuts had started to fall, and their prickly brown husks lay open on the leaves around the bases of the smooth gray trunks. Rob stopped on the edge of the grove. I knew he suspected that a bird was nearby, feeding on the nuts. Maybe he’d heard one walking on the dry leaves.

  “He calls this being his own pointer,” I whispered to the shooter. “If you’re perfectly still, they can’t stand to wait very long.”

  “Neither can I,” he said. “Winter’s drawing closer by the minute.”

  A bird went up at the far side of the beech trees, a hundred or more yards away. It flew laterally to the trace, appearing in dun-colored flashes between the beech trunks. Rob’s gun barrel followed its line of flight. He waited longer than you would suppose even a patient hunter could wait, and finally the partridge veered and came into the opening where the trace ran, and my uncle knocked it cleanly out of the air and into a small copse of fir trees on the edge of the gully.

  Rob was ebullient. When I got back with the dead bird, he was saying he’d like to be a sharpshooter too, travel around putting on marksmanship demonstrations and selling ammo. He wondered if the shooter could use an assistant.

  The Manchester Arms Company representative looked off in the distance at the red-and-yellow hills. Somewhere he had lost one rubber. His shoes and socks were wringing wet. His pants were splashed with mud up to the fringe of the overcoat, which was bristling with several varieties of burrs. A livid welt zigzagged across his right cheek, where he’d been raked by a blackberry cane.

  “Enough’s enough, boys,” he said, and started back the way we’d come.

  Before he’d taken a dozen steps, a partridge flushed out from under a lone wild apple tree we’d walked past not five minutes earlier, and came zooming straight back up the trace at our heads. The shooter took one wild shot, then dropped to the ground. I jumped aside. Rob ducked his head, whirled around, waited until the bird was far enough away for his pattern to spread, and dropped it into the leaves as leisurely as plugging a Campbell’s soup can on a stump—turning a nearly impossible shot into a routine one.

  “They do that this time of year,” he explained to the shooter, who was gulping Southern Comfort. “They get drunk on fermented apples and fly straight at you. Smash into car windshields, house windows, trees even. What do you think about that assistant’s position?”

  Without a word the shooter headed down the path toward his car.

  When we were halfway to the field he stopped suddenly. “What’s over yonder?”

  “Over where?” Rob said.

  “Yonder.” The shooter jerked his head toward the ravine.

  “Oh, there. A brook runs down through there in the spring. It’s mostly dried up this time of year. It’s all full of brush.”

  The shooter veered off the trace toward the gully. He walked purposefully and quickly for a winded and defeated man who had gone through a pint and a half of whiskey since mid-morning, and there was an alarming desperation about the set of his shoulders and the back of his head.

  “Watch your step,” Rob yelled. “There’s a big drop-off over there.”

  The shooter stopped short at an old barbed-wire fence strung up to keep cows from falling into the ravine years ago when the woods were open pasture. I ran up beside him. We peered over a rusty, single strand of wire embedded inches deep in the trunk of a half-dead maple tree. Far below I could hear the trickle of the diminished brook, but I couldn’t see it. It was concealed from bank to bank by softwood slash and brush, and brush trailed down the steep side of the ravine over boulders and stumps and dense berry thickets.

  The shooter clicked off the safety of his gun. He put one leg over the fence, caught his overcoat on a barb, and tore a long jagged rent in the lining. He lifted his other leg and momentarily lost his balance. He did a rapid little dance astraddle the fence, waving his gun over his head like a baton. I was afraid he was going to pitch headlong into the ravine or accidentally shoot himself or my uncle or me. Then he was standing on the brink of the gully, looking as unhappy as an aging, wet, and exhausted salesman whose luck had played out at last could possibly look.

  He got out his bottle of Southern Comfort and stared at it. There was less than a swallow left in the bottom.

  “Story of my life,” he said, and flipped the bottle high into the air. It fell into a great pile of brush in the bottom of the ravine.

  “Don’t take it so—” Rob started to say.

  He was cut off by a thunderous roar. The entire gorge seemed to be filled with birds. It was as if someone had tossed a springer spaniel into a covey of eight or ten partridges. In fact, there were only four; but four partridges flushing in four different directions can seem like forty.

  I never saw the shooter’s gun go up. That’s how quick he was. His narrow shoulders swung right and he fired. They swung left and he fired again. He raised the barrel slightly and shot a third time and swung right again and killed the fourth and last bird of his bag limit just as it cleared the opposite bank. The air around us was full of smoke and the scent of gunpowder, and my ears were ringing.

  The shooter’s voice sounded small and faraway when he said, “Go out around and fetch them birds up, will you, bub? That hollow down there looks colder than Ned’s Frigidaire.”

  When we came back into the meadow where we’d left the cars, it was beginning to get dusky. In the hazy twilight, the bright fall leaves on the hills had faded to a tawny orange. Crickets were singing. It was as warm as an evening in late May.

  “All right,” Rob said. “How did you know they were there?”

  The shooter leaned his gun against the rear bumper of the Pontiac and began to unbutton his overcoat. “Them birds? I watched which way the ones I missed flown. They all flown off toward that quarter.”

  Rob reached into his pants pocket and got out his keys.

  “What’s they?”

  “You know what they are. You know damn well.”

  “Oh, them.”

  The shooter took the keys and unlocked the Hudson’s trunk and peered inside. “Needs a good hoeing out, don’t she?”

  He handed Rob his baseball glove and spikes and two 38-inch Louisville Sluggers. He handed my uncle his three-piece fly rod and fishing basket and toolbox and his rolled-up sleeping bag. He unlocked the trunk of his Pontiac and transferred the cartons of ammunition and his valise to the Hudson. He took off his overcoat, picked out what burrs he could get, spread it lining-up on the floor of the Hudson’s trunk, and put the gun cases containing the .22 and .30–30 on top of it. He picked up the shotgun and frowned at it.

  “Coming back,” he said, frowning at the gun, “it crossed my mind to give this to you. Tell you to practice up, you could maybe be a shooter too.”

  He put the gun back in its case and put the case on the overcoat and said, “Well, you couldn’t.”

  Rob and I stared at him.

  “That’s correct,” the shooter said in a voice that was almost cheerful. “Like you said earlier, it’s ninety percent speed. And you ain’t quite quick enough.

  “Not quite quick enough,” he repeated, and for the first time that day he seemed happy.

  He shut the trunk and went around and got into the Hudson. Leaving the driver’s door ajar and one foot on the running board, he got a fountain pen and a pad of ammo orders out of his jacket pocket and wrote something on the back of an order blank and handed it and the pen out to Rob.

  “Legal bill of transfer,” he said. “Sign it.”

  Rob
signed it and gave it and the pen back to the shooter. He did not say a word, but he looked lower than I’d ever seen him look, after losing a ball game in the last inning, or losing a girlfriend, or losing a record trout.

  “So,” the shooter said, “you ain’t getting no nearly new demonstration model pump shotgun to fool yourself with for two, three years until you find out the hard way you ain’t quite quick enough for gun club work, county fair work, and have to spend the next thirty years of your life selling shells or clerking in some sporting goods store.”

  “I could leam,” Rob said.

  The shooter shook his head. “Quick part can’t be learned. Fella has to find what he does best and stick with her. But not this thing. Not for you.”

  He shut the door and rolled the window partway up and started the engine. Rob turned away.

  “You hold on a minute,” the shooter said out the top half of the window.

  He wrote something on the order pad, tore off the sheet and handed it and the Pontiac keys out to my brother.

  “Round one goes to the boot,” he said. “Heater’s shot. Keep up the Valvoline, she’ll get you where you need to go.”

  He rolled the window all the way up and pulled off the hand brake. Then he unrolled the window six inches. “You might land on your feet yet,” he told Rob Roy. “I doubt it. But you might.”

  He cranked the window back up as far as it would go, leaned over to turn on the Hudson’s heater, and drove unhurriedly down the lane and out of sight in the dusk.

  The shooter’s Pontiac ran all right, on what seemed to me like nearly equal amounts of gas and oil, for the next four years, while Rob was away at the state university. When Rob left Vermont for Alaska, I inherited the car and got another couple of years out of it. Neither of us ever managed to fix the heater so it would work.

  The shooter never returned to Kingdom County. His replacement, a young salesman in a white shirt and necktie like any other salesman, knew little about guns. He told Cousin Clarence that our man had requested a transfer to a warmer territory but it was denied and a few months later he’d checked himself into a sanatorium in New Hampshire. The next time the new salesman passed through he said the company had received a burial bill from the sanatorium for two hundred and thirty-five dollars. According to office scuttlebutt, it had been returned unpaid since the company was having financial troubles.