by Robert Ruark
“One thing you will find running through all these tall stories about bandit heroes. They were all supposed to be kind, generous, handsome, happy, chivalrous, kind to women and children. They were all supposed to be forced into a life of crime because of some outrage society dealt ‘em off the bottom of the deck. I don’t know what it takes to make a legend, but honesty, decency, and a reasonable obedience to law and order don’t seem to qualify.”
“How about Robin Hood, from the olden days?” I ventured. “I read a lot about him, how he robbed the rich to give to the poor.”
“Fiddlesticks,” the Old Man said. “There never was a highwayman would give a plugged nickel to a blind beggar. As for Mr. Robin Hood, he got in trouble first because he was a poacher—a rustler, if you will—and stayed in trouble because he couldn’t keep his paws off other people’s pokes. His pleasing personality was an invention of time and people with vivid imaginations.”
“How do you know all this, for sure?”
“I don’t,” the Old Man said, “but it figures. When a man sets himself up bigger than the society he lives in anything he had nice for a start wears off him as he goes along, and he winds up a rat in a hole until somebody removes him from serious consideration.”
“There must of been somebody from the last hundred years you admired,” I said, figuring that the Old Man was so mad at Roy Bean and Billy the Kid and Robin Hood that I was off the hook for my own misdemeanor.
The Old Man smiled. “I kind of fancied a couple folks,” he said. “I reckon I would go along with Jim Bowie. He was wild but he wasn’t no outlaw, and he died with the knife he invented in his hand in the battle of the Alamo. Like everybody else in the fort. You must of read about that in the history books, General Santa Anna and the siege and all?”
“Yes sir, we had a chapter on it.”
“Well, that chapter didn’t tell all about Bowie, not by a durn sight. This was a cold-eyed, soft-voiced gentleman, from all accounts, and a real ring-tailed wildcat. He was born gentle and raised rough. He rode alligators for fun in Louisiana, and he had slave dealings with Jean Lafitte, the pirate, on Galveston Island. He was a colonel under Andy Jackson. He ran wild cattle and speared them, and he was a great dark-room duelist with that wicked knife he thought up. He was maybe the greatest Injun fighter of them all. One time a hull flock of Comanches aimed to ambush him, and he and ten men accounted for fifty dead and thirty-odd wounded, against one white man dead and three hurt. The books say there was a hundred and sixty-some Injuns against the eleven whites. He was a sick man at the siege of the Alamo, but they say there was Mexicans stacked up like cordwood alongside his bunk before they finally got him.
“No man I ever heard about lived as big as Jim Bowie. He married the prettiest girl in San Antonio, a Spanish gal, daughter of the vice-governor when the Mexicans still had Texas. He went out and got himself adopted by the Lipan Apaches. These Lipans did a heavy traffic in silver at the trading posts, and Bowie had himself a keen eye for old Spanish treasure.
“He worked hard at being a good Injun. He was a fine shot and he killed a lot of buffalo and fought a lot of the Lipans’ enemies. He stood so high with the chief and the tribe that they finally showed him their treasure. The historians don’t quite agree as to whether they showed him a galore of smelted Coronado ore or an ocean of natural veins. But they showed him something that drove him mad, and he spent the rest of his life trying to locate the lost San Saba mine.
“Some think he found it, but didn’t have time to exploit it, or else he was biding his time until he could work it without cutting the country in half. But the Texas War of Independence came along and Jim Bowie died with all the other men in the Alamo. Even today the Texas people around Santone think he died knowing the whereabouts of the San Saba treasure, whether it was smelted ore or natural vein. And they’re still looking for the lost mine.”
“Your Mr. Jim Bowie sounds about as raunchy as the others you’re so down on,” I said. “I mean he was a killer and a slaver and a real roughneck.”
“There’s a difference,” the Old Man said. “Bowie was a gentleman and most of his legend is founded on fact, not on what a bunch of latter-day sentimentalists and maudlin outlaw-worshippers wove around some drunk cowpoke, who managed to shoot six Mexicans and make himself a reputation as a bad hombre. Most of the Kids and Jameses were just murderers and stick-up artists, before they hung halos on ‘em. There’s been more lies told about the olden days and the tough guys that inhabited those days than I like to think about. Seems like all a fellow’s got to do is die with his boots on and he gets to be an archangel, when all the time he was just some ignorant bushwhacker with a mean streak.”
“How do you account for all the hero worship then, in modern times, if they’re all so no-account?”
“Son,” the Old Man said, “a fellow named Thoreau once remarked that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. The average fellow is stuck so firm under the thumb of his wife and his family and his job that even a hyena sounds romantic, if it happened to holler yesterday. These hairy ruffians would have seemed pretty commonplace, disgusting, and possibly full of lice if you’d lived in the same neighborhood with ‘em. When they got drunk you ducked out of their way, and wished they’d move off someplace else.”
“All the same,” I said stubbornly, “I would like to have lived in those days.”
“I do not doubt it in the least,” the Old Man said. “You would have been one of the first victims of the James boys or of Billy the Kid, due to being a basically law-abiding type and a little slow at fanning a gun.”
About that time a female voice sounded strong on the evening breeze.
“That’s your grandma requesting that we wash up for supper, Judge Roy Bean,” the Old Man said. “I’ll say one thing. If she’d of been around in those days, there would have been law west of the Pecos, and they wouldn’t have made a legend out of your namesake. She’d have made a great peace marshal without firing a shot.”
9—You Got to Hurt to Be Happy
It was one of those freezing Southern days, with the wind slapping harshly against the clapboards and riffling the green shingles on the roof. The house seemed to shake a little as the gale buffeted the tiny town, and there was a flurry of snow amongst the magnolias. The Old Man hunched his rocker a little closer to the fire, and we both listened to the wind screaming down the chimney and raising tiny cyclones of loosely shifting ash. The Old Man mock-shivered and hunched his shoulders. He was wearing a ratty old gray sweater hauled up under his chin.
“If you pinned me right down to it,” the Old Man said, “I don’t like nothing very much but a hot fire and a warm bed and a quiet woman to fetch me my food. I can generally manage the first two, but I been looking constantly for the basic ingredient of the third. Quiet, I mean.
“What I really like is more or less bearish. I mean a cave, a snug, warm cave. Let the winds howl and the snow fall and leave me safe inside my cave. The bear is a mighty intelligent animal. He’s got sense enough to come in out of the winter weather and wait for the pretty flowers in the spring.” The Old Man spat a sizzling jetstream into a fire that was fairly shaking the chimney.
“Listen to that wind,” he said. “It’ll have the planks off the house by tomorrow. Nobody but a damned fool or a hungry Eskimo would go out in weather like that. You better go to bed early tonight, boy, or us damned fools will be late for the ducks.” He grinned and spat again. “Try to remember you’re a hungry Eskimo when the alarm clock rousts you out tomorrow. It makes more sense than being an idiot.”
That was the Old Man for you—full of contradictions. He would be praising the comforts of the fireside one minute and then deviling you to buck weather that would have put old Peary off his program.
The Old Man had a lot of favorite topics, and one was that a hunting-fishing fellow hated comfort, that he welcomed pain, that he was never so happy as when he was miserable. He was like the gent in the old joke who kept hitting hims
elf over the head with a hammer, because it felt so good when he quit. The Old Man ranked duck hunters with mountain climbers for damfoolishness; said he never climbed a mountain and didn’t want to. He hadn’t lost nothing up there in those clouds.
The Old Man had stomped in with his pipe frozen solid, rime on his mustache, and his nose a brilliant cherry red. He seemed as bright as a boxful of birds at a time when the dogs were indistinguishable from the logs on the fire, they were that close to the blaze.
“It’s a lovely day today, ain’t it?” said he, shaking the snow from his overcoat and warming his chapped hands before the fire. “And by all indications it’ll be lovelier tomorrow.”
Grandma regarded her mate with disapproval. “Quit dripping all over my rugs,” Miss Lottie said. “A lovely day for what? Pneumonia? Hang that wet coat on the back porch.”
The Old Man smiled. “It’s a lovely day for ducks,” he said. “I never saw a nicer day for ducks. The wind will break up the rafts, and the snow and ice will freeze up the big ponds. The ducks’ll fly low and come into any little pothole that isn’t frozen tight. They’ll decoy to anything that looks free of wind. If I was a meat hunter I’d make me a fortune in the morning, just creeping up on a few unfrozen patches and letting fly with a 10-gauge or some other murderous weapon. Slay ‘em by the hundreds.”
The Old Man scowled at the idea. “Fortunately,” he said, “I ain’t a pothunter, and I don’t own no 10-gauge shotgun. But all the same I intend to take advantage of the weather and shoot rather selectively with that old pump gun that’s standing in the corner. Tomorrow I shoot nothing but canvasbacks, bar the occasional pintail and a Canada goose or so. Have I got any takers or are you just going to sit here and shiver and feel sorry because it ain’t April? “
The Old Man used to reckon that one man’s weather is another man’s poison. “The only way to handle weather,” he said now, “is to know what you want to do with it and use it accordingly. Quit complaining about it and put up with it for what it’s worth. And be prepared for it. The trouble with city people is that they freeze when it’s cold and boil when it’s hot, because they dress the same way for all seasons. An Eskimo knows it’s going to be cold, so he stokes himself up on boiled walrus or blubber, builds a house to match his mood, and only interrupts the long dark winter to thaw out another chunk of seal. The African savage knows it’s going to be hot the year round, so he wears a strip of banana leaf to hide his nakedness and seeks his coolness under a palm.
“You get a big unseasonable snow like this, and the man who owns a pair of long-handled, red-flannel drawers hollers hooray and goes for a sleigh ride. The fellow that’s still stuck into summer BVD’s whimpers and wails that the weatherman’s betrayed him personally. There ain’t no such thing as bad weather, if you come right down to it. Some’s just better than others, as there ain’t no such thing as a real ugly woman. Some are just prettier than others.”
I had seen that pointed pipestem before. He strictly wasn’t aiming it at Grandma.
“What time do we get up?” I asked. “Before dawn, as usual?”
“Let’s don’t overdo it,” the old buzzard grinned. “It’ll be black night until seven o’clock, and they’ll fly all day in this wind anyhow. I should remark that if you had breakfast ready by six-thirty we’d have ample time to cope with all the necessities. But dress warm, boy, dress warm, and don’t bother to get me up till the coffee’s boiling. I aim to sleep in my long drawers, too. That way you start off warm.”
One thing the Old Man taught me: You dress warm from the inside out, not the outside in. You start with a hot breakfast—ham and eggs and toast and a lot of coffee—and then you surround the breakfast with long drawers and a soft sweater and a couple of flannel shirts and two pairs of socks. A pair of woolly britches over that, and hip boots to keep the wind and water off you, and an oilskin jacket and a cap with earmuffs, and you don’t need a bearskin coat. Once that inside furnace starts working you find you can sweat in a blizzard.
“I know it sounds kind of sissy,” the Old Man said, as we mopped up the remains of the eggs with the toast, “but certain creature comforts can make a power of difference in how good you shoot. You go get that little kerosene stove we used on the beach this fall, while I tend to the coffee thermos.”
He tended to another kind of thermos, too, but I suspect it contained no coffee. It didn’t sound like coffee. It sounded thinner to the naked ear, and possibly contained a vitamin tonic whose sale, at the time, was highly illegal. In any case it was too special for boys.
We had two or three blinds to be used according to wind and weather, and this freezing morning we chose a nearby one, with me poling the boat and freezing my fingers through the mittens, my nose running droplets onto the scarf around my neck, the marshes cold and gray and windswept, as only salt marshes can be on a day like this. As I shoved the skiff up the little avenues of what was water day before yesterday the boat’s keel made a crackling noise, forcing its way through the thin crusting of last night’s ice. The narrow lanes were frozen bank to bank, but when we hove onto a semisweet-water pond it was only iced around the edges. A mighty flock of mallards took off with irritable quacks when we approached the blind, and the darting squish-wish of frustrated teal swept low as we shoved the skiff into the little tunnel behind it. The Old Man more or less slung a dozen decoys into the water helter-skelter, with nothing of his usual attention to meticulous placement.
“Today,” he said blandly, “they’ll decoy to a couple of old tin cans and some milk bottles. Fire up that stove, sonny, and hand me the jug—the other thermos.”
I swear we could have gotten a limit of anything with a couple of old brooms and a slingshot that day. It was almost—but not quite—as if the ducks were trying to come into the blind to get warm. You know Canada geese as wary birds. We collected our limit of the old honkers in two flights, and didn’t even bother to change to goose loads; they came in that close.
The roaring wind had filled the skies with disturbed birds, all looking for a place to set. None of the usual artifices which the Old Man employed, and which I knew by now, were necessary. It was a mere matter of choice of breed. We got so persnickety at one time that we made a bargain: I would shoot only canvasbacks and the Old Man would specialize in pintails. We sneered at mallards—as it was late in the season, and we suspected a tendency to fish eating—and simply stood up and shooed away the teal and the goldeneyes and broadbills and trash ducks that fought their way to the little space.
Time has passed, but I would swear we were out of that blind with the boat loaded to the gunwales and the special jug only a quarter diminished before an hour was up. I have only seen it that way once since, when an old friend named Joe Turner, a Washington rasslin’-boxing promoter, and I dared a snowstorm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. You had to look between the snowflakes to see the ducks, but Lord save us there were more ducks than snowflakes.
Well, the Old Man and I snuffed out the little kerosene stove, broke the skiff free of the ice that bound her, and shoved happily off for home and fire. The snow had started again but the wind had dropped, and the sky was still filled with enough low-flying ducks to have provided a hundred years’ imprisonment for a man who wished to overshoot his quota. When we dragged the boat up on the shingle and shouldered the strings of fowl and the guns the Old Man smiled sort of sardonically at the putty-gray skies.
“Your grandma ain’t going to believe it,” he said, “but I think this was one of the prettiest days I ever saw in my life. Any argument?”
“No sir,” I said. “I ain’t arguing. You can have them bluebird days.”
I don’t ski, as I would rather contract pneumonia without breaking my back in the process, but I can see now where a snowfall that wrecks a city’s transportation can be a thing of beauty to a man who straps staves on his feet and goes hurtling down a hill to sudden dissolution.
The older I get and the more places I have hunted, the more I figure the old m
an was dead right, as usual, about suffering. Ernie Pyle, the late war correspondent, once wrote that he had been sicker in more hotel rooms than any living man, and I swear I have been scareder, hotter, colder, dizzier, more extensively bug-bitten, sunstricken, breathless, witless, and generally unhappier than any of the old Penitentes, who used to climb mountains wearing hair shirts and beating themselves rhythmically over the shoulders with whips for fun. And all in the name of happy outdoor sport.
I get vertigo just crossing a plank bridge over a six-inch-deep creek, but now it seems everything I hunt is placed on top of a peak that would make a molehill out of Everest. I took up grouse hunting once because I thought a moor was a kind of lowland bog—at least a marsh—and found out that a Scottish grouse moor is always placed on the highest peak of the highest range, and that no matter how the cards fell for the draw of butt position I drew the one nearest the top.
I took up elephants as an art form once because I thought you could find them on level ground. You can find them on level ground, all right, but you’ve got to climb Mount Kenya first and then walk a rough hundred miles before you discover that the owner of the big fat track you’ve been following has only one lousy tusk.
In the hunting business there seems to be no pleasure without excruciating pain. You got to hurt to be happy.
I was mixed up in an Alaska brown bear hunt not too long ago, and it seems to me all I did was crawl through thick bush on my belly, trying to make the summits of mountains I never cared for even pictorially, in order to sit glumly in the rain and let the mosquitoes bite me. I had heard of Alaskan mosquitoes, but never believed they actually carry four motors. They do.
I shot a bear eventually, and nearly got hit on the head by it. I shot it in the heart, and it had enough adrenalin left to run straight away from me up the face of a mountain for about sixty yards before it decided to die and come roaring down again like a Sherman tank out of control. One thousand pounds of bear bounced between me and the guide, and later I reflected that this would have been a silly way to die. Sample conversation around the cracker barrel:
