Old Man's Boy Grows Up

by Robert Ruark

  October was the month for torturing the young dogs. You took them out and worked them on quail, using a choke collar if necessary, and firing a pistol to get them to hold to gun. But we never worked the old pros, because they had enough problems when the season started just before Thanksgiving, and we didn’t want to confuse the reflexes. Sometimes I wondered who’d go crazy first, me or the old dogs. You would nail a covey in a patch of peas and the birds would hold to a point perfectly and then fan out into an ideal singles situation in a pasture of broom grass. And there you were, stranded with a .22 pistol, a choke collar, and a puppy.

  The old dogs would know it when you came back and they’d snap at the young’uns, and then you would go and take down the shotgun and inspect it for the merest fleck of rust. You’d groan and think, would it never get to be November so you and the old dogs could go out and deal with these speckled bombshells properly? It would get to be November, all right, but it would take six centuries, so in the meantime you sort of had to do something after prison hours, when Miss Clifford or Miss Struthers turned you loose on the free world.

  So you took a man’s knife with a sawing edge for scaling fish on its blade top, a fishing rod, and a tackle box full of such things as four-ounce pyramid sinkers and long wire leaders, and you went to the beach to start a rumble with the bluefish, which were, by now, invading your turf.

  A Carolina beach in October is a thing that would have captured Van Gogh’s tormented paintbrush. The wind-tortured little scrub oaks all bend in the same direction. There are long dunes of really high hills with crape myrtles helping the tiny oaks. There are vast rolling waves of sea oats, like wheat rippling in the wind, and over-all an air of wonderful loneliness that is invaded only by the silvered gulls, slanting in the breeze, and the saucily tipped-up sandpipers. And then there would be the fish.

  The nor’easters start in September, and by the time October rolls around in its golden glory the wind-built tides will have cut tremendous sloughs between the protecting barrier reef and the beach proper. All manner of small fish and a great many sand fleas inhabit these sloughs. The water was icy around our knees when we stepped in to cast, because we scorned waders in those days—I doubt if they were even made, though hip boots were made—but we slung that four-ounce lead pyramid out into that slough and we didn’t have to wait long for action.

  We always used diagonally sliced strips of salt mullet for bait, because it would hang onto a hook, whereas the crashing waves would disengage a shrimp, a feeble creature at best. A good slab of mullet, with the hook worked through it three or four times, would withstand a typhoon. We used a double leader with two baited hooks, and when the dark evening came and the moon began to peep the local suckers came to call.

  Any man who has ever tied into two channel bass ranging up to twenty pounds each will carry the memory of it to his grave. The big white fellows with the black spots were there, and so were the speckled sea trout, and so were the big, mean-mouthed bluefish that later sputtered so happily in the pan. A couple of three-pound blues, striking at the same time and heading in opposite directions, could create considerable diversion for the gentleman with his hand stuck into the reeling apparatus of an old-time surf-casting rig. Not so much diversion as would the puppy drum—the channel bass—but enough to stifle a yawn.

  There was usually a well-weathered shack nearby, with a tin stove that was dangerously heated by its kerosene fuel. And around ten at night, with your hands freezing red and wrinkled from the sea and your body just one big goose pimple, the snug harbor of that salt-rimed shack was like a preview of heaven. But if there wasn’t a shack at close hand you dragged together a pile of driftwood and built a fire on the beach, and thawed yourself out before the leaping blue flames of the salt-impregnated fuel. Hunger clutched at your belly and the cookin’ was easy. You gutted a bluefish, stuck him on a stick, and let him baste himself with his own fat. His hide cracked as he cooked, but inside he was sweet as peaches.

  Apart from the cold it was marvelously spooky on an October beach, with the warped, stunted oaks casting strange shadows in the fitful moonlight and the wind soughing sadly through the myrtle. All the ocean was out there, broad-striped by a moon path, and it stretched across all the world, the world you were mad to see but never really reckoned you would. Over there, somewhere, were Europe and Africa and China, and underneath the surface of that wind-tossed silvered sheet were all the secrets you would never know: sunken galleons, treasure troves, great fish, sea serpents....You shivered deliciously, and not from cold.

  This was a part of October. A better part was the opening of the deer season, when you took a stand in the autumn-changing woods and listened to the hounds, the bugling ever closer, now fading as the running buck changed course, the belling now rising, now falling. You always knew that the deer would be a half-mile or so ahead of the coursing pack, but you never really expected to see him when he burst out of the bushes, his rack laid back as he split the breeze.

  What I mean is, it was asking too much to really see a deer. Other people did, maybe, but it could never happen to you. Until it did. And then the buck fever, as you stood there gawking like an idiot and just watched the deer run, with the dogs panting up a couple of minutes later looking pretty sour, because they’d done their job of work and had expected to hear rewarding gunfire at the end of it.

  There was the business of retrieving the hounds that never quit running a deer until he hit the lake and left his pursuers frustrated at the edge. Sometimes one of your best hounds wouldn’t show up for a week or you would get a phone call from a farmer in the next county saying that Old Bell or Old Blue had arrived in a ramshackledy condition and would you please come fetch your dog?

  Come to think, there was so much to do in October, while you waited for the serious business of the quail and the ducks to start in November, if it was only playing Tarzan in the shrimp house. And thereby hangs the major tragedy of a life that has known considerable pain.

  It was the end of October, and the dogs were fighting fit and the puppies behaving well, and soon the bird season would open. (In North Carolina when you said “bird” you meant one thing—quail.) Soon the bird season would open, and I had spotted the using grounds of every covey in Brunswick County or almost. We had a limit of fifteen in those days, and I figured that if I hunted six days a week I would average out at ninety birds a week until March 1. You cannot call me bloodthirsty; I was just optimistic.

  October birds have a way of knowing when the season starts, and coveys that come when you call in October decide to spend the winter in Cuba or Jamaica or some other exotic place. No matter where or how closely you had them taped, come that fateful day of legality they leave a Miss-Otis-regrets note, and all you rouse is a fieldful of larks. No matter. Eventually you catch up with the little brown scoundrels and miss them to your heart’s content.

  My tragedy was this. In a spate of boredom we were playing Tarzan in the shrimp house and swinging from rafter to rafter in the best approved manner. I missed a swing, and when I got up off the floor my left wrist had a most curious-looking sag in it. It didn’t hurt, but it sure was busted.

  I began to cry, because here it was the end of October and November was just over the hill, and I wasn’t going to be able to make opening day of the bird season. Not with this busted wing, I wasn’t. I recall I cried some more when it did begin to hurt, but the tears were not half so hearty as when I realized that I had used October, the golden month, to cheat me of the serious business of the day after tomorrow.

  23—To Seek a Bear and Find a Boy

  The expectation of excitement, the Old Man used to say, is better than the fulfillment thereof, or in his precise words candy in the window is better than candy in the belly, because you can’t catch a bellyache from just looking.

  “But,” he said, “there are certain differences between eager anticipation and ducking responsibilities. The happy medium is to approach the candy with caution, enjoy it, and avoid the be
llyache. This is a perfection that very few colored folks and no white people at all ever achieve.”

  This had come to be known to me as November talk, when my mind was not really on algebra but was sweating profusely over the imminence of the hunting season. My nose was hot and I had a tendency to quiver, like a pointer dog that can’t wait to get out of the kennel on an autumn Saturday afternoon.

  “There ain’t but two things really worth-while,” the Old Man continued. “Anticipation and remembrance. But in order to remember, you have to include execution of the anticipation. This means, roughly, that you got to take the dare. You got to bet your hand. You got to put your courage on the block and invite everybody to take a whack at it. And a brave coward is like a force-broken retriever. He may not like his work, but he’ll force himself to do it, even if he’s gun shy too.”

  This came back to me as I was headed for Alaska to shoot a bear, and was wondering slightly if I hadn’t stretched my luck a little. After achieving the untender age of the mid-forty’s I have never been disappointed in anything that ever happened in the field or on the stream, and I didn’t want this bear, to whom I had not yet been introduced, to let me down. He was to be the last big bugabear that I intended to shoot, except in self-defense, and I must confess I was quivering as eagerly as on the eve of opening day of the bobwhite season.

  The Old Man could get real windy on occasion, but mostly there was a solid kernel of sense in his vocal finger exercises. “What you remember,” he said, “is the end result of practiced anticipation. Nor do I mean just triumph. That kind of remembering is bragging. Any bum can brag, because all you have to do is remember the girl you kissed and forget the one that slapped you flat. Experience comes from an acute recall of your mistakes as well as your successes.”

  I caught a fair point there. That last year I had started off with a flashy streak of quail shooting. Man, I had that quail thing down to a point where all I had to do was close my eyes and loose off both barrels and at least three birds would fall into my coat pocket. Then I hit a slump. One day I missed thirteen straight birds, one of which was sitting in a tree. Old Frank, the setter, took a final disgusted look at me and went home.

  Then the panic set in. Just walking up behind Frank or Sandy or Tom was such a venture into terror that I began to invent excuses not to go hunting. I even mentioned that I was behind in my schoolwork, which fooled nobody at all, since schoolwork ranked next to embroidery in my disesteem file. The Old Man scourged me into what the Spaniards call the “moment of truth,” and literally forced me at gun point to walk up behind those damn dogs—which I now regarded as enemies every time they pointed—and blast away. Fortunately, finally, my timing came back, and I executed what could only be called a snappy double, and then went on to fill my limit with a minimum of misses. The jinx was broken, and I was okay again.

  But I noticed that I refused to remember the series of raging misses. All I wanted to recall was the first part of the season, when I could have shot a teal with a slingshot. That, as the Old Man said, was the bragging section. I had closed off the failure, in my own mind, as securely as if I had slammed and dogged down the door.

  I believe that one of the first signs of mellowing is when you start remembering your failures—remembering not only with honesty but with pleasure, because they were as much a portion to the day as the mad triumphs or the competent performance. For instance, I have two enormous tiger trophies, and the bigger of the two gives me a tremendous lift every time I see him or even think of him stretched skyward on my wall. But my favorite tiger is the one that is stretched skyward only on the wall of my memory. Because he is the one that got away.

  This is the one that has now grown in my reveries to be at least twenty-two feet long, with teeth like railroad spikes, and a ruff twice the size of a zoo lion’s mane. It must be true, because I killed that tiger and he was dead for at least twenty minutes. Vanity prevented my giving him the other barrel as he lay slumped over the carcass of a buffalo, but I didn’t want to spoil the hide. And he was dead, wasn’t he, shot precisely through the neck just like the other two?

  So I thought. So thought Khan Sahib Jamshed Butt, who was perched with me in the tree in the black night of the Madhya Pradesh. This tiger—at least forty-four feet long from nose to tail tip—was stone-dead, with his face pillowed snugly on the buff’s behind. Khan Sahib informed me that I was a Sahib Bahadur, the greatest tiger slayer since the late Jim Corbett, and I agreed with him freely.

  And then this tiger, which was eighty-eight feet long if he was an inch, got up, snarled, and disappeared. It was a very long walk home, because the cobra-filled jungle now contained a wounded tiger, and anyhow, I am afraid of the dark. I was even more afraid of facing the two Texans sitting on the veranda of the dak bungalow, who would be certain I had missed the tiger when they heard only the one shot.

  It has taken some time, but I find I can now face the memory of this beast, which was a hundred and sixty-six feet long and weighed over ten tons, without cringing and even with pleasure. Because the tiger has grown and I have gotten older and can realize that a damn fool is a damn fool, and also that foolishness does not necessarily spoil the entire picture of the trip.

  I could cite you some more of the same sort of stuff. I was shooting perdices—the big, fast Spanish partridge—a while back, and missing everything that passed. On my right my friend Ricardo Sicré was keeping two guns hot and nailing everything that approached. Señor Sicré and I had shot grouse earlier in Scotland, and here, too, I was the bum, Ricardo the star.

  But late that afternoon I shot a passing bird over my shoulder, going fast and far away, and the tumblers clicked and I was on the beam again. On the last drive of these transplanted Hungarians I was zeroed in and pulled twenty-two birds out of the flight.

  Now, this is nice to remember. But what makes it so nice is that I remember the morning when I couldn’t have hit a trapped elephant, and the Scottish trip, which cost a fortune and from which I accumulated little but embarrassment and a magnificent hangover from dancing on the green with the locals. When I finally started hitting again I was so relieved I really enjoyed recalling the shocking state of my shooting hand before.

  This also applied to greater kudu. I have spent the last seven or eight years doing everything possible wrong with that magnificent, double-curl-horned African antelope, and now that there’s a decent one on the wall I remember all the mistakes and tragedies and grim post mortems, but also the beauty of the days in Tanganyika and all the wonder of the birds and animals.

  I think it really takes a Pollyanna to be the kind of hunter or fisherman who gets the most out of the expedition, rather than the result. I don’t think the result, though necessary, is one-half so important in retrospect as all the side-bar fun and the little incidents that go to fill in the holes. I was certain that Alaska, which I had never seen, would be fabulous.

  The bears might possibly eat me, and the fish might get away, and I would fall off a mountain or into a stream, and the geese might nibble me to death, but out of the whole ordeal was sure to come a series of possible triumphs that would plant the forty-ninth state more firmly in my memory than an oil strike or a gold mine.

  Whatever the outcome the Old Man remains firmly in my head. “You can’t enjoy it or be sorry about it unless you try it,” he said. “Whether it’s bobwhites or possums, whether it’s a war or a job, you got to be in it to know about it. And unless you know about it, it didn’t happen, and there you are as lonesome as an old maid who never got off the front porch for fear she might meet a man.”

  The Australians put it more succinctly. Around the race courses in Sydney there is a saying, “You’ve got to be in it to win it,” and a common phrase is “I’m in it,” no matter what it applies to.

  I was in it in Alaska, and a most unusual thing happened. I ran into a kid, who but for a change in time might have been me.

  I became very young this time in Alaska, when I met a youngster named Je
rry Chisum, age about fifteen. He was a quiet youngster, good-looking, blondish, blue-jeaned, and competent to be a man with a gun or an airplane or a hunting camp.

  Jerry’s father is Jack Chisum of Anchorage, Alaska, who runs a flying service and an earth-moving operation with his brother Mark. Both are veteran bush pilots and sourdoughs in the better sense of the word, hunters and fishermen, hard-working, gnarled-fisted men who can grease an airplane into a tricky landing as easily as they might once have handled a sled and a team of huskies.

  We were goose hunting together, after a chance meeting in, of all places, a bar. I had met Jerry’s father earlier in Kodiak, where I was shooting a brown bear. When we bumped into each other in Anchorage it seemed natural enough to climb into a plane and ramble off to an island to belabor a goose or so. The other members of the party were Mark Chisum, young Jerry, and Paul Choquette of Homer on the Kenai Peninsula.

  We took off from Anchorage in a float plane with added wheels, a Cessna 180, and because the water was rough we switched to a true amphib, a Widgeon. And we hit a hunting camp that carried me back about thirty years. It was a rough shack, comfortable enough, with crude bunks and a heat-quivering stove, and there were the usual hurried preparations for food and drink in the local store at Homer. Nobody had shaved that day, but I noticed the pilots had taken not so much as a short beer for a minimum twelve hours before flying. Bush flying in Alaska is a sketchy business at best, and a hangover doesn’t help you much when you are flying mountainous passes in a float plane or landing downwind from necessity in rough water.

  At first I was a little surprised to see the kid, carrying his full share of the duffel, scramble into the plane, and figured him for a passenger. Then something struck me as vaguely familiar. The kid, young Jerry, was a full-fledged hunting partner, a man among men. Apart from being taller and better looking and of course apart from using aircraft instead of T model Fords, he might very well have been me, thirty years ago. That is, if Alaska in any way resembles Southport, North Carolina.