Old Man's Boy Grows Up

by Robert Ruark

  Biltong came as no surprise to me, nor did dried fish in the Pacific and Japan. They only tasted vaguely familiar, as if I had been there before.

  As a kid I cooked the fruits of my gun about as sketchily as any savage. We made long safaris on Saturdays, which were as full of adventure as any major safari I made in later years. Even in the air-rifle stage we had attained considerable skill with the Daisies, and later the fifty-shot BB pump guns. Robins, song sparrows, jorees, thrushes, woodpeckers, and the big flickers—the yellowhammers—were regarded as major game, and the occasional dove, rain crow, or once in a long while a quail or marsh hen were placed in the elephant, lion, buffalo category. What we shamelessly slew we cooked over a hasty fire—sketchily skinned, hastily gutted, and unwashed—impaled on a green stick and merely scorched. But it tasted good at the time, and oddly it tasted just as good later...

  ...such as a couple of years ago in Africa. One day on a long walk after elephant we got hungry at midday, and nobody carries a chop box when he is fighting high grass after moving elephant. We called a halt, and somebody shot a small antelope, a gerenuk, I think it was. We whipped off the hide and emptied the stomach. We ate its heart and liver raw, and it was delicious. We roasted a few chops over a hasty fire. It may sound horrible, but the animal was still hot from life and tasted great after being liberally salted.

  We performed a small series of experiments thereafter, and found that all birds and most small gazelle tasted wonderful, if you got them onto the fire while they were still warm with recent life. It was only after they cooled out and rigor mortis set in that they had to be aged and otherwise kitchen-treated to provide tenderness.

  The birds were particularly good. We would shoot a batch of sand grouse, young guinea, doves, pigeons, or francolin, clean them while they were still quivering, impale them on a green stick, and pop them over the coals, and they were great. And these were no savage palates, either. We would go home to camp that night and sit down to a dinner which might include caviar, breast of guinea fowl, asparagus, and fresh fruit, washed down with a French wine such as Mouton-Rothschild or Chambolle-Musigny. One of the heartiest eaters of the half-cooked, only-just-dead birds was a Spaniard, who made annual pilgrimages to France merely to eat his way across the countryside and who was an expert on wines and sauces.

  It did not really seem to matter what you ate, as a youngster, if you were actually hungry. One of the palatial meals I shall always remember (and still eat, when I am lucky enough to find an old-fashioned country store when I am quail hunting in the Carolinas) was what we had around noontime, when the birds had fed back into the cool of the swamp and the dogs needed water and a breather before hunting resumed around three-thirty.

  A gourmet would shudder at this, perhaps, but what we ate was canned salmon (the same as we fed the dogs), canned sardines, oyster crackers or plain soda crackers, gingersnaps, and rat cheese. This was washed down with one of the enormous bottles of soft drinks they used to sell for a nickel, grape-or orange-flavored, and twice the size of a Coke. The Old Man called it “bellywash,” and so it was, but it made a delicious accompaniment to the sardines, gingersnaps, and rat cheese. If belching is a sign of politeness in some countries we were more than exceedingly polite.

  All through the woods in the afternoon I gnawed on dirty—and sometimes bloodstained from the pockets of my hunting coat—peppermint candies and hard cooking apples from the barrel, with perhaps an enormous, bumpy, brine-rimed sour or dill pickle from the keg that stood in the cool of the store, amongst the kegs that held the various sizes of nails, under the shelves which contained the overalls and hickory shirts. If I was in funds I might also buy a bag of assorted cakes from the slanting stand that held them—crumbly vanilla johnny cakes, as big as coffee saucers, round sticky black chocolate cakes with vanilla goo between the cake halves, and great pink things with sparse slivers of white coconut glued to the top pastry.

  To go home to an oyster roast, with that sort of backlog of fodder, did not seem strange, although roasted oysters are held by some to be indigestible enough without the aid of the earlier accompaniment, without the cool-of-the-evening swill of scuppernong wine at the nearest colored man’s farmhouse when your whole body is still hot from hunting.

  And speaking of wine, for a man who in later life learned a little of vintage years and brand names, I was in on the birth of some of the more bizarre home-stomped beverages that ever assaulted a palate. Or a stomach.

  With no regard whatsoever for the Volstead Act we young hellions pounded juice-oozy wild cherries into goo, fattened the mixture with sugar, and strained the fermented leavings into what we fondly believed was wine. Some wild and savage voodoo experiments were concocted in the cool of the caves we built—hideaways against the onslaughts of hostile Indians, parents, and if we had thought about it, revenooers. Dried apricots and raisins made an acceptable mash, as did grapes and fresh peaches. Mostly the stuff was nauseating to the taste, and usually contained collections of dead beetles and woozy flies, but the mere idea that we were doing something unsanctioned was sufficiently intoxicating.

  I really do not know how we all lived through it. We chewed sour grass and smoked rabbit tobacco in our totem pipes. We combined sparkleberries with green persimmons and richened the mixture with all manner of nuts, from the rich tame pecans to wild hickories and chinquapins. Uncle Jimmy’s all-purpose store contained penny candies that must have been confected of equal portions of ratsbane and sugar. Irey Ivans, in colored town, specialized in Brown Dogs, which seemed simply to be made of peanuts and burnt sugar. The colored folk did interesting things with blackstrap molasses in candy form, which I loved. And I never turned a hair when confronted by roast coon or a mess of chitterlings or squirrel-head stew.

  We ate these oddly assorted vittles avidly. I can remember clearly drinking stickily sweet condensed milk so thick you could cut it; and the yams we roasted in the woods were notable more for their content of ingrained dirt and wood ash than for their half-raw innards.

  We had only one rule on food: If it grew wild, was bought in a store, or was condemned as unfit for consumption by parents it had to be delicious. Some of the less hardy scientists occasionally went green in the face and became ill. They were greeted with jeers, the same unfeeling juvenile taunts that were hurled at the timid souls who got seasick.

  When I grew older I graduated to the vile corn liquor and the viler home-brew of the prohibition era, and never batted an eye. I survived Tunisian eau-de-vie (ugh!), Australian whisky, South Sea jungle juice, and some illegal seagoing mixtures of compass-cleaning alcohol and grapefruit juice. I have sampled Kaffir beer and Tanganyika pombe, which ferments after it hits the stomach. And I have survived, although the Lord in His wisdom only knows why.

  When he discussed the range of my gustatory habits with something more than admiring disgust the Old Man dusted off the old chestnut about curiosity killing the cat. “But in your case,” he said, “it’s a very large cat, and anyhow you ain’t home yet.”

  The Old Man was generally right about most things, and these days, on some mornings, I have a queasy feeling that his record for accuracy is still unbroken, even if it’s taken a long time to jell.

  27—Snakes Ain’t Hostile in November

  Like I say, the Old Man infected me early with a feeling for the seasons of the year, and he divided the year sharply according to what the seasons had to offer. This, the Old Man said, was the way the Greeks did it. There was a season for planting, a season for harvesting, a season for suspicion and worry, and always a time to love and a time to die. March, the miserable month, had its ides, against which even the great Caesar was warned. June was soft and sweet—a woman’s month—and October was full of promise and present perfection.

  But the big month, at least for this boy—and I think for the Old Man—was November, a harsh, rough, tough man’s month, with the threat of winter ahead but a marvelous sense of weathered magic in the woods. The quail now called only when they
were scattered from flushed coveys, and you could hear the rutting snort of the buck deer as his neck swelled and see where the velvet had rubbed off—in tatters—his fighting horns.

  Everything happened in November. The quail season opened, around Thanksgiving time, and the deer and turkey seasons opened. The days were crisp but still red and golden in North Carolina, and the nights were sparklingly cold and made welcome a roaring blaze. The ducks were flying legally, and sometimes it seemed that there was just too much action for one boy to stand.

  Even the fishing had improved. The summer fishing was gone, but the big stuff had come in from the skimpy schools of September and early October, and November was the time for the really big jut-chinned blues and the heavy channel bass. The gray seas were chill and sad to see, but the fish flocked in close in the deep-cut sloughs, which were now almost bayous banked by a barrier reef, and the fish took up housekeeping in the sloughs.

  One of the keenest memories I have is of a big shark, run almost aground and stranded on a reef when he sought to cross the barrier reef that lay between him and the feeding blues and trout and Virginia mullet. His dorsal fin wavered out of water as he literally pulled himself over the shallows on his belly.

  After my first few bucks I was never much of a deer shooter, but to me November meant the beautiful belling of the hounds in the dim distance, growing and swelling to the full strength of bass and cello, almost in your lap, just before the buck burst out of the gallberries.

  The dogs knew November: Jackie, the upcurl-tailed fice that was an expert on squirrels; the deerhounds, Bell and Blue; and the quail dogs, which had hunted themselves lean in early practice and now were deadly in diagnosis and steady as rocks to shot. Six days a week saw me in the woods or on the water, and if it had not been for a certain stuffy attitude about Sunday shooting I would have compromised the Biblical injunction about working on six days and resting on the seventh.

  Maybe I’m too much the old man now and too little the boy when I say that modern kids—those I know, anyway—don’t feel as deeply about the wondrous works of God in the forests and fields and waters; that they are completely unconscious of the present unless it involves a TV show or a red-hot car. Am I becoming an old fuddy-duddy—one of those when-I-was-a-boy types?

  Perhaps, but I still think that modern kids are cheated of sensation that is not contrived. I occasionally try to talk with some of the spawn of my friends, and get the feeling they are very far away from kinship with adults. It seems to me that as a boy I didn’t have many friends of my own age. My friends were mostly adults, black and white, and they raised me without recourse to hot-rods or rumbles. I can swear that the month of November was rendered delightful by my association with a bunch of hairy characters, who would be ruled off the course as improper associates in this era of the switchblade knife.

  My guys fought among themselves when they got drunk on a Saturday night, and some of them manufactured illegal whisky, besides drinking it. But mostly they seemed to possess a tremendous gentleness and understanding for small boys who tagged along with them in the woods or on the boats. I can even recall one compulsive thief who threatened to beat the bejabbers out of me if he ever caught me stealing anything.

  These people were as much a part of November as the sleepy possum in the persimmon tree; the cold, clotted lumps of earth in the sere cotton fields; or the delicious, frightening loneliness of the swamp on a deerstand; or the burning cold of a turkey blind on a cold morning as you waited for the big toms to come.

  Perhaps I spent more time with the Negroes than with the whites, largely because in my neck of the woods there were more Negroes than whites. I was at home in the abodes of Big Abner and Aunt Florence, and they allowed no stranger to trespass on my quail reserves. I ate with them, and on occasion when caught out too late to get back to the Old Man’s house slept in their tiny clapboard or rough-log houses. I suspect we were pretty well integrated before they made a law of it. At least nobody ever brought up the subject of who was white and who was colored, when we shared the squirrel-head stew or the possum and sweet taters.

  The crowning aspect of my November was the big camping trip, when the Old Man and a couple of cronies permitted me—if I had been a good boy about splitting kindling and cleaning fish and gutting ducks and plucking birds—to go along sometimes on a week-long campout, where I would split kindling, clean fish, gut ducks, and pluck birds, with a few additional duties, such as skinning deer and squirrels and fetching water and washing dishes. This was now the perfection of a boy included in an adult world, where men cursed openly, told man-type stories, drank whisky, and appeared to accept the boy as a man, while tactfully forbidding him to cuss, drink whisky, or tell off-color yarns.

  The fruition in weather and sport was something unbelievable. October had beckoned, but November delivered. Only a true idiot can appreciate the predawn misery of a duck blind. Even in the South—as far south as Louisiana—it is black and miserable in the morning, with the cold graved into your bones, and the torture of whistling wings of unseen ducks is something more than exquisite. Then comes the faint dove’s breast pink of dawn, and then the rosy red, and then you can see the ducks. You can shoot. And miss. And occasionally hit.

  Perhaps jubilance is the word that describes it all. There was the nocturnal stupidity of coon hunting, when the hounds were as apt to raise a skunk as a coon. The tumbles we took seemed fun, and certainly the streams we fell into were part of the obstacle course.

  I was one time in a friend’s house in Texas, where the doves were swarming like locusts and the wild turkeys consuming a ton of purloined food a week, just waiting for Thanksgiving. I was prowling around, bird-dogging some dead doves, when a remark the Old Man once made struck sharply home. I had turned up a rattler the size of a log, and just before the lady with me blew its head off with her new gun I remembered the ancient remark.

  “In November,” the Old Man said, “even the rattlesnakes don’t like to bite people.”

  28—Stoicism Is Bad for Boys

  “The accumulation of laughter,” the Old Man said, pacing up and down in front of the fire with his hands behind his back, “comprises an aggregate of wisdom.” It was raining to beat the band.

  “Huh?” I said. “What was that again?” I was looking hopefully out the window, and not paying much attention to the inside of the house.

  “The accumulation of...you heard me the first time,” he said. “How did it sound?”

  “Fine,” I said. “What does it mean? And who made it up?”

  “I just made it up,” the Old Man said. “Maybe I might of read it somewhere, I disremember. Seneca or one of them other old Romans. Somebody or other.”

  “Seneca?” I said. “I always thought Senecas were a tribe of Indians, kind of like the Iroquois.” If this was going to be one of those days when everybody was flinging knowledge around I was going to crowd right in there with my share.

  “There’s a lot you don’t know,” the Old Man said. “Seneca tended store somers about thirty or forty years A.D. He got famous for being a Stoic.”

  “A what?”

  The Old Man held up his hand. “A Stoic. A Stoic is a man who practices and preaches Stoicism, which is another word for grinning and bearing it, no matter how rough times get. You could pull the toenails out of a real Stoic before he’d let out a whimper. He was calm in the face of adversity. He could stand there and take it, even though his whole life was crumbling in ashes all around him. You got to be a Stoic these days to get along in this world.”

  I noticed the Old Man wasn’t dropping his “g’s,” a sure sign of something about to happen that I wasn’t going to like He had a habit of leading up to these things kind of sneaky more or less for his own amusement. The Old Man was about the kindest man in the world, but there was a streak of bad boy in him still. He liked to tease me, and that’s what he was doing now.

  “What does it mean?” I asked again.

  “It means,” the Old Man s
aid, “that it ain’t going to quit raining today and if I were you I’d start practicing being a Stoic right now. I’d try to think about all the funny things that’ve happened, and this way you wind up wise. How’s your stiff upper lip?”

  When I looked out the window my lip didn’t feel very stiff, and I didn’t feel either funny or wise. It was raining pure pitch-forks, and each driving tine stabbed my hunter’s soul. I had waited nine months—and one five-day century—for this Day. Very seldom does Opening Day come on Saturday, but this year it did, combining permanent Christmas with a blue moon and a month of Sundays, with hell about to freeze over for good measure.

  Now then, me and the weather had come to grips before. I had been rained out of more than one Saturday, but generally I found something to do with it that did not involve robbing a bank. Being rained out of any Saturday would stab you to the heart, and all the Old Man’s favorite quotes about life being just a rainy Saturday didn’t help much.

  But I had never been rained out of a Saturday which was also Opening Day before, and I had been planning this one since I put my gun away when the season closed last February.

  I had been to the hardware store and bought the shells. I was spending Saturday night out in the country, at Sheriff Knox’s house. Apart from the Sheriff’s birds, there were Mrs. Goodman’s birds, and Aunt Florence Hendricks’ birds, and Big Abner’s birds, and Aunt Mary Millette’s birds, and Lyndon Knox’s birds, and some vagrant perimeter birds, all waiting to be shot at on this Saturday by me. The dogs had dry-hunted every Sunday since the weather turned cool, and were panting for the smell of powder. There was one six-month-old puppy who promised to be the best quail dog that ever hit the piny woods.

  Monday had been bright and golden, the sky blue and unspecked by cloud. Frosts had come and killed the undergreenery. The corn shucks were sere and liver-spotted, and the persimmons were sweet enough to eat without turning you into a Chinaman. A fire felt cozy-comforting at night. The last Sunday, the dogs had worked well on the tame coveys we kept around the house for training purposes. The dogs were sharp and ready, and so, I thought, was the hunter.