The Best Hunting Stories Ever Told

by Jay Cassell

  When it actually happened, though, the moment could have almost slipped past without being noticed. One Friday evening in the October after I turned eleven, my father looked up from his newspaper and said, “Want to come with us tomorrow?”

  I rode in the back seat for the two-hour drive into New Hampshire. My father and Grampa Grouse talked about business and politics and foreign policy, about men and bird dogs who had died, subjects not selected for my interest, but not censored because I was in the back seat, either. They included me, I understood, by not excluding me.

  I was not allowed to carry a gun on this my first grouse hunt, of course. “Walk directly behind me,” my father instructed me while we laced on our boots at the first cover. “Stay close to me, and keep your eyes and ears open. When a bird flushes, fall flat to the ground. If you can’t do that, you’ll have to stay in the car.”

  Grouse covers, I quickly learned, were thick, hostile places, nothing like the Aden Lassell Ripley watercolors that hung in my father’s den. Grouse covers were hilly, rocky, brushy, muddy hellholes where hunters had to wade through juniper clumps and claw through briar patches and clamber over blowdown. I struggled to keep up with my father. Sometimes saplings snapped back against my face and made my eyes water.

  Once my feet got tangled and I fell. Before I could scramble to my feet, my father stopped and looked back at me. “You’ve got to keep up,” he said.

  “I tripped,” I said. “It’s hard walking.”

  “You can go back to the car if you want.”

  “I’m okay.”

  The first time a grouse flushed, I watched my father’s gun snap up and shoot into the thick autumn foliage. The gun seemed to react on its own, independent of the man who carried it. I never saw the bird. I only heard the sudden, explosive whirr.

  “Well?” called Grampa Grouse from somewhere off to the right.

  “Nope,” called my father. “Dog busted him.”

  Then he turned and looked at me. I was standing there right behind him. “I told you to fall to the ground when a bird gets up,” he said.

  “I heard the noise,” I said. “I didn’t know . . .”

  “That was a grouse. That ’s the noise they make when they flush. You’ve got to go to the ground.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I understand.”

  I learned that grouse hunting involved miles of hard walking, a great deal of yelling at the dogs, frequent shooting, and not much killing.

  The day was warm and I soon grew tired. The part I liked best was returning to Grampa’s wagon after each cover. There the men would pour coffee for me from a big steel Thermos. The coffee was cut with milk and sweetened with sugar. I had never tasted coffee before that day. It wasn’t whiskey, but drinking coffee for the first time nevertheless seemed important to me.

  Many grouse flushed that morning, and I quickly learned to fall to the ground at the sound. When my father finally shot one, he turned and said, “Did you see that?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “I was lying on the ground.”

  He smiled.

  We ate lunch by a brook in the woods. Thick corned beef-and-cheese sandwiches between slices of bread my mother had baked. Big wedges of applesauce cake, my mother’s secret recipe. More sweet coffee. I grew drowsy. My legs ached.

  After a while, Grampa Grouse unfolded himself, stood up, and stretched. “Better get a move on,” he said. “Don’t want to get all bogged down.”

  It grew cloudy and cooler in the afternoon. A soft rain began to sift down from the gray sky, and the woods were silent except for the tinkle of the dogs’ bells and the occasional whistles that my father exchanged with Grampa Grouse. My pants soaked up rainwater from the brush. I found myself stumbling. I hoped it would be over soon. I plodded along behind my father, my eyes on the ground so I wouldn’t trip and fall again.

  We were moving through an old apple orchard. It grew thick with juniper and thornapple and popple and alder. A blanket of small, hard Baldwin apples carpeted the ground under the trees. They cracked under my boots. The woods smelled sweet with their ripe aroma.

  Suddenly my father stopped. “Look!” he hissed.

  I peered along his pointing arm and saw the big bird perched on the lowest limb of a gaunt old apple tree. One of the dogs stood directly underneath, looking up. The grouse craned its neck, peering down at the dog.

  My father pressed his shotgun into my hands. “Shoot him,” he said.

  I had fired my father’s shotgun just once in my life. I’d shot it at a rusty old oil drum. The oil drum had disintegrated. My father had said, “Good shot,” but I understood it had nothing to do with marksmanship. This had been a lesson about the power of shotguns.

  I pressed the gun against my shoulder, aimed it at the grouse in the apple tree, and tugged at the trigger. Nothing happened.

  “The safety,” my father whispered. “Q uick.”

  I remembered. I thumbed off the safety, set the bird over the barrels, and pulled the trigger. The gun sounded louder than I remembered from shooting at the oil drum. The grouse fell from the tree.

  “Hey!” my father said. “You got him. Good shot.”

  The dog came trotting in with the dead grouse in his mouth. My father took it from the dog, stroked the bird’s feathers, then handed it to me. “Your first grouse,” he said. “Congratulations.”

  I carried the grouse by its feet through the rest of the cover. When we got back to Grampa Grouse’s wagon, my father took a picture of me. Grampa punched my shoulder and called me Nimrod.

  The men tried to act as if my first grouse was a big triumph, but I understood that hitting a sitting grouse with a shotgun was no great feat. No different from shooting an oil drum, really. Something any boy could do. I also understood, because I’d been paying attention that day, that the men shot only at flying grouse.

  Being seen but not heard, of course, I did not share this understanding with my father and Grampa Grouse.

  After that day, I accompanied my father almost every autumn weekend, and when I turned thirteen, my father gave me my own shotgun, a single-barreled Savage 20-gauge with a thumb safety.

  Being seen and not heard, I had come to realize, enabled me to learn a great deal. I absorbed what the men said—f rom the back seat and in grouse covers and while eating lunch alongside brooks and in hotel dining rooms. I watched what the dogs did and the paths my father took through the woods, and I noticed the kinds of places where grouse hid.

  Now, carrying my own shotgun and walking my own routes through covers, I found I had a good instinct for grouse. My father and I and Grampa Grouse worked as a team, pinching birds between us so that one or the other of us would get a good shot.

  There were a lot of grouse in the New England woods in those days, and I had my share of chances. My father had told me that having a single-shot gun would make me a better marksman, but it didn’t work out that way. I had quick reflexes, and soon my Savage was coming to my shoulder and my thumb was flicking off the safety and I was pulling the trigger without any conscious thought. I shot often. I took crossing shots and straightaway shots and odd-angled shots at flying grouse. I learned to shoot through the leaves where I thought a grouse might be headed, and sometimes I shot at the sound of the flush when all I saw was a quick blur.

  I never once hit a flying grouse.

  “Keep shooting,” my father counseled. “You can’t hit what you don’t shoot at. It’ll happen. The good old law of averages, right?”

  A couple of times I broke my private vow and shot a grouse out of a tree or off a stone wall. I did it out of anger and frustration at my own incompetence, and even when my father congratulated me on bagging a bird, I found that it gave me no satisfaction whatsoever. Men, I knew, did not shoot sitting grouse.

  So for the entire season of my thirteenth year and most of the next one, too, I kept my wingshooting streak alive. I shot often and missed every time.

  When we hunted with other men, neither my father nor I m
entioned my perfect record, the fact that I had never once downed a flying grouse. Since everybody missed grouse far more often than they hit them, nobody except my father knew my secret.

  I understood that shooting grouse out of the air was not really the main point of grouse hunting. I liked figuring out where a grouse might be, sneaking up on it, planning how I’d get a shot when it flushed, or if I didn’t, one of the other men would. I liked watching the dogs work. I liked the New England woods in the fall, the way the melting frost glistened on the goldenrod early in the morning and the way Baldwin apples smelled when the ground was blanketed with them. I liked riding in the back seat with the dogs, listening to the men talk, being seen and not heard.

  But I had never shot a flying grouse. That single fact separated me from the men. Shooting a few from trees or stone walls didn’t count. Boys did that, but not men.

  On the final weekend of that year’s grouse season, my father and I traveled to a new area. We hunted with three old friends of his, men I had never met.

  These men included me in their conversations and treated me like a man. They had not known me when I plodded through grouse covers in my father’s footsteps. They had not witnessed my first grouse, shot out of a tree. They didn’t know that I had never shot a grouse on the wing. I spoke when spoken to, and otherwise continued to be seen and not heard.

  We found very few grouse on Saturday. Two of the men missed hasty shots. I never saw a feather, never even had a chance to shoot and miss.

  Sunday, the last day of the season, was one of those dark, bitter, late-November New England days. Winter was in the air. Heavy clouds hung over the leafless woods, and now and then a few hard little kernels of snow spit down from the sky. We hunted hard all morning and never flushed a grouse. At lunch the men talked about calling it a season and getting an early start for home.

  But one of them said he had a secret cover we ought to try first, and the others agreed, although I noticed their lack of enthusiasm.

  The birdy part of the cover lay at the end of a long tote road that twisted down a hill through a mixture of pine and poplar. The men and I trudged along with our shotguns at our sides while the dogs, who seemed to have lost their enthusiasm, too, snuffled along ahead of us.

  Suddenly the man in front stopped and raised his hand. “We got a point,” he whispered.

  I looked, and under an apple tree at the foot of the hill, I saw the dog stretched out.

  “There she is!” hissed the man a moment later, and I saw her, too—a grouse pecking fallen apples about fifteen feet from the dog’s nose.

  We stood there in the path for a minute, just watching, the dog staunch on point, the grouse oblivious, pecking apples, taking a step, bending to take another peck.

  Then one of the men touched my shoulder and said: “You take her.”

  I caught my father’s eye. He nodded. So I stepped forward, gripping my Savage single-shot at port arms, and approached the place where the dog was still on point.

  The grouse had wandered into the thick undergrowth, and for a minute I couldn’t see her. Then I did. She had stopped and twisted her neck around to look directly at me. I stood there, staring back into her intelligent, glittery eyes.

  From behind me, one of the men said, “Go ahead. Shoot her. Quick, before she flies.”

  I raised my gun to my shoulder and aimed at the bird. The grouse kept peering at me.

  Then I lowered my gun. I couldn’t do it. Shooting this grouse on the ground would prove nothing, and I felt that I had something I needed to prove.

  Boys, I thought, shoot grouse on the ground. Men only shoot them when they’re flying.

  I’d miss, of course. I always did. So what? Better to miss like a man than kill a grouse like a boy.

  Then the grouse ducked her head, scuttled deeper into the brush, and disappeared from sight. I stepped forward, paused, took another step.

  The grouse exploded, practically from under my feet. She rose, then suddenly angled toward the left. I have no memory of my gun coming up, my thumb flicking off the safety, my finger pulling the trigger.

  But I heard the muffled thump of the bird hitting the ground and the quick flurry of wingbeats, and then I heard the men behind me shouting.

  A moment later the dog brought the grouse to me. I took her in my hand, smoothed her feathers, tucked her into the pocket in the back of my vest, and walked back to where the men were standing. I was surprised that I felt no particular elation.

  “Good shot,” said one of the men. “Nice goin’,” said another, and I caught the tone I’d hoped for in their voices: It had been a good shot, not a spectacular one, they were saying. It was a shot that grouse hunters often miss but sometimes make, and I had done well.

  There was no exaggerated celebration, as there might have been had they known that I had never before shot a grouse out of the air, and that was exactly the way I wanted it.

  I glanced at my father, begging him with my eyes not to reveal my secret. My father nodded once, then turned to the other men. “So,” he said, “is the rest of this cover worth hunting?”

  Reprinted with permission of the author. To order his books, go to www.williamgtapply.com.

  Spiller Country

  WILLIAM G. TAPPLY

  Three or four times a year I take my old friend’s shotgun from my gun cabinet, break it apart, check it for rust, and give it a good cleaning. It’s a Parker 20, VH grade, a nice gun—beautiful, in fact—and perhaps modestly valuable. It looks like it’s been hunted hard, and it has. Its bluing is worn shiny around the breech and at the ends of the barrels, there are dents in the stock, and the recoil pad is beginning to crumble. I’ve never bothered to have it appraised. It’s not for sale, so why bother, although men who know its provenance have offered me what I’m sure is ten times what a shrewd gunsmith would pay.

  I fit it together, snap it to my shoulder, trace the hard flight of a grouse cutting across the wall of my den, and remember all the birds it’s shot—and all those I’ve missed with it. Then I sit back, lay the little Parker on my lap, close my eyes, and indulge myself in a moment of nostalgia—for the days when I tromped the uplands with Burt Spiller, and for the days when ruffed grouse prospered in Spiller country.

  According to my father’s meticulous journals, I hunted with Burton L. Spiller for the first time on November 10, 1951. Well, I didn’t actually hunt in those days. I was eleven, too young to carry a gun in the woods. Instead, I followed at my father’s heels all day—through briar and alder and mud, up hill and over stone wall and around blowdown. I didn’t mind. Grouse hunting in those days was exciting enough even if you couldn’t shoot.

  One English setter, two men, and one boy flushed 23 separate grouse that November day in Burt’s string of southern New Hampshire covers. Burt, who was sixty-five, walked the field edges and shot one of them with his sleek little Parker. My father dropped three.

  Dad’s journals suggest that was an average day back then.

  In the 1955 season we became a regular threesome. At nine every Saturday morning, Dad and I pulled up in front of Burt’s white frame house in East Rochester. A leg o’mutton gun case, black lunch pail, and pair of well-oiled boots were already lined up on the porch, and when Dad tooted the horn, Burt came out, waved, and lugged his gear to the car. “Hi,” he always grinned. “I’ve been expecting you. It looks like a wonderful day.”

  Burton L. Spiller was born on December 21, 1886, the right time—in Portland, Maine, the right place.

  The nineteenth-century Maine farmers had opened the land. They moved rocks to clear pastureland and piled them along the edges to make Frost’s “good fences.” They planted apples—Baldwins and Gravensteins, Northern Spies and Russets and Pippins. Second-growth birch and popple and alder and hemlock pushed in when the farms were abandoned. Just about the time young Burt was old enough to carry a shotgun into the woods, classic grouse cover was everywhere. No wonder Burt Spiller became a partridge hunter.

  He b
lasted his first grouse off the ground with his father’s 10-gauge duck gun when he was seven. “Many, many times I have stood as I stood then,” he wrote in “His Majesty, the Grouse,” his first published story, “but there has never been another grouse—or another thrill like that one. The kick is still there, as I presume it still is in the old 10-gauge, but—well—we are a little harder around the heart and shoulders than we were then.”

  A year later the Spillers moved down the seacoast to the little hamlet of Wells, and young Burt’s lifelong love affair with the ruffed grouse was sealed. “Other boys of my acquaintance might content themselves with slaying elephants and lions and other inconsequential members of the animal kingdom,” he wrote, “but I wanted none of that . . . Nothing but the lordly pa’tridge would satisfy me.”

  Eventually Burt bartered his bicycle and his watch for a 16-gauge double and “began to kill grouse regularly on the wing. I used the word ‘regularly’ advisedly,” he wrote, “for the regularity was truly astounding. I shot a bird and killed it. Then I shot at forty-nine more and missed ingloriously. Then I killed another.”

  When he was a young man, he teamed up briefly with a pair of market hunters, an experience that steeped him in grouse lore and sharpened his wingshooting eye. But eventually he recognized “the difference between a sportsman and that reprehensible thing I was becoming . . . . [so] I bought a bird dog and became a sportsman.”

  In 1911 Burton Spiller married and settled in East Rochester, New Hampshire, where he lived out the rest of his life. He was a blacksmith and a welder, and during the Great War he built submarines at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. He raised and bred prize-winning gladioli. He carved violins and made hunting knives. He hunted—not just grouse and woodcock, but ducks and deer, too—and he fished for brook trout and landlocked salmon.