The Best Hunting Stories Ever Told

by Jay Cassell

  The possibility of downing another big buck never even crossed my mind. But given all the sign on Franny’s Island, there was surely a butterbuck or two around—some tender young three- or four-point with spindly tines that would put meat in the pot.

  I again elected to drive, but Sil took a stand in the same place Al had been. To my utter amazement, the morning proved a carbon copy of the day before. I put a deer up while crawling through the same bower of brush, and Sil shot it as it broke for the mainland. But this one had the uncommon decency to scale that eight-foot bank and come to rest between two logs in an attitude of repose that permitted evisceration with surgical precision. It died ten yards from the road and pickup access. Someone in the party grumbled to Sil, “Next time, can you put him in the bed of the pickup?”

  The buck’s headgear was every bit as massive as Al’s deer, but it wore five perfect points on a side. It is something of a cliché to call a big buck a “mosshom,” but indeed, this one was. The knobby burls at the base of its antlers were green in the pocks, though I couldn’t tell if it was vegetable matter deposited in the process of rubbing or if it really was moss. The deer weighed 178 pounds, and it was the largest in weight and antler size that Sil has ever shot. It adorns the wall above her office desk in our home.

  Three trophies in a day and a half, deer that behaved by the books, and an extra kiss from Lady Luck that put each of them close to a pickup. It was surely the most perfect hunt in my life, marred by only one thing: I don’t have the slightest idea why, nor what it was that we did right, and in the absence of such knowledge, I doubt we can make such magic ever happen again.

  Reprinted with permission of Silvia Strung.

  A Flintlock in the Rain

  LIONEL ATWILL

  I came upon the archaic world of blackpowder a year ago at a hunting trade show in Houston. I was frazzled from stalking concrete aisles and in vile humor, affronted by the trash I had seen hawked under the banner of outdoor sport: saw-toothed survival knives, SWAT team web gear, drum-fed shotguns for home defense. In a search for an exit, I came across a small booth displaying flintlock rifles that so caught my eye, I forgot my vitriol and simply stood and stared, moonstruck.

  I haven’t reacted to guns that way since I was 12 and spent nights under the covers reading Guns Magazine with a flashlight. Those flintlocks had full stocks of curly maple, rich brown barrels and burnished brass fittings. Their workmanship was admirable, but what distinguished them was their lines. They had a subtle grace that made them particularly pleasing. “Pick one up,” said a man in a blazer, and I did. The gun balanced and pointed and held steady and swung quite perfectly. I lusted for one of those guns.

  The man in the blazer smiled. He had seen this infatuation before, and he appreciated it, for he was both designer and builder of the guns. We chatted for a while and hit it off so well that when I walked away he promised to send me one of his flintlocks; I promised to take him on a deer hunt in the Adirondacks. We kept those promises. In so doing I learned a lot about blackpowder—more, certainly, than just the mechanics of the shot. The man in the blazer learned something about the big north woods. And we both learned a bit about the sound of pffft.

  Initially, I was attracted to the simplicity of those rifles. At least I felt that way until I looked beyond lines and function to the abstruse world of contemporary blackpowder shooting. I bought a fat paperback, one of those “everything you want to know” books, and found chapters on the most esoteric subjects: pillow ticking versus linen patches; cast versus swaged balls; moose milk versus bear fat as a lubricant. The author spoke of working up to that perfect combination of powder, patch and ball with analytical techniques out of a physics lab. And the section on accoutrements read like a Revolutionary quartermaster’s inventory: jags, worms, ramrods, starters, possibles bag, powderhorn, pick, primer, flint knapper—on and on. No wonder frontiersmen died early, I thought; they fell to terminal hernias from carrying so much stuff.

  When the flintlock arrived, I was thoroughly intimidated, but then a letter fell out of the box, a letter from the man who made the gun. This, in part, is what it said: “I would suggest you start with a .490 ball (the rifle is 50 caliber), a .20 patch and 70 grains of FFFg blackpowder. I would take the powder charge up at five-grain increments to 100 grains. You should find a cloverleaf group somewhere in there . . . . Also, sometimes these guns are a little funny about cleaning, in that you may have to run a patch through about every third shot or so to make them group.”

  That struck me as terrifyingly simplistic. I had read so much about analyzing spent patches, chronographing balls and scouring between shots that when this man told me, in effect, to stuff it and shoot it, I panicked. What kind of patch should I use, and should it be precut or cut on the muzzle? What about lubricants? Cast halls? Swaged? Should I take the gun apart and scrub it with hot water? Would a cycle through the dishwasher help?

  My reaction, you see, was typical consumer overload. I called the rifle’s father. For lubricant, he used spit; worked okay for the old-timers. Wouldn’t take the gun apart; no, just swab it out with cleaner and a half-dozen patches. “If had to take a rifle apart every time I shot,” he said, “I’d never fire one.”

  Then he told me a story that summed up his feelings for flintlocks. He and a friend went on an antelope hunt in Wyoming. His friend dropped a nice buck. They tossed most of their gear into the truck, which a rancher friend was driving, and set out to gut the kill. The rancher said he had to go to town but would be back in an hour, and took off.

  As soon as the truck disappeared, the antelope got up and stumbled off. In 100 yards it lay down, but when the two hunters approached, it stumbled off again. This continued until antelope and hunters had traveled nearly a mile. The animal, although seriously wounded, was showing no signs of giving up the chase.

  The guy who shot the buck had his gun but not his possibles bag, the pouch in which blackpowder hunters carry gear. My friend didn’t have a thing with him—except an idea. He looked in his pocket and, sure enough, in the fluff and lint was a smidgen of powder, dribbles from a powderhorn he had carried there. He pinched up the powder and dropped it down the barrel of his friend’s gun. He saved just enough to prime the pan. Then he looked around the ground for a 50-caliber rock. He found one, patched it with a piece of his shirt, and rammed it home. So armed, his friend stalked the antelope and killed it—or rocked it to death.

  “Always some way to get one of these guns to go off,” he said. “One of the things I really like about flintlocks is that you can look at one and understand it, everything about it. A flintlock is pure, simple function, and its beauty evolved from that simplicity. That, and the fact that without too much trouble you can get one to shoot pretty good against a modern rifle, make a flintlock special.”

  I would soon agree. Behind my house I paced 50 yards and rigged a shooting bench out of cinderblocks and a board. With my blackpowder book and my mentor’s letter beside me, I poured a measure of powder. I started the ball (swaddled in mattress ticking) down the barrel with a short dowel. When it was level with the muzzle, I cut off the excess fabric, and with that slice of the knife I traveled back 200 years, back through a hundred paintings and drawings I had seen of frontiersmen doing the same thing. The twist of the wrist that turned the knife that sliced the cloth was nearly instinctive and very pleasant. I rammed the ball home, settled into the bench, primed the pan, set the trigger, cocked the hammer, cuddled up to the stock, sought out the sites, settled on the target, sighed, and fired.

  It took me 20 minutes to recover, clean up, and reload after that first shot. When I had fired two more times, I checked my target. The cloverleaf was not there. What appeared on the target was a mild case of measles. I followed my mentor’s advice and increased the charge. The second group was an improvement; the third fit in a two-inch circle.

  I drew out that ritual several more days, one group after another at five-grain intervals, until I pumped three balls into the ta
rget so close to one another that the cloverleaf appeared. I can’t shoot that well; never have. But I did.

  Suddenly the gun took on mystical proportions. Pouring the powder down the barrel and ramming the ball home and fiddling until the cloverleaf appeared put life into that rifle, made it organic to the hunt. I felt a closeness to it, too, the way one feels to a friend rather than to a tool.

  That feeling of partnership (reflected, perhaps, in the frontiersman’s habit of naming his gun) is one of the reasons people like blackpowder, I came to believe. A sense of history is another, the notion that a window to the past is opened through an act—loading and shooting a flintlock—that men of the 20th century can share with men of the 18th. And there is the simplicity of the sport (if we do not approach it with the contemporary need to quantify and qualify). There are no secrets in the mechanism of a flintlock, no magic of design. The flint strikes the steel frizzen, hot bits of metal shower into the prime, sparks explode upward and outward and through the touchhole, the main charge ignites, gasses expand, and a ball—or a rock—heads toward game.

  The maker of that gun, Ted Hatfield, lives in St. Joseph, Missouri, a town that was once the springboard to the West. Ted’s name draws smirks because Hatfield conjures up a picture of a feuding hillbilly with a pointy hat and a backyard still. Truth be told, Ted is one of those Hatfields, and although he doesn’t wear a pointy hat (in public, at least), he does bottle up some smooth corn liquor in stoneware jugs (quite legally, I must add).

  Ted flew from Missouri to Vermont, where I live, with an aluminum case about a flintlock long and an appetite for a north-woods white-tailed deer. I picked him up at the airport and brought him home to a pile of red meat and a bottle or two of wine the same color. That is a nice ritual on the day before a hunt.

  We were out of the house at dawn. Down at the general store we met BJ, my hunting partner on many an exploit, and Davey Hicks, a pal who sells guns, buys fur, and trades in ginseng, antlers and bear gallbladders—a country commodities speculator, you might say—and headed north and west to the center of the Adirondacks.

  The Adirondacks embrace six million acres in northern New York, more than a third of which is state land. Much of that public holding is designated wilderness, zoned and restricted to ensure that those qualities that make country wild are preserved—forever, one hopes. For people who have never seen the Adirondacks, it is hard to believe such unspoiled land exists so close to the urban sprawl of the East Coast. But it does. I have roamed a good bit through America’s wilds, and my touchstone for wilderness, my standard for comparison, has always been the Adirondacks.

  I planned to take Ted and crew into an area I had fished and hiked for many years. The trip would mean a lengthy drive and nine miles of canoeing—upstream. That plan changed the day before we left, when I spoke with a friend who told me of a new acquisition by the state, a large section of land that had never been open to public hunting, land surrounding a superb waterway—a river and lake. Loons, beavers, otters, ospreys—the indices of wilderness were there, said my friend, so I changed our plans. The drive and the paddle would be shorter. And the hunting, I believed, would be better. That decision, like most made at the 11th hour, was a trifle flawed.

  We drove all morning, stopping in every hardware store we passed for last-minute necessities. We launched our canoes, chockablock with gear, in midafternoon, and paddled up a meandering river that took us and our flintlocks back in time.

  The river was deep in shadows when tired backs and sore arms told us the time to camp had arrived. We headed for shore and a bureaucratic catch-22 of ponderous perplexity.

  At our launch point we had read a list of administrative rules for this newly acquired state holding. Along the river and the lake, we learned, were designated camping sites for small groups and for large parties. The large-party sites had to be reserved with the local forest ranger—a difficult task, at best, since the nearest phone was 20 miles away and the forest ranger, no doubt, was out guarding the forest. The catch-22 was this: one could camp anywhere as long as a few requirements were met—set back from water, and similar, less arbitrary rules of common sense. Since this was late October and no other canoes were in sight, we chose to be creative in our camping and to adhere to the spirit of the law, if not to the letter. Ashore, we found a group campsite and pitched our tent.

  That night we ate a hot meal of javelina chili, fired a salvo to clean the oil out of our rifles, and told the deer they were in for trouble.

  Loading a flintlock at five in the morning by the light of a Coleman lantern is a ticklish feat. It is hard to tell if the powder goes down the barrel or down your boots. The temptation is to stand smack next to the light and see what you are doing, until the thought of the lantern igniting the powderhorn in your hand soaks through your coffeelaced brain. Then you step back even farther and forget if you have tossed a charge down the barrel or not. “This,” says Hatfield, “is why Indians attacked at dawn.”

  Our plan was to still-hunt, then rendezvous at camp in midmorning. I was the last to leave, and as I zipped up the tent, I heard a deer scuffle along a ridge 40 yards from where I stood. But there was no chance of a hasty shot. I took the deer as good sign and headed toward a mountain above camp.

  I hit a road right off and met another hunter. That depressed me. Company is fine for rifle season, but a flintlock cradle in the arm makes a man lust for endless space and for neighbors a lot less than few. Back in camp we decided, although we had all seen or heard deer, to move on—away from the road and the trucks and the kids camped down the river.

  We packed up and paddled for the rest of the day, into the lake, into a hard-quartering wind, past loons and beavers and a shoreline this century has ignored. We came to a pretty bay at dusk. A small sign on a tree identified another forbidden group campsite, so we circled the bay looking for an alternative. Finding none, we pulled into the designated camp. A clearing set back 30 yards from the water showed signs of considerable use—old boards, trash, a partially covered dump of rusted cans. We would move if a party with a reservation came in; anyway, we had seen no other canoes on the water. We pitched the tents and settled in for the evening.

  The road was still with us, we discovered at first light, but we had run out of lake and were running out of time, so there was no escape. We ate breakfast and split up to hunt.

  I do not brag about my deer-hunting skills. I am mediocre at best. My talent, if I have one, is this: I have been around long enough to have distilled out the essence of deer and the ways of hunting them. I believe that deer are found where sign of deer are found. So when I found deer sign not 50 yards from the camp—scrapes and rubs and fresh tracks—I took them under advisement and kept walking, to the top of the mountain, where the sign diminished, then disappeared, but where the view was great and the exercise invigorating. Mediocrity can have its own rewards.

  I got back to camp before noon. Davey was there, heating the coffee. We had a cup and told our stories and speculated on BJ’s and Ted’s success. Then the ranger arrived. He drove up to our camp, radios squawking, along the road we had been trying to escape for two days. He wore a big handgun on his hip and tight lips on his face. “Damn,” I thought, “this guy is going to stick it to us.” He did.

  He ticketed us, summonses that turned into two $25 fines, and delivered a spiel about how, by all rights, he should haul us in to the local JP, 50 miles away. But since we were cooperative (we admitted our guilt immediately and said we would gladly strike camp and move), he would let us plead guilty by mail. That we had paddled the better part of a day to that camp, that no one else was on the water, that we would have been legal had we camped 20 yards away, had no effect. The ranger drove off. Davey and I were left to stew.

  Then it started to rain.

  When Ted and BJ returned, we told them of our run-in with the ranger. BJ stretched out in the tent; Davey and I, irritated from our scrape with the law, paced about; and Ted, bless him, just cracked a grin an
d wisely sauntered off to where he had seen deer sign, not 100 yards from where I had seen sign.

  In two hours the big boom of a flintlock rolled through the woods. In 20 minutes Ted strutted into camp, rooster proud. We pumped him for the details. He led us to a eutrophic beaver pond. A six-point buck had ambled down to the clearing, 110 yards—honest paces from Ted’s stand. He had drawn a fine bead and drilled a ball through the deer’s heart.

  We dragged him out, each fighting for a chance to pull, to share the glory that comes from being close to the kill. At camp we sliced the liver and fried it up fast, serving it pink and tender with sliced onions and great gurgling, sputtering slugs of Hatfield’s corn whiskey. That was all so fine that we paid little attention to the increasing rain.

  I started to pay attention to it in the middle of the night when the tent began to leak and puddles spread across the floor like overweight amoebae. Everyone was paying attention by morning, when our makeshift kitchen had a mud floor two inches deep and each step said squoosh. Too much rain to hunt. We thought about it, long and hard, even tried plastic around the locks and wax on the pan. But blackpowder sucks up moisture all too well, sucks it through the barrel and the touchhole like Lana Turner once sucked sodas at Schwab’s. Pffft, says a flintlock in the rain.

  We broke camp, loaded the canoes, and paddled out the lake and down the river. We camped again near where we had camped that first night, but at a legal site.

  We tried to hunt, on and off, for another day and a half. We would load our rifles when the rain let up and slink through the heavy mist in the woods until the rain began again. Back at camp we would have a shoot-off. Pffft, said our rifles, time after time.

  And so that hunt ended. Wet. Cold. Fraught with frustration. One deer down.

  But, in truth, a lot of hunting trips balance out less successfully. Blackpowder was a special catalyst on this hunt. It added dimensions that enhanced the memories, and that is good. Maybe, too, it heightened the irritation of our run-in with the bureaucracy; that was not so good. In the balance, however, the fun and romance of blackpowder left us eager to go again, knowing the next time could be better still. We might wear skins and woollies like mountain men; it is so easy to be swept up in the romance of flintlocks that dressing up hardly sounds foolish at all. Certainly, we would stick to the wilderness where a man can camp where he chooses, as long as he obeys the less capricious laws of conscience and good sense.