The Best Hunting Stories Ever Told

by Jay Cassell

  This remarkable event notwithstanding, the west hollow is not my favorite side. My choice is the one on the east, and its choicest point is at the head of the hollow, just as you walk onto the central ridge.

  The central ridge begins as a nonentity. It breaks off from a perfectly ordinary looking hill with some scrubby-looking old-field loblolly pine mixed thinly among a stand of ratty-looking post oak, and falls gently away to a pile of limestone in a thicket of mountain laurel. There is an abrupt right-hand turn in the gap between two rocks the size of elephants, and an equally abrupt left-hand turn behind them. Then you step beyond the screen of laurel and down into an open area the size of a small room.

  The room is ringed with limestone rocks that have been broken by weather and frost. Fossilized clamshells are visible along all of the breaks. The ring is nearly waist-high, and the area commands a view of both hollows and looks along the path that follows the crest of the ridge.

  Just below the ring, the ridge saddles, and the path beyond, the saddle gently rises and passes from sight among the trees. The central ridge then curves gently to the right, beginning at a point just beyond the disappearance of the path, and you have a fine view along the eastern slope.

  The first ten chains of the east hollow is an almost pure stand of beech.

  I have never understood why the druids fooled away their time deifying an oak tree when beech was available. Sargent’s manual lists nineteen commercial species of oak indigenous to south Alabama and four species of scrub. After you get past cherrybark oak, there is not fourteen cents worth of class in the lot of them.

  Live oak has limbs that twist away from a central trunk for as much as twenty yards and is prone to festoons of Spanish moss, which you always associate with funerals and pallbearers.

  Overcup has a regrettable tendency to have sucker sprouts all along the trunk, which ruin the symmetry of the bole. All of the red oaks produce a staple food for game, and we have to have them, but corn bread and collard greens with side meat are the same kind of staple. You may eat them all the time, but you don’t put on your necktie and specifically take your wife out to dinner just to buy them. They may be good, but they do not go with candlelight and damask napkins and brandy and a good cigar afterward.

  Beech does.

  Not only is a beech tree handsome, but it has a nut that is perfectly delicious. If I were rich and powerful, I would have beechnuts collected by faithful family retainers and put them in my fruitcake rather than pecans. I might even eat them on my cereal for breakfast. A stand of beech, with its smooth blue-gray bark all the way to the stump, is cool and dim and hushed early in the year, when the leaves are on, and light and open and airy in the fall and winter, when the white bark on the thin, naked branches shines in the afternoon sun.

  Forty Crook Branch itself starts in this hollow and makes up from a spring that first appears from under a monstrous limestone rock. The branch runs in a series of abrupt turns almost from its beginning and on the inside of most of the bends is what can only be called a sandbar, even though most of them are less than ten feet long and eighteen inches wide. The sand in these bars is clean and gray and has tiny flecks of mica in it.

  Once, years ago, when she was very small, I took the Colonel’s daughter there—the last half mile on my back—and cut her name and the date in small, dainty block letters low down on a beech tree. In my pocket I had brought a little block of wood with a hole through it, and we set up a flutter mill there in the creek made out of forked and split sticks with halves of magnolia leaves for blades. The whole thing was tied together with strips of bearpaw.

  She watched the wheel run, with delight, and got both feet wet in the branch. Then she ran her fingers over her name cut in the bark and asked me if the shiny flecks of mica were tiny diamonds. I assured her that they were, with the utmost solemnity, and congratulated her upon her perspicacity in finding them.

  We swore never to disclose the location of our mine to anybody, but agreed that if, later on, either of us ever needed money, he or she could come back and gather some.

  I have never killed a turkey in this hollow, though there is a perfect place to do it. There is a beech there that overlooks an arena exactly one gunshot across. The tree has two buttressed roots which come away from the bole on both sides of your butt exactly the right distance apart and curve down at just the proper height to support each elbow. The ground in front of the tree drops away just gently enough to allow you to dig your heels in properly and not leave your knees propped up too high. It is as comfortable as a rocking chair, and I have done some of my very best sleeping there, in the fall, after I have scattered turkeys in the morning and had come back after lunch, and it made no real difference where I sat.

  I have run a couple of turkeys off the roost there in the spring—turkeys that were gobbling fit to choke themselves—by crowding them in the last few yards of my approach in a futile attempt to get to that tree. In both instances, it was one of those pieces of stupidity that you carefully commit while your native good judgment is shrieking at you continuously to stop.

  I am going to do exactly the same the next time it happens, too, because just one time, before I die, I am going to kill a turkey out of that rocking chair. It is important. It gets more important every year I don’t get to do it.

  Below the rocking chair, the hollow begins to widen and you move out of pure beech and begin to run through the mixed stands of upland oak and hickory common to the upper coastal plain. It is at this point that I usually climb the central ridge and walk along it, rather than staying down in my favorite hollow. If you are hunting, you have an opportunity to listen in both hollows simultaneously; and if you are just visiting, you get a marvelous overview of either side. The ridge is so narrow and the sides so steep, that as you walk along, you are level with the tops of eighty-foot trees down in either hollow and it is the next best thing to flying.

  Right out on the point of the ridge, nearly a mile from its beginning and just before it drops off, there is a clump of shortleaf pine, not all that big, but old as hell. You can sit there and listen to the wind in the needles and look out over three-quarters of a county. In cold weather, you don’t want to stay too long because the wind gets such a clear shot at you out there. But cold or hot, it is always worth the trip. Even if the sun is not shining and the rain has wet you straight through, it is still worth it, because the woods are always gloomy as hell on rainy days and there is a perverse pleasure, in one sense, at looking out over a quarter million acres of gloom.

  When I leave Forty Crook Branch, I always try to go out so as to pass by the tree in the curve where we built the mill. I never go in to the site itself. I go close enough to see that the tree is still there, that lightning has not struck it, or a summer windstorm blown it flat since the last visit. But I never go far enough to see over the little hill and look in the bottom of the branch.

  Because I have never gone back for my share of the diamonds.

  In point of fact, I have not put my eyes on her name since the day I cut it in the tree. The mill cannot still be there. It was hardly built for the ages and could not have survived the first rainstorm. I would rather not go back and look at the scene of the ruin. The tree and the mill belong to the day itself, not to any other.

  I never will go back.

  So long as I never do, my shares are still there, still held in escrow. So long as I never do, she is still there, always four years old, always under the tree with her name on it, stooped in the sand by her mill with the utter absorption of a little child, enchanted with her diamonds.

  I hope she never needs them.

  Excerpted from Better On a Rising Tide with the author’s permission. To order his books, go to www.tomkellyinc.net.

  Acolytes

  TOM KELLY

  Of all the social customs that are in use along the Gulf Coast, one of the more civilized is that of calling older people by their first names, and preceding the name by the honorific. A stranger to
the region will hear these references to Miss Laura or Mr. George and come to the logical conclusion that all these people are either spinsters or aged bachelors. The conclusion may be logical, but it is in error. The custom is not grounded on the marital status of the individual. It is, rather, a combination of affection and respect and is a method whereby the younger person can simultaneously avoid the callow presumption of the Christian name and the stiff formality of the family name. It is used properly only in friendship and only after long familiarity with the older person. It helps to bridge those gaps formed by either rank or years.

  If the custom had not been firmly entrenched at the time Robert Cobb’s years made him eligible for its benefits, it would have been necessary to invent it—specifically for him. I have never met a man it fitted better.

  Kindly, courteous, considerate, white haired, member of a distinguished family, Robert Cobb has all the attributes and qualifications. He is the very epitome of the fatherly old regimental commander beloved by all his troops. Except for one thing. Any regiment unfortunate enough to go into action with Robert Cobb as its commander would need a five-ton truck to bring back the dog tags.

  Ever since the American Revolution, it has been customary for former members to poke fun at the United States Army. Not only do they poke fun at it, some of them write rather bitter exposes of its criminal stupidity. The army, God love it, manages to muddle through somehow despite these waspish attacks, and it is not nearly as stupid as it is made out to be. It was astute enough, in 1917, to immediately recognize the quality of one of its newest recruits and see to it that Robert Cobb remained a private throughout his service. Mr. Robert made no objection and accepted his station cheerfully and without resentment. The Cobb family, as a matter of practice, invariably offers its services in emergencies of all kinds and accepts whatever assignment is given. Mr. Robert’s rank was no real handicap to him at the time he served. It was only of minor importance later, because of where he lives. It was important because it effectively denied him a courtesy title.

  It is customary in this region for a man to carry his title to the grave. The country abounds with people who are called “Judge” or “Senator” or “Colonel” because at one time or another they have been one. But nobody ever seems to use the courtesy title of private. We have a lot more ex-privates than we have of anything else, but none of the former privates clings to the title. It just doesn’t seem to have the proper ring to it.

  Mr. Robert has never alluded to this handicap in my hearing because I do not think he feels hurt over it. He served the nation to the best of his ability in the position the nation selected for him, and he considers that to be sufficient. What did hurt his feelings was that the army declined his services in 1942. A forty-five -year-old rifleman is hardly a pearl of great price to begin with, and it is possible that the army remembered his performance as a twenty-year-old. But the fact remains that he was not invited to the war, and he has never forgiven the army for its omission.

  Unfortunately, there are a great many things that Mr. Robert does not understand. I do not mean for a minute to say that he is simpleminded, for he is not. He just thinks differently. He has a genius for bad luck and disaster and, were it not for the fact that the Cobb family is both wealthy and influential, he would have had a pretty hard time of it over the years. His family, and everybody else, makes excuses for him, finds things for him to do, and no one ever overrides his opinions pointedly or insinuates that he is anything other than a full member of the lodge, with all rights and privileges. It is easy to do all this because he is so thoroughly nice.

  He has one premier and transcendental quality.

  He is the worst turkey hunter in southwest Alabama.

  The statement is accurate, is made carefully and with due deliberation, and you should consider the source. With no intention of being offensive to a sister state, calling a man the worst turkey hunter in Rhode Island, for instance, is no real star in his crown. It is sort of like your mother’s thinking you are handsome. She has no real basis for comparison, and her judgment must be considered suspect.

  Southwest Alabama abounds with turkey hunters, and they come in all shapes, sizes, and levels of expertise. To be considered the worst of all this multitude is to be a rare bird indeed. I do not mean simply to imply that Mr. Robert is ignorant. There are whole swamps full of turkey hunters who are simply ignorant. They have stumbled upon a particularly stupid turkey while deer hunting and killed it. Somebody walking through the woods has flushed one over their head, and they killed it. Somebody has taken them along one spring morning and called a turkey up on their side, and they killed it. And they pass then, in their own minds, from one side of the salt to the other and become full voting members of the board.

  They enter avidly into all the telephonic transmission of intelligence that goes on at night during the spring season. They become the life and soul of those early morning discussions on tactics and techniques in small-town cafés. They give freely of their advice on shot sizes, attend with critical ears all the turkey calling contests held south of the Tennessee line, pontificate at cocktail parties about the difficulties of their sport and, along about here, invest in a three-inch Magnum with a 30-inch barrel. They remind you of a 14-year-old girl struggling with her first pair of high heels—willing but awkward, and a little bit pitiful.

  Mr. Robert is different. Mr. Robert suffers from that most tragic defect of all: experienced incompetence.

  He was born in the middle of turkeys in the last year of the nineteenth century, and was presented with his first shotgun in 1908. If you believe half the stories you have heard about the era, it was perfectly possible, in 1908, to feed a family with a backyard garden and a 12-gauge. The hunting seasons opened when the summer ducks got big enough to fly, turned into serious business at the first cool snap, and ended only when the turkeys quit gobbling on the first of May. Here was a boy from a family of considerable financial resources, who could begin hunting at his back gate and who, except for school, had nothing else to do with his time. He turned himself into a superb shot—he is still one. Slow now, as you would expect, but given time to get ready, as good as anybody. He should be able to get inside a turkey’s head and think like one. But he cannot, and I have never been able to figure out exactly why. And he is not alone. Their ranks are much diminished now, but thirty years ago, a great many of his contemporaries were still active, and a disproportionate number of them suffered from the same defect.

  I suspect it is because the first decade of this century concerned itself largely with numbers. The browning, faded old photographs all bear that out. Pictures of boatloads of ducks or 30 feet of deer, hanging side by side on the same pole. A Model-T Ford with two men holding the ends of a string of fish far longer than the car. An angle in a rail fence with the hunters standing behind a pile of doves ten feet in diameter and knee-high. They seem to have taken a lot of pride in things like this. There was plenty to shoot, the supply was obviously inexhaustible, and you demonstrated your expertise by coming home with a back load of game.

  Nobody, even then, was going to kill a boxcar full of turkeys, and I think they got so wrapped up in their numbers that turkeys were considered too slow to fool around with.

  When the doldrums came—that period between World War I and 1950, when turkeys nearly went away—almost nobody fooled around with them. And after 1950, when turkeys, like Lazarus, rose from the sepulcher, it was, for most of that generation, then too late.

  Those, like Mr. Robert, who could still make it past the front-porch swing, came out of retirement, accepted what they considered was a bounden duty to pass their skills on to the next generation, and showered their ignorance upon us. In certain instances, this ignorance fell as the gentle rain from heaven. Now and then there was a deluge.

  I am being a trifle unfair, and I know it, because some of these creaky old folks knew exactly what they were doing. These knowledgeable individuals got the job done. Unfortunately, there were m
any, many more whose only qualification was the simple fact that they had lived through the era. Because I am a member of our peculiar society, a civilization that believes in its soul that expertise in one field automatically creates expertise in another, at first I was delighted to have Mr. Robert take me under instruction. There are not all that many turkey hunters willing to waste a morning on a rookie under the best of circumstances—and in those days there was a dreadful shortage of experts. Slowly I began to find out there was even one fewer than I had thought there was to begin with.

  Here was a man whom I had seen call ducks across a quarter mile of marsh, a man whose delicate touch with a fly rod had to be seen to be believed, and a man whose careful, courteous, generous instruction was a perfect pile of horseshit. Naturally, I didn’t know it at the time and spent several seasons under his careful tutelage, patiently committing all this useless excrement to memory. I would have been infinitely better off if he had refused to help me at all.

  Mr. Robert is of that school that feels you should never get closer than a quarter of a mile to a gobbling turkey and is, in addition, a charter member of the Soft and Seldom Yelping Society. We would tiptoe to a point just inside the 500-yard mark, sit under a tree while he fiddled around and got out his wing bone, and then he would emit three tentative, plaintive, hesitant peeps at about the same volume you would expect from a baby hummingbird.