by Jay Cassell
Then he would carefully put his wing bone back in his pocket, deliver a whispered homily about how many turkeys had been run off by too much yelping, and we would sit at the base of the tree and commune with nature for thirty minutes. During this time, the turkey would continue to gobble on the roost, hens would answer, hens would run or fly through the woods on their way to the gobbling, and the turkey would finally fly down, gather the ladies under his wing, and go off. I don’t know whether or not these turkeys would have come to our calling, but we gave them no chance. They never heard us.
One morning, in the middle of one of these affairs, we made a mistake. We tiptoed in and sat down in the same township with a gobbling turkey, and just as Mr. Robert did his imitation of an orphaned hummingbird, a turkey we had not even suspected was in the country gobbled in a tree a scant 200 yards to our left. The turkey flew down in a matter of minutes, came steadily and directly to us in a full strut, and Mr. Robert shot him neatly in the head at a distance of thirty steps.
On the way out of the woods, in the same delicate, carefully chosen terms you use to suggest a possible lack of virtue in another man’s wife, I ventured to suggest that maybe we ought to try getting a little closer and yelping a little louder. Mr. Robert put the turkey down in the middle of the logging road, turned around so that I could get the full effect of his snow white hair and senatorial diction, and made me feel as if I had suggested we sell the First Presbyterian Church to the Hindus so they could have a place to stable their water buffalo.
I was not a child at the time of this incident. I was a grown man in my middle twenties. But when he got through with me I could have crawled under a leaf and hidden.
In some detail, the lecture covered ingratitude, callow ignorance, disrespect of elders, a blatant disregard of tradition, and the possibility of prior cases of misidentification of certain babies in certain hospitals. He even managed to work in the gallantry of the Confederate Army and the purity of Southern womanhood. It was a masterful performance, and it is a pity that it could not have been recorded. It could serve as a shining example to public-speaking classes all the way from Virginia to Texas.
Impressive as it may have been, it had one of the characteristics of four volleys from a battalion of eight-inch artillery. It was far more enjoyable on the sending end than it was on the receiving.
Mr. Robert did not turn me out into the world alone from that moment, although I suspect he wanted to. He is far too generous and far too conscientious. Even though ignorant and ungrateful, the young must be instructed. But the incident always lay between us.
It lies there yet.
No matter what I do, no matter what I may become, no matter what rank or fame or wealth I may acquire, I will always remain the unlicked cub who asked, in effect, wouldn’t we all be just as well off with only Nine Commandments. I suspect he is secretly relieved that I am safely married. There is little chance that I might, some bleak day, ask to form an alliance with the daughter of some member of his immediate family.
I did begin to hunt a great deal more with other people. He began, more and more, to spread around his instruction. There were, after all, far more deserving swine before whom he could cast his pearls. And then one day we both looked up and realized that we had not hunted together for a long time.
In the more than thirty years that have passed since I blotted my copybook, Mr. Robert has not learned a thing. He is still moderately active now, though much enfeebled. He goes through life serene and confident in the sure knowledge that he is absolutely right, giving roosted buzzards to people in the firm conviction that they are turkeys. He calls at night to present unscattered droves of nonexistent turkeys to innocent bystanders. He is the life and soul of every turkey-calling contest held in a five-county area, sits firmly in the middle of the front row, and makes no comment whatsoever if I appear upon the platform as a judge.
The Cobb household goes through no single Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner with the shame of a tame turkey upon the table. One or another of his ex-students always manages to get one into Miss Sally’s kitchen with some flimsy excuse about not having time to get it plucked, or the pressures of a forthcoming business trip or some other such transparent fiction. The ones that come from me—the bad seed—get there through an intermediary, sworn to secrecy.
Any day now, and considering how fast he appears to be fading, someday soon, Miss Sally is not going to be able to wake him up one morning, and we are going to have the biggest funeral the county ever saw. The cars are going to stretch from the First Presbyterian Church all the way down to the courthouse on both sides of the street—after the parking lot gets full. There will be three preachers at the church, and another at the cemetery, and the honorary pallbearers will fill the entire first four rows of the left-hand side of the congregation. There is going to be a firing party from his old company of his old regiment; and the first volley is going to be presentable, the second ragged, and the third a disgrace. The boy from the high school band who plays taps is going to do some ugly things to the notes that make up the sixth bar, and when the flag is put in Miss Sally’s lap, it is going to be folded a little crooked and have the wrong corner showing.
If you happen to be a stranger driving through town that day on your way to someplace important, you might wonder about the reason for the size of the turnout.
If you ask, you are going to express surprise when you are told it is for a man who never rose above the rank of private, never held a public office, was never a power behind anybody’s political throne, and who never, in all his life, amassed a sizable estate or made any substantial fortune.
If you are still curious, do not ask the family. They won’t be able to help you.
Go down to the barbershop, or visit the boat dock. Go by the depot or, better yet, go talk to that pack of loafers who play dominoes under the oak tree on the courthouse square. Ask any of these.
These are his acolytes.
Any one of them will be happy to explain.
Excerpted from Better On a Rising Tide with the author’s permission. To order his books, go to www.tomkellyinc.net.
A Sudden Silence
TERRY WIELAND
Sometimes it is Not What Happens so Much as What Happens Afterwards
The buffalo came in a rush of heaving shoulders, out of the thicket, head up, hunting. The bullets struck and his body followed his head around and down on top of me.
The bolt worked on its own, firing, ejecting, firing again as the buffalo came on with our eyes locked, and part of me loved him as the other part worked the rifle in a concentration of conscious effort and subconscious analysis, counting down the shots remaining . . . three, two, one . . .
We cut strips from his loins and blackened them over a fire as the skinners worked. The meat was rubbery-fresh and juicy, and we chewed and chewed and chewed in the silence that persisted in spite of the chattering voices and the breeze ruffling the trees.
Then a part of me withdrew. I would sit in camp and look out across the plain to the smoke rising from the lower slopes of Kilimanjaro. They were burning off the grass and the smoke mingled with the clouds that shrouded the peak. I stared at it for hours at a time. Sometimes I would walk to the edge of camp and look back up the mountain where the Cape buffalo had died with his eyes still fixed on me, muzzle to muzzle with my rifle. Then my other self returned, haggard but intact. It was very quiet in that camp, I remember. That part of it lasted two or three days.
Magic
TERRY WIELAND
It was a day like you find late in the fall, when the leaves are off the trees and the snow comes gently in wet flakes—when the sky is gray and motionless and you learn how good canned soup can be, steaming on a woodstove, and the snow you stamp off your boots lies unmelting on the cabin floor.
Claire was an old man even then, a man who had hunted deer up there for longer than I had been alive. He started with his father just after the first war, saw his father’s last hunts, taught hi
s son what it was all about, and then sort of adopted me when his sons went off and married. I was not an orphan, except in the sense of being a kid in thrall to hunting but trapped in a family of indoorsmen, and I took to Claire and his old ‘94 like a tack to a tire.
It was the last day of the season, a Saturday when everyone was out for one last time. The deer were starting to yard up, and even seeing one was a long shot at best. With a new rifle and a pair of new dubbined boots and my first deer license, out in the woods with real ammunition, it did not matter to me how long the odds were; I still expected a big buck to appear the way bucks did in Outdoor Life, heavy-horned and silhouetted against the snowy timber. Wet and cold but supremely unmiserable, even the long trip back across the lake to the cabin, with the waves slapping and ice building up on my precious Marlin, felt good to me. And the smell of that soup on the stove as I lugged more firewood into the cabin—I can still feel it all today.
We were on the last of the coffee when Claire took his pipe out of his mouth and started to talk, looking into the fire. It felt awfully good, that fire, and if Claire wanted to talk for a while rather than get right back out there, it was okay with me. It was a long way across the lake with only a chilly stand to look forward to. Afternoon optimism is tough.
“We might see a deer later, and we might not,” he said. “There aren’t as many as there used to be. Haven’t been for quite a few years. I’d like to see you get your first one, but other than that, I don’t much care if I shoot another one. I just like to be up here hunting them.”
Many fall days have slipped away since that one. Many big wet flakes have drifted down, and now a few of them sift gently onto the place where Claire is buried. There have been mountaintops in Alaska and plains in Tanzania and swamps in Botswana; I’ve made a few good shots and missed more than a few easy ones, and I’ve stared into a lot of campfires, and every one is as good as the last. Sitting by the fire in Alaska one time, a fire that was built with wet alders and camp scrap and was more wishful thinking than anything else, a sheep guide said to me that he’d climb over an entire mountain range and down a dozen hanging glaciers if there was the chance of a big ram at the end of it, but he couldn’t understand people who would do that just to get a photograph.
“It ain’t the meat and it ain’t the horns,” he said. “I don’t know what it is, but that’s what makes it all worthwhile.”
I don’t know exactly what it is either, truth to tell, any more than Dale did, although actually I suspect we both knew, we just could not explain it.
One of the great things about big game hunting, more than any other activity known to man, is that one minute you can be poor as a church mouse, soaked through, shivering, with a thousand dollar rifle rusting into scrap before your very eyes, and the next minute you can be richer than Solomon—all because an animal walked out of the woods and threw his head back, and you made one of those wonderful miraculous shots that was as much luck as anything, but at least it was luck you made yourself. This is a fact that has been true since man first killed something to eat and hung the antlers in a tree over the campfire; it has been true since there has been a god of hunting (or a goddess, depending on who and what you are); and it will still be true long after all the other artificial pastimes we have invented to take the place of hunting are gone and forgotten. That is why there has always been a god of hunting, and why there will never be a god of racquetball.
It is why what you get will never be as important as what you gave to get it, and why sometimes you find, when the search has failed, that the search itself was what you were really looking for. That is when you look at a big Dall ram on the wall and remember what it took to get him back down the mountain, long since out of water with darkness coming on, and having to dig deeper into yourself than you ever did before. And why, forever after, you could say, “No matter what happens, no one can take away from me that on that night, in that place, I did those things.” That is why, looking at your cat curled up asleep on the bear skin, you can remember what that bear looked like when he came down off the hill at a dead and silent run. That is why the Cape buffalo will always be a memory of heaving shoulders and blowing blood and shooting from the hip, and to hell with how wide he was. He was plenty wide enough.
Then there are the times when a plan works to the letter, and the buck is exactly where he is supposed to be, when he’s supposed to be there, and your pal drops him with one perfect shot as you come out of the woods, grinning. He’s only a forkhorn, with one tine broken at that, but the plan simply worked too well to waste. The meat will be damned good, anyway, and those little antlers are just the right size to make a rattle. There’s a buck just like that one hanging up outside my window right now, beside the woodpile. That hunt was 27 minutes from start to finish, like clockwork, but I’ll remember it the rest of my life, just like the five-point bull in Colorado that Jim flushed out of the bush that time. Half the bunch went one way, the other half the other, but the one big bull came straight and nearly ran me down. I shot him at ten yards, in self-defense as much as anything. He was good meat, too.
It is fall again now, and last night for the first time we had those big heavy flakes. They covered the little buck where he hangs from the high branch, coated him like frosting, and I look at him every time I go out for more wood. He’s high enough the wolves won’t get him, but the shotgun is by the door anyway.
All of those are real things. The buck is real. The shotgun is real. God knows the wolves are real. None of it is magic, unless it all is. Claire was right all along. The magic lies just in being there.
Struggle and Chance: Why We Do It
DATUS PROPER
You never know when you will catch what you are chasing, but in good country you have faith. You stop and swing your gun three times where bright, unmown hay pushes against a thicket of twisted limbs. You dare the pheasant to flush. He is in the geometry of leaf and trunk, hill and field; you see how his colors will shine in the sun. Enough of this will conjure him up. You keep going. You do not intend to do violence to yourself, but the harder you try, the better your odds. This knowledge draws you out.
At the edge of fatigue comes relief: your head floats free of your legs. It feels a little like the sensation you get from a portable radio playing music in both ears as you ride a bus to work—but better. (I tried the recorded music once and did not like it because it got between mind and world. Bad as the commuter’s environment was, an impermeable membrane between it and me was worse.) The hunter’s high brings a heightened perception of wind in the aspens, mud squishing around boots, places where a pheasant ought to be. At this point it becomes easy to understand how visions came to Indians seeking them. A person who does mostly mental work needs this feeling; craves fresh air in the confines of brain and body. Perhaps everyone needs it.
You can get a runner’s high, too, so it may have something to do with the blood pumped from legs that are weakening to a brain growing more active—a passing of the baton from the tired part of you to the fresh. I don’t know, but the effect has a name: euphoria.
Euphoria feels as good as it sounds. According to the American Heritage Dictionary , it means: “1. A feeling of great happiness or well-being; bliss. 2. Psychiatry. An exaggerated sense of well-being in pathological cases involving sympathetic delusions.” I leave the pathology to the pathologists and the physiology to the physiologists. What I think I understand is the music that the brain plays without benefit of radio. It is quite real, and here is how it works.
Your brain is constantly thinking, out there in the fields. You can confirm that easily next time you take a walk. You may not realize, however, that you are thinking in a language—presumably English, for most readers of this book. You are in a language mode even when you do not think aloud. This is by no means my discovery. I did not even grasp it till I came to know my own language by learning others. In time I found myself thinking in a couple of them, recognizing the words because they did not come so nat
urally as those in English. Language, it seems, is a way of forming thoughts, not just expressing them.
Your language is timed by your breathing. (This is easy to feel if you talk aloud to yourself as you walk.) Your breaths, in turn, are timed by the needs of your legs and heart and emotions. Musicians play the rhythms of the chase as if they were pounded out by a horse’s four hooves—but you march to the same drummer, biped, after you get going. Your chair-bound muscles stretch. Your tempo becomes upbeat, as regular as the farmland where pheasants live: andante for the most part, allegro when dog strikes scent, presto when he trails the bird. And by now you are thinking in meter. You cannot help it.
Hunting is the oldest song, I guess. It would be nice to know the mother language that our ancestors evolved on the African plains. This much I can report: English is right because it has feet—literally. Feet (sequences of stressed and unstressed syllables) are the units of meter. Modern English-language poets sometimes soar above their language’s feet, just to be different, and when they do, readers walk away. Conventional Spanish and French poets do not use meter, and their poems do not move my boots. I dream in Portuguese, sometimes, but I hike in English.
By the time you hear the beat, the thing that caused it has become important. It must be important to have done this to you. Therefore you try very hard to shoot the bird when your chance comes. You try even if you were not eager when you started walking. If you have not had the experience, you may find this baffling, but I imagine the long-distance hunters nodding yes, yes.
Whether you miss your chance or make it, you fix the pheasant’s place by its coordinates. You will need to call it back later at the edge of sleep. The spot will be precise, then: the intersection of struggle and chance. Your energy carries you far enough to cross the pheasant’s path at some random place. Your dog’s search meets the bird’s collusion with cover. Your gun swings to intercept the path of flight. Your brain sends your trigger-finger a signal at the millisecond when the curves cross. The trajectories in time and space all intersect. True sports have such junctions and so does life, if played as a participant sport. Watching does not count.
