The Best Hunting Stories Ever Told

by Jay Cassell

  Another part of that process involves the gun in hand. Vice President Dick Cheney’s recent relationship with a Perazzi 28 gauge shotgun—a dainty firearm compared to the workhorse 12 gauge—caused a national spotlight on hunting safety, and it’s one I welcome. I want gun safety front and center. I want my kids to know what I knew at age ten, forwards and backwards—the Ten Commandments of Gun Safety. (Yes, there is such a thing.) I want them to pick up a firearm and without thinking check the safety, point the muzzle up, and peer into the chamber to make sure it’s unloaded, even if they saw me do this five seconds before. In my house, there is nothing mysterious about a gun. Unless it is on its way to the truck, it is locked in a safe. But guns are used, and regularly. My kids think of a gun as they think of an axe or a roll of duct tape. It is a tool. (And truth be told, nowhere near as cool as duct tape.)

  But I don’t take my kids hunting just to teach them firearm safety, and I don’t take them hunting solely so I will have playmates for my dreamy forays to distant woods. I take them because I want them to experience the natural world in a way that puts them in the picture. The more my kids know about nature—real nature, beyond the pixelperfect world of Pixar Studios—the better they will understand why their particular species bears so much responsibility for the future of all the others.

  There will come a time when my children will choose whether they wish to hunt or not. It may be a precise moment of great weight and consequence—I imagine a particular animal, a particular smear of blood on fur, an instant in which fire is kindled or extinguished, forever. Or it may be a gradual dawning of self apart from nurture and experience: This is not for me.

  I’d be lying if I said that their choice does not matter. But I’m working on that.

  The Measure of a Hunter

  NORMAN STRUNG

  We mature as hunters as we mature as human beings and the process is no less complex than the journey that leads us from childhood to adulthood. I can still recall my first year with a gun. I was 14 then, with a 16-gauge bolt-action shotgun and an unbridled blood lust. Throughout that fall, I would venture from the family’s summer home every Saturday and Sunday at dawn, and walk the woods all day long, a boy possessed.

  My intent was to bag limits of grouse, quail, pheasants, rabbits, squirrels, raccoons, oppossums, ducks, geese, and even crows and fox. This fantasy of mayhem was not blind of reason, however. I couldn’t articulate it then, but I equated being a hunter and sportsman with all the elusive qualities of manhood: courtliness, confidence, knowledge, and above all, freedom. It seemed obvious that the shortest, most direct route to that state of grace was to bring home limit after limit of game. After all, what better proof existed that one was a good and able hunter?

  There is, fortunately, a law of inverse proportions at work in the woods when you are young, inexperienced, and bloodthirsty. Although I would have decimated Long Island’s game populations had I been given the opportunity, my aimless wanderings, flock shooting, and sky blasting resulted in a season’s bag of one rabbit and one quail. I came to the painful conclusion that I was not a very good hunter.

  The next year proved better. I had begun to learn from experience where and when game was likely to be found. I discovered that the twilight hours of dawn and dusk might be good for trout fishing, but that quail generally stayed under cover until the sun burned off the frost and went back to their roosts around sundown. I noted that rabbits preferred clearing edges rather than deep woods, and that grouse tended to hole up where laurels grew. Occasionally, I shouldered my gun fast enough, and shot straight enough, to bag a few.

  Sadly, I had no mentors during those green years. None of my family, nor friends of my family, hunted. But I did have a role model, a man of casual acquaintance who lived next door. He had a pair of sleek bird dogs kenneled behind his home. He carried a fine, engraved shotgun from his house to his car when I left on Saturday mornings. And soon after he returned, a brace of mallards or pheasants, or two quail and a rabbit, were usually hanging below the eaves of his garage, catching the low, fall sunlight like a still life by the Old Masters.

  One Friday in late November, it snowed heavily. Then the snow changed briefly to rain, and it got bitterly cold. I went hunting the following day and surprised a small covey of quail in a flattened, white field, scratching through the crust for ragweed seeds.

  I can still recall my elation at that stroke of good fortune. There was literally no place for the quail to hide, and the shooting was wide open. I took my first double ever from the covey rise, then hunted each single down until I reached my limit; that, too, a first. In the afternoon, six quail turned slowly on a string that was secured under the eaves of our garage.

  I waited idly until my neighbor returned, and then pretended to fiddle with the quail and the string. I waved to him as he kenneled his dogs. He saw the birds and smiled, returning my wave. He stepped into our yard.

  “Did pretty well today, son,” he said through pipe-clenching teeth.

  “Sure did,” I replied, and recounted the circumstances of the hunt.

  Like the ticking of a clock, each detail removed one weathered wrinkle around his eyes and mouth. When I was done, his smiling face had become as flat, featureless, and somber as the crusted snow. He tapped his pipe thoughtfully on the palm of his hand, gazed at the quail, and smiled a different smile.

  “You’re young,” he began, “and I was too, once. You got your birds, and you’re proud, and I don’t want to take that away from you. But someday, when you get a little older, you’ll come to find there’s a difference between killing and hunting. It’s a distinction that people who aren’t hunters seldom understand.”

  I was devastated. A rite of passage that spanned two years and had at last been successfully run was disqualified in half a minute. If numbers were not the name of the game, by what yardstick was I to measure?

  I would like to report that an epiphany occurred that night, or soon after, but such was not the case. I continued to hunt with a laser focus that stretched from the barrel of my gun to the game that rose in front of it. A good day equaled a heavy game pocket.

  But I had been sensitized. Long hours in the woods gradually taught me how to spot hiding rabbits and squirrels by the telltale pinprick of light in their shiny, black eyes. I concluded that gift was advantage enough, and chose to walk them up and flush them, rather than shoot them where they hid. I once did the same thing with a pheasant on the ground. I rushed the bird to make it fly before I shot. I missed.

  Aside from those small gestures, though, I was not tested again until my early twenties. By then I had entertained and discarded a dozen friendships with people I had met afield, and had found a handful of special friends called hunting buddies, with whom strong bonds had been formed through times good and bad.

  I was hunting black ducks on Moriches Bay with one of them when a norwester arrived with the suddenness and power of a hammer blow.

  We were on a long point, and a raft of at least 1,000 birds lay to the east. The fierce winds tore loose a sheet of ice that stretched for three miles along the western shore of the bay, and as it bore down on the raft, the birds were forced to move. The wind was so strong that the only way they could make headway was to fly into the teeth of the gale, flat on the deck, where backcurrents and eddies broke some of the blow. Their route took them right over the point where we hid.

  At first we were astonished as singles, doubles, and small flocks arrived as if on an assembly line, flying so low that we could touch some of them with our barrel ends. There was also a short time of humbling shooting until we figured out that a bird pumping along at five miles an hour into a 55-mile-an-hour headwind had to be led the same distance as one sizzling along at 55 miles an hour on a calm day. But once we got the lead down, there was no contest, and no sport. We found each other reluctant to shoot, saying, “You take this one,” and “Poor devils,” as the confused ducks poured into our decoys.

  At some point, one of us spoke for
both of us and said, “Enough.” We broke our guns, lay back, and enjoyed the spectacle, leading birds with our fingers, and yelling “boom.” To this day, when I tell the story, someone will allow as how we must have been nuts not to take advantage of such a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but I recall both of us feeling uncommonly good later that evening about what we had done.

  The years went by and I grew in knowledge, experience, and I think, as a hunter. I acquired fine bird dogs of my own, expensive guns I knew how to shoot, and I learned the habits of game so well that I rarely returned from the field empty-handed. But along the way, a curious transformation took place. Armed with such sure knowledge in my callow youth, I would have killed all the limits I dreamed of. Yet now, I began to exercise restraint.

  Sure, there were times when filling a table with a feast for friends led me to shoot a limit of ducks or pheasants, and big-game season represented sustenance as well as sport. But more often than not, I would swing on the most difficult bird in a covey rise, rather than taking the sucker shot. When a flock of fidgety mallards swung wide of the decoys and circled overhead, I would resist the long shot for the possibility that they might settle down, and treat me to the singular beauty of a classic toll, approaching the decoys on confident, cupped wings.

  I also found that I preferred the company of others with a like mind. It wasn’t snobbishness or elitism; just a matter of priorities. It gradually made more sense to enjoy the company of people who could savor the best of a morning on a marsh, then cap that memory when the bottle was full, rather than let it overflow with the excess of another two or three birds that could be bagged in an instant as a foregone conclusion. I also discovered another common denominator among those I called both hunter and friend: a mutual reverence for the things we hunted.

  That one can have reverence and respect for something you are trying to hunt down is easy to imagine as a contradiction, but I have seen antelope hunters choose a tough, tricky stalk over an easy one in exchange for the certainty of a swift, clean kill, and bird hunters who spent half their afternoon finding a cripple. But no example speaks so eloquently of this abiding sense of reverence as the time a friend downed a six-point bull elk that we had hunted hard and well. It was a perfect shot and a magnificent trophy, yet in that ebullient moment of deserved triumph, he was moved to briefly touch the carcass and mutter, “I’m sorry. . . . It was not a statement of regret, but of humble apology and thanksgiving to a spirit that we both understood perfectly.

  Upon that cold and windblown hillside, perhaps I arrived at the estate I first sought as an adolescent in thought and years, but I don’t really know. It’s like asking me now, at two score and three, if I’ve finally grown up, and to be honest, I hope I haven’t, because when you stop growing, you stop living. At that moment of salute to the fallen elk, a quote ran through my mind. It has been a creed of mine ever since, and I recall these same words every time I sight down a barrel:

  “We are measured more as hunters by the things we choose not to shoot, than by those that we do.”

  Reprinted with permission of Silvia Strung.

  Integrity

  ED GRAY

  You’ll know it when the time comes. There won’t be any need for official regulations or the posting of seasons—those things take care of themselves, and they always manage to make things legal for you. The time comes late in the season, every year. It will come again this year.

  The week before, it will snow. Hard. For three days. And the northeast wind will push drifts deep into the troughs of the sand dunes along the barrier beach. At the height of the storm the crests of the dunes will shed spumes of sand into the wind, hard stinging grit that rides in the snow across the channel and onto the marsh.

  Then the snow will taper, clouds thin, and the tides will rework their sculpture on the hardened edges of the little creeks. Salt ice cover, a foot thick, will crack and fall in the draining marsh to lie like collapsed tunnels before the rising neap floats them again. Hardened spartina will bend up under the crusting snow, trapped by the weight until group pressure pops a jagged hole and the grasses rise in a mat above the lumpy white.

  That night the clouds will blow to sea, and by midnight a hard starry sky will blink down on the subdued marsh. Cold northern night, quiet radiational chiller from the land of tapered meridians, this will be the dark that comes before the time.

  False dawn, light without heat, faint hint of the eastern horizon, will find you, shadows moving on the marsh. Three of you, moving slowly, bent and bundled, stepping cautiously on the grass and snow mat, picking your way along the edge and moving toward the silver twinkle of open water.

  At the point of the marsh, where two of the little creeks come together to form a small bay, you will stop, thump wet burlap heavily on the snow crust. The dog, still dry and carwarm, tail-high and excited, will prance and sniff at the decoy bags, then slide down the muck to the sludge ice edge of the creek.

  Your partner will drag a line of decoys—cork bodies and pine heads, black, gray and tan, big Canadas—out into the water while you scrape at the snow on the grass, looking for beaten plywood that covers the pit.

  The pit. You had found the spot earlier, in the high summer when you were pramming the creek with the little guys, scouting for periwinkles and cherrystones, and you had come back in bright September with your partner to dig the pit. Four feet down, three feet back, seven wide, lined with plywood; bench and shelf, drainage hose, hinged cover and woven grassing. Hours. Hammered thumb. Fishing time given up. The pit.

  Now it’s here. Ice cracks when you open the lid; inside the mud is frozen hard, like dark brown plaster spilled badly, and the bench is slick and crinkly when you step down on it. Your partner comes back for another string of blocks as you set out the gear in the blind.

  Guns out of the canvas, thermos on the shelf, ammunition in utility boxes—a faint Army memory, bad, gone quickly—and then out of the pit to check the grassing. Snow has covered the storm-blown bare spots. No problem today.

  It’s coming on real dawn now, and with it the wind, cold beyond gradation, a solid pressure on your chest and pure pain in your face. You can’t look into it. Look away.

  Your partner is back and the decoys are all out, 19 pitching geese grouped according to his view of the order of things. Other days you’d need more silhouettes on sticks out in the flats, but not today, not this late and cold. Today is the time.

  In the pit and waiting, you watch the sky. The rising wind brings clouds, gathering gray smothering the early yellow and red of the dawn and cutting off the sun before it can show itself. The cold flows deep, a dark sensation heightened by the shivering dog sitting between you. He’ll be okay; underneath he’s a furnace burning with focussed and retained energy.

  So you focus yourself. You know where they will come from, and you have to look into the wind to stay with it. Up in the wind, over the little bay and the breadth of marsh, are the sand dunes, shields against the winter sea, low cover for the homing birds. They may be there right now, just outside the barrier, three feet off the water, fanned out and winging steady, coming fast and smooth downwind.

  Look for them. Look for them on this last day. Hold fast into the bite of the wind, don’t miss any of it. Any of it.

  For now it has come down to the simple—the clean, hard end of it. No more ducks, no more shore birds, gulls; no more easy autumn, late sails up in the harbor; no other hunters, blue herons, distant horns or light planes overhead. No more days. One more chance, two tracks on a sure vector. The time. Take all of it. Look hard, don’t turn.

  There they come.

  Over the dunes, half a dozen, rising. Ten, fifteen now, wings steadily beating. Twenty. Thirty, fanned out, coming in off the ocean, winging easily. More coming, fifty now.

  There they come . . . there they come . . .

  Here they come. Half a mile, straight at you. It had to be. You knew it, you knew it. Get your head down.

  Hold now in the pit of wi
nter, in the ending cold of it; hold now and watch them as they slide down the wind and spread out, twenty feet off the ground, coming at you. Three hundred yards. Look at them . . .

  The wings set. A hundred and fifty yards and coasting. Now you must look down and count the seconds. Count them. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . .

  Now. This is the time. This is the time.

  Look up.

  Mercy on Beeson’s Partridge

  SYDNEY LEA

  It was my scream, not the knock on the head, that put white spots before my eyes. Nothing lay handy to attack but a metal barrel. I crashed it like a cymbal, spilling rubbish. The racket sent our cat flat-belly across the kitchen floor and downcellar; he’d been watching three chickadees at the window feeder: I half noticed them blow off their perches like seedpods. The dogs hid inside their kennel-houses.

  I was, thank God, the only human on hand. But there was more than one of me.

  And had always been. Just now I think for instance of a hot afternoon’s baseball in my tenth summer, our playing field the back meadow at Sumneytown. I’ve misremembered my slot in the order, so that when it comes around my teammates all shout, “Syd! Syd!” I linger on the whale-shaped boulder near third, looking for the fellow they’re calling. Then someone, not I, walks to home plate. From what seems the sudden height of my seat, I watch him pop lazily to first, then amble over to the rock and climb it to where I perch.

  I am on the rock. I.

  I—whose age, looks, character, and very gender seem as hazy as the August air. My motives for connecting that boyish self to the self who decades later would beat up a trashcan may seem equally hazy and ill defined. I appear to inherit from my mother’s mother a tendency to oblique association, without her tendency to lay positive emphasis upon it. In any case, pulling that barrel from under our sink, I rammed my skull against a countertop, and even though the blow was pretty light—no gash, no blood—my rage so lifted me that once again I looked down on someone else: a lame man teetering in my kitchen, waving a cane, searching for something further to smash. Could he have been the child who so languidly waved that old bat?