The Best Hunting Stories Ever Told

by Jay Cassell

  Like anyone, I’d been lamed before, though never seriously nor for long. The usual run of a young male’s sports injuries, little more. Still I knew certain things, or thought I did: how in health we forget the body’s primacy; how, when bodily health fails, the spiritual may soon follow; how even then, if we recover in due course, we simply take up our affairs again, none the wiser. Yet this time would be different, I was sure. It seemed impossible that memories of the preceding five weeks would ever dull, that I’d need to feel an identical wound to resharpen them—or else some jog as unpredictable, say, as that turn a moment ago to an ancient inning of ball.

  I convinced myself that this time I’d seen into the suffering and despair the chronically ill must experience. Indeed, my hip scarcely better after a month than when I first crippled it, I imagined myself among their ranks. And so there’d be no more of anything that till now had made me what I was. I might sit in a blind or on a deer stand, but no more busting the puckerbrush; I might fish from bank or boat, but no more scrabbling among slippery rocks in a streambed.

  In fancy I’d vainly squeeze two triggers on the thunderous getaway of a grouse. He lit too far to be chased up again, and thus in fancy I hobbled from thicket’s edge to where I’d parked nearby. Or I pictured the head-and-tail rise of a trophy brown trout—there, against the opposite bank, too distant to reach without the deep wading I couldn’t risk anymore. I envied the yellowlegs on that shore, trotting smartly into the riffle, smartly out, then strutting like arrogant pimps, bobbing their sound little asses.

  At last the great outdoors would have turned dangerous. From now on, in an April like this I’d pick my way across our paltry meadow, staff in hand, a sharp eye out for swells and soft spots. Looking high over the ridge I might see the broadwing hen, spring’s annual genie, and covet her view more than ever. I’d breathe the mud, the sap, the mist. Then I’d turn for the house in tears.

  Come fall, I’d weep too, remembering the scents of a bird cover: frost-slackened apple, cinammon whiff of dead fern, pungency of the slain grouse itself, pointer’s breath in my face as I congratulated her or him on the find. In June I might drive to some old roadside trout haunt: dusk; bats; spinners in their egg-laying dance; slurping fish; the odors of water and weed and gravel. I’d take it all in through my rolled-down window, then start up the new truck, the one without a clutch.

  Summer’d annoy and winter scare me. I wouldn’t be one of those admirable souls who, squarely acknowledging the goneness of a prior life, start over in a new track. My deepest track was worn through those gamewoods and riverbottoms, and I followed it, even when inobviously, in the craft I had long since chosen. The very notion of another context for my writing spun the brain.

  In short, he had vanished, that I I’d known for so many years.

  I’m supposed to stand six feet, two inches tall, although—bones settling after half a century—I may have shrunk some. At all events, I felt shorter during this period of soreness than I had since eighth grade, when every last girl in town seemed a tower enfleshed. My wife is supposed to stand six feet one, and does, but just then she became one more woman looking down on me, for every good reason, physical and metaphorical: I made a miserable, nasty invalid, whom I myself despised.

  I mention my wife in part because of this whole business started with her, whose statuesque height is all in her legs. I, on the other hand, am apelike, nothing but upper torso. While her inseam is a full six inches longer than mine, on taking over the wheel of a car from me, she must tilt the rearview mirror significantly down.

  On Robin’s thirty-fifth birthday, we contrived to put our preschoolers in the care of a babysitter. For the first time in years, she and I were free to ramble the hills, just the two of us, as we’d done on first marrying. While a good deal of our conversation was of course about those children, our outing felt—well, romantic and then some.

  Robin herself is March’s child, which might in an ordinary late New England winter seem inauspicious. But on this particular day we could halfway imagine all nature smiling in congratulation. The temperature climbed to the middle forties, the sun strong. A snow had fallen overnight, just enough to turn the woods crisp and clean, even as the freshets loosened and sang of springtime. We saw a mink track, a doe who’d made it through the cold months in fine shape, even a precocious warbler, its gilt plumage a shock against the sober hemlocks.

  There was a certain steep tote road, about seven years old, near home. Though it meant a detour, we hiked it for the view of Moosilauke. On the way down my wife suddenly stopped and laughed out loud.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  She pointed at our footprints in the snow. I saw, not for the first time, that I needed two strides to cover the distance she made in one. But I laughed back anyhow, because it seemed such a long way from eighth grade, from those idiotic leg-stretching drills I’d invented in the hope of growing tall as my pretty second cousin Anne Longstreth—because here stood my wife, even taller, prettier.

  Then Robin broke into a downhill run, catch-me-if-you-can, a willowy woman in a thermal undershirt, a pair of Johnson’s green wool pants, a set of felt-lined Sorels, a weathered down jacket cinched around her waist, but—she was that beautiful, she was that desirable—I conjured a fleeing nymph. I took off, for all the world like a bassett on a hare’s trail, but I caught and kissed her. She smelled like fresh air.

  When she broke again, I tried to match strides with her, laying my feet down in her tracks. Though each pace felt like a broad-jump, I kept at it until I heard an odd little crackling just behind me. Three more strides and I went down like a shot boar.

  That strange sound had been the wrenching of hyperextended hip ligaments, but it had taken my brain a moment or two to register the pain, the weakness.

  Sound again, I’d recall that pain and that weakness and accompanying moods—mopery of March, fury of April, related miseries of May and June. They’d seem exotic enough by then that I likened my contemplation of them to the sort of research an archaeologist must do. So often and long has he studied, say, the mystic artifacts of the ancient Niger delta that he “knows” them backward and forward; yet they are not his by virtue of that knowledge. Nor will they ever become his unless he can somehow and improbably be drawn into a context where all their originative energies and felt meanings operate. He may consciously or unconsciously long for such transport; but he must also sense how awesome, even crushing, it could prove.

  I have dug around sufficiently in my period of lameness to have the archaeological knowledge of it, but I can no longer truly feel it from within, even if in certain instants of magical thinking I may want to. Perhaps such a desire passes in my case for intellectual curiosity; a saner self, however, prays that if it should ever revisit the spiritual domain of those months, if it should ever again inhabit the I that I was then, it will do so not in a sickroom—to say nothing of ward or cellblock or nursing home, or any other place that literally shuts a soul in.

  The physical end of this story arrived, none too soon, by July, and by August I was back on the track entirely. The mornings and evenings turned brisk, the less hardy trees began to blush, the grouse chicks pushed their adult feathers. I had two veteran gun dogs, but also a green one to work, and at last the time was right for him to meet wild birds.

  A mile from my house lay a great beaver flowage, its eastern bank a strip of ground just under a cliff. Narrow as that strip was, its hedges of alder, sumac and berrystalk always held game. The water on one side and the sheer ledge on the other, moreover, were natural checks on a headstrong pup.

  That summer the grouse were in cyclical decline, and the Beeson cover—as I called it for its absentee Connecticut owner—harbored only one brood. But this consisted of a half dozen birds, who liked to congregate in a certain northerly corner of the puckerbrush. I could park my truck in Beeson’s field, leave the pointer yapping in his crate, walk to the spot, and flush the partridge. Then I could bring my novice back to
hunt up the singles, which were mature enough by August that when we arrived the mother hen would simply fly out of the cover, abandoning them temporarily to their own devices. I had other wild thickets in which to train, but this one combined handy terrain with a decent number of grouse, well past being squealers but still adequately naive to stay put while I firmed up a point.

  In one case, a spring chick sat too well. Before I could get there, my dog broke and grabbed the bird. He killed it, even if he can’t have given much of a bite: I dressed and cooked the contraband partridge that evening, but I never found a toothmark. I ate a perfect meal for a single person, my wife and children off visiting her mother at the time.

  Perhaps because everything about that meal was illegal—and I couldn’t help thinking a bit immoral, despite my innocence—I remember offering a Paganish prayer to the hen, penance and gratitude mixed together in it. I’d been walking and even running steadily for several weeks, but the taste of her chick seemed a culminative rite in my healing.

  There is a passage in Emerson that I’ve adored for so long I can all but recite it, and as I lingered at my table, sipping black coffee, missing my family, noting how short the evening shadows were becoming, it crowded my thoughts:

  The writer wonders what the coachman or the hunter values in riding, in horses and dogs. It is not superficial qualities. When you talk with him he holds these at as light a rate as you. His worship is sympathetic; he has no definitions, but he is commanded in nature by the living power which he feels to be there present. No imitation or playing of these things would content him; he loves the earnest of the north wind, or rain, of stone and wood and iron. A beauty not explicable is dearer than a beauty we can see to the end of. It is nature the symbol, nature certifying the supernatural, body overflowed by life which he worships with coarse but sincere rites.

  I couldn’t speak for the coachman, but I could for the hunter, our values being identical, and likewise for the writer. Indeed, by the merest bending of Emerson’s observations I could claim that to write and hunt in the same spirit was to be, as his title implied, “The Poet” . . . or at least a sort of poet.

  My sort.

  To be that way (the hell with fame and riches) seemed all I could wish for; and it still does. I recall looking at the backs of my hands, on which the Beeson brambles had prematurely inscribed a birdshooter’s autumn tatoos. Strange that there’d been no pain in their making, and certainly none now. In fact, whether because it was a matter of “body overflowed by life” or not, those red scratches seemed to feel good. Healed, I’d already forgotten the despondencies of the prior months, forgotten what it was not to worship—nor be able to worship—nature in sympathy. I was again the I with whom I’d for so long been most familiar, steeped in a beauty whose end he could not see.

  That I. He was among other things more than ready for his family to come home. He wanted to touch the good flesh of his children. He wanted even more to touch the flesh of his marvelous wife, and thus he simply leapt over his interlude of mental and physical pain to a snowy trail, in fancy watching her glide downhill ahead of him, virtually defining his notions of the erotic. This time, of course, he scripted a more appropriate close, in a wrangled bed.

  It was as if he’d never fallen, would never fall again. He could barely remember the bitter human being who frothed at the mouth; who stood in his kitchen, dazed, chopping the air with his cane, ready to raze the whole world.

  By further vague association, however, I’ll now remember another person who brandished a cane, her grim lips likewise flecked with foam. I knew this woman only as Mrs. Greene. She was a friend of my grandmother’s, though everyone in my family made a great joke of the friendship. For as unfailingly cheerful as that grandmother remained to the end of her astonishingly active life (she played tennis through her late eighties), so gloomy and angry was Mrs. Greene, although she hung on to her spectacular good looks till the end of her long but sedentary life. While my mother’s mother was all good-natured non sequitur, Mrs. Greene was all fierce concentration. Indeed, everything about the two women seemed so different that they could scarcely resist—and usually didn’t—falling into quarrel whenever they met. My father assumed that they called on one another in order, as he put it, to keep their batteries charged.

  There is a certain very large cornsnake that figures prominently in my recall of this Mrs. Greene. One of my younger brothers had found it on a ramble over my uncle’s farm and brought it home. By happy coincidence, a younger sister had recently been presented by some thoughtless adult with a pair of white mice. Since these were apparently of opposed sex, their numbers soon multiplied by tens. Before long, of course, my mother was stuck with tending both reptile and rodent, and she conceived the obvious plan: the snake would be fed, and the population of mice controlled.

  Now anyone who has ever kept a constrictor knows that its appetite is unpredictable: it may hop right on its prey, or it may lie there for hours and even days, as if unconscious of the prey’s existence. Corny, as the snake had been witlessly named, proved more energetic than some, and could generally be counted on to swallow his mouse within a half hour.

  Practical-minded as my mother was and is, aware as she was and is of the natural world’s sternness, still she felt a tinge of compassion for the mice, who tripped with such moronic fearlessness around Corny’s glass cage. Having deposited a rodent, therefore, she would immediately set an egg timer for forty-five minutes. If the creature survived that span, he or she would be lifted out and another put in. My brothers and I called this arrangement Mouse Roulette.

  Corny was provisioned well—and perhaps too effortlessly. Indeed, I sometimes surmise it was because he missed the challenge of a stalk that he finally broke from confinement. He did not, however, leave the house: now and then he’d make brief appearances, poking out of a heat register but always ducking back in before someone could nab him.

  Enter, from stage left in the living room, Mrs. Greene, for her weekly cup of tea and her fight.

  Enter, from stage right, Corny, who stretches more of himself than usual out of the wall-grate, shoots his tongue, weaves like a cobra.

  Exit Mrs. Greene, rapidly, for all that she needs a cane. In her rush she scatters the tea service to the floor.

  It’s still easy, you see, to recall all this as farce, even without the snake. On that bright September afternoon just before Labor Day, I’d made an audience because at 21 I was young enough to be amused by an old woman’s wrath, and by the hoarse and haphazard chastisement it always earned from another old woman. I never dreamed, though, of anything so comically appropriate as Corny’s appearance, a touch that convinced Mrs. Greene that my grandmother—or at least someone from our evil clan—had contrived this whole show.

  None of us would see Mrs. Greene again for more or less exactly a year, across which I’ll hop here. Though by now the evenings had turned clear and cool, the women’s reconciliation was to transpire not over tea but over dinner on the back porch—in the open air, where no serpent might be cached.

  My parents were up in Maine, fishing. In their absence, I’d been sucking down beer all afternoon with my oldest chum Tommy White. Like most people, I could be much changed by drunkenness. Like most arrested adolescents, I liked to show off. The circumstance, in short, was volatile.

  Tommy and I fixed ourselves sandwiches. On a whim I carried mine to the table where the old ladies sat, and he followed me. I gave my grandmother an exaggerated kiss on the cheek, and I greeted Mrs. Greene with a similar, but even more exaggerated one, together with compliments on her appearance, overdone even for so physically beautiful a person as she—who was no fool. She shrugged me off and muttered grimly.

  A general silence fell till my grandmother offered a few cheery and diffuse platitudes. The last of the sweetcorn always tasted wonderful. The Phillies had the pennant sewed up at the end of a wonderful season. Lyndon Johnson was a wonderful man after all. It was wonderful too how the Pennsylvania mugginess was
fading, and the September breezes starting, and you could just smell the garden’s wonderful marigolds—“Naughty Mariettas,” she called them, inhaling demonstratively.

  “Yes, Bessie,” growled Mrs. Greene, “everything is just so damned wonderful.”

  “Well,” my grandmother answered, “better that way than some others.”

  I winked at my friend—the show was warming up, the batteries charging—but Tommy looked nervous.

  “How old are you?” Mrs. Greene suddenly asked, her brilliant, ice-blue eyes seeming to recede into her skull as she studied her friend.

  My grandmother, in spite of that fixed stare, justifiably supposed the question addressed to one of us boys. It took her a moment to catch on. “You know exactly how old I am,” she finally answered. “Five years older than you are. Why ask such a stupid thing?”

  “Stupid?”

  “Stupid.”

  “Well, I was wondering exactly how you could live so long and be so stupid.”

  My grandmother deliberately folded her napkin and set it on the table, a prelude, I was sure, to the dressing down she meant to give her veteran adversary. I beat her to it: “Mrs. Greene,” I asked, speaking softly, feigning respectful curiosity, “I was wondering something too.”

  She turned her gaze my way now, eye sockets become black holes, that glimmer barely discernible within—the frigid light, it suddenly occurred to me, of a snake’s stare.

  “I wonder why you’re such a bitch.”

  I think back on this crudeness with horror, as if someone else—maybe Tommy—were responsible for it. I’d been irked by this broody woman’s assaultive comments to my beloved grandmother, of course, but it was more than a mere rallying to flesh and blood that prompted my own assault. It was liquor, to be sure, but it was somehow hormones as well: for all Mrs. Greene’s years, a bizarre, aggressive sexual edge had some part in my treatment of her just then.