The Best Hunting Stories Ever Told

by Jay Cassell

  All of which, perhaps, is only to say that I ached to be other than my same old well-raised self.

  “Yes?” I prodded.

  “Yes, what?” Mrs. Greene grunted. But for the eyes her face looked bored, as if she’d encountered—and now I’m sure she had—challenges that put my own dull insult to shame.

  “How come—” I began.

  “I don’t have to answer you,” she said, her voice drenched in condescension.

  “Maybe you can’t.”

  “Oh, I can. Or I could.”

  “Then you accept the fact that you’re a bitch?”

  “I accept the fact that you say so, and I accept the fact that you don’t know the first thing about anything.”

  “You can’t answer,” I said, sensing how foolish and resourceless my taunts appeared, how desperate I was growing—I, who dreamed of becoming an author, a wordsmith.

  “I said I don’t have to explain.”

  “You can’t.”

  “The world will explain it to you in time, young man. All of it.”

  I turned to my grandmother. She was a woman, God bless her, of whom I simply could not be afraid; but I was curious to see how my oafishness sat with her.

  I would not see, for just then I glanced indoors, where my father—stationed so that I alone could detect his presence—beckoned me. I rose without making excuses and went in to him, and to my mother, who lurked even further back in the room.

  Both were sun-browned and unkempt.

  My father showed the full week’s growth of beard.

  I noticed that my mother, in a five-and-dime cotton dress, had long hairs on her legs.

  They’d sneaked home to deposit their Maine salmon in the freezer and to pick up some clean clothes. They meant to extend their holiday by spending a couple more nights away, in my dead grandparents’ cabin out in Montgomery County. I felt mildly hurt to witness their earthy energy, their mischief, their clear lust to be gone again, for in spite of the pleasant anarchy that I and my brothers and sisters always enjoyed under my grandmother’s care, I had missed them both. Yet I was relieved as well: in their distraction and hurry, my parents overlooked the fact that I’d been drinking. Moreover, some part of me relished the prospect of further and better outrages toward Mrs. Greene.

  By the time I returned to the porch, however, the two old women were onto some other topic of dissension, fairly mild. And I could tell that my friend Tommy, if he’d savored my boorishness in the first place, now wanted to leave as much as my parents had.

  “Good night,” I said to my grandmother. And then, the devil come back despite me, I made a deep actor’s bow to Mrs. Greene. “And good night to you too, Madame Bitter.”

  “Bitter,” she flatly repeated.

  “Madame Bitter.”

  My barb seemed no less labored and puny than the others, but Mrs. Greene—wincing with the effort—laid her hands on the glass tabletop and pushed herself to her feet. Next she unhooked her cane from the chairback and raised it overhead. At last I’d made an impression.

  “You wouldn’t hit me?” I sneered.

  “You stand where you are and find out!” she shouted, a runnel of spit flowing down the channel of her frown, that aged face’s only groove.

  “You’d smash up the whole world if you could,” I said.

  “I’d love to,” she answered. “And you will too one day.”

  I took a few steps toward her and, her timing faulty, she came up empty as she swung the stick. I stood in my tracks till Tommy dragged me backwards off the porch. Even as I left Mrs. Greene made hatchery gestures in my direction.

  The autumn after my lameness, the grouse remained as scarce as they’d promised to be during those summer training sessions by Beeson’s beaver swamp. The male dog who’d caught and killed the young bird in August came along nicely, though given more plentiful upland game he’d have come along even better. All through the gun season I needed to return to Beeson’s just to make sure he’d get his nose into something. Time and restiveness had dispersed the grown chicks to other places, but that faithful hen remained. She was smarter, flightier, harder to pin than the brood she had raised; but she was always there, and she saw my pup into college, as her chicks had seen him through high school.

  On the final day of the season, I tramped through miles of woods behind that young dog. All the grouse in New England seemed gone. Dusk descending, I crated my pointer and headed for home. It had been a meager fall, but I remembered enough of the spring preceding to know how much worse it might have been. There’d be other seasons now; those angry and melancholic dreams of myself as an old man with a staff rather than a gun or rod in his hand would not come true for a considerable while.

  And yet it was disappointing to think how soon we’d eat our way through the year’s harvest of grouse in our freezer: I could feel saliva pool under my tongue at the thought of those few meals. And it was even more disappointing not to have shot a bird over the pup on his last hunt of the autumn, not to have lodged such a kill in his memory for the long coming winter. As I passed Beeson’s bog, therefore, I slowed, my mind in conflict. There were some twenty minutes of shootable light remaining in the afternoon, all I needed to locate my hen partridge.

  At length I backed up and parked. Breaking the shotgun, I slid one round only into a chamber; I meant to give that grouse all but every advantage. Then I opened the door of the dogbox, slipped the bellcollar over the pointer’s head, and followed him toward the brush.

  Halfway across the field beside the cover, I kicked a hidden wedge of granite. I must have done so, as they say, just right, for the hip I’d wounded eight months before cried out in pain, and so, falling to the ground, did I—I, who was again in that brief second the self of wan April and not bluff November.

  When I got up, my legs were sound beneath me; yet I went on standing for minutes on end, till down in the thicket my dog’s bell quieted: he’d found his bird. Still I stood, waiting for the inevitable fusillade of wings, and afterwards the clank of the moving bell. As soon as I heard these, I blasted my whistle.

  It was time to go home; it was time for mercy on Beeson’s partridge, the constant one, who’d even surrendered a chick to me and mine.

  My eager young pointer was reluctant to come to heel, and I waited a long spell before he finally did. It was during that spell that I remembered not merely the bodily pain of a few short weeks ago, not merely the rage with which I clubbed a wastebasket but also that last evening with poor, dauntless Mrs. Greene, who wielded her cane like a weapon too.

  I recalled the rough beard on my father, who would drop dead within eighteen months of that night.

  I remembered my mother’s silky leghairs.

  I may even have remembered those pink-eyed mice, and how blithely they trotted the invisible confines of their glass world until—at the egg-timer’s gong—they were lifted back to a more familiar realm, or, the gong too late, they were rapt by sudden coils.

  Those coils would unravel, Corny’s diamond head be smeared on the driveway by an unwitting neighbor kid’s bike wheels.

  My grandmother would fall and break her hipbone and never be the same woman again, her mind, so often delightfully scattered before, become a permanent and grisly chaos. She would not recognize her grandchild, me, for her last four years.

  Standing in Beeson’s field as the light went down, I scarcely knew that grandchild either. There was once a boy who could not quite understand his middle-aged parents’ romantic silliness; nor the blackmindedness of his grandmother’s quarrelsome companion; nor—as that wondrously handsome old companion claimed—much of anything at all.

  Reprinted with permission of the author. Originally appeared in Hunting the Whole Way Home.

  Three Days to Thanksgiving

  T. EDWARD NICKENS

  Rivers are funny like this: One minute you’re paddling along absorbed in the moment, all senses fixed, then the river bends and you have the stern seat, so you quietly take a hard
draw stroke because there could be a wood duck around the corner and Lee is hunched over in the bow, hand on his gun, leaning as far forward as he dares. Every detail is in fine relief, like hand-cut checkering, where you feel it in your palm. Heartbeats thud in your chest like the steady thump-thump of the dog’s tail when you come into the dark kitchen before daybreak and she knows where she’s going. The canoe inches forward, forward; any second now the ducks will see it and launch skyward, startled. If they’re there at all.

  But they’re not, and five minutes later you’re drifting through a languid pool and your head is a million miles away. One minute you’re in the moment and the next you’re off on a stream of consciousness down memory lane. At least that’s how it is for me.

  We launched our canoe in a trickle of black water through fall-spangled woods and wound up where the river broadened to 400 feet and turned brackish enough speckled trout. Three days and 15 dawdling miles untwined between the two spots. Looking back, nothing much happened. In that respect it was one of those unforgettable trips, a tile mosaic of small, glittering moments that coalesce into a grander work with just a few short days of distance.

  Like the turkeys. Fifteen minutes after pushing off we eased around a kink in the creek and there were two gobblers standing on a sandbar not 50 feet away. We froze, drifting closer. The birds stood statue-still for long moments, silhouetted against the glare of the creek behind them as if cut and punched straight out of Audubon’s Birds of America. Blue-white heads on slender necks, bronze shoulders, barred tails nearly dragging the ground. We cut the distance to 30 feet before one bird took a quick hop and crossed the creek with a flush of beating wings, followed by the other. In the woods unseen birds galloped through dry leaves like startled ponies.

  Lee turned slowly and grinned as if any sudden movement would send the memory itself into startled flight.

  “That was too cool,” he whispered.

  “Big toms,” I said. “How many birds you figure?”

  “I don’t know. I was too impressed by those gobblers to even think about it. Can you believe how close we got?”

  I could, because that’s the nature of these coastal-plain streams. The river was a river in name only—not much more than a creek, really—uncoiling vinelike through dark woods where a few cypress trees towered over the floodplain, a handful old enough and tall enough to elicit whistles. Every coastal-plain county has one, or ten, of these floatable creeks—thin blue lines snaking across topographic maps in the blank spots between rural roads. Many offer get-gone-quick pockets of quasi-wilderness, two or three days’ worth of quiet water and muddy banks pocked with mammal tracks. Some turn into, or spill into, full-size rivers. The best stretches have no more than one bridge crossing. Looking on the map, you’ll think, I could paddle that in a day easy. Which you could. But then you must factor in the sneak time for ‘round-the-bend woodies, the time you’ll spend exploring beaver ponds, the fact that you’ll need your tent up and firewood stacked by three p.m. because there are squirrels in the woods and supper beckons.

  If you don’t know the locals, you’ll need public land for a campsite, or count on sandbars below the high-water mark. Don’t expect primeval conditions. You’ll hear the distant hum of traffic and the occasional barking dog and maybe a tractor, but they will be less bothersome than you might imagine. Expect that you’ll pull your loaded boat over downed trees and logjams, sometimes so often that you’ll swear it’s the last time you’ll try this. But it won’t be, because you’ll have a little piece of river to yourself and how often does that happen?

  That first night we camped on a knoll of high ground overlooking the largest beaver pond I’ve ever seen. Two separate, parallel beaver dams, each hundreds of feet long, impounded a pond of swamp and dead timber that stretched to the horizon. It was easily a mile long, perhaps much larger than that, but even from the highest bank I couldn’t see the far side. Amber water drained through the dams in gurgling cascades, like surf. We cooked a late supper as a nearly full moon rose over the beaver swamp, laying down a lane of shimmering white light through the trees. The Coleman lantern hissed, peppers and onions sizzled on a backpacking stove, wood crackled and popped in the fire. I lit a cheap cigar bought at the last minute from a country store just a few miles from the put-in. We’d paid $2.09 for a five-pack of Tampa Nuggets, and I thought of the pretentious days when I’d turned up my nose at any smoke that didn’t cost twice as much as that entire pack.

  “You remember those Garcia y Vegas you used to bring on our college backpacking trips?” Lee asked. I did. Each one came in its own plastic tube, which was the only thing differentiating them from every other cheap cigar. “Man, we thought we’d hit the top with those,” he said. We counted off a few places and times we’d smoked them: Mount Mitchell’s backcountry in 14 inches of new snow. Merchants Millpond in March, the time we hauled a bushel of oysters into the swamp woods by canoe. Who knew how many duck blinds?

  And I began to understand, sitting there with cheap smoke trailing up to the stars. Like the turkeys on the sandbar and the swamp moon, each one of these memories was a gift. Each one a tiny tile in the mosaic of memory.

  The next morning we woke to deerhounds that had struck scent north of the river. I made a quick cup of coffee and downed a handful of raisins. Ten minutes after waking, we were in the boat. Already the river had broadened; now it was twice as wide as our canoe was long—but it was just as crooked as ever. The trick to jump-shooting ducks by boat is to move slowly, steering the canoe into the shadows and along the inside of each bend. The hardest part is doing all this while positioning the gunner for a quick shot—and all with feather and sculling strokes, rarely removing the paddle from the water.

  We hugged the bank and sliced through plumes of mist rising from the creek. Lee saw the ducks first, on the far side of the sixth or seventh bend. He dipped his hat brim and tightened his grip on the Ithaca over/under that his father had given him when he’d turned 12. It was a right-hand bend, and as I pried the boat away from the bank, there were the ducks—woodie drakes and hens, heads erect, nervous. The closest bird, a resplendent drake awash in sunlight, swam back and forth like a panicked squirrel in the road. Any second. And then the ducks flushed and the gun popped twice and a single bird came down.

  “Whoa, nice one!” I said.

  Lee picked up the hen. “She’s banded,” he said. “Don’t see that every day.” Paleyellow feathers checked with black drifted on the water, and my thoughts went downstream with them.

  Lemon feathers, we called them, and in college I worked at a drugstore lunch counter where I traded the delicate flank feathers of wood ducks to an older fellow who came in for coffee most days. He tied trout flies with them and treasured all I could garner, but I always was convinced I was getting the better end of the deal. For a brown lunch bag of wood duck feathers, I got to listen to his stories of trout fishing up in remote stretches of the Pisgah Forest. He brought me samples of flies—tawny tufts as small as peas—and told me about brown trout that sucked them down into dark pools and rainbows that slashed at them from riffles. At the time I’d never caught a trout, but leaning over the lunch counter, pouring his refills, I knew it was only a matter of time. I was 20 years old. Back then it was all just a matter of time.

  On the second day we had a go of it finding high ground to camp. All day long tributary streams and swamp seeps flowed into the creek, which soon wound through low ground cloaked in cane and shrub. Hardwoods and cypress trees retreated from the banks. We could see where the river rose and fell with the ocean tides—not a lot, just a foot or so, but enough to make every piece of dry ground a question mark. Two good spots were clearly posted against trespassing, so we paddled on to a knuckle of public land that was our last hope before having to spend a long night in the bottom of the canoe. We cut briers and cane and wedged the tent into a tangle of brush. If we curled up just so, we fit between the cypress knees that poked under the tent floor.

  Dinner was
standard fare for my canoe camping trips; I long before had eaten my last can of Dinty Moore beef stew. To the wood duck breasts I added bacon and the boned squirrel I’d been able to pot, and I sautéed the lot in garlic and olive oil. I toasted pine nuts in the fire and boiled linguine, sun-dried tomatoes and dehydrated mushrooms. Parmesan cheese was the finishing touch—that and the cries of barred owls upriver. Then the Coleman lantern ran out of gas and we watched orange sparks rise from the fire and wink out amid the stars, and I wondered why we’d lit the lantern in the first place.

  By most standards we ended up with little to show for our time. We shot two wood ducks and a squirrel. We never saw a deer, although we paddled through another flock of turkeys and drifted so close to a beaver that its tail-slap splashed the canoe with water. Simple pleasures. Gifts, if you look at them in just the right light. One morning after breakfast I sat on the riverbank watching leaves drift around an upstream bend and tried to guess which color would come next: a golden-yellow beech leaf, a nut-brown oak, perhaps an orange-tinted maple. We paddled under a huge aerie; whether it was the nest of an osprey or an eagle I can’t say. I remember lying back by the fire and talking about old friends and our young kids and listening to the swamp water run over the beaver dam.

  But most of all I remember the old man. He was the only human we saw on the entire trip until we cruised far into the tidal zone, where a few houses huddled over the marsh on sparse high ground and fishermen cast for speckled trout along marsh humps. He waited for us to break camp on our second day on the river, floating in the quiet water just downstream of a big logjam. He was quiet and patient as Lee and I struggled with our boat and load, each of us out of the canoe and gingerly balancing atop a slick sunken log while we pulled the boat—one, two, three, heave!—laterally between us.