The Best Hunting Stories Ever Told

by Jay Cassell

  “Fort!” Kip threw his arms around his old friend’s broad shoulders.

  “Why, Kippy,” he purred in his Carolina drawl. “Good God, boy, it’s good to see ya.”

  “How long has it been, Fort?”

  “Lemme see. . . . Been about ten years, I reckon. You was just getting out of that fancy college your pa sent you to in Massachusetts.”

  “Williams. Yeah, I know. Well, that’s behind me, thank God. Fort, I want you to meet my wife, Laurie, and my son, Tommy.”

  Fort held a box tied with a fancy ribbon in his hands and gave it to me. “Jest a little something for you, Laurie—pralines, a specialty down South. My wife, God rest her soul, she used to make the best pralines in all of Carolina. These are store-bought. Not too bad, but I can’t say I’ve had a really good praline since Louise died.”

  “I’m sorry about Louise, Fort,” Kip said.

  “She had all kinds of problems at the end, then her heart just stopped beating one day.” Fort’s eyes got teary. “I’d just come in from sowing the corn—”

  “Tell me,” I interjected, anxious to reroute the course of the conversation. “How did you get your name, Fort?”

  He brightened up. “Well, now, that’s quite a story, Laurie,” he smiled. “You see, my daddy was born and bred in Carolina. He and his kin never quite got over losing the War. . . .”

  Tom whispered to me, “He’s talking about the Civil War.”

  “. . . so when I was born—I was the last of twelve children—it so happened that I came into the world on the day that Fort Sumter fell. So my daddy—his last name were Falls, you see—he named me Fort Sumter Falls—”

  “. . . because,” I interjected, “you were born on the day that Fort Sumter fell.”

  “She’s not only pretty, but she’s smart, too.” Fort winked at Kip. “You picked a good’un, Boy.”

  Maybe, I thought, having Fort for a month wouldn’t be so bad.

  We Meet Rebel

  “How many bags do you have, Fort?” Kip asked as we made our way the short distance to baggage claim.

  “Just one . . . and Rebel.”

  “No. . . . ” Tom said, stopping in his tracks. “ You didn’t bring Rebel, did you?”

  “Rebel?” I asked.

  “ Yes,” Kip replied. “ Why, he must be fifteen by now!”

  “Sixteen, Kippy!” Fort beamed, and at that moment, an airport representative carried a small kennel into the baggage claim area.

  “Rebel!” Tom cried. “How are you, old boy?” He opened up the wire cage, reached in, and took out a handsome beagle that, like his master, did not at all show his age.

  “ You didn’t say anything about bringing Rebel,” Tom said.

  “Don’t suppose I did, Kippy,” Fort smiled, fondling his dog’s ears, “but then I reckon I guess I didn’t have to. You know I never go anywhere without my Rebel.” Rebel pulled away from Kip to plant a series of wet kisses on his master’s hand.

  Tommy squealed with delight at the little dog.

  “I don’t know when there wasn’t Rebel—that is, a Rebel,” Kip explained to me. “Fort ’s been raising beagles . . . since when, Fort?”

  “Since I was a tadpole myself, Kippy. One time, I had twelve beagles. Got Corey started on beagles for years and years before he took up with them high-hat setters of his. Though I gotta say, I did love ‘em—Cider and Tober and, a’ course, Trout. I always named one a my beagles, though, Rebel, and I’ve never been caught without one.”

  “This dog must be the great-great-grandson of the first Rebel I ever knew, right, Fort?”

  “Yep, I reckon that ’s so. That was Rebel of the Wilderness. His son was Rebel of Gettysburg. This old boy is Rebel of Appomatox.”

  “He always named his Rebels after Civil War battles,” Kip explained.

  “Do you think he’ ll get along with Bess?” I whispered to Kip as we headed to the car with Fort, his bag, and Rebel in tow.

  “Sure, if she ever wakes up long enough to get to know him. Besides,” Kip added, “it’s not like anything is going to happen.”

  “I see what you mean,” I grinned. “I guess the most they could ever be is really good friends.”

  Fort Settles In

  Fort and Rebel fit right in. Kip was delighted to have his old friend with us, who proved to be like a favorite uncle, not a guest. Rebel and Bess hit it off immediately and spent most of the day curled up, sleeping contentedly together like a couple of old folk, which in point of fact they were. It was hard to believe, but Bess was now getting on nine.

  “Your dogs have always lived to a great old age,” Tom asked Fort when we were sitting to dinner that evening. “ What ’s your secret?”

  “Can’t say I do anything particular,” Fort replied. Take care of ‘em just like I take care of myself. We take a long walk every day, he gets a lot of loving and gives a lot of loving, and he eats what I eat.” Fort took the side of his fork and shoveled some of the sherried beef and rice I had made over to the side of his plate. He could see I was concerned that perhaps he didn’t like his dinner. “Mmmmm, that was a reeeeal good dinner, Laurie,” he said. “ That cow died good. I’m just saving a bit for Rebel. Like I said, he eats what I eat.”

  “ There’s plenty more, Fort,” I said, lifting the casserole cover to offer seconds.

  “I’m full, gal. Besides,” he smiled, looking over to the counter. “I see them Joe Froggers sitting over there, and I’m particular partial-like to Joe Froggers.”

  Fort Reminisces

  Fort told us stories, wonderful stories. About the plantation down South, and years before when Corey first bought it, and how back then some black folk wished the Civil War had never happened because the road to freedom was a hard road for them. “Corey was a great quail hunter,” Ford reminisced, “and he bought the plantation so he could hunt birds. Of course, the business of the place was growing cotton, and there were black folk who tended to the crop just like their daddies and mammies had.

  “They were poor folk. Corey was away most of the time in Hollywood, writing those movies for all those famous people like Hedy Lamarr and Robert Taylor and Greer Garson. He got mighty upset when he saw how poor people was. So he called me from Hollywood one day and he says, ‘Fort,’ he says to me, ‘every week you butcher one of those big hogs we got on the farm, and you let the folk come down and give them some meat.’ I remember how workers would gather round the slaughter yard, standing up along the ridge, waiting for the signal to come down for their pork parcels that me and my wife made up after some of the hands did the slaughtering. Corey made sure the families with children got the best cuts, then the sick and old people. Soon we was raising hogs like nobody ’s business and slaughtering three or four a week, just so the black folk that worked for Corey could have fresh meat.

  “ Well, then Corey gets another idea. You see, the nearest store was nine miles away, and folk had to walk to get their supplies. No one had a car back then, and only a few black folk could afford to keep a mule. One day, Corey calls me up from Hollywood and says, ‘Fort, you go build us a store. That way the folk don’t have to walk so far to get their supplies. And while you’re at it,’ he says, ‘you go and build a school, for the youngsters. They need some education, too, you know.’ He had a heart of gold, Corey did, and no one never gave him near enough credit, but he didn’t want gratitude. He was rich and famous. ‘I had a lucky break,’ he’d say to me. ‘If I can give other people a break, well then, that’s payback enough for me.’ ”

  Fort’s Visit Sails By

  And so the days melted into weeks, and Kip and I reveled in Fort ’s company. The two men went off just about every day to their old, secret trout streams and dark holes on the lake, fishing with Bess and Rebel in tow. They never came home without at least a couple of handsome rainbow, or a salmon, or a string of smallmouth bass.

  All the while, Fort told us stories. There was the hilarious one about how the septic system got stopped up when Corey’s mistre
ss came from Hollywood to visit him at Stonybroke, his home in Hardscrabble; or the time when Corey’s best friend, W. C. Fields, came to stay with Corey at Christmas and how people here in Town took no notice. After all, Hollywood types didn’t impress people in Hardscrabble. Now, a tenpoint buck . . . that was a different matter entirely.

  Years later, when I started working on Corey Ford’s literary archives, I discovered how deep the friendship was that he shared with Fields. Ford, a lifelong bachelor, always had difficulty coming to grips with Christmas and, until the day he died, gathered friends and friends’ families about him and positioned himself as the benevolent Ebenezer Scrooge. Fields, likewise, had a great difficulty at Christmastime, but for a different reason. He was quoted as saying, “I believed in Christmas until I was eight years old. I had saved up some money carrying ice in Philadelphia, and I was going to buy my mother a copper-bottomed clothes boiler for Christmas. I kept the money hidden in a brown crock in the coal bin. My father found the crock. He did exactly what I would have done in his place. He stole the money. And ever since then I’ve remembered nobody on Christmas, and I want nobody to remember me either.”

  There was Fort ’s story about how Judge Parker and Corey founded the “Love the Little Kitty Society,” a club complete with printed membership cards and a charter dedicated to “tiger hunting for the man with modest means.” The two friends would sit on Corey’s stone porch every night after supper and pot feral cats because, as Fort pointed out, “feral cats kill most of the wild birds, including pa’tridge—and the Judge wanted to pronounce and execute the sentence against those feline offenders.”

  But there was one story that Fort told us. It would take a number of years before I gathered up all the pieces and I could put the whole puzzle together. It is one of the most poignant stories I’ve ever known—and I daresay, I’m not alone.

  Just a Dog

  Farmer Boyden was tending to his chickens and pigs when he heard a shot ring out from below his barn. It was deer season. Fearful that one of his cows had been hit, he dropped what he was doing, grabbed his shotgun, and ran as fast as he could to the pasture. Gratified, after a quick glance, that his small herd appeared unscathed, his relief turned to outrage when a second shot was discharged not fifty yards away. It came from an adjacent field, which belonged to his neighbor, a country gentleman and a writer. There, beyond the stone fence, by the apple tree, stood a hunter. The farmer did not recognize the man. A cloud of dissipating smoke encircled the muzzle of a 30-30, freshly fired at point-blank range at what the farmer assumed was a small deer or coyote. But when he came upon the scene, he saw to his horror that the fallen animal was his neighbor’s English setter.

  “ Whatinell do ya think yer doin’?” the farmer hollered at the hunter.

  “ Thought it was a deer,” the hunter said offhandedly, as he unloaded the unspent bullets from the chamber of his gun. “I heard a rustle in the brush and saw a flash of white. Thought it was a whitetail deer. Honest mistake. It was an accident. . . . Anyone could have seen that white through this heavy cover and thought the same thing.”

  Indeed, the brush was heavy; and the dog was mostly white—a snow white English setter with orange ticks. But now she was a pitiful, lifeless heap. The farmer knelt down, hopeful of finding a sign of life, but finding none, he gingerly hoisted the poor animal onto his shoulder. As he was doing this, he caught a glimpse of the hunter turning heel and making his way to the road, where a car with Massachusetts license plates was parked.

  “Mister,” the farmer called. “Come back.” The hunter turned around with a smirk on his face that was wiped clean when he realized he was looking into the shooting end of the farmer’s double-barrel gun. “You come with me,” Farmer Boyden ordered quietly, as he motioned toward his neighbor’s house with the persuasive point of the gun muzzle.

  “Look, I said it was an accident,” the hunter mewled, turning pale. He groped for his wallet. “Here. . . . ” he offered with hands shaking. “Here’s five bucks. That should settle the matter.”

  The farmer replied with the determined cock of the right hammer of his gun. “ This dog was my neighbor’s,” the farmer said. “ You owe him some explaining, not a darn fiver.”

  “Hell . . . it was just a dog,” the hunter pleaded.

  “ You tell that to my neighbor,” the farmer replied bitterly.

  The farmer marched the hunter across the road and up the long, winding drive that led to an imposing stone lodge.

  “Knock on the door,” the farmer ordered, as he gently lowered the body of his neighbor’s dog onto the front lawn.

  A moment later, the country gentleman answered the door, beheld the scene—and fell to his knees.

  Mabel, the housekeeper, related what happened. She had been in the kitchen baking pies when she heard a hollow cry. Running to the front door, she came upon her employer on his knees, cradling the body of his beloved setter, Trout. Sitting stiffly on the ledge of the stone porch, looking blankly over the valley vista, was a stranger. Standing nearby with a loaded shotgun trembling in his hand was Farmer Boyden.

  “ The stranger got up,” Mabel recollected, “and said, ‘ It was just a dog.’ Then Charlie Boyden said to the stranger, ‘Get the hell outta here.’The man ran down the driveway like a frightened hare. Charlie carried Trout behind the house and buried her. Corey was too broken up. He went to his room and didn’t come down for dinner.”

  The Day was November 23, 1940.

  Farmer Boyden’s neighbor was the legendary outdoor writer Corey Ford, who wrote a monthly column for Field & Stream. From 1952 until 1969, the antics and misadventures of an eccentric Down East group of hunters and fisherman known as the Lower Forty Shooting, Angling and Inside Straight delighted and captured the hearts of readers the world over. Not only were dogs an integral part of the fictitious Lower Forty, but they were fundamental to Corey’s real-life existence. A lifelong bachelor, Corey’s beloved setters were his family—and Trout especially was like a favorite child.

  The night his little setter died, Corey made an entry in his diary that I happened upon but can’t divulge. After all, a man, when confronted with the handiwork of the Grim Reaper, is due the privacy and respect of his sorrowing, and I found his diary unwittingly. Suffice it to say, the man mourned deeply, as you who have loved and lost a dog well know; and afterwards, he wrote a letter to his hunting buddy, chief editor of Field & Stream Ray Holland. Corey asked him to publish the following letter, and Holland stopped the presses to get it into the December issue of the magazine. It read:

  Dear Ray:

  I know this is a kind of unusual request; but I ’d like to borrow some space in your columns to write an open letter to a man I do not know. He may read it if it is in your columns; or some of his friends may notice his name and ask him to read it. You see, it has to do with sport—a certain kind of sport.

  The man’s name is Sherwood G. Coggins. That was the name on his hunting license. He lives at 1096 Lawrence Street, in Lowell. He says he is in the real estate and insurance business in Lowell.

  This weekend, Mr. Coggins, you drove up into New Hampshire with some friends to go deer hunting. You went hunting on my property here in Hardscrabble. You didn’t ask my permission; but that was all right. I let people hunt on my land. Only, while you were hunting, you shot and killed my bird dog.

  Oh, it was an accident, of course. You said so yourself. You said that you saw a flick of something moving, and you brought up your rifle and fired. It might have been another hunter. It might have been a child running through the woods. As it turned out, it was just a dog.

  Just a dog, Mr. Coggins. Just a little English setter I have hunted with for quite a few years. Just a little female setter who was very proud and staunch on point, and who always held her head high, and whose eyes had the brown of October in them. We had hunted a lot of alder thickets and apple orchards together, the little setter and I. She knew me, and I knew her, and we liked to hunt together. We had hunted w
oodcock together this fall, and grouse, and in another week we were planning to go down to Carolina together and look for quail. But yesterday morning she ran down to the fields in front of my house, and you saw a flick in the bushes, and you shot her. You shot her through the back, you said, and broke her spine. She crawled out of the bushes and across the field toward you, dragging her hind legs. She was coming to you to help her. She was a gentle pup, and nobody had ever hurt her, and she could not understand. She began hauling herself toward you, and looking at you with her brown eyes, and you put a second bullet through her head. You were sportsman enough for that.

  I know you didn’t mean it, Mr. Coggins. You felt very sorry afterward. You told me that it really spoiled your deer hunting the rest of the day. It spoiled my bird hunting the rest of a lifetime. At least, I hope one thing, Mr. Coggins. That is why I am writing you. I hope that you will remember how she looked. I hope that the next time you raise a rifle to your shoulder you will see her over the sights, dragging herself toward you across the field, with blood running from her mouth and down her white chest. I hope you will see her eyes.

  I hope you will always see her eyes, Mr. Coggins, whenever there is a flick in the bushes and you bring your rifle to your shoulder before you know what is there.

  —Corey Ford

  A furor followed. Mail poured into the New York offices of Field & Stream the likes of which the magazine had never seen before or possibly since. Hundreds of newspapers, magazines, dog and sportsmen’s clubs, businesses, and community groups across the country seized upon Corey’s poignant open letter and reprinted it to the same effect. Anyone who ever loved a dog understood. Most wept. Today the message garnered from Corey’s letter is no less potent or poignant than when the ink and tears were still wet on his paper, and “Just a Dog” stands alone in the laurels of American sporting dog literature.