by Jay Cassell
“Steady,” he called, “steady, boy.” He started across the bridge. “I’m coming.”
He had been sick when he wrote “Tinkhamtown,” sick in body and soul, for a long time. Corey was sixty-seven that summer when, while traveling in Ireland, he developed an aneurysm that required immediate attention.
They flew him back home, to Mary Hitchcock, a stone’s throw from his house, where he had an operation, and it was deemed a success. He was recuperating in Dick’s House, a brick mansion dedicated to ailing members of the Dartmouth family; Corey was surely family, considering all he’d done for the college—founding a boxing squad, the rugby team, helping boys financially through college.
He called home.
“Bring me Tober,” he said, meaning his English setter, the son of Cider. But in the few minutes it took for one of the boys to get Tober to Dick’s House, Corey had suffered a crushing stroke.
He was half paralyzed. The doctors determined there was nothing they could do, not anymore, so he went home where his housekeeper and a nurse could care for him, and the boys could come in and out and keep him company.
One morning he made it known that he wanted to go to the bathroom to shave, alone. A couple of the boys carried him in and closed the door. Shortly after came the crash. Corey had suffered a second stroke, this one devastating: He was in a coma.
The ambulance came. It was a short distance to the hospital, and they put him in a private room. Meanwhile, one of the boys had followed in Corey’s car with Tober. He would want Tober. A couple of boys were outside Corey’s room. They gave their mate the signal, and he led Tober up the fire escape. When the coast was clear, they took Tober into Corey’s room.
He lay there in a coma. Tober saw Corey and jumped on his bed and set down beside him. The setter put his head on his master’s shoulder.
And in the coma, Corey Ford raised his arms, put them around his beloved dog’s neck, and died.
A year to the day, despite a loving home, Tober followed his master to Tinkhamtown.
Is Tinkhamtown a real place? Yes, of course. Everything is the way Corey said it was, down to the lilac trees. Majestic elms surround the cellar holes, vestiges of homes that were once alive with people; but the elms died, too, from disease. The summer of the twentyfifth anniversary of Corey’s death, I went to Tinkhamtown. The dead elms were alive again with new, green growth and new life sprouting from saplings and branches thirty feet up.
I once brought someone to Tinkhamtown, the only time I ever did. When we came to the bridge, he stopped. He refused to cross.
He said it was not his time.
But then, how will we know when it is our time to cross the bridge?
And So, Farewell and Adieu
“This is the [Hardscrabble] of the past and present, and of the future, who shall speak? But whatever may betide—and if it be ill may we not be here to see it—the mountains will still keep a stately watch in their changing garb of green or russet gold or white, with the lakes spreading below in sparkling blue or armored ice. What man has created here can pass away, but the beauty with which God dowered this beloved corner of our great land will remain forever, even as it dawned upon the vision of that first white explorer three hundred years ago.”
—Dorothy Peck Chapman
We have come to the end of our journey, and it is time to part. Do not say goodbye. Just say so long. We will meet again, and then, as Joe Gargery said to Pip in Great Expectations, what larks we shall have! In the between time, remember Hardscrabble; remember all the things you’ve been told and seen and heard. . . .
Whenever you hear the breast-bursting song of the first robin of spring, or whiff the sweet autumn perfume of rotting apples settling on a mossy bed of fallen leaves . . . When the deep blue of a bottomless summer’s lake has the cast of a sapphire, and a trout breaks the surface and flashes his tail in the sun-glinted water . . .
Think of us. . . .
For Hardscrabble will always be just down the road apiece and as far away as a thought; as eternal as a memory, and evermore sheltered in the safekeeping of your dreams.
And now, dear friend, Godspeed.
Reprinted with permission of Dartmouth College.
The Heart of the Game
THOMAS MCGUANE
Hunting in your own back yard becomes with time, if you love hunting, less and less expeditionary. This year, when Montana’s eager frosts knocked my garden on its butt, the hoe seemed more like the rifle than it ever had before, the vegetables more like game.
My son and I went scouting before the season and saw some antelope in the high plains foothills of the Absaroka Range, wary, hanging on the skyline; a few bands and no great heads. We crept around, looking into basins, and at dusk met a tired cowboy on a tired horse followed by a tired blue-heeler dog. The plains seemed bigger than anything, bigger than the mountains that seemed to sit in the middle of them, bigger than the ocean. The clouds made huge shadows that travelled on the grass slowly through the day.
Hunting season trickles on forever; if you don’t go in on a cow with anybody, there is the dark argument of the empty deep-freeze against headhunting (“You can’t eat horns!”). But nevertheless, in my mind, I’ve laid out the months like playing cards, knowing some decent whitetails could be down in the river bottom and, fairly reliably, the long windy shots at antelope. The big buck mule deer—the ridge-runners—stay up in the scree and rock walls until the snow drives them out; but they stay high long after the elk have quit and broken down the hay corrals on the ranches and farmsteads, which, when you’re hunting the rocks from a saddle horse, look pathetic and housebroken with their yellow lights against the coming of winter.
Where I live, the Yellowstone River runs straight north, then takes an eastward turn at Livingston, Montana. This flowing north is supposed to be remarkable; and the river doesn’t do it long. It runs mostly over sand and stones once it comes out of the rock slots near the Wyoming line. But all along, there are deviations of one sort or another: canals, backwaters, sloughs; the red willows grow in the sometime-flooded bottom, and at the first elevation, the cottonwoods. I hunt here for the white-tailed deer which, in recent years, have moved up these rivers in numbers never seen before.
The first morning, the sun came up hitting around me in arbitrary panels as the light moved through the jagged openings in the Absaroka Range. I was walking very slowly in the edge of the trees, the river invisible a few hundred yards to my right but sending a huge sigh through the willows. It was cold and the sloughs had crowns of ice thick enough to support me. As I crossed one great clear pane, trout raced around under my feet and a ten-foot bubble advanced slowly before my cautious steps. Then passing back into the trees, I found an active game trail, cut cross-lots to pick a better stand, sat in a good vantage place under a cottonwood with the aught-six across my knees. I thought, running my hands up into my sleeves, This is lovely but I’d rather be up in the hills ; and I fell asleep.
I woke up a couple of hours later, the coffee and early-morning drill having done not one thing for my alertness. I had drooled on my rifle and it was time for my chores back at the ranch. My chores of late had consisted primarily of working on screenplays so that the bank didn’t take the ranch. These days the primary ranch skill is making the payment; it comes before irrigation, feeding out, and calving. Some rancher friends find this so discouraging they get up and roll a number or have a slash of tanglefoot before they even think of the glories of the West. This is the New Rugged.
The next day, I reflected upon my lackadaisical hunting and left really too early in the morning. I drove around to Mission Creek in the dark and ended up sitting in the truck up some wash listening to a New Mexico radio station until my patience gave out and I started out cross-country in the dark, just able to make out the nose of the Absaroka Range as it faced across the river to the Crazy Mountains. It seemed maddeningly up and down slick banks, and a couple of times I had game clatter out in front of me in the dark. Then I
turned up a long coulee that climbed endlessly south, and started in that direction, knowing the plateau on top should hold some antelope. After half an hour or so, I heard the mad laughing of coyotes, throwing their voices all around the inside of the coulee, trying to panic rabbits and making my hair stand on end despite my affection for them. The stars tracked overhead into the first pale light, and it was nearly dawn before I came up on the bench. I could hear cattle below me and I moved along an edge of thorn trees to break my outline, then sat down at the point to wait for shooting light.
I could see antelope on the skyline before I had that light; and by the time I did, there was a good big buck angling across from me, looking at everything. I thought I could see well enough, and I got up into a sitting position and into the sling. I had made my moves quietly, but when I looked through the scope the antelope was two hundred yards out, using up the country in bounds. I tracked with him, let him bounce up into the reticle, and touched off a shot. He was down and still, but I sat watching until I was sure.
Nobody who loves to hunt feels absolutely hunky-dory when the quarry goes down. The remorse spins out almost before anything and the balancing act ends on one declination or another. I decided that unless I become a vegetarian, I’ll get my meat by hunting for it. I feel absolutely unabashed by the arguments of other carnivores who get their meat in plastic with blue numbers on it. I’ve seen slaughterhouses, and anyway, as Sitting Bull said, when the buffalo are gone, we will hunt mice, for we are hunters and we want our freedom.
The antelope had piled up in the sage, dead before he hit the ground. He was an old enough buck that the tips of his pronged horns were angled in toward each other. I turned him downhill to bleed him out. The bullet had mushroomed in the front of the lungs, so the job was already halfway done. With antelope, proper field dressing is critical because they can end up sour if they’ve been run or haphazardly hog-dressed. And they sour from their own body heat more than from external heat.
The sun was up and the big buteo hawks were lifting on the thermals. There was enough breeze that the grass began to have directional grain like the prairie, and the rim of the coulee wound up away from me toward the Absaroka. I felt peculiarly solitary, sitting on my heels next to the carcass in the sagebrush and greasewood, my rifle racked open on the ground. I made an incision around the metatarsal glands inside the back legs and carefully removed them and set them well aside; then I cleaned the blade of my hunting knife with handfuls of grass to keep from tainting the meat with those powerful glands. Next I detached the anus and testes from the outer walls and made a shallow puncture below the sternum, spread it with the thumb and forefinger of my left hand, and ran the knife upside down to the bone bridge between the hind legs. Inside, the diaphragm was like the taut lid of a drum and cut away cleanly, so that I could reach clear up to the back of the mouth and detach the windpipe. Once that was done I could draw the whole visceral package out onto the grass and separate out the heart, liver, and tongue before propping the carcass open with two whittled-up sage scantlings.
You could tell how cold the morning was, despite the exertion, just by watching the steam roar from the abdominal cavity. I stuck the knife in the ground and sat back against the slope, looking clear across to Convict Grade and the Crazy Mountains. I was blood from the elbows down and the antelope’s eyes had skinned over. I thought. This is goddamned serious and you had better always remember that.
There was a big red enamel pot on the stove; and I ladled the antelope chili into two bowls for my son and me. He said, “It better not be too hot.”
“It isn’t.”
“What’s your news?” he asked.
“Grandpa’s dead.”
“Which grandpa?” he asked. I told him it was Big Grandpa, my father. He kept on eating. “He died last night.”
He said, “I know what I want for Christmas.”
“What’s that?”
“I want Big Grandpa back.”
It was 1950-something and I was small, under twelve, say, and there were four of us: my father, two of his friends, and me. There was a good belton setter belonging to the one friend, a hearty bird hunter who taught dancing and fist-fought at any provocation. The other man was old and sick and had a green fatal look in his face. My father took me aside and said, “Jack and I are going to the head of this field”—and he pointed up a mile and a half of stalks to where it ended in the flat woods—“and we’re going to take the dog and get what he can point. These are running birds. So you and Bill just block the field and you’ll have some shooting.”
“I’d like to hunt with the dog,” I had a 20-gauge Winchester my grandfather had given me, which got hocked and lost years later when another of my family got into the bottle; and I could hit with it and wanted to hunt over the setter. With respect to blocking the field, I could smell a rat.
“You stay with Bill,” said my father, “and try to cheer him up.”
“What’s the matter with Bill?”
“He’s had one heart attack after another and he’s going to die.”
“When?”
“Pretty damn soon.”
I blocked the field with Bill. My first thought was, I hope he doesn’t die before they drive those birds onto us; but if he does, I’ll have all the shooting.
There was a crazy old autumn light on everything, magnified by the yellow silage all over the field. The dog found birds right away and they were shooting. Bill said he was sorry but he didn’t feel so good. He had his hunting license safety-pinned to the back of his coat and fiddled with a handful of 12-gauge shells. “I’ve shot a shitpile of game,” said Bill, “but I don’t feel so good anymore.” He took a knife out of his coat pocket. “I got this in the Marines,” he said, “and I carried it for four years in the Pacific. The handle’s drilled out and weighted so you can throw it. I want you to have it.” I took it and thanked him, looking into his green face, and wondered why he had given it to me. “That’s for blocking this field with me,” he said. “Your dad and that dance teacher are going to shoot them all. When you’re not feeling so good, they put you at the end of the field to block when there isn’t shit-all going to fly by you. They’ll get them all. They and the dog will.”
We had an indestructible tree in the yard we had chopped on, nailed steps to, and initialed; and when I pitched that throwing knife at it, the knife broke in two. I picked it up and thought, This thing is jinxed. So I took it out into the crab-apple woods and put it in the can I had buried, along with a Roosevelt dime and an atomic-bomb ring I had sent away for. This was a small collection of things I buried over a period of years. I was sending them to God. All He had to do was open the can, but they were never collected. In any case, I have long known that if I could understand why I wanted to send a broken knife I believed to be jinxed to God, then I would be a long way toward what they call a personal philosophy as opposed to these hand-to-mouth metaphysics of who said what to whom in some cornfield twenty-five years ago.
We were in the bar at Chico Hot Springs near my home in Montana: me, a lout poet who had spent the day floating under the diving board while adolescent girls leapt overhead; and my brother John, who had glued himself to the pipe which poured warm water into the pool and announced over and over in a loud voice that every drop of water had been filtered through his bathing suit.
Now, covered with wrinkles, we were in the bar, talking to Alvin Close, an old government hunter. After half a century of predator control he called it “useless and half-assed.”
Alvin Close killed the last major stock-killing wolf in Montana. He hunted the wolf so long he raised a litter of dogs to do it with. He hunted the wolf futilely with a pack that had fought the wolf a dozen times, until one day he gave up and let the dogs run the wolf out the back of a shallow canyon. He heard them yip their way into silence while he leaned up against a tree; and presently the wolf came tiptoeing down the front of the canyon into Alvin’s lap. The wolf simply stopped because the game was up. Alvin ra
ised the Winchester and shot it.
“How did you feel about that?” I asked.
“How do you think I felt?”
“I don’t know.”
“I felt like hell.”
Alvin’s evening was ruined and he went home. He was seventy-six years old and carried himself like an old-time army officer, setting his glass on the bar behind him without looking.
You stare through the plastic at the red smear of meat in the supermarket. What’s this it says here? Mighty Good? Tastee? Quality, Premium, and Government Inspected? Soon enough, the blood is on your hands. It’s inescapable.
Aldo Leopold was a hunter who I am sure abjured freeze-dried vegetables and extrusion burgers. His conscience was clean because his hunting was part of a larger husbandry in which the life of the country was enhanced by his own work. He knew that game populations are not bothered by hunting until they are already precarious and that precarious game populations should not be hunted. Grizzlies should not be hunted, for instance. The enemy of game is clean farming and sinful chemicals: as well as the useless alteration of watersheds by promoter cretins and the insidious dizzards of land development, whose lobbyists teach us the venality of all governments.
A world in which a sacramental portion of food can be taken in an old way—hunting, fishing, farming, and gathering—has as much to do with societal sanity as a day’s work for a day’s pay.
For a long time, there was no tracking snow. I hunted on horseback for a couple of days in a complicated earthquake fault in the Gallatins. The fault made a maze of narrow canyons with flat floors. The sagebrush grew on woody trunks higher than my head and left sandy paths and game trails where the horse and I could travel.
