For a Handful of Feathers

by Jim Harrison

  “You’re telling me.”

  VIII

  I was introduced to hunting by a Normandy gamekeeper when I was seven years old. The gamekeeper was a huge middle-aged man who killed crippled birds with his teeth. My weapon was a single-barreled nine-millimeter shotgun. I shot a hare my first day in the field, wounded it, and cried. I was not allowed to shoot hares—rabbits out, hares non—but I did, and hit the animal in the hindquarters. I cried because I was in trouble, because the hare was screaming and dragging itself in circles on the ground, and because I had never killed with a gun before and it scared me. My tears fell on the rough cloth of the gamekeeper’s hunting coat. He made me finish what I had started but was sensitive enough not to rub blood on my face as was the custom.

  It was a wonder I ever picked up another gun, but I did. The very thing that had frightened me, the conscious and formal resolution to kill and the tangible weight of that decision in my hands, pushed me out the door and into the woods two days later. Although the motives have changed, hunting began with killing. My affair with nature has since then been related to the pursuit of game. I studied a species because I wanted to kill it, and I looked at things through the quick, impatient eyes of the hunter; eyes that darted under brush piles, anticipated movement, plotted courses, assessed what belonged in the shadows and what didn’t; eyes that learned to recognize the details that made me good at what I did. I looked at nature from the narrow angle necessary to act out my passion and always with defined objectives in mind. I looked at a piece of country for the game it hid. I moved differently, dressed differently, and I thought differently from 95 percent of the other hunters, but the bottom line was that I was one of them and still am. I killed a lot of birds in those days and was good at it because I had no regrets. Game was for the taking, and I was galvanized by the glory of numbers; restraint and empathy came later.

  The specific mission of hunting slanted my vision of nature throughout my life, to the extent that even as I grow older and spend more time in the field without a gun I still think, look, and move as though I am hunting. A quest lives in me. I am a hunter like other people are bankers, and along with the seduction of the landscape, my dogs, the efficaciousness of some of my shooting, and the mild aura of danger that follows any hunter in the field, the stroke that killed was always at the core of the sport that took me to the field. This is a waning passion in the gene pool of mankind, now that hunting has no meaningful role in society, no survival merits, no reason to exist except as a sport. In my case it is a sport as natural as dancing or making love, and just as ancient, but to others it is an abomination, and I do understand why.

  I didn’t always obey the rules or the ethics of hunting and have over the years used my guns for all the wrong reasons, but when all is said and done I will make sure I have given back more than I have taken, which I presume is the essence of conservation. In the process of being comfortable with what I do for sport and how I go about it, I see much more of the natural world than most. But keeping things in perspective, I see less than a farmer, a rancher, a surveyor, and all those who are out there every day making ends meet.

  As a hunter I am conscious of food and cover, space and time, predation and disease, hunger and overbreeding, and I understand the effects that these ingredients have on the species I hunt and those I don’t, including our own. In terms of pure knowledge I know less than a third-year biology student.

  My farm has replaced my gun, and I don’t look for the same hiding places anymore; I don’t compute range and angles, I don’t look for feeding patterns. I look at birds that soar under the clouds, birds that eat other birds, and birds that fish with their feet (before this is over I shall be a falconer). I look at all sorts of birds, large and small, and I look at them with gentle eyes.

  I have always been a walker, but before I became a landowner I walked looking at the ground and didn’t raise my eyes unless I was carrying a gun. I would pretend I was thinking but in fact was letting things pass by. In cities I walked into things because they happened to be there. I lost a bet to a woman once who guessed my astrological sign because of the way I shuffled through the streets of Paris wondering where my feet were taking me. “You are a Taurus,” she said, “an earth person.”

  “Merde!” I cursed.

  I tried blaming my posture on the fact that I had been thinking about ways to get into her britches, but she shook her head and laughed like Frenchwomen do. “Cheri, you have a tongue. Use it next time. I might have said yes, I might have said no, but at least you would not have lost that expensive bracelet in the window.” Compounding the affront, she patted me on the rear and it felt like she was burping me.

  Now that I own the land I walk on, I have extended my horizons, dilated my vision, and adopted a druidlike contentment in the laws of nature. We have all reveled in the carnival of death and even lingered in the shadows of spilt blood, but those times, like the day of the great elephant herds, are gone.

  There is nothing divine about man’s laws; in fact they are outdated and self-serving. The laws of God and nature are just as self-serving, and because they are not remunerative they are short on compassion. Darwin once said, “Nature will tell you a direct lie if she can.” So will our Congress, our children, and so will we; it is the nature of the beast.

  IX

  September 1, 1991

  I mowed for five hours today. For two of those hours I stood on the tractor naked except for my sneakers and hat. The temperature gauge scrambled up to 120 degrees and broke. I burned my ass, swam in the pond, and went back to the house feeling tired and thirsty.

  Bill and I drove the perimeters of the property that afternoon and frightened a baby fawn out of a cornfield. It ran, long-legged and awkward, in front of the car, and trembled when I carried it back to the cornfield where its mother waited. The spotted buck was all ears and hooves and knobby extremities, and its breath smelled like condensed milk.

  Last year about the same time I saw a bobcat stretched out across a dirt road four feet in the air, twenty feet in front of my car. The cat sailed over the road three feet behind another fawn, this one a little older and without spots. The deer’s eyes were big and black and terrified; the cat’s eyes were yellow and narrow and focused. The deer turned its head when it jumped the road and there was incomprehension in its eyes. I stopped the car but didn’t hear or see anything. The forest resumed its dominion over mystery.

  A male bobwhite quail ran toward me, gathered speed, and flew at my legs, almost up my shorts. I counted thirteen fledglings the size of mice in the grass, running and stopping, running and stopping. The bobwhite flew across the road and pretended to fall, twisting and pulling itself upright, following the proper genetic upbringing of a drag queen.

  I walked a long way around the big field at sunset. Weather helps sunsets, but there was no weather that night, just dust particles enhancing the red and purple sky my spaniel so loves to watch. At times her eyes pop out of her head for trying to take it all in. She snaps at huge grasshoppers when they fly past her head, but is happiest looking for birds.

  I could barely make out the pine trees now that the weeds and vines have grown around them. In ten years, this field will turn golden in the fall and the tops of the broom sedge will gather the pale evening light, and if I am still here I will walk down a keyboard of loblolly shadows; tonight I walked past the shadows of ragweed, dog fennel, and young pine trees.

  I am attracted to this field even though the trees haven’t grown up. The authority of a two-hundred-acre field. I read in Edward O. Wilson’s Biophilia about man’s natural penchant for parklike habitat, complete with hills and water and well-spaced trees. Edward O. would be pissing in high cotton if he could see this place.

  At worst, a Southern summer feels like a monumental itch; at best, it is the sound of mystery, of childhood, of a string symphony tuning up, of the sounds without which the planet dies. Remove the termites from the planet and the planet will die; remove man, and except fo
r the applause the loss will pass unnoticed.

  Once or twice a week I add my own music to the big field by turning the volume up in the car’s sound system and opening the doors. A boom box of size. Sometimes I replay songs that uncurl the years; usually, like my oak trees, I wave my arms and dance without moving my feet. I prefer dirty boogie, get-down, suck-an-egg kind of music; music to drink to while the dogs chase their noses. J. J. Cale and I cut quite a rug under the boughs of my trees, where there’s no one but myself to criticize or tell me what to do. A man gets spoiled living like this.

  A breath of gold moved into the landscape last week. Harbingers of fall, waves of partridge peas and Crotalaria moved over the landscape. I leafed through a book on Florida’s wildflowers and realized that I had come upon another in a long series of disappointing educational lapses. A certain and unnerving thought came to me: I would be dead long before I knew the names of the flowers that grow on my farm.

  Two white birds dance above the hardwood trees. They are difficult to see. I think of cattle egrets because their wings are long and white. I am wrong; one is a cattle egret, the other is a mature bald eagle. It is his neck and head that are white, not his wings. An eagle dancing with an egret above the trees overlooking the pond. They are close together, slowly bending the air with their bodies, melting bodies, tango-dancing in the sky, and then they are one. The raptor holds the egret’s chest in its talons. The thin, white bird hangs boneless below the eagle that flies toward a pine tree.

  I move too soon. The big bird drops the cattle egret and it falls to the ground in a bundle of white feathers. The eagle lands in the pine tree and looks at me. The white bird gets up, shakes itself like a wet dog, and flies to the safety of where I stand.

  Plus je vois des représentants du peuple, plus j’aime mes chiens.

  (The more I see of the people’s representatives, the more I like my dogs.)

  —Comte Alfred d’Orsay, 1850

  Fall

  I

  I cool my heels in the shade of an ironwood tree, counting doves flying into a cornfield to feed. It is clear and cold for October and the light sparkles through the auburn tassels of the cornhusks. At four-thirty in the afternoon there are 150 mourning doves on the ground, a gray wave of birds feeding on the tiny seeds of the brown-top millet that Bill sowed when he laid the corn by in June. The earth quivers and dances under the flocks of pewter-colored birds. The second phase of the dove season opens in three weeks. I am only here to listen and watch.

  We planted the ten-acre field last spring and at harvesttime we left long rows of standing corn, six stalks wide, for the shooters to hide in, rows that I will mow down as the seasons progress to provide legal food. Later in the month I’ll spread wheat or, if I can buy them cheaply, sunflower seeds. The day before shooting the field I’ll harrow it. Technically that is baiting. The federal law decrees that the seeds must be turned under ten days prior to shooting a dove field. The state gamekeepers don’t enforce that law. Historically the federal and state bodies that regulate the laws pertaining to nature don’t get along. To that basic mistrust one adds the appointed game commissions composed of non-professionals and the pot boils with political intrigue, not to mention imbecility.

  I believe that supplemental food is beneficial to all game and, in the case of dove fields or duck ponds, that growing it should be encouraged rather than forbidden. With more food available, the concentration of migratory birds on the land whose owners are willing to break the law would be lessened, more people would enjoy better hunting, and tens of thousands of nongame as well as game species would benefit from these legal soup kitchens. Enforcement should not be aimed at the sowing of food but at encroachments on limits. Make it tough, make it five hundred dollars for each bird over the limit, and see what happens. No one is going to mess with those numbers.

  On the ground, doves look like bathroom fixtures; in the air they look like small fighter planes. A red-tailed hawk steals over the field. His broad, round wings influence the doves, who jump off the ground in a creaky clatter of gray wings. They split into groups of twenty, scatter, and rise like fireworks above the hawk who, oblivious to their concerns, glides downwind, his chestnut-colored tail spread against the breeze, his attention focused on rats and snakes and other such delicacies. The doves bank over the wet-weather pond and turn back to the millet, dipping and twisting and exposing to the falling sun a wash of pink breasts. The air is alive with glancing wings.

  Dove shooting—our version of lawn shooting—is a social affair, and while the birds deserve high grades for the gunning difficulties they provide as well as for their culinary value, dove shoots fluctuate from boring to out of control. Given adequate wind and enough trees, doves make some of the best targets and, except for passing snipe, the smallest legal ones. A hot sun and a lack of birds is boring; a legal, twelve-bird limit is plenty; a barn burner is a shoot the law hopes to invite itself to; and a sneaker shoot is a barn burner the law is expected to raid and the participants to run from. I have been on every kind of dove shoot over the years and I find it amusing that nowadays, while I am perfectly happy to sit for hours with a pair of binoculars around my neck and not see what I set out to see, sitting with a gun in a dove field with no birds bores me to tears. I would like to think that my impatience stems from an ancestral urge to produce the bacon but suspect that while the act of hunting necessitates a denouement of sorts, the act of observing demands nothing more than one’s eyes and the ability to muse.

  I think of plucked doves glistening with butter and imagine rolling them on a hot grill while the real ones settle back down into the millet. At five-thirty an immense covey of bobwhite quail twenty-five birds strong flies out of the woods. They cast an irregular shadow over the field of black-eyed Susans that leads to the feeding doves. The quail flare in a heartbeat of wings into the first row of standing corn. Birds of all ages fill the covey, giving the assembly an odd, unraveled look. The phenomenon of these huge fall assemblies is nature’s strategy for stirring the blood. These social gatherings eventually break into companies of twelve to fifteen birds that remain loosely together until spring.

  The quail spread in the corn rows, feeding leisurely out of sight. The sun sets through an excess of hanging moss, an orange sun falling through gray-green living moss, decadent and ugly in its beauty. I lean against the ironwood and wait for the quail to finish eating. After a while I feel myself slowly sinking into the tree, all the way into its heart, where I feel the sap pull me underground into the unconsciousness of sleep. A cold breeze out of the north wakes me. The doves and the quail have gone; the purple light introduces a notion of winter and the harvest of wild things.

  II

  My neighbor, Marine Sergeant Retired B. J. Pruit, owns seven acres of land adjoining mine, on which he lives in a single-wide trailer raised on cement blocks. B.J. is in his late fifties, short, and, except for a big mouth and a perfectly round stomach, bone thin. He builds and repairs rifles and demands that the utility people, the mail lady, and the UPS delivery boys call him Sergeant.

  B.J. is a martinet and a bore who will tell you that during his tenure in the corps he made life hell for his subordinates. “Rubbed some grit into the bastards, made ’em into men.” I don’t believe the man has the sense to pour piss out of a boot, but he does have opinions, particularly about guns and politics. His companion, Pigskin, is a mixed-breed bulldog-Rottweiler; Pruit is most proud of him for learning to attack trees on command. Pigskin takes his job seriously, and the trees surrounding B.J.’s trailer are wanting for bark.

  I went bird hunting once with B.J. and his buddy Johnny (Bubba) West on a piece of land that they leased for deer hunting but on which they swore to me there were quail. I was new in the county, accommodating because B.J. was my neighbor, and interested because I had heard he was an oddball. I should have known better, but didn’t, so I got stuck riding around in Bubba’s Jeep Renegade for two hours, drinking beer, dodging chew tobacco spit, and listening to
the kind of trash that fuels civil uprisings.

  I sat in the back seat next to Duke, a big white pointer with warts on his head. Duke was a nice old dog with some hound blood hidden in his ancestry. Every so often he would stand up and bay for no apparent reason. I could tell that Bubba liked the old dog because every time it stood up, he would reach a thick arm behind the seat and absentmindedly play with Duke’s nuts, which dangled inches from my face.

  B.J. spent the morning making endearing comments that ranged from a simpering “Well, no one left any buffaloes for me,” to a rebellious “I want to be remembered as the man who kills the last grizzly.” When I mentioned coyotes, Bubba roared, “Sums of bitches eat all my deer, bucks and butt-aids alike, don’t make no difference.” Butt-heads is a colloquial, low-rent nickname for does. I don’t see B.J. much anymore except late in the season, when he’s desperate enough to try and talk Bill out of a doe permit. I do hear him sighting in his rifles, though.

  III

  The morning glories, which for weeks had dressed the young pine trees in white and lavender gowns, have begun to wilt. Cold nights drag the green from their leaves. The heavy underbrush sighs and looks forward to a rest.

  All but a handful of the bob white broods are fledged, and the young quail have sprouted grown-up feathers. Their flight is erratic, but at least they are airborne and, if vigilant, will distance themselves from most predators. A murder of crows lands on the farm during the corn harvest, hundreds of cheeky black birds alighting on the branches of dead trees, fighting among themselves, chasing jays and woodpeckers, mocking hawks, plucking worms from behind the harrow’s job, and taunting each other like the children they are. Here and there, pink-and-white butterflies dapple aimlessly over the dying grass and once in a while a grasshopper lands weakly on my shirt. For the first time in eight months I think of quail as food and surprise myself by aiming my finger at passing doves. The year always starts for me in the fall, possibly because I spent a long decade in boarding school, but probably because September introduces the start of a new hunting season; forty seasons later, no matter how my approach to hunting differs from when I was younger, venery lives inside of me like a strong woman calling.