For a Handful of Feathers

by Jim Harrison

  The sometimes heedless and always presumptuous experiment that breeders wallow into in order to fashion winners is line breeding. When successful, line breeding produces dogs whose bird-finding acrobatics are those of perfectly controlled madness. When unsuccessful, which is most of the time, some or all of the tainted traits in the bloodlines surface, as was the case in the thin-lipped, tight-assed noble blood of Europe before the revolution. Extreme line breeding, standard in most kennels, goes hand in hand with extreme culling.

  The experiments in genetics performed by the monk Gregor Mendel in his kitchen garden over a hundred years ago are mathematically so simple to understand that anyone, including my neighbor, is convinced that he can build a better dog, a super-dog, one that will win the Ames Plantation field trials and make him famous. To that purpose, mother and son, father and daughter, sister and brother are Osterized into a gene-pool stew by stubborn men and women with egos the size of beer kegs and brains the size of seeds. Once in a while, a man with a vision and a man blessed with the perfect touch comes along—in this century that man is Bob Wehle; his dogs are English pointers and his bloodlines originate with a dog named Elhew—and God-dogs claw their way out of otherwise malformed litters. But as a rule, line breeding does not include a scientific horoscope that can predict whether the dog will be a monster or the reincarnation of Rin Tin Tin. The bottom line is, when dogs are born with two dicks and teeth growing through their nose, it is time to heed the wisdom of one’s mother, genetic decency, or even the corrupt but lucrative practices of thoroughbred racing, and listen to the plaintive howls of civilizations whose leaders had similar designs.

  Some years ago, a good-looking French dog-trainer and I watched a bitch Labrador I had driven three hundred kilometers to buy being serviced by a littermate, by error, because the hospitable breeder had invited me into her converted farmhouse for a glass of wine, some cheese, olives, a plate of crudités, Normandy butter, and a loaf of bread. While we ate and the siblings got acquainted, the dark-haired trainer with freckles on her nose got my attention by biting into a pickle and stating, “If cooking is the foreplay, swallowing is the orgasm.” Now, half an hour later, confronted with incest and the sure loss of a sale, she held the palms of her hands to the sky and said, “In this business there is too much line breeding and not enough imagination.” Taking that as a cue of sorts, I scooped her up in my arms—she was tiny—and, along with my imagination, trotted up the stairs to her bedroom.

  VI

  The best dog is one that adapts to its master’s temperament and style of hunting, and while I marvel at the English pointers and setters, such dogs have always tiptoed beyond the horizons of my hearing within hours of my owning them, and from that moment on I have had to blow up my face to get their attention. Now that I have retired my sneakers they are no longer right for me. I want a dog that hunts about a hundred yards or so on either side of me and passes within gun range each time it checks in. I usually have an idea where the birds are and would just as soon have Biff go where I tell him to. Not a workable agenda when dealing with the tightly strung violins of dogdom.

  Now, when I hunt, I like to think about things like how the trees have grown, the last time I slept with a strange woman, the direction of the wind, and what wine I’m going to drink with dinner; killing is a formality. When I hunt with another person, I want to listen to and talk to that person—otherwise I wouldn’t hunt with him. I want to stop if I choose to without losing the dog or having to hack at it to keep it on a level course. I have done all those things, and after a decade of getting just as pissed off as I did when I played golf, I bought the Brittany with hopes that I won’t feel the fingers of retribution crawl up my backside each time the dog is out of sight. It all comes down to the man and what he wants from his dog. In my case I plan to hunt behind pointers and setters until the day I retire my guns, but they will belong to someone else.

  One can argue that, performed with a measure of dignity and restraint, hunting is just as important an issue now as it was three hundred years ago, but for opposite reasons. Hunting is no longer a survival issue for man, but has become a survival issue for the game, because while we have multiplied like rabbits, the game has dwindled tenfold. Our importance as hunters lies in the fact that we as individuals, without affiliations to anything or anyone other than the sport, witness and assess the condition of the game and habitat in this country. Our credentials are that we are out there, in nature, when others are not, and that we are out there because we want to be, not because we have to or are paid to be. Our eyes solicit the traceries of spoors on the earth and of birds in the sky; our spirits are conscious of ravens and long for the restitution of wolves and bears to the land. We are the wildlife thermometers, poking about in rivers and swamps, in the shadows of forest canopies, under the flashes of desert suns, and the force that drives us is our soul.

  We hunters, more than any other group on earth, should understand the symbiotic relationship between species and how it has come to pass that, thanks to our destructive meddling, the reflection of a teal on a pond is no longer free of charge. Those of us who understand the complex nature of a teal’s life, the protection and food needed to grow the feathers that send that image darting over the water, also understand what the chase and the kill do to the spirit of man, their rewards and their shames. Because we understand and feel these things more acutely than our peers, it is sacrilegious of us not to protect with all our might what resources remain to be saved. If we neglect our obligations, we deserve the contempt of generations to come.

  VII

  I have done some shameful things in the name of sport in the past forty years, and I recognize in my not-so-distant past the genetic chimpanzee in me. When Robin wasn’t quite a year old I picked her up by the scruff of the neck and with just enough anger in me to sicken the act, threw her to the ground. The dog had been running around in a dove field enjoying her youth, the sounds of gunfire, and the sight of falling birds while I, infuriated at her disobedience, wanted her to sit by my side. Robin fell wrong and screamed like a baby. She wasn’t as hurt as she was terrified by the fact that the one being in the world she loved unconditionally had suddenly and for no apparent reason turned on her. It scared me for all the appropriate reasons, not the least of which was that I recognized in me the dog trainer I had knocked to the ground years before. Nowadays when the little bitch lays her head on my shoulder in the dark of night it is because I have called her to me, waking from the nightmare of that act; waking from the dream in which I had broken her neck.

  The same crass and impulsive behavior incited me to shoot sparrows and swallows as a child, crows and hawks when I should have known better, and more recently a bobcat in the back and a raccoon in the face. My unbecoming and violent nature as a child doesn’t concern me anymore. I have forgiven myself for being a young man with a young man’s rules. But now that I am, for better and for worse, tired—no, exhausted—from witnessing the insipid venality that conjures up violence in men, these questions of ethics so easily dismissed a few years ago weigh me down for reasons of principle, age, and change. What I forgave in the past I don’t anymore, and it is not that I am uncomfortable in my role of predator. I fully understand the nature of hunting and being hunted, eating, sleeping, and procreating. In fact my inclination toward reclusiveness nudges me further and further into the world of animals, and I have to constantly guard against letting myself regress into a medium that functions with even less thought than the one I see in the streets and watch on television. My dog’s voice belongs to a dog and I am not meant to take it personally. On the other hand, I know deep in my heart that there is something basically wrong about killing for pleasure.

  The day I shot a bobcat instead of a turkey I altered the natural progression of life by killing for no reason. The cat walked out of the woods, I raised the gun and pulled the trigger. The act was a simple one. A response to the knowledge of the cat’s predilection for turkey, but one I deeply regretted
when I ran my hand over the tawny-colored coat of the adult female, tough and sinewy from making a living and dropping litters but now lifeless and flat on a bed of dirt in the shade of a sweet-gum tree with a .22-caliber Hornet hole in her heart. There was a time when killing the bobcat would have pleased me. I would have felt like the protector, the benevolent despot of the forest. Now I question what it means to meddle in things that are so much more natural than what I see on the news. I feel like a half-wit to have in me the same senseless traits I reproach in others, particularly as I am no longer convinced that I am better than the cat. Killing for no reason is killing with malice.

  A month later, driving down a dirt road overlooking a pasture, I stopped and, from inside the car, shot a raccoon in the face while it watched me from inside the fork of a dogwood tree. The raccoon fell slowly, raking the bark with its claws, holding on to life until gravity took hold and pulled it to where it would eventually rot. I had just finished reading an article about how raccoons rob quail nests.

  The seduction of the scope made for simple killing and emotional ambiguity. Physical magnification stole the life from the image and left me with a sharp target. The precision of glass is finite, but the consequence of a senseless death is not, except in how it takes its toll on the psyche of man. Could it be that those unnatural killings—I didn’t eat or use either animal—were attempts at killing the wildness in myself?

  VIII

  December 15, 1992

  The full moon is framed by the top of the loblolly pines that flank the pond house. The moon robs the stars of their light. I listen to the night and once again pray for rain; weather makes grown men throughout the South hunker down with rock-hard plugs of chew in the sides of their mouths. At the gas station, young men tug at their nuts through the crotch of their pants and forecast the weather in loud voices. They talk on and on, so that when something does happen one of them can say, “I told you so!” The older men spit and shut up. They know all there is not to know about weather.

  The water in the pond is not up to the dock yet and the bottom is full of tall brown weeds that look a little like picked cotton. A quarter of a mile to the northeast the structure of the new dam rests like a tremendous black log in the water, large enough to hold back the floods of Judea, or so it seems. Words such as permits, specifications, decrees, fines, and board meetings entered and left my life, as did the United States government, but my name and the name of my farm is in its repository, sandwiched among other files like felonious fingerprints, for the rest of time.

  Yesterday I asked Bill to butcher two piglets from the sounder of eleven the sow dropped two months ago. “There won’t hardly be enough meat to eat,” he says.

  “Ever hear of suckling pigs?”

  Bill nodded.

  “I need to have them weigh between twelve and fifteen pounds, dressed.”

  He shook his head. The waste of meat was an indulgence. “In that case,” he said, “we’ll butcher them here. Won’t cost a thing. Little porkers like that; hell, we’ll kill ’em, scald ’em, rub the hair off their hides, and make them ready in an hour. Won’t be nothing to eat, though.”

  The next day Bill adjusted a hammer to the heads of two twenty-pounders. The piglets never made a sound. Their siblings went on about the business of eating corncobs without paying the slightest attention to the quivering bodies, didn’t even smell them. The water in the boiler was kept just under boiling and after the pigs were run through it their bristles rubbed off with a brush of the hand. Under the coarse hair the skin was just as white and smooth as a baby’s. Bill removed the hard coating on the hooves, a plug of wax out of each ear, checked the livers—but they were wormy—and tried to talk me into eating the oysters. I passed. Bled and gutted the pigs weighed twelve pounds. Castrated and a year later they would have weighed three hundred.

  There is a great deal to be said about patience, but there is also something to be said about slow-cooked suckling pig rubbed with fruit preserves, hot peppers, soy, and garlic.

  IX

  In December the white-tailed bucks run does until their hinds are dark with sweat and they stand shaking and exhausted, surrendering to the insistence of the reproductive process. It is the beginning of deer-hunting season in Gadsden County, and just like everywhere else, the deer take a beating without much thought given to the well-being of the herd.

  My neighbor’s motto (as it is with all the Bubbas in the Union) is a truculent “Shoot the shit out of dem sums-abitches.” A sorry state of obtuse thinking for a species about to celebrate the two-thousandth anniversary of the birth of a spiritual leader who advocated compassion.

  Shooting deer in Florida is almost always practiced from a tree house, or stand, overlooking a mound of corn, beets, sweet potatoes, or anything else deer enjoy eating. Not to be confused with hunting, which by definition is the pursuit of game, this passive involvement with nature includes waiting, watching, and shooting; it is not hunting in the same manner that shooting doves is not hunting. Seeking, searching, chasing, ferreting out, or even casting aimlessly about the woods as I do applies to hunting. Sitting on one’s ass waiting for an animal to come to bait is just that: sitting on one’s ass, wearing dirty-looking outfits. The skills most sought after in this endeavor are immobility and the ability to shoot a bullet inside the radius of a Ping-Pong paddle at a hundred yards.

  However, the ambushing of game (and man) coming to food and to water holes is as old as predation. And although elitists like me look down upon the sport as a form of mendacity, it has its merits, particularly for the voyeurs, the listeners, and the dreamers. Whenever I really want to get personal with nature I’ll sit in a tree stand and wait. I’ll wait as long as it takes for the entire natural world within the radius of my sight to manifest itself, and if I wait long enough and sit quietly enough I’ll fool nature’s tenants into resuming their lives unaware of the peeper in the tree, the peeper who by virtue of being alone with his beginnings feels a deep joy and pride in being alive and in a position to observe what others couldn’t care less about.

  A few days before the deer season, my neighbor, Sergeant B. J. Pruit, calls on some friends and in a party atmosphere sight-in their rifles, crank some rounds, and suck on belly beers. The party starts slowly, a shot every five minutes or so, a walk to the target, a debate on velocity, elevation, grain, and powder—all the specifics that excite hunters. But as the afternoon lengthens and the beers settle and the time between drinking and pissing shortens, the tension on the range quickens and the momentum builds to a crescendo. Volleys of bullets scream through the air, bury into trees, fracture empty cans, fly aimlessly into clouds; shoulders ache, eyes redden, foam builds, and rational thought evaporates. Just before dark the countryside is at war with itself and afterward, long after the sun has dropped behind the last tree stump, a final salvo is loosened by those who simply can’t stop pulling on the trigger; undoubtedly the same nucleus of men virulently terrified that the prerogative of shooting at the night may one day be taken away.

  In Texas I witnessed a fine example of sporting impatience at a camp where the deer feeders—erected on metal derricks, exactly one hundred yards from the tree stands—are automatic and noisy. Twice a day a pound or two of corn is loosened out of a solar-activated grain-spreader onto a plot of bare, sandy earth, a stage of coagulated blood hardened by the hooves of a thousand deer. Before the sound of the cogwheels has faded in Norman Nimrod’s ears, deer and turkey race out of the mesquite mottes to get a first lick at a purposefully scant amount of flying food. The shooter waits for the grinding of the gears to end and lets fly one hundred and eighty grains of lead at the biggest deer, forks over two thousand dollars to the smiling owner, and heads for home, full of temporary cheer and a flushing kinship with Daniel Boone. However, as there is no way of posing for a picture with a dead animal without looking retarded, the feeling eventually passes and the picture yellows on the wall. Death soils the best intentions and that is why blood and agony work best on
the six o’clock news.

  X

  December 11, 1993

  The acorns, which fell early this year, predicted a cold winter, as did the hornet nests, built very close to the ground. Misty treetops hidden in the fog. Meadowlarks work the fields, confusing the dogs. On overcast days the sky falls all the way to earth. Autumn’s bearing is one of lingering death.

  Two weeks ago a storm blew across the pond and stripped a sweet-gum tree of a year’s worth of living by hurling its leaves into the water. Golden reflections raced over the choppy gray surface and disappeared like shoals of shiners into the bulrushes.

  High-flying cirrus clouds curl over the state with regularity, and the insects that are not otherwise transfixed by the cold hibernate under a scale of time. Freezes deepen the silences of night. Early in the morning when dew beads the spiderwebs and fog washes the shadows away, the kudzu vines hang lifeless from the trees like the rigging of becalmed sailing ships. The quail, even the squealers, are full-grown and have chosen their retinue. I run the dogs for a week without carrying a gun. We work the heart out of the mornings and, hiding behind trees, under leaves, and high in the sky, the eyes of nature track our progress. The sky never reneges on its deadly promises to quail.

  The discoloration of fall and the comportment of the dogs, casting with rural determination ahead of me, reestablishes the conviction that simplicity wears well. I celebrate that simplicity every time I hunt.