“What was it like, Papa, when you were a little boy and used to hunt with the Indians?”
“I don’t know,” Nick was startled. He had not even noticed the boy was awake. He looked at him sitting beside him on the seat. He had felt quite alone but this boy had been with him. He wondered for how long. “We used to go all day to hunt black squirrels,” he said. “My father only gave me three shells a day because he said that would teach me to hunt and it wasn’t good for a boy to go banging around. I went with a boy named Billy Gilby and his sister Trudy. We used to go out nearly every day all one summer.”
“Those are funny names for Indians.”
“Yes, aren’t they,” Nick said.
“But tell me what they were like.”
“They were Ojibways,” Nick said. “And they were very nice.”
“But what were they like to be with?”
“It’s hard to say,” Nick Adams said. Could you say she did first what no one has ever done better and mention plump brown legs, flat belly, hard little breasts, well holding arms, quick searching tongue, the flat eyes, the good taste of mouth, then uncomfortably, tightly, sweetly, moistly, lovely, tightly, achingly, fully, finally, unendingly, never-endingly, never-to-endingly, suddenly ended, the great bird flown like an owl in the twilight, only it daylight in the woods and hemlock needles stuck against your belly. So that when you go in a place where Indians have lived you smell them gone and all the empty pain killer bottles and the flies that buzz do not kill the sweetgrass smell, the smoke smell and that other like a fresh cased marten skin. Nor any jokes about them nor old squaws take that away. Nor the sick sweet smell they get to have. Nor what they did finally. It wasn’t how they ended. They all ended the same. Long time ago good. Now no good.
And about the other. When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first. He could thank his father for that.
“You might not like them,” Nick said to the boy. “But I think you would.”
“And my grandfather lived with them too when he was a boy, didn’t he?”
“Yes. When I asked him what they were like he said that he had many friends among them.”
“Will I ever live with them?”
“I don’t know,” Nick said. “That’s up to you.”
“How old will I be when I get a shotgun and can hunt by myself?”
“Twelve years old if I see you are careful.”
“I wish I was twelve now.”
“You will be, soon enough.”
“What was my grandfather like? I can’t remember him except that he gave me an air rifle and an American flag when I came over from France that time. What was he like?”
“He’s hard to describe. He was a great hunter and fisherman and he had wonderful eyes.”
“Was he greater than you?”
“He was a much better shot and his father was a great wing shot too.”
“I’ll bet he wasn’t better than you.”
“Oh, yes he was. He shot very quickly and beautifully. I’d rather see him shoot than any man I ever knew. He was always very disappointed in the way I shot.”
“Why do we never go to pray at the tomb of my grandfather?”
“We live in a different part of the country. It’s a long way from here.”
“In France that wouldn’t make any difference. In France we’d go. I think I ought to go to pray at the tomb of my grandfather.”
“Sometime we’ll go.”
“I hope we won’t live somewhere so that I can never go to pray at your tomb when you are dead.”
“We’ll have to arrange it.”
“Don’t you think we might all be buried at a convenient place? We could all be buried in France. That would be fine.”
“I don’t want to be buried in France,” Nick said.
“Well, then, we’ll have to get some convenient place in America. Couldn’t we all be buried out at the ranch?”
“That’s an idea.”
“Then I could stop and pray at the tomb of my grandfather on the way to the ranch.”
“You’re awfully practical.”
“Well, I don’t feel good never to have even visited the tomb of my grandfather.”
“We’ll have to go,” Nick said. “I can see we’ll have to go.”
About the Author
ERNEST HEMINGWAY was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899, and began his writing career for The Kansas City Star in 1917. During the First World War he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the Italian front but was invalided home, having been seriously wounded while serving with the infantry. In 1921 Hemingway settled in Paris, where he became part of the expatriate circle of Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford. With the appearance of The Sun Also Rises in 1926, Hemingway became not only the voice of the “lost generation” but the preeminent writer of his time. This was followed by his novel of the Italian front, A Farewell to Arms (1929). In the 1930s, Hemingway settled in Key West, and later in Cuba, but he traveled widely—to Spain, Italy, and Africa. Later he reported on the Spanish Civil War, which became the background for his brilliant war novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1939), hunted U-boats in the Caribbean, and covered the European front during the Second World War. Hemingway’s most popular work, The Old Man and the Sea, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and in 1954 Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his powerful, style-forming mastery of the art of narration.” One of the most important influences on the development of the short story and novel in American fiction, Hemingway has seized the imagination of the American public like no other twentieth-century author. He died, by suicide, in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961. His other major works include To Have and Have Not (1937), Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), and posthumously, A Moveable Feast (1964), Islands in the Stream (1970), The Dangerous Summer (1985), and The Garden of Eden (1986).
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