XIII.
GUNS AND GUNNING.
ALL round the Boy's Town stood the forest, with the trees that must havebeen well grown when Mad Anthony Wayne drove the Indians from theirshadow forever. The white people had hewn space for their streets andhouses, for their fields and farmsteads, out of the woods, but where thewoods had been left they were of immemorial age. They were not verydense, and the timber was not very heavy; the trees stood more liketrees in a park than trees in a forest; there was little or noundergrowth, except here and there a pawpaw thicket; and there weresometimes grassy spaces between them, where the may-apples pitched theirpretty tents in the spring. Perhaps, at no very great distance of time,it had been a prairie country, with those wide savannahs of waving grassthat took the eyes of the first-comers in the Ohio wilderness with animage of Nature long tamed to the hand of man. But this is merely myconjecture, and what I know does not bear me out in it; for the wall offorest that enclosed the Boy's Town was without a break except where theaxe had made it. At some points it was nearer and at some farther; but,nearer or farther, the forest encompassed the town, and it called theboys born within its circuit, as the sea calls the boys born by itsshore, with mysterious, alluring voices, kindling the blood, taking thesoul with love for its strangeness. There was not a boy in the Boy'sTown who would not gladly have turned from the town and lived in thewoods if his mother had let him; and in every vague plan of running offthe forest had its place as a city of refuge from pursuit and recapture.The pioneer days were still so close to those times that the love ofsolitary adventure which took the boys' fathers into the sylvan wastesof the great West might well have burned in the boys' hearts; and iftheir ideal of life was the free life of the woods, no doubt it wasbecause their near ancestors had lived it. At any rate, that was theirideal, and they were always talking among themselves of how they wouldgo farther West when they grew up, and be trappers and hunters. I do notremember any boy but one who meant to be a sailor; they lived toohopelessly far from the sea; and I dare say the boy who invented themarine-engine governor, and who wished to be a pirate, would just assoon have been a bandit of the Osage. In those days Oregon had just beenopened to settlers, and the boys all wanted to go and live in Oregon,where you could stand in your door and shoot deer and wild turkey, whilea salmon big enough to pull you in was tugging away at the line you hadset in the river that ran before the log-cabin.
"ALL AT ONCE THERE THE INDIANS WERE."]
If they could, the boys would rather have been Indians than anythingelse, but, as there was really no hope of this whatever, they werewilling to be settlers, and fight the Indians. They had rather a mixedmind about them in the meantime, but perhaps they were not unlike otheridolaters in both fearing and adoring their idols; perhaps they camepretty near being Indians in that, and certainly they came nearer thanthey knew. When they played war, and the war was between the whites andthe Indians, it was almost as low a thing to be white as it was to beBritish when there were Americans on the other side; in either case youhad to be beaten. The boys lived in the desire, if not the hope, of sometime seeing an Indian, and they made the most of the Indians in thecircus, whom they knew to be just white men dressed up; but none of themdreamed that what really happened one day could ever happen. This was atthe arrival of several canal-boat loads of genuine Indians from theWyandot Reservation in the northwestern part of the state, on their wayto new lands beyond the Mississippi. The boys' fathers must have knownthat these Indians were coming, but it just shows how stupid the most offathers are, that they never told the boys about it. All at once therethe Indians were, as if the canal-boats had dropped with them out ofheaven. There they were, crowding the decks, in their blankets andmoccasins, braves and squaws and pappooses, standing about or squattingin groups, not saying anything, and looking exactly like the pictures.The squaws had the pappooses on their backs, and the men and boys hadbows and arrows in their hands; and as soon as the boats landed theIndians, all except the squaws and pappooses, came ashore, and went upto the court-house yard, and began to shoot with their bows and arrows.It almost made the boys crazy.
Of course they would have liked to have the Indians shoot at birds, orsome game, but they were mighty glad to have them shoot at cents andbits and quarters that anybody could stick up in the ground. The Indianswould all shoot at the mark till some one hit it, and the one who hit ithad the money, whatever it was. The boys ran and brought back thearrows; and they were so proud to do this that I wonder they livedthrough it. My boy was too bashful to bring the Indians their arrows; hecould only stand apart and long to approach the filthy savages, whom herevered; to have touched the border of one of their blankets would havebeen too much. Some of them were rather handsome, and two or three ofthe Indian boys were so pretty that the Boy's Town boys said they weregirls. They were of all ages, from old, withered men to children of sixor seven, but they were all alike grave and unsmiling; the old men werenot a whit more dignified than the children, and the children did notenter into their sport with more zeal and ardor than the wrinkled sageswho shared it. In fact they were, old and young alike, savages, and theboys who looked on and envied them were savages in their ideal of aworld where people spent their lives in hunting and fishing and rangingthe woods, and never grew up into the toils and cares that can alonemake men of boys. They wished to escape these, as many foolish personsdo among civilized nations, and they thought if they could only escapethem they would be happy; they did not know that they would be merelysavage, and that the great difference between a savage and a civilizedman is work. They would all have been willing to follow these Indiansaway into the far West, where they were going, and be barbarians for therest of their days; and the wonder is that some of the fellows did nottry it. After the red men had flitted away like red leaves their memoryremained with the boys, and a plague of bows and arrows raged amongthem, and it was a good while before they calmed down to their olddesire of having a gun.
But they came back to that at last, for that was the normal desire ofevery boy in the Boy's Town who was not a girl-boy, and there weremighty few girl-boys there. Up to a certain point, a pistol would do,especially if you had bullet-moulds, and could run bullets to shoot outof it; only your mother would be sure to see you running them, and justas likely as not would be so scared that she would say you must notshoot bullets. Then you would have to use buckshot, if you could getthem anywhere near the right size, or small marbles; but a pistol wasalways a makeshift, and you never could hit anything with it, not even aboard fence; it always kicked, or burst, or something. Very few boysever came to have a gun, though they all expected to have one. But sevenor eight boys would go hunting with one shot-gun, and take turn-aboutshooting; some of the little fellows never got to shoot at all, but theycould run and see whether the big boys had hit anything when they fired,and that was something. This was my boy's privilege for a long timebefore he had a gun of his own, and he went patiently with his elderbrother, and never expected to fire the gun, except, perhaps, to shootthe load off before they got back to town; they were not allowed tobring the gun home loaded. It was a gun that was pretty safe foranything in front of it, but you never could tell what it was going todo. It began by being simply an old gun-barrel, which my boy's brotherbought of another boy who was sick of it for a fip, as the half-realpiece was called, and it went on till it got a lock from one gunsmithand a stock from another, and was a complete gun. But this took time;perhaps a month; for the gunsmiths would only work at it in theirleisure; they were delinquent subscribers, and they did it in part payfor their papers. When they got through with it my boy's brother madehimself a ramrod out of a straight piece of hickory, or at least asstraight as the gun-barrel, which was rather sway-backed, and had alittle twist to one side, so that one of the jour printers said it was afirst-rate gun to shoot round a corner with. Then he made himself apowder-flask out of an ox-horn that he got and boiled till it was soft(it smelt the whole house up), and then scraped thin with a piece ofglass; it hung at his side; and he
carried his shot in his pantaloonspocket. He went hunting with this gun for a good many years, but he hadnever shot anything with it, when his uncle gave him a smoothbore rifle,and he in turn gave his gun to my boy, who must then have been nearlyten years old. It seemed to him that he was quite old enough to have agun; but he was mortified the very next morning after he got it by acitizen who thought differently. He had risen at daybreak to go out andshoot kildees on the Common, and he was hurrying along with his gun onhis shoulder when the citizen stopped him and asked him what he wasgoing to do with that gun. He said to shoot kildees, and he added thatit was his gun. This seemed to surprise the citizen even more than theboy could have wished. He asked him if he did not think he was a prettysmall boy to have a gun; and he took the gun from him, and examined itthoughtfully, and then handed it back to the boy, who felt himselfgetting smaller all the time. The man went his way without sayinganything more, but his behavior was somehow so sarcastic that the boyhad no pleasure in his sport that morning; partly, perhaps, because hefound no kildees to shoot at on the Common. He only fired off his gunonce or twice at a fence, and then he sneaked home with it throughalleys and by-ways, and whenever he met a person he hurried by for fearthe person would find him too small to have a gun.
Afterwards he came to have a bolder spirit about it, and he went huntingwith it a good deal. It was a very curious kind of gun; you had to snapa good many caps on it, sometimes, before the load would go off; andsometimes it would hang fire, and then seem to recollect itself, and gooff, maybe, just when you were going to take it down from your shoulder.The barrel was so crooked that it could not shoot straight, but this wasnot the only reason why the boy never hit anything with it. He could notshut his left eye and keep his right eye open; so he had to take aimwith both eyes, or else with the left eye, which was worse yet, till oneday when he was playing shinny (or hockey) at school, and got a blowover his left eye from a shinny-stick. At first he thought his eye wasput out; he could not see for the blood that poured into it from the cutabove it. He ran homeward wild with fear, but on the way he stopped at apump to wash away the blood, and then he found his eye was safe. Itsuddenly came into his mind to try if he could not shut that eye now,and keep the right one open. He found that he could do it perfectly; byhelp of his handkerchief, he stanched his wound, and made himselfpresentable, with the glassy pool before the pump for a mirror, and wentjoyfully back to school. He kept trying his left eye, to make sure ithad not lost its new-found art, and as soon as school was out he hurriedhome to share the joyful news with his family. He went hunting the verynext Saturday, and at the first shot he killed a bird. It was asuicidal sap-sucker, which had suffered him to steal upon it so closethat it could not escape even the vagaries of that wandering gun-barrel,and was blown into such small pieces that the boy could bring only a fewfeathers of it away. In the evening, when his father came home, heshowed him these trophies of the chase, and boasted of his exploit withthe minutest detail. His father asked him whether he had expected to eatthis sap-sucker, if he could have got enough of it together. He said no,sap-suckers were not good to eat. "Then you took its poor little lifemerely for the pleasure of killing it," said the father. "Was it a greatpleasure to see it die?" The boy hung his head in shame and silence; itseemed to him that he would never go hunting again. Of course he did gohunting often afterwards, but his brother and he kept faithfully to therule of never killing anything that they did not want to eat. To besure, they gave themselves a wide range; they were willing to eat almostanything that they could shoot, even blackbirds, which were so abundantand so easy to shoot. But there were some things which they would havethought it not only wanton but wicked to kill, like turtle-doves, whichthey somehow believed were sacred, because they were the symbols of theHoly Ghost; it was quite their own notion to hold them sacred. Theywould not kill robins either, because robins were hallowed by poetry,and they kept about the house, and were almost tame, so that it seemed ashame to shoot them. They were very plentiful, and so were theturtle-doves, which used to light on the basin-bank, and pick up thegrain scattered there from the boats and wagons. One of the apprenticesin the printing-office kept a shot-gun loaded beside the press while hewas rolling, and whenever he caught the soft twitter that the doves makewith their wings, he rushed out with his gun and knocked over two orthree of them. He was a good shot, and could nearly always get them inrange. When he brought them back, it seemed to my boy that he hadcommitted the unpardonable sin, and that something awful would surelyhappen to him. But he just kept on rolling the forms of type andexchanging insults with the pressman; and at the first faint twitter ofdoves' wings he would be off again.
My boy and his brother made a fine distinction between turtle-doves andwild pigeons; they would have killed wild pigeons if they had got achance, though you could not tell them from turtle-doves except by theirsize and the sound they made with their wings. But there were not manypigeons in the woods around the Boy's Town, and they were very shy.There were snipe along the river, and flocks of kildees on the Commons,but the bird that was mostly killed by these boys was the yellowhammer.They distinguished, again, in its case; and decided that it was not awoodpecker, and might be killed; sometimes they thought that woodpeckerswere so nearly yellowhammers that they might be killed, but they hadnever heard of any one's eating a woodpecker, and so they could notquite bring themselves to it. There were said to be squirrels in thehickory woods near the Poor-House, but that was a great way off for myboy; besides the squirrels, there was a cross bull in those woods, andsometimes Solomon Whistler passed through them on his way to or from thePoor-House; so my boy never hunted squirrels. Sometimes he went with hisbrother for rabbits, which you could track through the corn-fields in alight snow, and sometimes, if they did not turn out to be cats, youcould get a shot at them. Now and then there were quail in thewheat-stubble, and there were meadow-larks in the pastures, but theywere very wild.
After all, yellowhammers were the chief reliance in the chase; they werepre-occupied, unsuspecting birds, and lit on fence rails and dead trees,so that they were pretty easy to shoot. If you could bring home ayellowhammer you felt that you had something to show for your long day'stramp through the woods and fields, and for the five cents' worth ofpowder and five cents' worth of shot that you had fired off at othergame. Sometimes you just fired it off at mullein-stalks, or barns, oranything you came to. There were a good many things you could do with agun; you could fire your ramrod out of it, and see it sail through theair; you could fill the muzzle up with water, on top of a charge, andsend the water in a straight column at a fence. The boys all believedthat you could fire that column of water right through a man, and theyalways wanted to try whether it would go through a cow, but they wereafraid the owner of the cow would find it out. There was a good deal ofpleasure in cleaning your gun when it got so foul that your ramrod stuckin it and you could hardly get it out. You poured hot water into themuzzle and blew it through the nipple, till it began to show clear; thenyou wiped it dry with soft rags wound on your gun-screw, and then oiledit with greasy tow. Sometimes the tow would get loose from the screw,and stay in the barrel, and then you would have to pick enough powder inat the nipple to blow it out. Of course I am talking of the oldmuzzle-loading shot-gun, which I dare say the boys never use nowadays.
But the great pleasure of all, in hunting, was getting home tired andfootsore in the evening, and smelling the supper almost as soon as youcame in sight of the house. There was nearly always hot biscuit forsupper, with steak, and with coffee such as nobody but a boy's motherever knew how to make; and just as likely as not there was some kind ofpreserves; at any rate, there was apple-butter. You could hardly takethe time to wash the powder-grime off your hands and face before yourushed to the table; and if you had brought home a yellowhammer you leftit with your gun on the back porch, and perhaps the cat got it and savedyou the trouble of cleaning it. A cat can clean a bird a good dealquicker than a boy can, and she does not hate to do it half as badly.
Nex
t to the pleasure of getting home from hunting late, was the pleasureof starting early, as my boy and his brother sometimes did, to shootducks on the Little Reservoir in the fall. His brother had analarm-clock, which he set at about four, and he was up the instant itrang, and pulling my boy out of bed, where he would rather have stayedthan shot the largest mallard duck in the world. They raked the ashesoff the bed of coals in the fireplace, and while the embers ticked andbristled, and flung out little showers of sparks, they hustled on theirclothes, and ran down the back stairs into the yard with their guns.Tip, the dog, was already waiting for them there, for he seemed to knowthey were going that morning, and he began whimpering for joy, andtwisting himself sideways up against them, and nearly wagging his tailoff; and licking their hands and faces, and kissing their guns allover; he was about crazy. When they started, he knew where they weregoing, and he rushed ahead through the silent little sleeping town, andled the way across the wide Commons, where the cows lay in dim bulks onthe grass, and the geese waddled out of his way with wild clamorouscries, till they came in sight of the Reservoir. Then Tip fell back withmy boy and let the elder brother go ahead, for he always had a right tothe first shot; and while he dodged down behind the bank, and creptalong to the place where the ducks usually were, my boy kept a hold onTip's collar, and took in the beautiful mystery of the early morning.The place so familiar by day was estranged to his eyes in that palelight, and he was glad of old Tip's company, for it seemed a time whenthere might very well be ghosts about. The water stretched a sheet ofsmooth, gray silver, with little tufts of mist on its surface, andthrough these at last he could see the ducks softly gliding to and fro,and he could catch some dreamy sound from them. His heart stood stilland then jumped wildly in his breast, as the still air was startled withthe rush of wings, and the water broke with the plunge of other flocksarriving. Then he began to make those bets with himself that a boy hopeshe will lose: he bet that his brother would not hit any of them; he betthat he did not even see them; he bet that if he did see them and got ashot at them, they would not come back so that he could get a chancehimself to kill any. It seemed to him that he had to wait an hour, andjust when he was going to hollo, and tell his brother where the duckswere, the old smoothbore sent out a red flash and a white puff before heheard the report; Tip tore loose from his grasp; and he heard thesplashing rise of the ducks, and the hurtling rush of their wings; andhe ran forward, yelling, "How many did you hit? Where are they? Whereare you? Are they coming back? It's my turn now!" and making an outcrythat would have frightened away a fleet of ironclads, but much less aflock of ducks.
One shot always ended the morning's sport, and there were always goodreasons why this shot never killed anything.
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