by Dave Crehore
mop of grey hair, merry blue eyes, and the long, expressive face of a comedian. He was carrying a dirty gray canvas bag in one hand and a leather leg-of-mutton shotgun case in the other. Dad and I turned toward each other and our eyes met. Could this be the superior being?
“Mr. Perkins?” Dad asked as he strode toward him. “Mr. Cre-
hore?” said the man. They shook hands and Dad introduced me.
Perkins wore a wrinkled waxed cotton shooting jacket worn shiny
on the elbows and sleeves, a pair of baggy corduroy trousers, and suede desert boots with scuffed toes. “Call me Perce,” he said.
I hoisted Perkins’s bag to my shoulder and carried it to the car.
It was stamped R M in faded Gothic capitals. Our guest
was using an old British mail bag for his luggage, and Dad and I were finally able to relax a little. Regardless of nationality, Perce Perkins 143
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was apparently one of us, a member of the perennially underpaid
lower middle class.
Dad took his pipe from his shirt pocket. At this cue, Perkins drew a four-ounce tin of Barney’s Punchbowle tobacco from the depths of his jacket and held it out to Dad. “Try some of mine, Dave,” he said.
Dad opened the tin and filled his pipe as Perkins filled his.
Our guest had passed the final test. Punchbowle was a strong
Scottish mixture of Virginia and latakia. Dad smoked it when he
could afford it and thought highly of anyone else who did. In about five minutes, Percival Perkins had crossed the Atlantic and become a friend. On the way home, we stopped to buy him a hunting license, and I watched as he wrote his name and address on the form: Percival Paul Perkins, 10 Mole St., Dorking, Surrey, England.
When we walked through our front door, we were enveloped
in the aroma of roasting beef from a dutch oven on the stove, and between gusts of beef we could smell cinnamon, which suggested an apple pie in the oven. Mom came out of the kitchen, brushing back her hair and drying her hands on her apron.
“Perce, I’d like you to meet my wife, Charlotte . . . ,” Dad said, but there was no need for further formality. Perkins took a step toward Mom, reached out and took both her hands in his as though they were about to be married, and looked deeply into her eyes.
“Perce Perkins,” he said. “Are you the lass who is responsible
for this beautiful home and that delicious food I smell from the kitchen?” Perkins asked.
“Why, I suppose I am,” Mom replied, blushing. No one had ever
called her a “lass.” In thirty seconds, Perkins had won her heart as well.
The adults talked while I did my afternoon chores, feeding the
beagles and shooing our bantam chickens into their henhouse in the backyard. Then the four of us sat down to supper. It was good that 144
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Mom had chosen the largest beef roast in the freezer; Perkins ate like a tiger, consuming about a pound of the roast himself and exclaiming over each mouthful.
After supper—and Perkins’s second piece of pie—we made plans
for the next day.
“We should get up fairly early,” Dad said. “The grouse aren’t
early risers, but we’ll need time for breakfast. I can promise you some really fresh eggs—nice little ones from our chickens—and the best pork sausage you ever ate, made right here in town by Herman Dramm. Then we’ll head out to Urban Smonjeski’s farm about five
miles from here. He’s got a big woodlot that hasn’t been hunted yet this season, so we ought to be able to move a few birds around. That will take us most of the day, if the rain holds off.”
“Jolly good,” Perkins said. “I’ll set my alarm for five o’clock.”
Saturday dawned cloudy and gloomy. I was too wound up to
need an alarm clock; I put on my hunting clothes and boots and
clumped down the stairs. Perkins and Dad were sitting at the
kitchen table, drinking coffee, and smoking their morning pipes.
“Dave, it’s time to fetch some eggs,” Mom said. “About a dozen,
if possible.” We walked across the backyard to the chicken pen. Dad and I went in, followed by Perkins.
When Dad opened the henhouse, Wilbur and Orville, the
roosters, jumped down to the ground, but the eight hens stayed put on their nests. Dad reached under a black-and-white hen in search of an egg. Suddenly, he spun around. “Shoot!” he said. “The roosters are loose.”
“Bloody hell,” said Perkins. “I must have left the door open.
After the buggers!” He ducked through the door frame and began to run after Wilbur and Orville.
“No, no, Perce,” Dad shouted, “don’t . . .”
Perkins could run surprisingly fast. When he caught up to the
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roosters they took off with a clatter of wings, heading toward the house.
“ . . . chase them.”
“Damn!” Perkins said. “I had no idea the little chaps could fly.”
“Oh, yes,” Dad said. “They fly like eagles.”
Wilbur landed near the back door of the house and began
scratching in a drift of fallen leaves. But Orville was made of sterner stuff. He kept on flying, locked his wings in a glide, and soared to the peak of the garage roof.
“Oh, Lord,” Dad sighed. “Davy, round up Wilbur and put him
back. Perce, let’s see if we can figure out a way to capture Orville.”
Wilbur had been through this before. I chivvied him along
quietly, and when he saw the hens he ran stiff-legged to the pen and hopped over the door sill. I latched the pen door and headed for the garage, where the real action was.
When I got there I saw that Dad had devised a strategy involving ladders and landing nets. He stood on a stepladder on one side of the garage, holding a big musky net. Perkins was on the other side, at the top of a wooden extension ladder with a smaller net we used for bass. Orville was having the time of his life, strutting back and forth on the roof peak and shaking his wattles.
“Davy,” Dad said, “get a handful of gravel from the driveway, and when I tell you, kind of lob it at Orville. Perce, be ready—there’s no telling which way he’ll fly. OK, Davy, throw!”
I lobbed the gravel, but Orville had seen through our designs. He took off before the gravel hit the roof and flew directly at Perkins, who fell backward off the ladder, made a desperate sweep with the net, yelled “Oh, blast!” and disappeared below the roofline. There was a second of silence, followed by a thud. “So much for the hospitality,” Dad said.
There were about twenty mature oak trees in our yard, and they
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shed a huge volume of leaves every year. There was nowhere else to put the leaves, so we simply raked them across the grass to the edge of a wooded ravine that ran along one side of the yard. There they lay in great piles, soft and fragrant, accumulating slowly—and it was on one of these piles that Perkins fell.
Dad and I ran around opposite ends of the garage. Perkins was
lying on his back; beside him was the net with Orville inside. I got to Perkins first. “Davy,” he said, “did you see it? I led the little blighter about two feet and got him on the way down!”
“Never mind that,” Dad said. “Are you all right?”
Perkins moved his legs and arms and then sat up. “I believe I’m
intact,” he said, and began slapping his jacket. “Except—dammit, I’ve broken my pipe.” He took the pieces from a pocket and tried to fit them together. “Oh, poor thing,” he said. “It was practically new, and I had such high hopes for it.”
“I can fix that, Perce,” Dad said. “Davy, go get the box in the
glove compartment of the car.” The box held a bra
nd-new Hard-
castle pipe, fresh from London by way of the little smoke shop in town. Dad gave the pipe to Perkins with a bow. “To the champion
rooster-catcher of River Road,” Dad said. He picked up Orville,
who was still struggling in the net. “If you’re sure you’re OK, we’d better put this eagle away and get some eggs.”
After breakfast Dad, Perkins, Rip, Nip, and I made the fifteen-
minute drive to the Smonjeski farm. Rip was getting a little old for chasing rabbits, but his limited range made him an ideal flushing dog, and he had learned to quarter back and forth in front of us like a springer spaniel.
Nip was our retriever. I had taught him to fetch by throwing a
tennis ball and giving him a slice of hot dog whenever he brought the ball back. He would only retrieve if I had a hot dog with me and showed it to him first, but the workman is worthy of his hire.
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At the farm, we found Urban and his sons finishing up the milk-
ing. “I heard partridges drumming in the woods all spring,” Urban said, “and back in July I jumped half a dozen of ’em. So you should have something to shoot at. I’ll wait ’til you’re into the woods before I let the cows out.”
Urban’s woodlot was surrounded on three sides by a flooded,
impenetrable cedar swamp, and we could get to the woodlot only
by crossing the pasture and entering from the east. He followed us out to the barnyard and watched as we put our guns together: Dad’s 12-gauge Lefever, my Fox 20, and Perkins’s handsome old Army and Navy boxlock.
“One thing I should tell you,” Urban cautioned. “See that black
cow over there, the one with the bell? I just bought her a month ago.
She’s taken over as boss cow, and she’s got a temper, so watch out for her when you come back across the pasture.”
Once into the woodlot, we spread out in a skirmish line about
twenty yards apart. “Hunt ’em up!” Dad commanded the beagles,
and we stepped off into a jungle of hazel brush. We hadn’t walked a hundred yards when a grouse flushed almost at Perkins’s feet, throwing up a shower of leaves and roaring away through the understory.
Perkins shouldered his gun smoothly and touched off a shot.
“That was a grouse, I assume,” he said. “I didn’t see it fall.”
“I heard it hit the ground,” Dad said. “Davy, put your retriever on it.”
I let Nip sniff a piece of hot dog and commanded him to fetch.
He charged off into the woods, and in about a minute he came back with the grouse in his mouth. I held out his chunk of hot dog, and he dropped the dead bird. “Jolly good,” Perkins said. “My first
ruffed grouse.” He smoothed its feathers and tucked it into his coat.
We hunted across the woodlot until we reached the swamp, but
didn’t move another bird. We walked north a bit and started another 148
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swath through the woods. About halfway across, Rip flushed a
grouse that flew straight away in front of me, an easy shot. I dropped it, and Nip made another retrieve, holding the bird until I gave him some more hot dog.
We hunted back and forth across the woodlot for two more
hours without flushing another grouse. “I think they can smell the rain coming,” Dad said. “They’re heading for the swamp to roost.”
We trudged on a bit farther, and then the last bird of the day
flushed in front of Dad. It ducked behind a big hemlock and banked hard left toward the swamp. Dad waited it out and killed it at thirty-five yards with the Lefever’s left barrel. As Nip delivered the grouse, rain began pattering on the leaves overhead. “We’d better hunt our way back to the pasture and decide what to do when we get there,”
Dad said.
When we got to the pasture we found that Urban’s cows had
heard us coming. About fifty Holsteins were gathered just across the fence, giving us the once-over. We unloaded our guns and I leashed the beagles while Dad and Perkins lit their pipes, smoking them upside down to keep the rain from putting them out. More rain clouds were scudding toward us from the east.
“Well,” Dad said, “I’m as wet as I care to be. I’m ready to call it a day if you are.”
“No argument,” Perkins said. “But I wonder about that black
cow. She’s right over there,” he said, “and she’s watching us.”
Perkins handed Dad his gun. “I’ll cross the fence and see what she does,” he said. I spread the strands of barbed wire so Perkins could squeeze between them. He walked a few yards into the pasture, but the black cow didn’t like him. She shook her head menacingly and started for him at a brisk walk, her vast udder swinging from side to side. Perkins waved his arms at her. “G’wan, you old git! Shoo! Be gone!” he yelled, but the black cow kept on coming. Perkins started 149
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walking backward and looked at us over his shoulder. “Spread the wire again, I’m coming through,” he said. At the last possible moment he turned his back on the advancing cow and crawled between the strands.
Perkins relighted his pipe. The black cow had her head across the top wire of the fence and was pawing the ground like El Toro. “It’s a standoff,” he said. “We can’t walk through the swamp, and we can’t cross the pasture as long as that old bitch is here.”
Then he smiled. “Half a minute, I’ve got an idea.” He walked
slowly toward the black cow, speaking in a crooning, singsong voice:
“Easy, girl, I’ll soon sort you, you’re in for a big surprise.” When he was within a foot of her he took a deep, whistling draw at his pipe and blew a dense cloud of Punchbowle smoke into her nostrils.
“Baw!” bleated the black cow. She reared up, snorting, and can-
tered off to the far corner of the pasture, her bell clanging and the rest of the cows thundering after her.
Dad and I were dumbstruck. “Where did you learn to handle
cows?” Dad asked.
“Oh, I don’t know a thing about cows, but I know a lot about
tobacco,” Perkins said. “I believe it was the latakia she didn’t like.
My wife doesn’t care for it either.”
The two men knocked the ashes out of their pipes, looked at each other, and grinned. “Well, I hope you had a good time today, Perce,”
Dad said. “Too bad you only got one shot, but in Wisconsin a bird a day is a good average, any way you slice it. Three shots, three birds—
we’re perfect.”
Driving home, Dad made an admission. “Perce,” he said, “I’ve
got to say I’m relieved. Before I met you I assumed you’d be some kind of upper-class hotshot who would make Davy and me look like bumpkins.”
Perkins laughed. “Dave, I was thinking the same sort of thing,
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but the other way round,” he said. “I had you figured for a back-woodsman who would make a fool of a city boy like me. But I guess bird hunters are all cut from the same bolt.”
It rained all night and was still raining Sunday morning, so we
ate a lazy breakfast of bantam eggs and leftover ham.
Mom broiled the grouse for lunch and then we drove Perkins
to the railroad station. We never saw him again, but he and Dad exchanged Christmas cards and tins of tobacco until Dad died in 1984.
Sometimes the cards had pictures of grouse, sometimes cows or
chickens.
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The Man of Action
J eez, you should see the shiner my old man’s got! He was in a fight in the tavern last night, and he really caught one. But he knocked the other guy down so I guess he won.”
The school bus that hauled us country kids rattled down Waldo
/> Boulevard on its way to Woodrow Wilson Junior High in Mani-
towoc. In the seat beside me, Frank was laying it on thick, making his old man’s scuffle at Art and Helen’s Tap sound like a title fight.
But in a way I was jealous of Frank. He had an old man that hung around taverns, got into fights, and bragged about them afterward, a tough guy who didn’t take crap from anybody. My dad, on the other hand, took a lot of crap as cochairman of the Saint Paul’s Methodist building committee.
Not that Dad was a milquetoast. In college, he had played the
line on both sides of the ball in the days of leather helmets. And he spent the late ’30s as an engineer on a Great Lakes ore boat.
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No, Dad was no softy, but he wasn’t exactly a man of action,
either. There was an Irish temper behind his smile and ever-present pipe, but few people saw it. Words, patience, and humor were his tools, and if they didn’t work the first time, he’d try them again. “Patience is a virtue, find it if you can, seldom in a woman, never in a man,” he used to say.
I put all that out of my mind as the bus pulled up at Wilson. I
had bigger worries that September, starting with a C in geometry that would probably get worse before it got better. And in any case, my jerry-built idea of manhood was about to be knocked flat at
Horicon Marsh, the big refuge in east central Wisconsin that was becoming famous for its goose hunting.
In the spring and fall, immense flocks of Canada geese gathered
at Horicon, and Dad loved Canadas the way most people love sun-
sets. Back in the midfifties, Canadas weren’t as common as they are now, and even when we were in the thick of a grouse cover, he would stop and look up when chanting flocks passed overhead. He’d stand there, listening, until they were out of sight.
That fall, Dad decided to try some goose hunting at Horicon. In
those days the Horicon season didn’t open until November, but Dad was a thorough sort of man and got an early start.
In August, he bought three books about goose hunting and read
them front to back at the kitchen table, smoking his pipe and taking notes. On September evenings, while I duked it out with Pythago-ras, Dad was down in the basement, jigsawing sheets of Masonite