Sportsman's Legacy

by William G. Tapply

  That fall, I signed up for a writer’s workshop. Soon, the teacher contacted me. He insisted I write him a letter about why I wanted to be in his workshop. Really? I mean, was this fifth grade or what? I’m not sure why I didn’t chuck the class there and then. Instead, I dutifully wrote the letter.

  A week later, a tall, wide-shouldered man ambled into the dive shop. I was wearing an unattractive pink top with black jeans, one of those outfits you buy and then feel obligated to wear. The guy was handsome, with a broad face and sleepy blue eyes and a crooked smile, the latter of which spelled trouble.

  He introduced himself as Bill Tapply, the workshop leader. He said he was there “just to say hi.” Then he claimed he hadn’t come to town just to meet me, but rather he was having lunch with his son who worked across the street. The kid’s name was Mike.

  Joe turned out to be one hell of a matchmaker.

  Bill and I had a lot in common. We loved reading and movies and competing at Trivial Pursuit and card games. We shared a delight in classical music and jazz and ‘60s rock, too. We loved nature and critters and streams and forests. We adored our respective children and were quite protective of them.

  We had a true passion for words and writing and telling a good tale.

  What we didn’t share was Bill’s love of hunting and fishing, something that was embedded in his DNA, yet as alien to me as my scuba diving was to him. But as I came to love the man, I grew to respect his pursuit of these, to me, rather odd pastimes.

  Wanting the relationship to thrive, I took a course in fly fishing. He called me an “aspiring novice” just to get a rise out of me. We’d go out in the canoe, and I rocked those crappies and bluegills.

  Yet most of my trout fishing adventures came with other women, not Bill. I never wanted to slow him down.

  I didn’t take up hunting, but sometimes, on a crisp fall day that smelled of woodstoves and apples, we’d bring Bill’s beloved hunting dog Burt out for a run. Burt never stayed close enough for Bill’s liking, but Bill and I loved to watch him gallop across a field, then slow, and finally hold a point on a woodcock or a grouse.

  Those were special days, memorable days, and I now reflect on the great legacy he left me and his children and my sons, a legacy filled with a love of the land and water, of dogs and family, of words and Pooh and more.

  Sportsman’s Legacy is arguably my favorite book that Bill wrote. I knew his dad but briefly and not well. Even in his 90s, H.G. “Tap” Tapply charmed with his warmth and generous smile and hearty greetings. I wish I’d known him longer and deeper. I love that Bill wrote this “poem” of admiration and adoration to his dad, an iconic sportsman. What I also love is that here, more clearly than in any of his other works of prose, I get to hear Bill’s voice once again—strong, assured, humorous, loving.

  So the title of the book now has, for me at least, an even more resonant meaning. When Bill wrote the original, his dad was alive. So was Bill. Now, both are gone. And yet the texture of their lives continues.

  I’ve added quite a few new (to this publication) photos and am so honored to present Bill’s son, Mike’s introduction. I’ve also included a few articles at the end of the book that were written by Bill after the original book’s publication. To me, they harmonize beautifully with the original work. I believe Bill would like that I included them.

  We did movies together and picked each other up at airports and edited each other’s work. We played Spite and Malice—a fierce card game—and watched Jeopardy and he cooked and I did laundry and he wrote and I wrote, and we loved our children and each other passionately. Except none of this even comes close to illuminating the life we shared for nearly twenty years.

  And then he left.

  Now? I picture him peering over my shoulder as I write this, nodding with approval, yet holding his black Flair pen ever-ready to make a slash here and add a word there.

  In my dreams.

  Vicki Stiefel Tapply

  August 2011

  VICKI AND BILL, 2003

  I was sitting beside a Rocky Mountain stream last fall watching a rainbow trout sip midges off the surface and wondering how I might catch him when a stranger wandered up the path, stopped beside me, and squinted at the water. “Nice fish,” he said. “You gonna try for him?”

  I told him I intended to eventually, but for now I was content to watch him.

  “Mind if I watch with you?”

  I patted the grass beside me. “Pull up a seat.”

  He was about my age, I guessed, and it quickly became evident that he shared my appreciation for trout-hunting as a spectator sport. We talked about bugs and fish, mountains and rivers, and in the course of our conversation we exchanged names and shook hands properly. He told me he had retired early from the computer business so that he could attend to more important things like fishing. I told him I wrote for a living, sometimes about fishing, which was almost as good as being retired.

  He smacked his palm with his fist. “Tapply!” he said. “Of course. I love your stuff.”

  I smiled modestly.

  “This is great,” he said. “Listen, when I was a kid I used to clip your columns out of Field & Stream every month. I kept ‘em in a scapbook. Hell, you’re my hero.”

  “When you were a kid,” I said, “I suspect I was a kid, too. That was my father who wrote the column.”

  He frowned. “You’re not Tap? You don’t write Tap’s Tips?”

  “That’s my Dad.”

  “Aw, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” I said. “Happens all the time. He’s my hero, too.”

  Enough potboilers are published every year to convince me that many talented and idolized people make perfectly frightening parents, and that their offspring’s published revelations make best-selling books.

  This book will shock and amaze you: H.G. Tapply really could tie flies and paddle a canoe and catch fish.But the thing he did best of all was raise a son. He’s still doing all those things, and he continues to do them with rare excellence.

  This book will boil no pots.

  I’m not sure where in my anatomy the hunting impulse resides—in my genes, some would say, or in my soul—but it’s certainly there as, I’m convinced, it is in all of us. The human species would not have adapted and survived if we couldn’t hunt. Those who lacked the instinct for it simply did not pass along their genes. Hunting and gathering constituted the primary occupation of the human male for all but the most recent eyeblink of human evolution. Such powerful adaptive mechanisms do not disappear easily.

  Hunting, of course, includes fishing. It’s all the same—that easy retreat into a predatory mode that feels too natural not to be genetically given. Whether I’m following a bird dog through grouse cover or creeping along the banks of a trout stream, I know I’m hunting. I hear and smell and see everything most acutely at these times. I am a fully alive and functioning human as I otherwise rarely am. I can easily imagine hunting for survival. Indeed, the survival of my sanity often seems to depend on it.

  There is still that triumphant feeling that a successful hunt produces—a fish is landed, a bird is shot. My ancestors, I’m sure, exulted when they slew a mammoth, and they were tribal heroes when they dragged home an edible trophy. But the more I hunt and fish, the less relevant the trophy becomes. I don’t need to shoot birds or catch fish to fulfill my powerful predatory impulses. I put back most of the fish I catch, and I feel little loss when I fail to land one. It no longer bothers me when I shoot and miss, as I usually do.

  Seducing a trout into striking my fly and getting a fair shot at a flying grouse convince me I’m an excellent predator, and I am fulfilled.

  Today an increasing number of people are denying this most basic aspect of human character. They call hunting “primitive,” which it surely is, but which surely doesn’t make it immoral, as they contend. Or they call it “cruel,” which it needn’t be, or “sadistic,” which it is only in its perversions. They sublimate the hunter-gatherer in th
emselves by playing tennis or the stock market—or by vilifying hunters and fishermen.

  Most folks who haven’t experienced our “blood sports” remain neutral on the subject, and that’s fine. Others, however, become downright self-righteous and judgmental, and that frightens me. I worry about which side the neutrals will eventually come down on.

  I’m glad so many people prefer concrete and air conditioning and their own perversions of the hunting urge, for there are already too many people crowding our rivers and woods. But I feel sorry for them, too. They have the same legacy that I do. Their ancestors gave them hunting, but they have not acknowledged the gift.

  So I’m completely convinced that I was born with the urge to slip into nature and to try to creep up on wild things, and when I do it, I feel as wild and as natural as they are. This is my legacy. Dad did not give these instincts to me.

  But he nurtured them. He gave me the outdoors, and mostly by bringing me along with him and allowing me to absorb it in my own way at my own pace, he taught me how to enjoy it fully.

  He had no interest in cloning himself. Nor did he hope to create a fly-cast wing-shooting prodigy—which is just as well, because I surely would have disappointed him with my modest skills. He kept it simple and allowed it to be natural and fun. If Dad had any ulterior motive, it was to cultivate an amiable sporting companion. In that regard, he did everything right. We have always liked each other.

  But he was no weekend parent. He did not limit his attention to our times outdoors. Fatherhood was fulltime work for Dad. When I was about ten, I took up the clarinet. Instead of buying me a metronome and sending me off to a soundproof room to squeak my way through my scales, he sat with me and beat time against the arm of his chair with his pipe. My childhood goal was to play shortstop for the Red Sox (Don Buddin, the incumbent during those impressionable years of mine, was fallible enough to make my dream seem realistic). So Dad threw me ten thousand grounders in the backyard, and on every one he yelled, “Charge the ball. Watch it all the way into your glove.” When I took up archery, Dad bought himself a bow and asked me to show him how to shoot. Then my mother and Martha, my sister, tried it, liked it, and were good at it. We joined a field archery club. The four of us traveled all over New England to shoot in weekend tournaments. Martha and Mum won trophies regularly. There was no shame in doing things as a family in those days. When I decided to try out for the basketball team, Dad built a backboard, nailed it to the oak tree out back, and retrieved missed shots for me. When I made the team, he skipped out of work early to join my mother in dingy junior high school gyms and watch my afternoon games.

  He moved his family into the country, and endured the long daily commute into the city without complaint, so that I could grow up with woods and fields and a pond out back.

  He respected my judgment, even when I was young. He allowed me to make my own choices knowing, I’m certain, that I’d make plenty of bad ones, but trusting that I would learn from them, which is generally how it worked out. I can recall his ordering me to do only two things in my life—study Latin and learn to type—choices I surely would not have made on my own and which I am grateful he forced on me. Otherwise, he let me figure out things for myself, such as when the lawn needed mowing.

  A friend of mine recently lost his father to cancer. “I sat with my Dad for his last twenty-four hours,” he told me, “and I was finally able to say the things that I hadn’t said to him in all my life. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

  Dad and I never run out of things to talk about, but I am content that he and I have said everything that needs saying already. It’s never been hard.

  Anyway, what I have to say wouldn’t take long. “Thanks, Pop,” would do it.

  SPORTSMAN’S LEGACY

  BILL AND HIS BELOVED BRITTANY, BURT, OFFICIALLY NAMED BURTON L. SPILLER AFTER BILL’S GOOD FRIEND AND FAMED GROUSE HUNTER AND WRITER.

  LAST HUNT

  ON A CRISP NEW HAMPSHIRE MORNING TWO YEARS AGO last October, Skip Rood and I pulled into the peastone driveway on Pond Road in Alton. Mum and Dad were expecting us for coffee before we began our day’s hunt. “Let’s see if we can talk Tap into joining us,” said Skip.

  I shook my head. “He won’t come. He doesn’t hunt anymore.”

  “I’ll convince him.”

  “He’s pretty stubborn. Says he’s too old. Arthritis, bad back, stiff neck, cranky knee, hernia. He doesn’t complain, but those are his facts. I’ve tried. He says his hunting days are over.”

  “He’ll come.”

  “Bet a buck he won’t.”

  “You’re on.”

  I felt pretty smug. It was a sure bet.

  The last time I had hunted with Dad had been more than a decade earlier. Birds were scarce in our old New Hampshire covers that day, and Bucky, Dad’s aging Brittany, ran wild and bumped a few that were there out of range. Sometime in the afternoon we were skirting the edges of a boggy tongue of alder when a woodcock jumped at Dad’s feet. I can still see it clearly—the “little russet fellow,” as our old friend Burt Spiller called them, twittering and struggling to the alder tops, pausing there in perfect silhouette against the sky directly in front of Dad, his gun rising instinctively to his shoulder.

  I mentally recited an epitaph to that doomed bird. Dad was a deadly wingshot, especially on woodcock.

  “Bang-bang,” he said, conversationally.

  He did not pull the trigger. The woodcock flew away.

  Back in the car, I said, “What the hell was that all about?”

  He feigned confusion. “Huh?”

  “Saying ‘bang-bang.’ Not shooting.”

  “Safety stuck.”

  “Sure.”

  He grinned. “Don’t buy that one, huh?”

  “Nope.”

  He gazed out the car window. “Guess I don’t have the heart for it anymore. I’ve shot an awful lot of birds. I do love ‘em, you know.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I did shoot that one. In my head. I just decided to put him back, like a trout.”

  That’s when I knew that Dad’s hunting days were over.

  We sat around the table in the sun-drenched kitchen nook and watched the chickadees and finches compete with the squirrels at Dad’s elaborate birdfeeder outside. Waldo, Skip’s Brittany, lay under our feet. Dad dangled his hand to scratch the dog’s ears. Mum poured coffee.

  “I don’t know how many covers old Waldo’s got left in him,” said Skip mournfully. “He’s slowing down, getting old.” He shook his head. “Best damned grouse dog I ever saw, too.”

  “Better than Seegars?” said Dad.

  Seegars had been Waldo’s sire. Dad had hunted with Skip and Seegars one dog generation earlier.

  “Waldo’s the best,” said Skip matter-of-factly. “Everyone who hunts with him calls him Waldo the Wonder Dog. Never saw a dog that would point grouse the way Waldo does.”

  “Seegars was awfully good,” mused Dad.

  BURT, AT ABOUT FOUR

  “You ain’t seen nothin’ til you’ve seen Waldo.” Skip shrugged, then said, “Why don’t you come with us, watch him work?”

  “I’d love to,” said Dad.

  Skip caught my eye and grinned.

  Dad put on one of the several blaze-red corduroy hunting shirts that Mum had made for him over the years. All its trips through the washer had faded it to pink. Then the four of us piled into Skip’s wagon—Dad and Skip up front, Waldo and I in back.

  It felt familiar. I had spent a lot of time in back seats with bird dogs as a kid. I understood that as long as I could demonstrate my mastery of the principle that children should be seen and not heard, I would be allowed to go along with the men. So while my Dad and Burt Spiller or Harold Blaisdell or Lee Wulff or any of the others he fished and hunted with debated politics or economics or dog training or fly patterns up front, I sat in the back with the dog, and both of us practiced the art of being seen and not heard.

  I learned a lot that way. It’s not a bad skill for an adult
to cultivate, either, I’ve since decided.

  Skip drove to one of our favorite old covers. Dad and I had discovered this classic grouse and woodcock hotspot one autumn afternoon twenty-five or thirty years earlier when a great horned owl flew across the dirt road in front of the car. “That,” Dad said as he braked to a stop, “is a sign.”

  My father is a rationalist. He doesn’t believe in portents, or superstitions, or even God. So I laughed. “What do you mean, a sign?”

  “The owl is a predator,” he said. “So I ask you. What’s he preying on?”

  “Chipmunks, probably,” I shrugged.

  “True. But did you see the alders and those old apple trees in there? There’s fruit on those trees. It looks awfully birdy. Let’s have us a little ex-plore.”

  The owl, of course, had nothing to do with it.

  An old woodsroad ended at a barway a hundred feet into the woods. On the right-hand side of the road, young hardwood sloped down to a brook where Baldwin apples mingled with hemlock and alder, and Dad and I found a brood of grouse among them on that day of discovery. We chased a single up to the crown of the hill where a stand of birch whips held a flight of woodcock.

  I don’t recall how many birds we took out of there that day. Probably not many. Duke, our setter, tended to get excited by too much birdscent and bust them wild, and I was not—still am not—a very good wingshot. Dad always chose the thickest routes where shooting was most difficult. He claimed that that’s where the dog should be, and it was his dog, and the master should hunt with the dog. I know for a fact, however, that he always tried to arrange for his partner to get the good shots, even when such an advantage was wasted on me.

  Back in the car that afternoon, Dad spread our topographic map on his knees, traced the lines with his forefinger, then drew a circle on it with a black felt-tip pen and printed the legend: “The Owl Cover.”