“But I bet it was a good shot.”
“It was,” he said. “Every time you hit a flying grouse it’s a good shot.”
In spite of my youthful energy and enthusiasm, I had to struggle to keep pace with Dad, who moved through the woods with swift efficiency and never seemed to tire. Juniper tangles caught my feet and muck sucked at my boots and birch whips snapped against my face and briars scratched the backs of my hands. But I was determined to keep up without complaining. I might be too young to carry a gun, but I was not too young to go hunting, and I was old enough not to complain. I understood that I had an apprenticeship to serve. I had to serve it honorably.
Grouse hunting, I learned, entailed a high ratio of tough miles walked to birds moved, and when it happened, it happened so suddenly that if I was lagging too far back I missed it all. It was not a laid-back sport like fishing from a canoe. There were no aimless ex-plores, no bait-catching or flat-stone skipping, no loafing. In the woods with guns, Dad and I were not equal partners. I was the apprentice. He was the boss. I did as I was told.
We hunted hard and purposefully all morning. At noon we sat against a sun-warmed stone wall by a little spring-fed brook and ate the lunches Mum packed for us—woodsie sandwiches (corned beef, American cheese, and mayonnaise) and homemade applesauce cake. I took my first slug of coffee from the thermos—a small but significant ceremonial occasion all by itself. When we finished, Dad abruptly stood and said, “Can’t sit too long. Dogs and men’ll get all bogged down and stiff-legged.”
The afternoon turned gray and chilly. My boots grew heavy. I stumbled and slogged through the thickets, struggling, now, to keep up. Dad plowed on, as energized as he had been back in First Chance. Now and then a grouse flew, and Dad shot at some of them. I learned that getting a fair shot at a flying grouse defined a successful hunt. Hitting one was a rare and wonderful achievement, even for a skilled and experienced hunter.
By the time we quit I was exhausted. Bing and Dad both seemed disappointed that we had run out of daylight.
We drove over to the Valley Hotel in Hillsboro. The dining room was full of middle-aged men wearing faded canvas pants and frayed flannel shirts and gray stubble on their chins. Setters and pointers and spaniels dozed in a tangle among the men’s feet under the tables. They talked about thornapple and grape and alder, No. 8 shot and modified chokes, over-and-unders and side-by-sides, flushing dogs and pointing dogs and hunting grouse with no dogs. Now and then a hunk of beef accidentally fell under the table. I practiced being seen and not heard.
After dinner Dad took me to the little movie house where we saw—honest—The Man with the Atomic Brain. It was, I recall, a terrific film. But I dozed through the last half of it.
I had pancakes and bacon and my own cup of coffee for breakfast despite Dad’s warning that pancakes would bog me down.
It was a crisp October Sunday morning. The narrow dirt roads wound under gold and crimson canopies of beech and maple. The goldenrod in the fields glittered with melted frost.
We stepped into the day’s first cover. I was still trying to get un-bogged-down and keep pace with Dad when he suddenly hissed, “C’mere. Quick.”
I hurried up to him. He pointed. “Look.”
Bing stood beneath an apple tree, gazing intently upward into its bare branches. A grouse sat there looking down at him. Dad pressed his shotgun into my hands. “Take him,” he said.
I hefted the gun. “Is it loaded?”
“Hurry. It’ll fly. Of course it’s loaded.”
I lifted the shotgun to my shoulder and sighted over the wavering barrel. The grouse craned its neck.
I pressed the trigger.
“The safety,” whispered Dad. “Quick.”
I remembered I had only fired a shotgun once in my life. It had obliterated a rusty oil drum. I pushed the safety forward, took a deep breath, exhaled half of it, tried to steady the front sight on the nervous grouse, and pulled the trigger. I don’t recall seeing the bird fall. I probably flinched and closed my eyes. But I did hear Dad shout, “Yeah! You got him. Great shot!”
A moment later Bing trotted in with my bird in his mouth. Dad took it from him, smoothed its feathers, and handed it to me. “Your first grouse,” he said. “You have been bloodied. Congratulations.”
He held his hand to me and I shook it. It was our first man-to-man handshake.
I carried that grouse by its feet through the rest of the cover. My legs remained light and springy all day, and I had no trouble keeping up with Dad.
After that, I followed Dad through grouse covers many times, and although I did not carry a gun and was still serving my apprenticeship, I realized that I had become his hunting partner, too. I learned to drop to one knee when a bird flushed so I could see it all. I noticed how Dad moved through the thickest cover with his gun always at ready, and how quickly everything happened when a bird flew. I watched the way he approached thick corners and field edges, how he and Bing worked as a team. I noticed the kinds of places from which grouse tended to flush, and how they flew, and where a man with a gun should be standing when it happened in order to have a fair shot.
I also noticed that the muzzle of his shotgun never pointed in my direction.
Now and then a young foolish bird hopped onto a stone wall or fluttered up into a tree instead of bursting away, and then Dad would hand me the gun and I would shoot it.
“There’s not much to shooting a sitting grouse,” I said to him once.
“Grouse are wily birds,” he answered. “It takes a good hunter to get that close to one. Lots of hunters shoot them on the ground. Men who hunt them without dogs, that’s what they try to do. Nothing to be ashamed of.”
I wasn’t exactly ashamed. But I noticed that Dad only shot at flying grouse.
I followed in Dad’s footsteps for two seasons, and it was just before the third when he decided that I was ready for my first shotgun. It was a single-barrel, one-shot twenty-gauge Savage. “I know,” he said when he gave it to me. “You were probably hoping for a fancy double like mine. A man’s gun, right?”
I shrugged. I was thrilled to have my own gun and to know that I’d be allowed to carry it in the woods. But he was right. A single-shot did seem like a kid’s gun. I had already developed a fondness for the sleek side-by-side doubles Dad and his companions all carried.
“Well, listen,” he said, reading my mind as he could do so well. “This is not a kid’s gun. No gun is a kid’s gun. This shoots real shotgun shells and you can kill things with it. Understand?”
I nodded.
“See, it’s got a thumb safety, just like doubles have. So when you do get your double, you’ll be used to it. Grouse hunting, you’ve got to be quick. Pushing off the safety’s got to be instinctive. The good thing about a thumb safety is that it automatically clicks on whenever you break the gun. That’s a very good thing.”
He certainly liked to harp on safety, I thought. But I understood.
“Having only one shot’ll teach you to make the first one count. And always remember this: After you shoot, the first thing you do is break open your gun. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
When we stepped into our first cover that season, we talked strategy. Instead of following behind Dad, I would, for the first time in my life, take my own route parallel to him. We would whistle and call to each other, he reminded me. We must always know where the other guy is, and never ever shoot in his direction. We would split an alder run where, he said, we might find a pod of flight woodcock. Duke, our new setter, would work between us. A grouse usually lived there, too. He tended to scurry ahead of the dog and flush from the field edge at the end of the thicket.
FOR YEARS, TAP HUNTED DEER….AND THEN HE DIDN’T
As I moved through the alders, I was acutely conscious of the fact that I had only taken one shot at a flying bird in my life. I had been trailing Dad through Harold Blaisdell’s Vermont grouse covers the previous fall when we emerged on the high banks of a creek.
Uncle Harold and his dog were far off to our right. We heard a yell. Dad peered up the creek, then quickly handed me his gun. “Get ready!” he said, pointing.
Flying down the middle of the river toward us was a single black duck.
“Shoot him,” said Dad.
I didn’t have time to think, or aim, or ponder the fact that I had never discharged a shotgun at a moving object of any kind. I took the gun, raised it to my shoulder, flicked off the safety, and shot the duck.
I had seen Dad miss plenty of flying grouse and woodcock in two years of trailing him through the woods. I knew wing shooting wasn’t easy. But on that first morning when I carried my own gun in the woods, I had never missed.
I nearly stepped on the woodcock. He twittered up from my feet and corkscrewed through the thick alders, zig-zagging and darting erratically. I raised my gun, tried to aim, pulled the trigger, remembered the safety, and thumbed it off. The woodcock was nearly out of range. I hastily shot in his direction. He fell to the ground.
From the other side of the cover, Dad called, “Get him?”
“Yep.”
By the time Dad got to me, I was kneeling to take the woodcock from Duke’s mouth. I looked up and grinned. Dad was not smiling. He was frowning at my gun, which I had laid on the ground. “I told you,” he said, “always break the gun after you shoot.”
“Right. I’m sorry.”
“What if that was the double you wanted?”
I understood. There would be a live shell in the second barrel. The safety was off. “It won’t happen again,” I said.
“I’ll take the gun away if you can’t treat it right.”
“I know.”
He stared at me for a moment, then smiled. “Okay,” he said. “Good shooting. Let’s hunt.”
Fifty yards farther on Duke bumped a woodcock from in front of me. It rose to the alder tops, then slanted off to the right. My new shotgun came up to my shoulder, swung, and shot the bird. I never thought about it. It just happened.
I carefully broke open my gun and waited for Duke to retrieve. Dad called, “Well?”
“Got ‘im,” I yelled. “And I broke my gun open.”
“Well, good,” was all he said.
The two woodcock in my game pocket made a pleasantly hefty little weight against the small of my back. I was, I decided, a remarkably gifted wingshot. My new gun and I couldn’t miss. In fact, I had never missed a shot at a flying bird in my life. Who needed two barrels, anyway?
We found our covers full of early woodcock flights that day, and the grouse were thick, too, and before it was over I had sent a box of shells, one at a time, through that single new barrel of mine. I never hit another feather.
FIELD AND STREAM GROUSE
After I got my own gun, I hunted with Dad whenever he went, which was every weekend of the season. I hit flying woodcock with remarkable regularity—not frequency, but with that same regularity I’d established my first day with my new single-barrel Savage.
I’d hit a couple, miss twenty or so, then hit another one.
My success with flying grouse was even more regular: I never hit a single one of them. Not one.
I missed easy shots and hard ones, straight-aways and crossers, in-comers and outgoers, high fliers and grass-cutters, darters and zig-zaggers. I missed grouse that I kicked up, grouse that Duke pointed, grouse that burst out of trees, grouse that Dad flushed to me. I missed grouse that darted through pine trees and grouse that sailed across open fields. I shot fast, I shot slow. I tried to lead them, I snapshot at them. It didn’t matter. I missed them all.
If I hadn’t dropped an occasional woodcock, I would’ve thought there was something wrong with my gun.
But the explanation was clear: I was a completely inept wingshot.
Dad just smiled and shrugged. “Hitting a flying grouse is the hardest thing to do in hunting,” he said. “Every time somebody hits one he knows he’s been lucky. There’s nothing to be ashamed of, missing a grouse. The best grouse shot in the world misses way more than he hits.”
“Yeah, well nobody misses all of them,” I grumbled.
“Absolutely right,” he said. “So you’ve just got to keep shooting. They’ll start falling. The only rule I know about hitting grouse is you’ve got to shoot. The guys who brings home the most birds, they’re generally the ones who get the most shots. Getting off a shot is the point of grouse hunting. You’re good at that. You’ve got quick reflexes. Every time you send a charge of number eights in the direction of a flying grouse, you’ve got a chance to bring him down. See, you’re actually a pretty good grouse hunter. Figure it out. At the end of a day, I bet you get off as many shots as anybody.”
“I must be doing something wrong.”
“Nope,” he said. “I’ve watched you. Nothing wrong with your technique. Keep shooting. The old law of averages is bound to catch up with you. Then you’ll probably knock down five in a row.”
I loved hunting. I loved the New England countryside in the fall. I loved the teamwork of it, moving through the woods parallel to Dad, with Duke criss-crossing between us. I loved figuring out where a grouse might lie and how I make him fly so Dad or I would get a shot, and I thrilled every time one flushed. I loved analyzing topographic maps and driving back roads and tracking down rumors in search of new covers. I loved our meandering conversations on the long rides to and from New Hampshire and between covers. I loved Saturday nights at the Valley Hotel. I loved the democratic companionship of Dad’s friends, who became mine after we’d hunted together, men like Burt Spiller and Harold Blaisdell, John Brennan and Corey Ford and Lee Wulff.
I loved shooting, and I never took a shot that I didn’t think would hit the bird. I didn’t even mind missing.
But I hated missing every grouse I shot at.
Dad and the others we hunted with missed often, I noticed. Sometimes they cursed the bird or the various natural or supernatural forces that caused them to miss. Sometimes they even cursed their own poor marksmanship, although these curses sounded mild and half-hearted coming from the mouths of men who had shot plenty of grouse and knew they would shoot plenty more.
Still, I realized that there was no shame in missing. The odds always favored the grouse.
I kept shooting, and I waited, with declining optimism, for the law of averages to kick in. It occurred to me that it was definitely possible for a man to go through his entire life without ever hitting a flying grouse, just by missing them one at a time. That’s the flip side of the law of averages. A coin can come up tails a hundred times in a row.
Sometimes I believed I had literally been cursed, that the Fates had singled me out—me, precisely because I loved this sport and persevered so diligently at it—for their tragic malediction. Like Sisyphus, I shoved mightily at my boulder even as I grew to believe I would never roll it to the top of the mountain.
By the time I was sixteen I had become pretty good at hitting curve balls with a baseball bat and swishing jump shots and blasting out of sand traps. I won archery tournaments and footraces. But my excellent hand-eye coordination and athleticism and enthusiasm for hunting were no proof against the omnipotence of the Red Gods.
“Finding birds and getting shots at them,” Dad kept telling me. “That’s hunting. Hitting them is shooting. That’s different. You’re a very good hunter.”
He didn’t need to finish his thought: I was a very bad shooter.
I figured that if, just once, the Gods’ attention was diverted, or if they took pity on me, and I was allowed to shoot one flying grouse, I could live with never doing it again. Until that happened, I felt I was still an apprentice grouse hunter. I did not belong among the bloodied men at the Valley Hotel on a Saturday night. For no matter how I looked at it, the ultimate point of grouse hunting was shooting them out of the air.
So I roamed the woods for all of that first season with my new Savage, and the next season as well, hunting hard, shooting often, dropping the odd unfortunate woodcock—and missing g
rouse with absolutely perfect regularity.
A few times a grouse flushed between Dad and me, and we both shot simultaneously, and the bird came down. Dad called them “doubles,” and tried to give me credit for hitting them. I didn’t argue. It was possible that I had, in fact, sent a pellet into one of those birds. It was even possible that I had hit it and Dad had missed.
I was grateful that he never tried to convince me that he had missed and that the bird should be credited entirely to me (although I had seen him do that with some of the men we hunted with). He knew that I wanted that first grouse—if it ever should happen—to be clean and unequivocal.
So I didn’t count the “half-birds” of our doubles. As far as I was concerned, when it came to hitting flying grouse, I remained a virgin.
On a dark November Sunday afternoon toward the end of that second season we were pushing through some thick cover along the edge of a swamp. The woodcock had already passed through, and the grouse had been scarce in our covers that weekend. Snow spit down from the low gray sky. The taste of winter was in the air. It was the last hunt of the day before we would begin the long drive south to Massachusetts.
The grouse exploded from a pine thicket beside me, angled sharp left, then darted through a screen of evergreens. By the time I snapped off my shot, he had already disappeared.
“Git ‘im?” yelled Dad as he always did.
“Nah.” I often found myself wishing Dad wouldn’t keep asking, because I was sick of always answering in the negative.
“Get a line on him?”
“I hardly saw him. Straight ahead, I’d say.”
“Might as well follow him up.”
A minute later Dad yelled to me. “Come over here.”
When I got there he was kneeling on the ground. He extended his closed fist to me, then opened it. Two breast feathers lay in his palms. “I found these drifting in the air,” he said. “I’d say we’ve got a bird down.”
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