Upland Autumn

by William G. Tapply

  Playing guns, of course, was a hunting game—a game, I’m certain, that young boys played eons ago when their fathers took up their clubs and spears and left the cave for the real hunt.

  Playing guns came naturally to us. Hiding, stalking, and ambushing required no instruction. No grownups showed us how to do it, organized it for us, helped us practice, taught us the rules, refereed for us, coached our teams, or argued on our behalf.

  On the other hand, they didn’t tell us not to do it, either. They didn’t need to. We never confused our index fingers with real guns. Our fathers all owned real guns and taught us how to shoot them. Back then, we boys knew the difference.

  We’d all been instructed about gun control. The phrase was familiar to us. It meant knowing whether a weapon was loaded and where the muzzle was pointing at all times and being sure the safety was on. Gun control meant aiming only at what you intended to shoot. It meant unloading your gun before you crawled under a barbed-wire fence, handed it to somebody else, or put it into the back seat of the car.

  We didn’t play with real guns. None of us ever did. We played with toys. Real guns were not toys.

  Playing guns taught me how to move while appearing motionless. I could creep through the summer woods without cracking a twig or crunching a leaf. I could spot another boy by an anomalous shape, shadow, color, or motion. When I slithered on my belly from tree to tree, I was both hunter and hunted, predator and prey, and I knew, even if I couldn’t articulate it, that I had tapped into something atavistic, natural, and important.

  In those days, nobody saw anything dangerous or disturbing about a bunch of boys slinking through the woods trying to shoot each other with make-believe guns. Our fathers had done the same thing when they were kids.

  When we outgrew playing guns, around the time we turned 10 or 11, many of my friends went on to other things that didn’t involve guns, real or toy. But some of us, including me, hadn’t lost our passion for slinking through the woods. Now we carried our Daisy air rifles and cardboard tubes of BBs, and we hunted dragonflies, grasshoppers, and moths. We also stalked toadstools, wildflowers, and leaves. Plinking, as it was called, was an honorable year-round sport for a country boy with a BB gun in those days. You don’t hear much about plinking anymore.

  When I became addicted to the bow and arrow, plinking evolved into stump hunting (which, I subsequently learned, was such a time-honored way for archers to practice hunting that it had a name: “roving”). The woods were full of targets for a kid with an imagination and a quiver full of homemade arrows. A clump of grass could be a rabbit; a rotten stump was a sitting grouse.

  I hunted wild creatures, too. On a summer’s evening, I crept along the edges of my local mud-bottomed, weedy ponds, hunting bullfrogs, which, I quickly discovered, were as alert for predators as one of my pals—or real fur—and feather-bearing game. I learned to spot the frogs by the two little humps their eyes made as they barely peeked up beside a lily pad. A sudden movement, a flickering shadow, a ripple on the water, or a flash of reflected sunlight, and those eyes would disappear. A careful stalk and a pinpoint shot—I aimed just behind those bulbous eyes—impaled the big amphibian to the mud bottom.

  The first time I brought a bullfrog triumphantly home, my father said, “Must’ve been a good shot. Now you’ve got to clean it.”

  He didn’t have to tell me why. I knew hunters ate what they shot. So I skinned the two meaty hind legs and put them in the freezer, and when I’d shot a few more bullfrogs, I fried their legs in butter.

  I never did acquire a taste for frogs’ legs. They tasted more like mud than chicken. But I liked hunting them, and so I kept eating them.

  During the legal hunting season, I stalked live game with my bow—mostly gray squirrels, which abounded in the woods out back, but also rabbits, pheasants, and grouse whenever I might find them. I refused to try a shot unless I’d crept to within 20 feet of anything, a range that I knew would give me a good chance to make a killing shot and minimize the chance of losing a precious arrow. It had to be on the ground with no brush to deflect my shot, and I wouldn’t try a shot at a moving target. I never did launch an arrow at a grouse or a pheasant, and even with all my playing-guns training, I spent a couple of seasons bow hunting for rabbits and squirrels almost every day after school in the fall before I finally shot one.

  That fact that I didn’t shoot anything—and rarely even shot at anything—didn’t feel like failure. I crept close to plenty of squirrels. They were wily creatures, especially when they were on the ground where they knew they were vulnerable. I learned to recognize the sounds they made when scratching among the dry oak leaves for acorns, and usually I stalked them by ear before I got close enough to spot them. The trick was to move only when the squirrel ducked its head, to avoid making any sound on the crispy leaves, and to be absolutely motionless whenever my quarry lifted his head. I measured the success of my hunting by how close I could approach a squirrel before he scampered up a tree, not by the number I killed.

  I shot only one squirrel with my bow, and that was the day I quit hunting them. I believe that, just once, every 12-year-old kid should gut-shoot a gray squirrel and hear its agonized, panicky squeal and see it try to crawl under a blowdown with an arrow sticking out of it. It’s an unforgettable reminder that a squirrel is not a stump or a clump of grass or even a bullfrog, and that sometimes hunting isn’t what you read about in magazines.

  Since the day I shot a squirrel with an arrow, I have hunted only game birds with a shotgun.

  The pastoral little truck- and dairy-farming town where I spent my childhood is now a densely populated suburb of Boston, but back when I was a kid I could load my double-barrel .410 in my backyard and spend a whole October afternoon hunting grouse and pheasants in the woods behind my house. Whenever the lady next door saw me heading out back with a shotgun under my arm, she’d call, “Good luck, Bill.”

  No farmer ever refused a kid with a gun permission to hunt on his land, nor would a local cop stop a boy who was riding his bike with a .410 braced across his handlebars and a handful of shells in his pockets.

  Inevitably, the old farmers in my hometown sold out to the developers and moved to Florida. Local ordinances outlaw hunting or the discharge of firearms there now, and skulking through the woods is looked upon as unhealthy and unnatural. A boy who likes to play guns visits the child psychologist weekly.

  Most of the kids I used to play guns with became adults who don’t hunt wild game. They’ve gone on to different kinds of hunting. They are litigators; insurance salesmen; hedge-fund brokers; and headhunters who stalk, ambush, and bring down other prey, and they don’t seem to understand that it’s the same thing.

  Many of them say they have happy childhood memories of slinking through the woods playing guns, but some of them have become holier-than-thou anti-hunting crusaders. I want to say this to them: No matter how hard you try, and whether you like it or not, you can’t escape the fact that you’re still a hunter, and before you criticize us, you should think about how you sublimate your own hunting instincts.

  I still play guns. Now I use a shotgun instead of my index finger, and I hunt birds instead of other boys. But still, when I creep through the woods, moving without appearing to move, listening and looking for something anomalous, that primitive feeling returns, as strong as ever. It absolutely convinces me that I am still a wild creature, that the urge to hide and seek, to hunt and be hunted, lives in my genes—and yours—as it has since we first slithered out of the primal slime.

  Chapter 2

  THESE ARE OUR GOOD OLD DAYS

  When I was a kid, a day of grouse and woodcock hunting with my father began at the crack of dawn with a long drive from our house in the Boston suburbs into northern and western parts of New England. Such days inevitably ended with a long drive back home in the dark.

  As the years passed, strip malls, highway cloverleafs, housing developments, and golf courses replaced our treasured alder thickets, poplar hil
lsides, and gone-wild apple orchards, and the commute to bird-hunting country grew increasingly longer. So did the distance between productive covers.

  Finally just a couple of years ago I fled the suburbs and moved north and west to a little farm in a pretty New Hampshire village. This town is webbed with dirt roads and second-growth forest and abandoned farmland. There are very few No Trespassing signs. Everybody fishes and hunts.

  My new hometown has a post office, a cash market, a library, and an inn that’s sheltered wayfarers since 1789. There’s a sheep farm, an apple orchard, and a couple of cornfields, and that’s about it for commerce.

  Our town dump recycles conscientiously, but it’s officially called The Dump. It’s that kind of a town.

  My neighbors own fly rods, shotguns, and canoes. They raise goats, pigs, and chickens. They park backhoes, tractors, and pickup trucks in their barns. They read books, debate foreign policy, and drive long distances for good theater, first-run movies, and Yorkshire pudding, too, and they send their kids to college.

  It’s that kind of town.

  In my new town, stone walls line every roadside. Old cellarholes are scattered through the woods. From my windows I can watch whitetail deer, wild turkeys, ruffed grouse, red foxes, black bears, and packs of coyotes hunt and browse in my fields. Barred owls and sharpshin hawks sometimes come swooping down to chase the chickadees and chipmunks from my bird feeders.

  It’s that kind of town.

  In my town, there are twice as many miles of dirt roads as paved ones. It’s mostly forest, meadow, mountain, and swamp. Rocky streams bubble through every crease in the hillsides. Pristine ponds nestle in every depression.

  You could spend a lifetime tramping all those woods, driving all those back roads, and casting flies upon all that water. Unfortunately for me, I don’t have a whole lifetime. But I’m giving it my best shot.

  Aside from figuring out where the local trout lived, when I moved here, my number-one aim was to put together a string of local bird covers. For once in my life, I wanted to be able to spend the hunting season in the woods, not in the car. Whenever the spirit moved me, I wanted to be able to step outside, sniff the air, give my dog a whistle, and go bird hunting for an hour or two.

  When you move to an unfamiliar part of the world and you’ve got a middle-aged bird dog—and when you yourself are looking back over your shoulder at the time when they started calling you middle-aged—scouting up a brand-new string of grouse and woodcock covers becomes a matter of some urgency.

  With birds scarce and scattered to start with, and with the depressingly steady loss of even marginal habitat, lining up a day’s worth of birdy places to hunt requires time and perseverance, not to mention a four-wheel-drive vehicle and a set of topographic maps—all of which are useless if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

  Nowadays, before you can go hunting for birds, you’ve got to go hunting for covers that look like they’ll hold birds.

  It was all so different in the good old days.

  I grew up hunting grouse and woodcock with my father and his friends. Burton L. Spiller, Frank Woolner, Corey Ford, Ed Zern, Lee Wulff, and Gorham Cross were some of Dad’s friends. They were old-timers when I was a youngster.

  When they talked about the good old days, “old days” meant the early decades of the 20th century when they were young men. By “good,” they meant the bird-shooting.

  In those days in New England, they told me, you could stuff a meatloaf sandwich into your game pocket, promise your wife you’d be back before dark with dinner, walk out the back door, slide a couple of shells into the old 12-gauge double, whistle up your setter, and set forth on a day of grouse shooting.

  You’d put the morning sun on your back and wander more-or-less westerly. You’d criss-cross abandoned pastures studded with clumps of juniper and thornapple. You’d work the edges of old apple and pear orchards grown thick with briar and grapevine. You’d follow boggy streambeds trampled by cows and rimmed with alder, cut through woodlots half-grown to pine and birch, climb over oak ridges, prowl south-facing hillsides where the birch and popple still clung to their yellow leaves ... and all along the way, they said, even with a mediocre dog you’d find plenty of birds.

  New England in the first half of the 20th century was not far removed from the agricultural New England that, in the middle of the 19th century, had been 80 percent cultivated. In those days, many of the Yankee settlers had pretty much given up trying to farm that stingy soil, but the countryside had not yet been suburbanized and super-highwayed and Wal-Marted. Back then it was a network of small villages and scattered dairy farms laced together with dirt cartpaths. Otherwise, it was mostly overgrown pastures, field edges, wild orchards, tumbledown stone walls, and empty farmhouses with caved-in roofs and family plots gone over to milkweed and goldenrod.

  Rural New England in the early 20th century, in other words, had become ideal grouse habitat, and when Burt Spiller and Corey Ford wrote their stories about it, they established the standard by which classic grouse hunting was measured.

  A bird hunter didn’t worry about scouting for covers in those days. The whole countryside was one big grouse cover. You just walked westerly for half the day, flushing birds here and there, shooting a few of them and missing plenty, which was okay because there would always be more. Around noon you’d stop beside a brook, empty your game pocket onto the ground, build a hot little fire, and boil a pot of water for your tea. You’d eat your meatloaf sandwich and munch the wild Bartlett pear or Baldwin apple you’d plucked from one of those old orchards.

  Your setter would lie down in the brook to drink, then flop onto his side in a patch of sunlight for a snooze. You would lean back against a boulder and sip your tea and fire up your pipe and savor the memories and daydreams. And if the day was warm, you might take a little snooze yourself. After a while you’d speak to the dog, who would scramble to his feet, and you’d put the afternoon sun on your back and hunt your way homeward.

  The days of the continuous grouse hunt didn’t last, of course. It was just a moment in history, a blip in time between two eras. Dirt cartpaths got paved, farms became neighborhoods, villages became suburbs, grouse covers became golf courses, and No Hunting signs popped up like mushrooms after an April shower. Pastures, hayfields, and woodlots grew to mature forest, and ruffed grouse and woodcock sought out the increasingly isolated and scattered corners and pockets of cover that gave them the habitat they needed to survive. Burt and Corey and the others were cheerful men. They didn’t wax nostalgic or talk wistfully about the good old days. They loved to go hunting. That never changed. But for the old-timers, grouse hunting in the middle of the 20th century, when I hunted with them, had changed. Now it meant driving the back roads and scouting hard for little patches of cover that looked birdy.

  Those old-time grouse hunters knew, without having to analyze it, what they were looking for. Decades of prowling the autumn countryside and finding birds in some location—and not finding them in others—had imprinted patterns on their memories that defined the characteristics of good grouse cover. They instinctively understood that grouse needed tangly corners for protection from predators, sunny hillsides for warmth and feather dusting, open edges for quick escapes, apple, grape, and thornapple clumps for fancy dining, pine thickets for roosting, and rocky brooks for drinking.

  When hunters found a place that looked right, they ran the dog through it to see if it actually held birds. If it did, they treasured it, gave it a name, and marked it on their topographic maps, and whenever they hunted there, they pulled their car far enough off the road so that other hunters, who would understand its significance, would not spot it.

  I learned a lot by tagging along.

  In my new hometown that first summer I discovered miles of dirt roads winding through woods, meadows, and old farmland, and I spent an hour or so almost every August afternoon driving them. I looked for breaks in stone walls, rutted cartpaths that petered out in the woods, field
s without houses, old orchards gone wild, second-growth woodlots, brooks, pine thickets, sunny hillsides, and edges of any kind.

  Nothing, I discovered, looks very birdy in August, when the woods are hot and thick with green foliage. It takes a lot of imagination to visualize how things might look in October.

  In the evenings I scoured my topo maps, interpreted the symbols, recalled where I’d driven that day, and drew optimistic circles around possibilities.

  My barber, my vet, my realtor’s brother-in-law, and my neighbor at the end of the street were all bird hunters. Unlike the suburbs, in this town it seemed as if everybody owned a couple of setters and hunted birds. We talked about dogs and shotguns and compared versions of the good old days. I knew better than to ask their advice about places to hunt, and as friendly as they otherwise were, they never offered any.

  Most of them, in fact, said they generally hunted, oh, a couple hours north of here.

  So by the time Opening Day came around, in spite of my research and explorations, I hadn’t identified a single grouse or woodcock cover where I felt confident I would find birds. I had only those hopeful circles on my maps.

  I figured, okay, this season would be for reconnoitering. I’d hunt for covers, not birds. I’d check out all those marks on the maps, and I’d drive the roads and see how things looked in October. My goal for the season would be to line up a string of productive covers.

  It turned out to be a summery autumn. The leaves clung stubbornly to the trees long after they should have fallen. The woods were dry and the air was warm, and it didn’t feel much like hunting season. I found a few places that looked pretty birdy, and here and there my dog bumped—and occasionally pointed—the odd grouse or woodcock.

  But I didn’t find enough birds in any one place to mark it with a star on my map and give it a name, and I’d begun to think that I’d settled in this village too late, that the local boys were right, and that no matter where I lived, the good bird hunting would always be a 2-hour drive to the north.