A year later the Spillers moved down the seacoast to the little hamlet of Wells, and young Burt’s lifelong love affair with the ruffed grouse was sealed. “Other boys of my acquaintance might content themselves with slaying elephants and lions and other inconsequential members of the animal kingdom,” he wrote, “but I wanted none of that. Nothing but the lordly pa’tridge would satisfy me.”
Eventually Burt bartered his bicycle and his watch for a 16-gauge double and “began to kill grouse regularly on the wing. I used the word ‘regularly’ advisedly,” he wrote, “for the regularity was truly astounding. I shot a bird and killed it. Then I shot at 49 more and missed ingloriously. Then I killed another.”
When he was a young man, he teamed up briefly with a pair of market hunters, an experience that steeped him in grouse lore and sharpened his wingshooting eye. Eventually he recognized “the difference between a sportsman and that reprehensible thing I was becoming ... [so] I bought a bird dog and became a sportsman.”
In 1911 Burton Spiller married and settled in East Rochester, New Hampshire, where he lived out the rest of his life. He was a blacksmith and a welder, and during the Great War he built submarines at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. He raised and bred prize-winning gladioli. He carved violins and made hunting knives. He hunted—not just grouse and woodcock, but ducks and deer, too—and he fished for brook trout and landlocked salmon.
Although he was pretty much self-educated, he began to write, working nights on his old Oliver typewriter. He sold “His Majesty, the Grouse” to Field & Stream in 1931. It was the first of 53 Spiller stories that magazine would print. The last was “Grouse Oddities,” in 1967, when Burt was 81.
Between 1935 and 1938 the Derrydale Press published a Spiller book a year—all numbered, deluxe editions limited to 950 copies. First came the classic Grouse Feathers, then Thoroughbred, Firelight, and More Grouse Feathers. All have been reprinted one time or another. Those original Derrydales are treasures.
Around that time, someone dubbed Burt “the poet laureate of the ruffed grouse.” The name stuck, as it should have.
In 1962, Drummer in the Woods, a collection of previously published grouse stories (mostly from Field & Stream), appeared. Burt also wrote a boy’s adventure yarn called Northland Castaways, and in 1974, the year after he died, Fishin’ Around, a collection of his low-key fishing stories, appeared.
I guess at one time or another, while the two of us were eating my mother’s applesauce cake by a New Hampshire brook or bouncing over a dirt road between covers or trudging side-by-side down an overgrown tote road, Burt told me most of his stories. Whenever I reread a couple of them, as I do every time I take out the old Parker, I can hear Burt’s soft voice, see the twinkle in his eye, and feel his finger poking my arm for emphasis.
In 1955, when I began hunting regularly with him, Burt was already 69 years old. He was a small, wiry, soft-spoken man, old enough to be my father’s father. I called him “Mr. Spiller,” as I’d been taught. But on the first morning of our first hunt he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Burt, please. Call me Burt. When a grouse gets up, you can’t go yelling ‘Mark! Mr. Spiller’ now, can you?”
I never heard him raise his voice, curse even mildly, or criticize or poke fun at any man or dog. He was a devout church-going family man who did not hunt on Sundays, even though it was legal in New Hampshire, or drink alcohol, but he was neither pious nor self-righteous.
A good joke, for Burt, was a joke on himself. His favorite stories were about the grouse that outsmarted him and the times he got lost in the woods.
He wore an old-fashioned hearing aid, the kind that plugged into his ear with wires running to the battery in his pocket. “I can hear pretty well,” he told me cheerfully, “but sometimes I have trouble picking up the direction.” It had to have been a terrible handicap for a grouse hunter, and it probably accounted for the fact that even in those years when partridge were bountiful in his covers, many a day passed when Burt never fired his gun.
When he saw a bird, though, his swing was as silky as I guessed it had been 50 years earlier. Once he and I were trudging up an old woods road on our way back to the car. Our guns dangled at our sides, and we were talking and admiring the way the October sunlight filtered through the golden foliage of the beeches that bordered the roadway and arched overhead. Dad and the dog were working their way along parallel with us somewhere far off to the left.
Suddenly Dad yelled, “Mark! Your way!”
A moment later a grouse crashed through the leaves and rocketed across the narrow road in front of us. It didn’t make it. Burt’s Parker spoke once, and the bird cartwheeled to the ground.
It was a spectacular shot.
Burt picked up the stone-dead partridge and stroked its neck feathers. Then he looked up at me. He shook his head and smiled apologetically. “Sorry,” he said. “I should have let you take him.”
He knew, of course, that the odds of my shooting that grouse were exactly the same as his own when he’d been my age: about 1 in 50. But that was Burt.
I was young and eager, and I tended to measure the success of a day’s hunting by the heft of my game pocket. I learned how to hit flying grouse the old-fashioned way—by shooting often and relying on the law of averages—and as much as I missed, and as much as I expected to miss, I still tended to kick stumps and grumble and sulk when it kept happening.
Burt used to tell me, “Just keep shootin’. You can’t hit anything if you don’t shoot. And always remember: Every time you hit a flying grouse is a good shot.”
I noticed that he never grumbled or sulked when he missed, although, to be accurate, he didn’t seem to miss very often. Even on those days when birds were scarce, and it rained, and the dog behaved poorly, and nobody got any shots, Burt always had fun. Afterwards, when we dropped him off at his house, he always smiled and said the same thing: “A wonderful hunt. See you next week.”
Gradually I learned to say the same thing at the end of every day—“A wonderful hunt”—and mean it. Burt taught me that.
He was moving a lot slower in 1964, and although he still wore the old hearing aid, he didn’t seem to pick up sounds as well. Burt was 78 that year, but he still greeted us the same way when we picked him up in the morning: “Hi. I’ve been expecting you. It looks like a wonderful day.”
On the second weekend of the season, after we laced on our boots at our Bullring cover for the day’s first hunt, Burt said, “Uh, Bill? Can I heft your gun?”
I handed him my cheap Savage single-shot.
He threw it to his shoulder. “Comes up nice,” he said. “Mind if I try it?”
“Sure,” I said, though I couldn’t understand why he’d want to.
“Here,” he said. “You better take mine.” He handed me his slick little Parker.
I carried Burt’s gun through the Bullring, and he carried mine. I recall missing a couple of woodcock with it. Burt, straggling along the fringes of the cover, had no shots.
At our next stop, Burt picked up the Savage. “Never got to fire it back there,” he said. “Mind if I try again?”
And so Burt lugged my gun around that day while I carried his Parker, and Dad’s journal reports that I ended up shooting a woodcock, while Burt never dirtied the barrel of that Savage.
When we dropped him off, he said, “Why don’t you hang onto that gun if you want to.”
“Well, sure,” I stammered. “I mean, I’d love to.”
He smiled and waved. “A wonderful hunt, wasn’t it?”
The next week when we stopped for Burt, it was my Savage that stood on his porch alongside his lunch pail and boots, and he carried it all day while I toted the Parker. Nothing was ever again said about it. We had swapped guns, and Burt had managed to accomplish it his own way, without ceremony. He never even gave me the chance to properly thank him.
I know for certain that Burton Spiller shot only one more grouse in his life, and it happened a couple of weeks after we’d exchanged gun
s. He was following a field edge while Dad and I were slogging through the thick stuff, and a bird flushed wild and headed in Burt’s direction. Dad screamed, “Mark! Burt!” and I could hear the frustration in his voice, knowing that Burt probably couldn’t hear him and wouldn’t hear or see the bird.
But a moment later, from far off to our right, came a single shot.
We hooked over to the field and emerged behind Burt. He was trudging slowly up the slope, my gun over his right shoulder and a grouse hanging by its legs from his left hand.
Burt Spiller shot his last partridge with my gun.
The following Saturday—October 31, 1964—sometime in the morning, Burt fell. He never complained—didn’t even tell us when it happened—but by the middle of the afternoon he had to call it quits.
He was still hurting the next week and the week after, and then the season was over.
Burt Spiller had hunted grouse for the last time.
During the next decade, Dad and I visited him periodically. He always had a smile and wanted to hear about the hunting. He continued to write stories and raise gladioli right up to his death on May 26, 1973.
A few months later, the old Savage came back to me with Burt’s instruction: “For Bill’s son.”
Dad and I continued to hunt Spiller country for the next several seasons. Then one October we found a power line had cut the heart out of Schoolhouse. The next winter, Bullring became a highway cloverleaf and a Stop & Shop parking lot took the upper end of Tap’s Corner. A couple of years later, the dirt road to The Old Hotel got paved over, and pastel-colored ranch houses sprouted up along both sides.
Burt’s covers, those that remained, changed, too. Mankiller and Tripwire just didn’t look birdy anymore. The hillsides that had once sprouted thick with juniper, birch whips, and head-high alders grew into mature pine-and-hardwood forests, and after a while we stopped hunting Spiller country altogether.
Besides, it would never be the same. It always seemed as if we’d forgotten the most important stop of all—at the white frame house in the village of East Rochester, where Burt would come to his door on a Saturday morning, grin and wave, lug his gear to the car, and say, “Hi. I’ve been expecting you. It looks like a wonderful day.”
Chapter 5
FIVE ACES
When I visited my father during the last autumn of his life, we liked to talk about how when he was feeling better we’d pile into my truck and spend a day or two driving the back roads to see if we could track down our old string of grouse covers. They were loaded with indelible memories that both of us cherished.
Somewhere along the line Dad had lost his priceless set of topographic maps where those old partridge hotspots were marked. We hadn’t hunted them for close to 40 years, but we figured between the two of us, we’d recognize the old landmarks. We’d find them.
We’d run Burt, my Brittany, through the familiar old orchards, alder runs, field edges, and piney corners, just for old times’ sake. Dad would walk along, and if we got a point, I’d hand him the gun and let him walk up the bird, the way he did with me when I was a kid and those old covers were busting with grouse.
My father was a crack wingshot in his day. I liked to imagine him dropping one last bird cleanly, and Burt hustling over, picking it up in his mouth, and bringing it to Dad’s hand.
I guess we both knew it wasn’t going to happen.
During those visits, I made it a point to urge my father to reminisce. He’d always been a pragmatic, stoical Yankee. He’d had a rich and fulfilling life, but a hard one, and he knew that the good old days hadn’t always been so good. Nostalgia didn’t come naturally to him.
But when it came to upland hunting, he admitted that those old days really had been awfully good.
“Remember Five Aces?” he’d say.
“A magical grouse cover,” I’d say. “The best one ever.”
“I’d like to see it again.” He’d close his eyes and smile, remembering. Then he’d look at me and shrug. “No, actually, I guess I wouldn’t. It won’t be the same.”
My father’s New England encompassed the southern halves of Maine and New Hampshire. This, naturally, has been my New England, too. The countryside was different in the decade before World War II when he began hunting ruffed grouse. Winding roads, most of them dirt, connected dairy farms to villages. Otherwise it was mostly young second-growth forest, meadows, stone walls, and recently abandoned farmland—pastures, orchards, and woodlots growing thick with blackberry and thornapple, alder and poplar, pine and hemlock, oak and beech.
As Dad remembered it, it didn’t much matter where you hunted. Grouse were scattered everywhere. A day of hunting meant wrapping a corned-beef-and-cheddar-cheese sandwich in waxed paper and stuffing it in your game pocket, cramming your pockets with 20-gauge shotgun shells, tucking your Winchester Model 21 under your arm, whistling up your setter, and setting forth. You’d put the morning sun on your back and head off, following the dog wherever his nose led him.
Around noon you’d stop, eat your sandwich, drink from a spring-fed brook-trout stream, and munch a wild Baldwin apple. If it was one of those warm October days, you’d lie back on the pine needles with the sun on your face, lace your fingers behind your neck, and snooze for an hour with your dog’s chin on your thigh. Then you’d load up your shotgun again, put the afternoon sun behind you, and wander eastward until you got back to where you started from.
All along the way, Dad said, you’d find grouse—singles, pairs, sometimes whole broods. Even an average dog would point some of them, and even a mediocre wingshot would bag a few. My father always insisted that knocking down a flying grouse in thick brush was surely a triumph, but not really the main point of it. Grouse hunting was more about finding birds than shooting them. A good day was never measured by the heft of your game pocket.
By the time I started hunting with my father in the late 1950s, the New England landscape had changed, and grouse were harder to find. The meandering old dirt roads had been straightened, widened, and paved over, the abandoned farmland was being claimed by developers, and houses were popping up everywhere. Civilization was spreading over the countryside, and we couldn’t just set off into the woods for a day’s hunt. We did almost as much driving as we did walking. A day of grouse hunting meant six or eight stops at pockets of cover that we’d learned to depend on to hold a few birds. Dad called them “our string o’ pearls.”
A few of our covers sprawled over several square miles and occupied us for the better part of an afternoon. Most of them took little more than an hour to hunt. They were apple-and-pine corners, grape tangles, alder runs, poplar hillsides, and brushy edges bordering dense evergreens. They were usually good for a grouse or two, and when the woodcock flights were down, we’d sometimes find the ground whitewashed with their chalking.
Every season we lost a few of our old covers to housing developments, power lines, highway cloverleafs, and strip malls. Others just stopped producing. So we were always scouting for new covers. We scoured our topo maps for clues. We drove the back roads, always ready to take the one less traveled. Any break in a stonewall might signify an ancient cartpath that led to an abandoned farmyard or an old woodlot. We looked for apple orchards gone wild, alder-edged streambottoms, pastures grown to clumps of pine and thornapple, hillsides thick with second-growth poplar and birch—anything that looked birdy, which meant anything that reminded us of someplace where we’d found birds in the past. We didn’t have much science for it. A birdy cover had a feel to it that was more than the sum of its parts.
Whenever a new spot produced some grouse, we circled its location on our map, gave it a name, and added it to our string o’ pearls.
One day we were munching sandwiches and sipping coffee beside a little brook in New Hampshire. Duke, our old setter, snoozed on his side in a patch of October sunlight. Our open shotguns lay in the grass beside us. After a day and a half of hard hunting, all four barrels were still clean.
“Slim pickins,�
�� murmured Dad.
I nodded. “Mighty slim.”
“First Chance, empty,” he said. “Ditto Bullring. That one wild grouse in Mankiller. And what was it, two woodcock in all of Tripwire?”
“Maybe three,” I said. “Duke bumped ’em. Never saw them.”
“I dunno,” he said. “Maybe our covers are just petering out. They don’t look as birdy as they used to.”
“They’d probably look birdier if we were finding birds in them.”
Dad smiled. “Hand me that map, will you?”
He spread our topo map on the ground between us. Circles had been inked on it, marking the locations of our secret string of grouse covers. Mankiller, Clumps, Schoolhouse, Jackpot, County Line, Long Walk In, Tap’s Pines, Bill’s Folly, Traitorous Owl.
Dad squinted at the map, moved his forefinger over it, paused, then looked at me. “You up for an ex-plore?”
Brush scraped both sides of our station wagon as we crept over the old rutted roadway. It paralleled a rocky little stream that surely held native brook trout. The road, we happily observed, did not appear to have been driven on for a long time—perhaps, or so we wanted to believe, not since the farmer who cut it through the woods had loaded his family and his belongings into the back of his pickup and left for the last time decades earlier.
It ended at an abandoned farmyard on the edge of a sloping field grown to milkweed and goldenrod and sprinkled with gnarled Baldwin apple trees and clumps of juniper. The farmhouse on the hilltop was long gone. The roof and walls had caved into the cellarhole, but the fieldstone chimney still stood, and an ancient lilac grew in the dooryard.
Upland Autumn Page 4