Upland Autumn

by William G. Tapply

  The rules of effective alibi-making are few and simple:

  Be prepared. You know with absolute certainty that eleven out of twelve grouse will elude you. Going into a partridge covert without a handy supply of excuses is like going out to sea without a life jacket. You’re inviting disaster.

  Keep in mind that there is an explanation for every miss. Your job is to come up with it without hesitating or bumbling. “I thought I was right on him,” or, “Geez, I missed again,” or, “Dunno what happened that time,” are not excuses.

  Never blame your own lack of skill. “I didn’t lead him enough,” or “I lifted my head just as I shot” mark you as an amateur of the alibi. Remember: It’s not your fault. Instead, deflect the blame to your equipment. “I had him centered. This old gun never did pattern no. 8s well.” Or, “The old blunderbuss just hasn’t hung right since I lost all that weight.” In a pinch, haul out the oldest and most shopworn excuse of all: “My safety stuck again.” It still works.

  Emphasize the difficulty of the shot you missed. “He was out of range. Never should’ve pulled the trigger.” Or, “Just caught a glimpse of him as he darted around that tree. It would’ve been a miraculous shot.”

  Never give the bird any credit as that’s just a backward way of blaming yourself. “He caught me off guard” or “He kept that big pine tree between us” simply makes you appear inept. Instead, shift the blame to the elements: “That big pine jumped right in front of me, took the whole load. I was right on that bird, too. Come here. Take a look at this tree.” Or, “The sun popped out from behind the clouds just as I squeezed off my shot. Blinded me for a second.” Or, “I swung right up against a poplar sapling.” Or, “I was horsecollared by a grapevine. Did damn well just to get a shot off.” Your gunning partner (who, remember, wants you to accept his excuses with a straight face) will nod and murmur sympathetically.

  Whenever possible, deflect blame onto your partner. Be cautious—you must be subtle and phrase these alibis carefully lest you provoke a did-not/did-too discussion that will convert all future excuses into debates. Try these: “I could’ve taken him easy, but he was headed your way. I pulled off at the last second so you could take him. What happened?” Or, “You kinda got out in front a little back there, didn’t you? If we’d done it right, we’d’ve had that bird cornered.” The advantage of this tactic, of course, is that it immediately challenges your partner to come up with a better excuse than you did, and you have preempted the entire blame-your-partner category of alibis. When you accept his excuse—as you must—you’ve assured yourself of an understanding audience for all the rest of yours, however weak they may be.

  Blame the dog. If it’s your dog, it’s easy. After you miss, simply yell, “Burt! Damnit! What do you think you’re doing?” To guarantee sympathy and understanding, mumble something about Burt’s ancestors, that charlatan trainer in Vermont, your wife (who insists that Burt sleep in the bedroom), or your kids (who throw objects for Burt but fail to use the command “fetch”). If it’s your partner’s dog, it’s trickier, but still possible. Never blame his dog directly. Instead, shift the burden of alibi-making to your partner. “Was Mack over there with you when that bird got up?” Or, “It looked like Mack was making game, and the next thing I knew ... ”

  That one-in-twelve occasion, when your shot brings a puff of feathers and a dead bird, if you handle it deftly, sets you up for the rest of the season. Never credit either your skill or your luck. Instead, use your moment of triumph to establish the excuses you know you’ll be needing. “I thought I was right on him, but the sun was in my eyes. I just kept swinging and shot at the blur.” Or, “My safety kept jamming. Got that shot off in the nick of time.” Or, “I think Freebie bumped him. That bird was nearly out of range when I shot.”

  In the beginning, it’s advisable to hunt alone. Practice your alibi-making on an imaginary partner. At first you’ll fumble around and your excuses will sound pretty lame. But if you work at it, you’ll find that acceptable alibis begin to tumble swiftly and gracefully from your lips.

  When you start believing them yourself, you’re ready to hunt with a partner.

  If you spend enough time in the woods, eventually a grouse will give you an unbelievably easy shot—say, a slow right-to-left across an open field. You will, of course, miss it. Nothing in your well-practiced repertoire of alibis has prepared you for this. You’ll be tempted to shrug and blurt: “How could I have missed? Never had a better chance in my life.”

  Don’t do it. Instead, recognize that this is the moment of truth, the ultimate challenge, the occasion that years of practice have pointed to.

  Now is the time to convert disaster into triumph. Look your partner in the eye, shake your head, and say: “Did you see how slow and straight that grouse was flying? It was too easy. No challenge. It was all I could do to restrain myself from shooting him.”

  Your partner will be awed. And isn’t that what grouse hunting is all about?

  Chapter 9

  THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GRAMPA GROUSE

  If any word here recalls to old or young some nostalgic remembrance of warm October sun, crisp leaves, incredible shots, frosty mornings, the tangy scent of old apples, the feel of cold gun barrels, a loved dog or elusive birds, I shall be repaid and please remember: Any allusions or references to persons or places are purely malicious.

  —Partridge Shortenin, Grampa Grouse, 1949

  The first time I hunted grouse with Keith Wegener, a bird flushed from the edge of a swamp while I was clawing through the limbs of a fallen tree. I screamed “Mark!” as I tried to disentangle myself from a wild grape vine and scramble into position to get a shot. Just as I fired at the flash of gray tailfeathers, my foot caught on a half-buried strand of barbed wire and I fell flat on my face.

  I was combing the twigs out of my hair and checking my gun barrels for dents when Keith wandered over. “Well?” he said. “Bring down any feathers?”

  “No, damnit,” I answered. “The blowdown had me horsecollared and a tripwire snagged me, and besides, that jeesly pat turned out to be a sidewinder. I think I’m gonna grudge him.”

  Keith frowned at me. “Huh?” he said. “Do you speak English?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I forgot you aren’t a member of the Grouse Shortener’s Association.”

  Once in a pre-dawn kitchen when the grouse shorteners were assembling their gear for a weekend in New Hampshire, the young son of Gorham Cross’s partner stumbled downstairs. When the boy’s father introduced him to Mr. Cross, the tot rubbed the sleep from his eyes, hitched up his pajamas, and politely held out his little hand as he’d been taught to do. “Good luck, Mr. Grouse,” he mumbled.

  Gorham Cross became Mr. Grouse after that, and he was delighted to become Grampa Grouse when his first grandchild was born.

  He was my father’s regular grouse-hunting partner when I might have been that sleepy-eyed boy—and even before—in the 1930s and ’40s, and he died just about the time I was old enough to carry a shotgun in the woods. So I became Grampa Grouse’s successor. I know Dad was happy to have his son for a partner. Still, my father missed Grampa Grouse to the day he died.

  As much as my partners and I have loved grouse hunting, I’m convinced that no one ever had more fun at it than Grampa. Even half a century later, Dad still chuckled and shook his head at Grampa Grouse’s sayings, foibles, superstitions, and off-kilter wisdom. Sometimes I’d catch him staring off into space with a soft smile playing on his lips, and I knew he was remembering those days he shared with Grampa when New England was dotted with tumbledown cellar holes and intersected with stone walls, when every dirt road led to an abandoned farmyard, when the alders and birch whips grew head-high and the old pastures were studded with juniper clumps and thornapple, when the field edges were thick and brushy, and when ruffed grouse pecked frost-softened Baldwin apples in every overgrown orchard in New England.

  My father’s October and November weekends were devoted to bird hunting in those
days. Grampa, clad in his grouse-hunting costume, would pull his old Jeep into our driveway before sunup on Saturday morning. In his Monday-through-Friday life, Gorham Cross was a respected and well-to-do Boston businessman. But in the woods he wore faded and briar-tattered jeans, a work shirt gone to holes at the elbows, and a shapeless felt hat. In a cold autumn kitchen with a bird-hunting weekend ahead of him, Grampa was as jittery and jangly as the dogs, who skittered their toenails on the linoleum and whined at the back door when they spotted the guncases and hunting boots piled in the kitchen. They couldn’t wait to get going. Neither could Grampa Grouse.

  And then the Jeep would appear again after dark on Sunday evening, and Grampa and Dad would unload their birds—always, at least in my memory, a lot of birds.

  Grampa Grouse had a round, ruddy, laughing face and a crown of white hair, and I remember my father’s affection for his older friend—and his grief the day Grampa died. He was just 59, way too young.

  Dad’s old hunting log records the fact that I began tagging along on some of his weekend hunts with Grampa Grouse in my 11th autumn. I was too young to carry a gun in the woods, so I dogged my father’s footsteps through the thick stuff, and I began to learn what a flushing grouse sounded like and where the birds lurked and how quickly a man had to shoot to hit one.

  On the long rides up and back to their New Hampshire grouse country, and on the shorter rides between covers, I sat in the back seat with the dogs. I leaned forward and folded my arms across the top of the front seat so I could listen to the men. They talked grouse talk. Their language was peculiar, decorated with words and phrases that made no sense to me at first.

  Luckily for those of us who knew him, Grampa Grouse wrote a book. He called it Partridge Shortenin—“being,” as Grampa expanded his title, “an instructive and irreverent sketch commentary on the psychology, foibles, and footwork of partridge hunters.” In 1949 he published it privately in a limited edition of 100 copies, dedicated it to his wife, “the self-styled Shotgun Widow,” and gave copies to his friends. Its pages are unnumbered, reflecting, as Grampa noted, “the fragmentary and haphazard manner in which these yarns have been written and printed.”

  Grampa presented a copy of his book to the young son of his hunting partner, and I still have it. It is, I have been told, treasured among collectors. I have been offered a lot of money for my tattered copy.

  For those of us who reread Partridge Shortenin every couple of years, it’s a journey back to days of innocence and wonderment that we otherwise might forget. They were my childhood days—and Grampa’s, too, because his enthusiasm for upland hunting was childlike right to the end.

  Grampa theorized about grouse cycles, but never did he acknowledge the possibility—now, half a century later, in fact—that beloved covers such as Timbertop, Limberlost, Rocky Hill, Binney Hill, Crankcase, Tap’s Pines, and Clayte Brown’s Picker would one day be cut down and paved over, or would just evolve into mature forests; nor did he ever consider that the day would ever come when broods of partridges would no longer burst from the corners and fly their grooves.

  Oh, how Grampa loved grouse, and the men and dogs who hunted them! Every day was an adventure for Grampa, and every hunt was a war. Grouse were canny adversaries, worthy enemies, and outsmarting them demanded Machiavellian strategies—that failed as often as not, to Grampa’s consternation ... and delight.

  And woe to the fox or hawk who dared to poach on Grampa’s beloved grouse. He always carried two loads of high-base Remington 00 buckshot—“varmint shells”—in his shooting vest in case he encountered a grouse predator in the woods.

  As much as he loved partridge, though, Grampa loved his hunting partners above all else. “Companionship is the essence of bird shooting,” he wrote. “When you get a pal whom you can hunt with, eat and sleep with, drive and endure with for two or three long days, you have a real shooting partner.”

  If I’d had Grampa’s book for those back-seat hours, perhaps I’d have been able to follow the men’s front-seat conversations more easily. And today, if I were to lend it (which I won’t), I wouldn’t have to translate myself to my hunting partners.

  So here instead, for the uninitiated, is a primer of the grouse-hunting language, as spoken by Grampa Grouse and my father and the other members of the Grouse Shorteners’ Association:

  batteries (n.)—energy (of hunters and dogs); “Let’s sit a spell and recharge our batteries.”

  battery acid (n.)—what you pour into a steel Stanley Thermos; coffee.

  been-through (adj.)—previously hunted, usually by rabbit hunters; “Not a single biddie in the whole cover,” mourned the Old Master. “Looks like it’s been-through.” Grampa Grouse believed that the explanation for all empty covers was that they’d been-through by rabbit hunters. He refused to acknowledge the possibility that his secret covers could be known to other grouse hunters who might’ve been-through them, or, even worse, that no birds lived in them.

  biddie (n.)—ruffed grouse (see: pat).

  birdy (adj.)—tense and alert, with wagging tail and snuffling nose (describing the behavior of a bird dog); also, likely to hold grouse (describing the appearance of a cover); “Spotting birdy cover is a matter of observation and experience.”

  blowdown (n.)—fallen trees and limbs (see: hellhole, mankiller, picker, horsecollar).

  boiler (n.)—bladder; (“bust a boiler”—urinate); “All you dogs can bust your boilers,” the driver announced.

  bogged down (adj.)—lethargic; a breakfast of pancakes and sausages can leave a hunter bogged down all morning.

  chalking (n.)—the distinctive white splashes left on the ground by woodcock, a sign that woodcock are present or, more likely, that they have recently departed.

  chassis (n.)—body (referring either to a dog or a person); “Old Dog, shame!” quoth I. “Your chassis is dirty!”

  disagreeable (adj.)—agreeable; “I’m disagreeable to most anything,” chimed the Professor.

  doodle (n.)—woodcock; short for “timberdoodle.”

  guess-what (n.)—the ingredients in sandwiches prepared for hunters by shotgun widows; “a guess-what sandwich.”

  groove (adj.)—predictable; “There’s groove birds that fly the same jumps every day till you get them.”

  grudge (v.)—to curse; “Grudging is equivalent to putting a ju-ju on a bird. It is a challenge and duly respected by all.”

  hellhole (n.)—thick cover (see: picker, mankiller).

  horsecollar (n.)—a tangle, usually a combination of blowdown, briars, and grapevines in a hellhole, mankiller, or picker, that ensnares a hunter and prevents him from snapping off an accurate shot; “We always found ourselves on the wrong side of a tree or horsecollared in bull-briers when a bird got up.”

  iron rations (n.)—Hershey chocolate bar.

  jeesly (adj.)—all-purpose malediction, typically applied to imaginary rabbit hunters who have been-through a grouse cover.

  mankiller (n.)—a hellhole or picker where a hunter is sure to get horsecollared.

  Mark! (exclam.)—what grouse shorteners scream to alert their partners when a grouse flushes; for those who have been yelling “Mark!” all their lives, it becomes a conditioned reflex; even when hunting alone or just tromping through the woods without a gun, the explosive flush of a grouse causes long-time partridge shorteners to scream “Mark!” the way a dog drools at the sight of his food bowl.

  pants-draggers (n.)—the flotsam and jetsam that hunters carry in their pants pockets; Grampa never entered the woods without ten shotgun shells for birds and two for varmints, a “dollar” pocket watch, iron rations, dog candies, a compass, a Boy Scout knife, a cloth bag for license and money, a waterproof container of matches, tissues in a waxed-paper sandwich bag, and a pencil flashlight.

  parlor (n.)—the prime part of a woodcock cover; a place where woodcock gather to eat worms and exchange gossip about the foibles of partridge and woodcock shorteners.

  pat (n.)—ruffed grouse; short for �
��pa’tridge.”

  picker (n.)—thick cover (see: hellhole and mankiller)

  pickins (n.)—abundance; e.g., “slim pickins” or “easy pickins.”

  popple (n.)—a species of deciduous tree; poplar.

  ravine (n.)—narrow valley or gulch; rhymes with “grape vine” and pronounced with the accent on the first syllable (RA-vine).

  road bird (n.)—grouse that is spotted in the road; “Road birds are exasperatingly tempting. They are harder to harvest, by legitimate methods, than a bird started in cover but are always worth a try, for they may traitorously lead the hunter to other birds or to a new cover.”

  seed bird (n.)—a grouse that hunters don’t shoot and that will therefore live to reproduce; excuse for missing an easy shot; “I pulled off him at the last minute. Figured we should leave a seed bird.”

  sentinel bird (n.)—a sly grouse that lurks on the edge of a cover, often in a tree, whose job is to flush loudly at the approach of hunters, alerting all the other grouse in the cover.

  shortenin’ (v.)—shooting and killing; shorteners are those who shoot and kill grouse and thus reduce, or shorten, their numbers.

  shotgun widow (n.)—wife of a grouse hunter, esp. in October and November.

  sidewinder (n.)—a grouse that flies at a sharp angle to the side, usually up or down a steep slope; often grudged.

  slot bird (n.)—a grouse whose escape route is a narrow opening in the cover.

  stink bird (n.)—all species of birds except grouse or woodcock; stink birds mislead inexperienced or overly eager dogs into making game and pointing, to the embarrassment of their owners.