by Sydney Lea
And yet.
And yet, perverse as it sounds, the carpenters and tradesmen having done their work so thoroughly and well, I do miss the scent of mouse urine and camphor balls; I miss the little gales whistling through gaps in the siding and window casings; I even miss going a full week without bathing as I chase the wildfowl, so that at trip's end I smell of sweat, of wood smoke and—the pointers having always shared my bed when I'm here alone in autumn—of gun dog.
I miss Creston and his uncle George MacArthur, to whom my family grew so close that we called him uncle too; I miss the wonderful raconteur Earl Bonness; I miss shrewd Paul Hoar, the storekeeper-guide who tipped us off to the place to begin with; I miss the days when Bea Bagley tended the post office, Bill White sold live bait and trained bird dogs, Glennister Brown ran the grader that swamped the rough road to this doorstep, Ada Chambers baked and sold her breads and pies out on Tough End, Hazel Rich tied exquisite streamer flies for the store, Eddie Brown—disabled by a logging accident—became a self-taught expert on the Passamaquoddy relics he constantly dug up. I could go on for ages and pages.
I miss these characters who in some cases lived in town well before electricity ever reached it, who worked in the woods prior to power saws, who cooked in log-fired ovens. The great drug television hadn't impoverished their narrative skills or their imaginations. They never sat in front of a screen and laughed out loud at comedians who, on their best days, were less funny than they on their worst. The elders once made their own, superior entertainment, mostly by way of telling stories.
I suddenly remember Uncle George on a thunder-stormy day. He sits at my table, tunelessly whistling and drumming his fingers, as he is given to do when he can't be out on the water, even though he is in his eighties on the morning I call up, even though he can't swim a stroke. The rain is like gunfire on the metal roof.
And what do I ask for?
"Tell me a story, George," I plead, as if I were an even younger kid.
George doesn't miss a beat. "We cut cedar one winter right across there." He gestures to the tossing woods behind Mink Rock, as if actual landmarks could start a yarn, as in fact they usually could.
"There was a fella worked with us. He was called Stubby, on account of being so short, and he had a hunched back. Worked like the rest of us, and done as well as a sound man. The Devil was, he couldn't tell time."
George looks at his own wristwatch, affecting a puzzled expression.
"The boss bought him an alarm clock, so he could quit for dinner and that, but of course us boys would get ahold of the thing after the boss set it, and we'd twist it just anyhow. Poor Stub wouldn't know was it ten in the morning or four in the afternoon if the sun wasn't shining."
I see Uncle George shake his head in some odd mix of self-reproach, nostalgia, and amusement.
"In them days Robbie Sutherland run the store. He and a woman named Mrs. Hawkins lived down handy the falls here. They was both fond of a drink, and when they got feeling too good, the fur would certainly fly.
"One night, they started in to feud, and this Mrs. Hawkins, she grabs a clock off the table and takes Robbie right over the ear with it."
George pantomimes Robbie's shocked reaction to the blow, standing up to weave and stagger, to do it right.
"Next day, Robbie's in his store with a big bandage around his head, which probably wouldn't feel all that good even without this fracas with the clock. Stub comes to the door with that alarm clock in his hand, and he calls in, 'Hey, storekeeper, what time you got?'
"Robbie don't even look over at Stubby but only says, 'You go to hell, you humpback son of a bitch!'"
It's still a good story. I love to repeat it, as I suspect I repeat a lot of stories nowadays. In fact, I know I do. Sometimes when she hears me say, "I can't remember if I've told you this," our youngest child will answer before I've uttered a word, "Yes, Dad, you have."
But for me certain stories will always bear retelling; I recite them to myself almost daily, as if I were the last on earth who could understand them, as it can sometimes feel I am.
I go on to remember Earl Bonness sitting at the same table, in a longer siege of poor weather. It has rained for two weeks straight. The cabin perches on ledge, and I have to wade to my truck as surely as I'd be wading the river if the downpour would just let up. I've invited Earl over for what we call "a tap."
I'm only in my twenties, and have all the pretension of an aspirant adult. I've brought along a bottle of finest single malt Scotch whiskey. I pour my friend a drink. This is expensive stuff, so it is not as big a serving as he's used to, or wants.
Earl turns the jug's label toward him, reads it out loud, "Fifteen years old . . ."
"Fifteen years," I proudly echo.
"Small for his age," Earl muses.
A high-handed wind has come on, turning the flat of Big Falls Pool to whitecaps, which resemble a flock of scattering, terrified lambs. That blow won't do the grouse hunting much good, especially for a man like me, whose hearing has worsened with time and gunfire. But I've always loved a bracing day like this on the stream. As I step outside, I feel one of those nameless, nagging aches—in my hip this time—that come every so often now, and so far always go away. I also inhale the wind-borne odors, each a tonic again: evergreen perfume, smoke, musty duff of the forest floor, clean savory spray. My knees buckle, but not with physical pain.
Bird dog Pete yawns and whines at once, his body a shiver head to tail. Like all his predecessors, he's impatient with my human slowness, more pronounced in these later years. He suddenly looks the spitting image of Hector, my very first grouse dog, sun rebounding off his flanks. I shake my head to clear it. Where am I?
A flight of Goldeneye arrives in a sudden hurtle and plows into the pool above the falls, almost without setting wings. The birds scurry under the cutbanks on either side, leaving lathers of wake that will be hauled downstream to break up among the rapids. It's as if the ducks were fleeing from something.
As they may be. An eagle, its white parts fore and aft blazing under the early light, rips toward me and my dog, very low. Noticing us in the camp yard, at the last minute the raptor banks and soars up over the gold-leafed popples on the west shore.
I decide to take this frantic ballet of ducks and this glissade of eagle as auguries, and promising ones. The river is still emphatically there. My cabin, in whatever shape, abides at its edge. My dog, like all before, looks yearningly at the crate in the bed of my pickup, squealing his avidity. I still seem to feel it too.
Daybook, October
The heavens have teemed all day today. I've sat here by the woodstove, alternately dozing and reading Edward Arlington Robinson, the darkness of the poetry and the darkness of the day complementing each other so perfectly as to make an aesthetic experience—which lightens the darkness. And how snug it's been in this little Maine cabin anyhow, with the autumn-low river's purr outside the window, the rainfall's tattoo on the standing seam roof.
No matter the self-contempt I'd once have felt on admitting as much, it's a pleasure not to be out there hiking and hunting. I've been at that all day for almost a week, and I'm not shy anymore to confess that the old bones and muscles savor the respite.
I keep falling in and out of sleep in my chair. During one of the wakeful spells, I had a look at the bird-hunting log I started in the early '70s. I used to come here with my friends Terry and Joe, the former of whom got hooked on archery for deer and permanently abandoned our grouse outings, while the latter moved to Colorado.
The book tells me that for almost two decades, it was routine for us to bag forty grouse in five or six days. Twenty-five was a number we logged with disappointment, likewise any trip in which all three of us had not limited—twelve birds—on at least one of those days.
Our team shot a lot of woodcock in those earlier times too, but the little birds drop out of the log around 1984. Having seen their numbers dwindle, we'd all decided to let them fly by then, unless we were working a green
dog, in which case we would shoot one or two, provided the points had been steady.
I have not shot a single ruffed grouse here this year.
Sad truth is, I've had next to no opportunity to do so, their numbers so wretchedly scanty and what few I've found so restive they won't hold for the point at all. Wild flushes. Tree birds.
What happened? This countryside is not like so many of my old Vermont and New Hampshire haunts, which have either grown up into big woods or been finished off by s o-called development, the newcomer owners completely obliterating the game's habitat for lawns and meadows, and then—believing they help that game—posting their land, on which no true wildlife now exists or can. No, great oceans of unspoiled cover remain up here, so it's not a matter of habitat. What happened?
Something ominous.
There are those who believe that massive spraying for spruce budworm eliminated not only those larvae but also a lot of the other grubs that grouse chicks so desperately need for protein. But the spraying program ceased almost twenty years ago, and it wouldn't account anyhow for the skinny numbers in such Vermont covers as still have all the makings, because Vermont didn't get that spraying.
Something ominous.
I'm not dismayed by my personal lack of luck, as I would have been back when those old entries were made; I don't need to fill up my game pocket anymore to enjoy a hunt. It's all about the dog work and the hard walking. No, I'm disturbed, precisely, for the dog, and more so for the birds, whose absence implies something dire. What have we done to our planet? And I do mean we: I came here by car, not horseback, after all.
There are days when I thank God that I'm no longer so young as the man who wrote in that bird log, the world become a place where iconic creatures like the grouse must struggle so grimly to endure.
On the other hand, I have five children. And on the other hand, I have four grandchildren.
Eighty Percenters: Reflections on Grouse and Grouse Dogs*
It's late into the north country's grouse season. The covers have gone spare; the peak foliage has long since tumbled. I like it this way, the leaves' early splendor given over, the far ridges abstract, hard-edged. You may, like me, have the illusion that your mind has cleaned up a little too, the summer clutter blown out. Impossible, of course, not to mourn a bit. This clarity, this grandest part of the shotgun season, is so temporary.
Gus is among the finest grouse dogs I've handled. I got him at nine months from a professional breeder-trainer in northern Maine, who predicted he'd be a "wild Indian." That sounded good to me for a lot of reasons. Mostly, it sounded as if, like a lot of grouse gunners, no doubt the majority in fact, the handler had the usual sense of what made a good pointing dog in our region. My subject here, really, is how misguided I believe that sense can be, as the following anecdote—on my word of honor, a true one—indicates. But in all candor, I may not even be talking of dog handling at all in this account. We'll see about that.
It's been a relatively poor year for birds. By my records, they peaked in 1976, when, under licenses from three states, we shot a bird for each year of the century. I don't know how that stacks up against tallies in the Midwest or in West Virginia, say, but around here, where the season is scarcely over a month long, seventy-six grouse among three hunters is a hell of a year.
On this late afternoon, we are about halfway through the decline from that summit to the bottoming out that will come in '84, when we'll still manage thirty partridge, but oh, how we'll work for them!
We've worked hard enough even today. Gus is tall and lean and very active, four years old now, getting better every season; but in all his hearty ranging since this morning, he's locked up just twice, and we're fifty percent. I can replay that miss, or misses, on the first flush: right out straightaway, along a brook bed, no obstructions, bang and bang. Gone! I can't believe it!
Well, yes I can. So can you if you're a grouse hunter.
The two points came early, my miss and Joe's kill, a sweet over-the-shoulder shot on a cinnamon hen. Since then, it's been a lot of tramping in steep country, and if we three were not such friends it's almost sad, or if we were other than young, Joe and Terry and I might have called it quits by now.
In fact we are more or less headed home when we pass a corner where we know of one apparently lead-proof grouse. Just one. The cover is tiny, and we like to bust brush for at least an hour at a time when we get out of the truck, so we haven't run through this patch for quite a spell. But the last day of the season looms, and we don't like one-grouse hunts at any point in the fall. We'll try for a second bird here.
There's a hedge of skinny pines just as you step in. Then it's a meadow with popple whips all through it, and a few twisty apples at the uphill end before it breaks into open hardwoods by an old beagle club's abandoned shack. There's a headstone a few hundred yards into those hardwoods. One John Goodridge lies under it. I wrote a lousy poem about that grave once. I couldn't help it.
I pull the crate's door at the back of the pickup, and Gus leaps onto the dirt. He takes four strides and huddles up in his customary crapping posture, quivering all the while, high-headed, nostrils working. We call it The Kennel Point. It doesn't matter how many times in the day he's done this, how many covers we've hit; he's got to have that kennel point before we go in.
I don't like him spraddled in the road that way; I keep an ear out for cars coming. Even he is impatient with his rite. In fact, just now he's whining, staggering toward the pine-strip in the act, leaving a trail of dung balls like Hansel's crumbs. He looks like a man hobbling back to camp from the privy, having forgotten the toilet paper, except that his nose is low as he waddles along.
We joke about Gus's behavior, pay it no real attention, wander ahead of him into the woods to wait for him. Joe almost steps on the grouse, which whirrs out through the softwood and heads somewhere up toward that dilapidated shack. We exchange the standard head-shaking curses, and Terry as usual says, "We should have minded the dog for once." We'll try to chase the bird up; it shouldn't have gone too far. There's not much place to go, and no one fired his gun.
Now here's the point at which many a hunter who ought to know better will check his dog, even have him, poor animal, trot along at heel or sit in the car, so as not to bump the grouse he knows is in there somewhere.
I have not checked Gus. He hasn't heard me say, "Whoa!" all day. I haven't said a thing to him now but "All Right!" meaning Go Ahead.
So it hasn't been two minutes, but my dog has been through the whole cover, ranging anywhere from underfoot to maybe 120 yards out. And now he's locked on. No bell. That's our bird, I'm sure, and I'm sure there aren't any others in this patch.
But where in hell is the bird? Where in hell is Gus? "Oh, there!" Joe calls, after we've searched for more than just a few minutes; he waves a hand toward the edge of the big woods. Gus's point is solid, picture-perfect, I wish I had a camera. Or maybe I'm glad I don't. I have that embarrassing miss to atone for, the birds are pretty rare this year, I want to shoot something beside a photograph. It's getting on dusk.
We approach as we always do. I'm in the middle. Terry's on my left, Joe on the right, each of them slightly ahead of me to guard the corners, keep the grouse inside. We've done this over so many points that we don't have to talk anymore.
Soon, though, we begin to talk a lot, our squadron collapsing into itself around the dog, who hasn't moved an inch, still stands there stiff as a spike and trembling.
"False point," I mutter, irked. I could have the best dog in the state, but he'd never be quite good enough. That's what Terry tells me. He's the one mellowing influence on our outings, a ballast to the huff that we others sometimes bring along.
"Talk about a hunt!" Joe growls, grouchy as I am.
I'm ready to give Gus a little nudge with my boot, because he won't leave it alone, this patch of perfectly open ground, all pallid beech leaves and umber oak.
"Now just a minute," says Terry. He always does. I love him like a brother
, but his laconic demeanor in moments like this sometimes makes me half want to cuff him. "Be ready," he warns.
Joe and I look at each other, sneering, rolling our eyes, as Terry walks a couple of concentric loops around the point. We've already done that! Nothing, again. Maybe a woodcock, Terry may be thinking. He kicks the hardhack ten yards ahead. Nothing. He grins; he knows what Joe and I are thinking about him, and he's good for it.
Then we all watch Gus's head droop earthward, slow as a second hand. At the very last instant, we also see the bird, another brown phase grouse, wings spread, flattened to the woods floor, which almost precisely matches its coloration. Panic, of course. I tense, stammer something inscrutable to my partners, lay my finger along the trigger guard. But by now Gus has simply picked up the shocked bird and, with two strides, he's holding it out for me. I tonk its head against a small tree.
Not a shot, mind you, has been fired.
You may say that this partridge was pricked up by some hunter in here before us, but I think you'll be wrong, not only because we've never seen signs of another person here but also because I take a full twenty minutes dressing that grouse, picking its feathers right up over the head, holding the body at all angles in the truck's high beam. Not a dent, not a scratch.
Did it stun itself on a branch or whatever? Maybe. But I'm all but certain that the bird was sound as a dollar, and that Gus, bold, fast and high-headed, simply froze it on that open ground. The critter had nowhere to hide, was perhaps caught in its dash between tangles, and the dog simply pinned it.
I believe as much not because Gus has ever before pulled this stunt, but because any number of times he has come so close. We've all found him, two to five feet from a grouse, looking it right in the eye, such that at length we too can see the bird as plain as day, motionless. He is famous for these tight points, though I take no particular credit. I didn't "do" anything. If there's credit coming to me, in fact, it's for not doing a lot. I let him go. I always let them go.