The Best Hunting Stories Ever Told

by Jay Cassell

  “It wasn’t Nellie screaming. It was Jericho. And there wasn’t any porky. The damn fool had run out onto the beaver dam; I guess he’d decided to go with somebody who was really hunting. In those days, the dam wasn’t quite as big as it is now, but it was big enough to stop a lot of water. The rain had raised the pond to spill-over, and the center of the dam was starting to wash out. Water was pouring through a three- or four-foot gap, and Jericho had tried to jump across or swim around it or something. In any case, he got his leg fast in the sticks, and he was caught. It was all he could do to keep his head out of the water, and every time he slacked off, the current pulled him under. He was a big dog, strong as a moose, but he couldn’t hold out forever.

  “Then I saw Caroline.

  “She was on the dam, heading toward Jericho and having a hard time keeping her feet. You know what trying to walk on a beaver dam is like, even when you’re going slow. I was afraid she’d get her own foot caught. I had no notion whether she could swim. I had visions of her disappearing under the water and never coming up, and I felt such a stab of fear that I could scarcely catch my breath. I shouted to her, but she didn’t seem to hear, so I started shucking off my vest.

  “Just as I started out on the dam myself, she got to the middle, grabbed hold of a branch, and leaned out to Jericho. He was about done in. She caught his collar and gave a heave that would’ve taxed the strength of any man. And she pulled him free.

  “Then everything changed to slow-motion. She lost her grip and hit the water, and the two of them tumbled through the gap and out of sight.

  “For about three seconds, I’m sure my heart stopped dead still. The downstream side was mostly marsh, but there was a fair-sized pool in the main channel, and the water spilling through had turned it into a cauldron. I was sure I’d find them both dead.

  “I scrambled down the back side of the dam and started floundering through the mud and rushes, sinking in to my knees. It was like trying to swim through honey. I couldn’t see or hear anything except rushing water and my own slogging around. My lungs felt like I was breathing fire. It seemed forever before I got to a hummock, climbed onto it, and stood up.

  “I saw nothing but rushes and marsh grass and cattails. If I’d had the breath, I’d have screamed in sheer anguish. Then I caught a flash of white through the grass and saw Jericho about twenty yards away, hauling himself up onto a hummock of his own. I shouted Caroline’s name, and then again. When I heard her shout back, ‘Over here,’ my knees went so watery that I almost went headfirst into the mud.

  “I got to her just in time to give her a hand out of the stream. She was bedraggled as a drowned cat, her hat gone, hair undone and plastered to her face. But she was smiling, her green eyes flashing. I felt some vital connection in me break and reform. I hugged her until she gasped for breath.

  “ ‘I didn’t know if you could swim,’ I said after a moment.

  “She pushed back her wet hair and grinned. ‘Even children of the idle rich manage to learn a few useful skills, you know. Where’s Jericho?’

  “I whistled and heard his bell, whistled again to give him the direction, and presently we could see the rushes waving as he made his way to us, limping and as wet as Caroline but otherwise undamaged. The three of us slogged our way out of the marsh, gathered up Caroline’s gun and vest, and walked to the meadow. Nellie, who had watched it all from the edge of the woods, lay down next to Caroline, and for a long time no one said anything.

  “She lay in the grass, eyes closed, breast rising and falling as her body absorbed its adrenaline. I wanted to hold her and say things that probably would have embarrassed us both a day later. Instead, I told her to wait there and waded back through the marsh—I wasn’t likely to get any wetter or muddier no matter what I did—and collected my own gun and vest.

  “When I got back, she was kneeling beside Jericho, gently flexing his leg and making soft sounds to him.

  “ ‘Nothing’s broken, as far as I can see,’ she said, ‘but he’s probably going to be gimpy for a few days.’

  “ ‘He’ ll have plenty of company,’ I said. ‘Let’s get you home to dry out.’

  “ ‘Tom, wait. Sit down here a minute.’ I did. ‘This has been quite a day, all in all, and in an odd sort of way, I think I owe you my life.’ She held up her hand. ‘No, don’t say anything. I didn’t come anywhere near drowning, though I could have. But that’s not what I mean. Just being with you and being able to tell you all the things I’ve told you has been like a reprieve, a freedom I’d almost given up hoping for. You’re a sweet man, Tom, and I’m very fond of you.

  “ ‘If this were a fine romantic story instead of real life, we’d probably have sworn undying love right there in the mud when you pulled me out. We were both frightened enough. But we’ve also lived enough to know that’s not how it happens—not that the feelings wouldn’t have been real; they just wouldn’t have been the feelings we thought they were. I’ve already made one nearly awful mistake, and I’d be foolish not to learn from it.’

  “ ‘This all sounds like good-bye,’ I said.

  “She smiled. ‘No, Tom, it isn’t good-bye at all. It’s only to say that whatever happens from now on will be for the right reasons—or at least the best reasons I can find. I’ll have to go back to the Cities for a while, to face some unfinished business, but I won’t be gone long. And then I’m coming back here. I think there’s a lot of lovely territory to explore here. I’d like to know it all better.’ ”

  The fire was only a mound of glowing embers where a few flickers of flame licked up. Mac and Scotty were sunk deep into their chairs. The dogs sprawled snoring on the hearth rug. A faint night wind muttered in the pines beyond the windows.

  Tom drained his glass.

  “Lord, lads, you should’ve muzzled me an hour ago. I must get myself home, though Caroline will be long asleep. Let’s meet in the village for breakfast. I think tomorrow might be a good day to see if there are any woodcock at the Petersen place.”

  What’s Worth Saving

  CHRIS MADSON

  It is a landscape that has been tamed. The wheat stubble stretches out to the horizon over the gentle swells of the high plains, punctuated now and then by a farmstead or, more often, a long-abandoned school house or barn with empty window frames and clapboards weathered to a dove-soft gray. Down below, the course of the old Missouri with its buffalo bones and keelboat wrecks winds unseen under the blue expanse of Lake Sakakawea. The fierce, feral history of this place has been buried by the plow or drowned.

  And yet it still feels wild. It is still empty country. If you were to break down on one of these roads, it might be a ten-mile walk to the nearest telephone or a two-hour wait for the first passing pickup. It may be a mile between fences. In late October with the first northers gathering on the horizon, the skiers and fishermen have winterized their boats and stored them away, leaving the lake to a few private weeks with sun and breeze before freeze-up.

  There is something else here as well. The face of the land is easily changed—the wild herds and the people who followed them, the river, the prairie sod were all formidable obstacles, but they were rooted in place, fixed targets. Eventually, they had to yield to the immense mechanical advantage of the technology brought to bear on them. But this place has an essence that has survived domestication. It floats on the wind like cottonwood down, delicate, transient, always just beyond the reach of our machines and ambitions, settling lightly in places where it is not disturbed.

  Standing on the edge of the wheat looking down 300 feet or so to one of the arms of Sakakawea, I see what’s left of the old times. These are the Missouri breaks, the hills and ravines that are too steep to plow, too tall to flood. They’re covered by the northern prairie’s version of savannah. The south-facing slopes support a lush stand of native grasses—I see sideoats grama and little bluestem along with the dried heads of coneflower and gayfeather. The north-facing slopes trend down into think stands of shrubs standing knee- to chi
n-high. The snowberries are thick, and the buffaloberries are bending over with loads of scarlet fruit. In the bottoms of the ravines, there are clumps of hawthorn, gray screens of branches tinted with a wash of hot pink—a bumper crop of fruit like tiny crab apples.

  Meg surveys the scent along the field edge while I plot a strategy. There will be birds here. The sharptails could be anywhere; the pheasants are likely to be tight in the woody cover close to the wheat. I decide to take a compromise course, fifty yards into the grass, then upwind along the wheat. Meg has finished her fresh-out-of-the-car ricochet and settles down to hunt ahead of me.

  We hunt a mile with great expectations. Every hundred yards, there’s an other promising corner of cover—a clump of buffaloberry; a grassy rock pile; the head of ravine choked with hawthorn, ragweed, and burdock. All good-looking spots; none of them with birds. It’s testament to the harshness of this country. In spite of the apparent wealth of food and cover, there’s a limit to how many birds this cover will support. Seems a little strange right now, I think; probably wouldn’t if I were here in February.

  A cool front is passing. The sky is tangled with clouds, and now and then, there’s a patch of blue and a shaft of afternoon sun. I’m watching one of the patches play over the surface of the lake a couple of miles away when I become aware of a chuckle at the head of the next ravine. A sharptail. The usual quiet rise and rub-it-in call. I run toward the spot, hoping to catch a second bird, but all four have gotten out ahead of me.

  It’s the first sign that we’ve come to the right spot. On the next grassy rise, two more grouse flush wild, then another three. I take a fifty-yard shot and miss. The disappearing bird chuckles. Frustration sets in.

  Four more birds out of the head of the next ravine. Two more out of the grass beyond. Another long shot. Another miss. The grouse gods don’t seem inclined to give up anything easy. And then, a careless single flushes out of the stubble edge, thirty yards out instead of forty-five. The sixteen-gauge speaks, and the birds hesitates in the air, then fights to control the fall. Meg makes a seventy-yard retrieve, and the expedition seems more worthwhile.

  Half a mile farther on, I angle out into the sparse snowberry on a north-facing slope and find myself in the middle of a stand of bittersweet. Where I grew up on the breaks of the Mississippi, bittersweet is a robust vine that climbs its way into small trees—here it’s a single spindly stick mixed with other shrubs. Still, the berry is unmistakable—a yellow-and-orange fruit like a tiny Japanese lantern.

  It is a sign of advancing years, I suppose, but I find memories pursuing me more these days than they once did. Dad used to suspend our bobwhite hunts when we came on a canopy of bittersweet twined into the edge of a patch of timber. I had the honor of shinnying up the trees and doing the cutting. Dad collected the harvest carefully and eased the cut branches into his game pocket. Mom valued the sprigs even more than the quail we brought home. The harvested vines went up around the dining room wall for the holiday season. To this day bittersweet means Thanksgiving to me.

  Dad passed on twelve years ago, leaving me the sixteen-gauge in my hand and an incomparable legacy of good times in wild places. A quail hunt long past comes back to me over the years, a warm recollection, a hard, hard loss. A bittersweet moment.

  A patch of sun drifts across the grass and moves on, leaving the breaks around me in the flat gray light of late afternoon. Time to head back.

  We drop down the slope a hundred yards or so and take the contour where the prairie blends into the shrubs. Meg works close and careful in the best kind of collaboration. She’s beginning to understand the lay of this new kind of cover and the birds living there—I don’t have to make a sound to direct her.

  Another pool of sun drifts across the broad prairie hillside in front of us, and the grass turns tawny with strokes of wine-colored bluestem scattered through it. Meg comes up on a low stand of buffaloberry and points hard. I step up to the edge, and five sharptails jump. The straightaway crumples with the first shot, and I swing hard to catch the crossing bird, without success. Meg has already disappeared into the bushes far below me and, after a couple of minutes, emerges again with the bird in her mouth and one wing across her eyes.

  It’s the last good chance we have on sharptails. We see half a dozen more as we work back over three or four miles of the breaks, but they all flush wild. The clouds have thickened again, and in the deepening twilight, geese and mallards start lifting out of some secluded bay headed for feed. Waves of them pass overhead, talking back and forth as they survey the options for supper.

  We bump two whitetails out of their beds in the head of a ravine. The forkhorn stops on the edge the wheat forty yards away to take a second look; the eight-point has played this game before—he ducks behind a thick stand of hawthorn before he checks the source of the disturbance.

  Then Meg pokes her nose into a buffaloberry patch, scattering the usual collection of juncos and sparrows, and a blur of movement streaks over my shoulder, nearly hitting one of the little birds. After the miss, the form sweeps upward thirty yards or so and suddenly suspends itself over the dog. It has the sleek aerodynamics of a falcon, and judging from its size, I figure it must be a kestrel. I’m wrong. The bird circles around us, showing its tail, then swings downwind to watch us again. A merlin. This is a new life bird for me. Trim, unafraid, a complete master of the air, the falcon follows us for ten minutes, waiting for us to shake more songbirds out of the cover. After two more unsuccessful stoops, it wheels and disappears.

  As we cover the last of the hills back to the truck, I find myself pondering the wealth of the day. Maybe thirty grouse, several thousand geese and ducks, a couple of bucks, a wild falcon, the endless kaleidoscope of prairie grass and sky—what is this afternoon worth? Generations of hunters before me have named the price and currency. The Teddy Roosevelts and George Bird Grinnells, the Aldo Leopolds and Ding Darlings, the Herbert Stoddards and Paul Erringtons spent their lives to preserve such places, such days, then passed them on to me.

  Up ahead, I see the shelterbelt that runs along the two-track where my truck is parked. The light is fading slowly toward night, and the quiet of the coming evening is gathering in the shadows. Meg, still hunting, disappears into the kosha edge, and I hear the oddly sharp slap of a primary on a weed stalk. A rooster pheasant jumps between two stunted cottonwoods. There’s an eight-foot window in the branches; no time to think; snap shot, and the rooster disappears into the jungle of weeds. Even if I hit him, there’s no way I can find him. Then the sound of movement in the cover. Meg.

  As she steps out of the weeds, the sun drops into one last crack in the clouds, and the landscape is drenched in the rich butterscotch light of a high plains sunset. The bird glows like molten copper as she drops it in my hand while the last breeze of the day sighs through the branches and comes to rest. For a long breath, it seems as if time has paused. And it occurs to me that Dad must be somewhere close by.

  Smiling.

  PART VI

  Waterfowl

  The Old Brown Mackinaw

  GORDON MACQUARRIE

  When the President of the Old Duck Hunters’ Association, Inc., died, the hearts of many men fell to the ground.

  There was no one like Mister President. When the old-timers go there is no bringing them back, nor is there any hope of replacing them. They are gone, and there is a void and for many, many years I knew the void would never be filled, for this paragon of the duck blinds and the trout streams had been the companion of my heart’s desire for almost 20 years.

  I made the common mistake. I looked for another, exactly like Hizzoner. How foolish it is, as foolish as it is for a man to try to find another beloved hunting dog, exactly like the one that’s gone.

  In the years after Mister President’s death I fished and hunted more than before, and often alone. There was a great deal of fishing and hunting, from Florida to Alaska, before a man came along who fit the role once occupied by Mister President. This is how it was:
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  I was sitting in the ballroom of the Loraine Hotel in Madison, Wisconsin, covering the proceedings of the unique Wisconsin Conservation Congress. I became aware that a man carrying one of the 71 labels for the 71 counties of the state was eyeing me.

  He held aloft the cardboard label “Iowa” signifying that he was a Big Wheel in conservation from that western Wisconsin county. He looked like Huckleberry Finn and he grinned eternally. One of the first thoughts I had about him was that he probably could not turn down the corners of his lips if he wanted to.

  Each time I glanced at him his eye was upon me. This sort of thing is unnerving. Once he caught my eye and held it and grinned harder. I grinned back, foolishly. The beggar burst out laughing. I felt like a fool. He knew it and laughed at me.

  Let me give you the picture more completely. In that room sat more than 300 dedicated, articulate conservationists. They were framing, no less, the fish and game code of this sovereign state for an entire year. Not in silence, you may be sure.

  Up at the front table on the platform, as chairman of the Congress, sat Dr. Hugo Schneider of Wausau, with a gavel in one hand and—so help me!—a muzzle-loading squirrel rifle in the other. Each time Robert’s Rules of Order seemed about to go out the window, Doc would abandon the gavel and reach for the rifle.

  In this delightful pandemonium, in this convention of impassioned hunters and fishers and amidst the shrieks from the wounded and dying delegates, Wisconsin evolves its game and fish laws. And if you can think of a more democratic way, suggest it. We may try it.