And Now We Shall Do Manly Things

by Craig Heimbuch

  The trip had not been a total waste after all.

  17

  Hunting Alone

  I think I was just glad I wasn’t hungover when the alarm went off at six on a Sunday morning in early December. We’d been out the night before, a Christmas party for a group my wife belongs to for Catholic mothers. It’s one of those kinds of groups that was probably started to provide support for stay-at-home moms and an entrée into the local community for new women in town, but it’s grown into a near-constant commitment of outings, parties, and events. They even went to the trouble to begin scheduling events for all the husbands to get together. And those are awkward.

  “Sweetie, I think you should go,” one imagines a wife saying. “All my friends’ husbands will be there and don’t you want to get to know some new people?”

  “What do I need to get to know new people for?” replies the husband—me in this case.

  “But, honey, you have so much in common.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, Bonnie’s husband will be there and he likes sports. You like sports. It will be loads of fun!”

  And so it was that I ended up knowing this group of men, some of whom have become actual friends; others are the kind of acquaintances you can spend a night with at a party never really knowing a thing about—what he does, where he’s from, if his name is actually Brian or Jeff. Which is what I did, for the most part, at the Christmas party. I mingled. I moved from bored husband to bored husband and sipped my favorite scotch, checking in every once in a while with my wife, who was drinking vodka and cranberries like Kool-Aid and chatting excitedly with the same group of women she talks to or hangs out with every day as if they had all just come home from decades on separate, but equally deserted islands.

  “Hey,” said my friend John, who, like me, does not especially enjoy being in a room surrounded by a loud group of mostly strangers and expected to mingle, “I don’t think I’m going to be able to go with you in the morning, but I’ll get your gun ready and you can pick it up tonight or early tomorrow.”

  I knew John wouldn’t make it even in spite of the fact that he had called me the day before to confirm that he was coming. His parents were in town, and I had a hard time believing that his wife, Anne, would be thrilled about him leaving her alone with them and their three kids to go tramping through the woods with me. I had even told Rebecca in the parking lot on our way into the restaurant where the party was held that I had a feeling he would back out.

  “Why would you think that?” she asked me, accused me really.

  “Just a hunch.”

  “Well, that’s not very nice.”

  I felt like going over to where she was standing, highball glass waving with each increasingly drunken gesticulation, to laugh in her face after he backed out, but discretion, when wives and their friends and friends’ husbands are concerned, is always the better part of valor. Plus, I know John would have gone in a second if the opportunity had been better timed.

  We stopped by Anne and John’s house after the party and he handed me my gun and case and told me for perhaps the thirty-second time how sorry he was that he couldn’t come along.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said and went home to catch a little less than four hours of sleep before the alarm woke me with a sudden jolt and the instantaneous relief that my head felt fine. A little tired, but no real worse for the wear. I pulled my reinforced upland field pants, socks, a bush pilot shirt, and a soft shell jacket on and headed out into the predawn darkness.

  Hunting alone was something I knew I wanted to try if for no other reason than to reinforce my own impetus. It was all well and good to go to Iowa to hunt with Mark and his boys, and I could see a time when I might join my dad in Michigan to tromp through the woods in search of ruffed grouse. But hunting on my own would mean I had done it; I had become a hunter. Instead of, like the little kid on the playground tagging along with the big guys for a game of pickup basketball, being the consummate guest, the outsider, the pretender. I also knew that I wanted to wait to go on my own until after I had experienced hunting in the safety and comfort of experienced family. Without that, my knowledge was academic. Book learning. No substance. I had spent whole hours watching videos on YouTube and studying diagrams in guides explaining how to field dress a pheasant, but had I not experienced it in Iowa, I would never have thought to bring zipper bags with me for the meat. Some things you just can’t learn in a book, and some things you have to do on your own.

  When I got back to work after the Thanksgiving break, I googled “public hunting ground in Ohio” and discovered, to my pleasant surprise, that there was indeed hunting in a state park not far from where we lived. The pheasant were stocked—or released, since “stocking” is really more of a fishing term and tends to take all the masculine self-delusion out of the whole enterprise for me—three times in this park every November, the last instance happening on Thanksgiving Day. Discovering this, I realized I should have tried to muster a hunt before the holiday and worried that the birds might be picked fairly clean by hunters with more knowledge of the area. But I had, at this time, been hunting before without shooting anything, so I was willing to give it a shot.

  I’ve gotten so spoiled having an iPhone. Time was I could read a map and would actually plan my trips before I got in the car instead of punching in an address or landmark at a stoplight and waiting impatiently the six or eight seconds it took for the GPS app to tell me where to go. I had been to this not-to-be-named-here-for-fear-of-making-local-hunters-mad park before, but never to hunt. And it’s a big park, built around a Corps of Engineers–created lake. Just because I knew roughly how to find the boat ramp didn’t mean I knew where to go to hunt or even where the pheasant might be. But, pshaw. Nothing to worry about. I’ll find my way and be just fine, thank you very much. Besides, I could feel that this was my lucky day. This was the day I would go from guy in funny clothes walking around with a shotgun to masculine purveyor of protein. This was to be my vision quest, the day I went boldly and alone into the woods to become a man. It had to be. It was going to be. I was ready.

  I followed a two-lane country road north as it skirted its way around the park. From what I could remember from the topographical map I’d looked at on my work computer five days earlier, that section of the park was more grassland than forest and since pheasant like grassy cover and since I didn’t want to be mistaken for Bambi’s father on the last day of deer season, I thought staying to more open areas was not only good hunting, but good self-preservation. So I meandered around, navigating by instinct and passing at somewhat regular intervals pickup trucks pulled off onto the shoulder of the road. Each one, I figured, belonged to a hunter who either lived closer or was up that much earlier than me, and each represented at least one more gun in the park.

  I drove another couple of miles and pulled into a gravel parking lot on the side of the road. There was a truck parked there already and I wondered for a moment or two if I should move on. The last thing I wanted to do on my first solo hunt was charge headlong into a thick bramble of underbrush only to be mistaken for a trophy buck and have my brain removed from my skull by a bleary-eyed hunter who’d been staking his claim to the area since long before dawn. I must have sat for whole minutes, allowing the sky to lighten, before looking back toward the road and noticing a field through a thin stand of trees on the other side. I figured I’d be safe out in the open with my blaze orange hat and vest. Should I be disowned of life and organ, it could only be ruled as homicide as long as my body is found in a field and not in the woods. So, I popped the trunk and began the process of getting ready.

  When I first began fly-fishing on my own for steelhead in the rivers and creeks that feed Lake Erie, I came to appreciate the little rituals of preparing for a jaunt into the outdoors. I liked sitting on the lip of my trunk and pulling my waders over the fleece pants and wool socks I wore for warmth. I liked checkin
g the pockets of my wading vest or waterproof jacket to be sure I had the flies I needed for the day. I liked the process of assembling and threading line through the eyelets of my nine-and-a-half-foot, eight-weight steelhead rod and double-checking the trunk to be sure nothing was left behind. It felt like I was getting ready for a contest, a gladiatorial struggle that I’m sure, had I played high school football, would have been similar to the pregame ritual of an athlete. It’s like putting on the gear was a way of taking off the world I was trying to escape in order to get myself ready to trek into someplace else.

  I had a similar feeling when getting ready for that first hunt with Uncle Mark, Tom, and my cousins. My hands had trembled the first time I assembled the Winchester in the field—or very near it—and once I had made sure all the tags were pulled off my new vest and hat, I enjoyed putting them on. It’s ridiculous, I know, to take such a thing seriously, but I did. And I was taking it seriously as I carefully arranged the items in my trunk on my first solo trip.

  First, I checked the pockets of my hunting vest to be sure I had the right shells. Then I untied and retied the laces of my Bean boots until they felt comfortable without feeling constrained. I was careful when I opened the gun case and slid the barrels onto the action and fitted the forearm into its proper place with the satisfying thwap of Play-Doh being pancaked onto a table. I was all set to go. I just had to use the key on the ring holding my car and office keys to unlock the trigger guard—a medieval-looking contraption that locks around a gun’s trigger in order to prevent, say, little kids from being able to fire the weapon—and I would be on my way. Key goes in lock, does not turn. Well, it budges a little, but it’s not really going anywhere. I struggled with it for a half hour, feeling like a monkey trying to get into a jar of peanut butter. How could I not open a lock? It’s like I was back in middle school trying to get my locker open before Stephanie Hagan walked by and left me speechless. It was one of the cruel ironies of my younger life that the girl whose locker was always next to mine, who always sat in front of me in homeroom and who, I’m quite sure, was made by angels out of clouds and sunshine was the one person to whom I most wanted to speak yet was completely unable to because I was, in short, terrified at the mere thought of doing so. Every time she walked by, my palms began to sweat, my heart began to race, and the numbers on my combination lock became blurred and illegible. Even the simplest of fine-motor skills were out of the question, something that continued until high school when she started dating football players and I settled into life as a burgeoning band geek.

  My heart pounded, my palms sweated, as I fumbled with the key, turning it a micron to the right and to the left. It wasn’t just about having come all the way to the state park and possibly not being able to hunt; it was about the gun. I really didn’t want to break or scratch it, and I certainly had no intention of handing it back to my dad with a stuck lock and a clean barrel.

  I grew increasingly desperate as the second half hour came to a close and I still hadn’t made any progress. I began sorting through options—call a locksmith. How the hell do you get ahold of a locksmith? And would one come all the way out here? I could call the police, but then I realized they probably aren’t too keen on the idea of unlocking a gun for a guy who has no proof that it is his. They’d probably think I was nuts. Besides, this was a powder-coated steel lock, what were they going to do? Pull it apart with that little jimmy they use to open car doors? No. I decided I was on my own.

  In a lot of ways, it was shockingly like an experience I had had in first grade. I was trying to be so cool. So fashionable, or as fashionable as a first grader can be mindful of being. I wanted to impress, to show off. After all, I had left, moved away, and now I was back. Growing up in north-central Wisconsin, you don’t often get in early on trends. Not in the mid-’80s anyway. With the Internet, Facebook, and MTV, it’s a little easier. Geography isn’t the barrier it used to be. Now, you see something on the Web or in a magazine and you hop on Amazon to buy it for yourself. But, back then, things took time to percolate and proliferate. Having gone away and come back, I felt a certain need to share the cultural wonders my journey had afforded me. I was feeling a bit like a nineteenth-century explorer having headed off into the great unknown of the Indian countryside. Upon return, that explorer felt a need to share in the things he had seen and experienced. It was his right, but also his duty.

  Parachute pants were my duty. I had to share them.

  They were red—as was the custom—with all manner of zippers and snaps stitched at exotic angles into the fabric. They made a very slight swishing sound as I walked and had the bonus curiosity of being convertible pants. With the simple unzipping and snapping of a couple of closures, they would change from pants to shorts and vice versa. How novel. How deliciously cosmopolitan. There could be little question what I might wear on my first day of school. That had been decided the moment they were purchased, the instant I realized we were moving back to Wisconsin.

  When the bell rang for recess, I remember my classmates pushing the limits of the no-running rule to get outside while I sidled at a manly gait. No rush. Recess waits for cool like this.

  I’m not sure if you’ve ever encased your body in cheap nylon, but there’s a certain lack of breathability that can grow rather uncomfortable. In fact, wrap your legs in cheap nylon and step out onto a sun-warmed blacktop playground and it feels as if you have put your legs into a steam room and are letting them parboil in advance of a good roasting. It took perhaps five minutes for my legs to get uncomfortably warm and sweaty. One boy, a neighbor, noticed my discomfort and began making fun of me. Well, I thought, I’ll show him. I asked the recess monitor for permission to use the restroom and went back into the school with the intention of unzipping my highly engineered pants for greater outdoor comfort. I found a first-floor boys’ room and took my place in a stall. I tugged on the zipper and it moved perhaps two inches before stopping. I tugged again, nothing. Again, again, and again. Still, it would not move. I tried to reverse the process, put the legs back on and, still, nothing. Tiny beads of sweat began falling from my forehead as I worked the zipper to no avail. More than ninety minutes of stricken effort passed before I was found in the restroom by a teacher.

  I guess this early incident proves my stubbornness; after nearly an hour and a half of wrestling with the gun lock, I was feeling crestfallen and ready to quit. Over the last hour or so, as the sun had risen fully and the world around me had come awake, it had sounded like a war zone. In almost every direction, the sounds of shotgun bursts could be heard. Boom. Boom-boom. Boom-boom-boom-boom. Somewhere, not too far off, pheasants’ wings were beating their last strokes. Hunters were filling their game bags, maybe even some of the same hunters I had driven past. It’s ridiculous to the point of insanity that I would persist as I had, turning the key the same fraction of an inch, back and forth, back and forth. I’d found a small can of WD-40 in my trunk and tried to lubricate the lock into submission, careful not to get any on the wood stock of the gun. I was just about ready to call no joy, to bug out and go home with my head hung between my legs when, in a last-ditch effort, I opened the glove box in my car and saw there my trustiest, oldest pocketknife. It was a rubber-handled, one-hand-open Buck knife with a half-serrated blade that locked and could be released with a thumb switch. I’d bought it when I was working at the backpacking store/fly-fishing shop right out of college. I’d carried it with me every time I’d ever gone into the outdoors except for the trip to Iowa. It was in my pocket when I’d wrecked that six-wheeler and had cut away more tangled fly line than I care to acknowledge. What the hell?

  I opened the blade and, holding the trigger guard steady so that I didn’t bend or loosen it from the gun, jammed the tip into the key slot. At first, I twisted lightly, gently, hoping that by some miracle the lock might pick itself. But as seconds ticked by, I got a little more aggressive. Just under a minute after I had first inserted the blade tip into the keyhole, I t
ook a deep breath and said “screw it, it’s only money if I break something,” knowing full well that it was about much more than money—my dad’s trust, his property, the fact that we didn’t have any spare cash to fix a gun I broke out of pure desperation—and twisted the handle as hard as I could.

  Jackpot.

  The tip of my trusty knife snapped off, but so too did the outer layer of the lock. I pulled broken pieces out and without thinking jammed the knife back into the now gaping lock. I twisted hard again and, again, a layer of the locking mechanism snapped. Three more times and there was nothing left of the lock. I jammed the knife in again and twisted the actual bolt of the lock and both pieces fell away harmlessly from the unmarred, still factory-new trigger. I could have cried. I felt relieved. It was and will be a very proud moment in my life—when I successfully picked a lock meant to keep anyone but the owner of a gun from firing it. I was both MacGyver and, well, kind of a criminal. It felt awesome. My knife may have sacrificed its proud tip, but the little boy struggling in the bathroom to unzip his parachute pants was, at long last, vindicated.

  With half my morning gone, I quickly reassembled the gun, which I had taken apart while working on the lock, threw a water bottle into the game bag on my vest, and headed across the road to the field I had seen through the trees. A sign at the road informed me that the field was the property of the park, available for hunting, and used as a location for dog training. It was fairly large, perhaps the size of three soccer fields and ringed on three sides by trees. To the north and south, the stands of trees were fairly narrow, just twenty or thirty yards deep. To the east, the trees demarcated the barrier between field and forest, and along the western edge ran a fence line dividing the public park from a neighboring farm where three hundred acres or more of corn had already been harvested. An open grass field was not, in and of itself, a great location to find pheasant. But the pheasant is a bird that lives near its food—corn—and cover, the trees.