And Now We Shall Do Manly Things

by Craig Heimbuch

  One of the first things the instructors teach about the act of hunting in hunter’s safety is to have a plan. Right after the angry and paranoid rants about left-wing conspiracies to remove the trigger fingers from all members of the NRA, like Tom Berenger in that movie Sniper, they stress the importance of laying out your moves ahead of time. It’s about safety, but also about game management. Wild animals tend to run away from the people stomping through their turf, so you want to be strategic in your approach. You want to push the game in a consistent direction and cover the hunting area efficiently. Given that I was by myself and I didn’t have the services of a dog, this was going to be extremely difficult. Pheasant are more likely to run for cover at the first sign of trouble than to conveniently pop up in front of you. They have to feel really threatened in order to do that, and as I weaved my way around this large open space like a sailor two days into shore leave, I quickly came to the realization that I was presenting no such threat. I could have been right on top of a pheasant, standing toe-to-claw with one and I might not have known it. There could have been dozens of them standing just along the edge of the woods, cackling at me, making jokes about the fluffy man in the silly orange hat who looked lost in an area the size of a small strip mall parking lot.

  I thought that working along the edge of the field, where the grass was taller and dotted with thorny brambles would give me the best shot at scaring one up. And so I walked three U-shaped circuits along the edge of the woods, hoping a bird would be nice enough to sacrifice itself for the benefit of my plate, ego, and this book. Not a single pheasant raised its claw. Perhaps, I thought, I needed to go deeper into the woods and work my way back toward the field. Maybe that would scare a bird into the open. So I, well, plunged is the only word for it, into the dense underbrush that was thick with thorny bushes and low-hanging branches, crouching down low at the waist while taking comically high-kneed steps to clear low obstacles, all the while trying to protect my gun and avoid putting any scratches into it. Eventually I got deep enough into the trees that the ground cover got thin and patchy and I was able to stand up in a small clearing the size of a suburban garage.

  That’s when I heard it—a cacophony of gunfire that sounded as if it were coming from just behind the nearest tree. Two shots, three, four, eight in rapid succession and over the span of about two seconds. I instinctively, by reflex and without thinking, ducked down onto my knees, cradling my gun and covering my head like a kid in a tornado drill. I don’t think I’ve ever moved so fast in my life or with so much purpose. Sebastian Junger, a favorite author of mine and, in my opinion, the second coming of Hemingway, wrote scientifically and eloquently about this kind of reaction in his book War. In the book, he embeds with a forward operating army unit in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan. He writes about the caveman instinct that takes over when a human brain detects a sudden, loud, and potentially threatening noise. The pupils dilate, the muscles contract and take the body into a crouching position, the hands instinctively cover the head. A seasoned soldier trains his body to react differently, to stand in the face of this base instinct. Hunting in a group, I didn’t react when the guns went off up and down the line to fell my pheasant. I expected it. I understood the context. And sitting in my car, hearing the pops off in the distance, it was more of a curiosity than a threat. But alone in the woods, believing as I did that there was no one around, I thought I was under attack.

  A couple more shots rang out, and this time I could tell they weren’t coming from the south or west, where most of the shots were that I’d heard while struggling with the lock. They were to the north and not by much. It took a second or two to realize that there was another field through the trees to the north and that there must be a group of hunters there who had found some pheasant. My heart rate slowed and I felt my muscles relax. I stood up and immediately thought about that section in Junger’s book, adding to his clinical description of the fight-or-flight response another indicator—a single drop of pee in my pants.

  I got my bearings and walked through the trees toward where I had heard the shots. You want to be careful sneaking up on hunters when you’re alone and unexpected. Blaze orange may do wonders to identify a human over a deer, but it doesn’t make you bulletproof. I walked through the trees until I saw six orange figures a couple hundred yards distant. They seemed to be gathering together, I imagined, to look at the birds one or several of them had just shot. I wanted to strut over there, shotgun slung over my arm, and ask, with a manly sniff, “So how we doing today, boys?” But I decided against it. I didn’t want to be that guy, the computer club president who thinks his job as the water boy makes him equal in physical and social stature to the football team. And, perhaps worse than being seen as a nuisance, I dreaded the off chance that they might invite me to join them. It had taken a bit of courage to join Mark and my cousins for a hunt. The idea of joining up with strangers having never shot anything or having any real, firsthand knowledge of what I was doing mortified me. It would be just my luck that a bird would rise and, apart from doing something idiotic like forgetting to take my safety off, I would do something dangerous like going full-on Dick Cheney and shooting one of the men in the face.

  This is not the kind of grounded perspective my dad might have. He’d see a group of experienced hunters offering to take me with them—even though I never got close enough for them to actually do so—as a great way to learn. I saw it as an opportunity to embarrass myself and possibly maim some well-meaning stranger. No, definitely better to get a little more experience on my own. It would be better for everyone involved.

  After an hour of fruitless tramping, I came to the realization that I really wanted a dog. A dog would be entertaining. A dog would make this whole process more enjoyable and—dare I consider?—significantly increase the likelihood of actually getting something. But more than just wanting a dog, I wanted Quigley. Quigley was my mom’s gift to my dad on his fiftieth birthday, a purebred liver-and-white English springer spaniel and quite possibly the most adorable puppy I have ever laid eyes on. I named him after Tom Selleck’s character in one of my dad’s favorite movies, Quigley Down Under, in which an American cowboy finds himself in Australia dispatching corrupt cattle ranchers dispassionately with the assistance of his trusty Sharps black-powder rifle, eventually riding off into the sunset with a beautiful, if abused, girl played by Laura San Giacomo.

  Dad loved that movie. In part it was because Selleck played a red-blooded, sealed-lipped hero, the kind only a person who grew up idolizing John Wayne could really appreciate. And in part because of the gun. The Sharps is one of those big, heavy long-range guns that nearly wiped out the American buffalo. But with its hexagonal barrel and peep sight, it just looked so cool. I’ve had the opportunity to fire one in my life and while the experience was loud, painful, and completely without accuracy for me, for Dad it was the equivalent of dressing up like Luke Skywalker and playing with a real-life light saber.

  Mom and I picked up Quigley from the store where she bought him as a surprise gift. He rode on my lap as we drove home and when we went inside, Mom ordered Dad to close his eyes then brought Quigley around and set him on Dad’s lap.

  “Nope, uh-uh, no way,” Dad said, holding the puppy up as if it had just laid a steaming pile on his lap. “No way do I want a dog, take it back.”

  It was one of the only times I remember my dad ever being anything less than completely gracious when receiving a gift. You could present him with a sweater made out of hairballs spit up by a feral cat and he would at least say thank you before throwing it out. But not with Quigley. He did not want a dog and that was final . . . for about twenty minutes anyway.

  English springers are hunting dogs, and Dad always said he was going to work on making that dog one. But as the years wore on, Quigley’s training consisted more of waiting for a nod from Dad before flipping a cracker off his nose and swallowing it whole. Quigley was Dad’s buddy and a great dog. True, as
a puppy, he chewed up countless doors and Mom got more new rugs in those early years than perhaps any other point in her life, but eventually Quigs settled down and even came to live with me for a while. In college and for a year or two after, I drove a Jeep Wrangler and it got to the point where Quigley didn’t need to be leashed or asked to hop in the backseat when I was going somewhere. He even lived with Rebecca and I after we got married, but our small apartment combined with some health problems that made him throw up on the carpet our newborn would soon be crawling on dictated that he had to go. We did our best to get him healthy, to retrain him, to get him used to his new environment. But, try as he did to improve his behavior, there was little that could be done for his health. I took him to the animal shelter on Good Friday 2005 and had him put down. I had not contemplated seriously getting another dog since, until I found myself wandering aimlessly through the woods trying to figure out just how in the hell I was going to scare a pheasant into becoming a target and, eventually, dinner.

  I decided to let the field rest a bit and wait until the group of hunters in the adjacent one cleared out before making another serious attempt, so I wandered deeper into the woods toward where I thought, if my memory of the map I’d seen on the ODNR website a couple days earlier served me well, I would run into a river. Fifty yards or so in, I came across a trail marked with blue blazes and a sign with a figure on horseback. I followed it for a while and the walking was easier. I didn’t have to duck under branches or step over thorns—just the occasional bit of mud that, from its color and smell, I suspected to be crushed horse dung—eventually coming to that river. I rested my gun against a tree and peed against another, feeling manly on so many levels it was difficult to comprehend. I had a good long look at the river, tried to conjure up some profound thoughts, and eventually succumbed to an odd blend of determination and anger. It was pure bloodlust. What the hell was I doing having a little stroll along a horse trail? I would never feed my family this way, never accomplish my goal of becoming a hunter.

  C’mon, Heimbuch, get your head in the game, I thought, though I had to admit that just being in the woods was pretty great. Dad used to talk about getting to a deer blind early, long before the sun comes up, and being there to experience the woods “waking up.” The sounds of songbirds, the rustle of leaves, the branches groaning in a light breeze. He was and is on to something there. Those few minutes I spent just standing there, just being, were so peaceful. It’s a shame I nearly ruined it with my urgent need for blood.

  I worked the field I started on for another half hour, seeing nothing larger than a starling but mounting my gun with every perceived movement on the off chance it would be a pheasant or a grouse, which I had decided to settle for if need be. I could see through the trees that the group of hunters had cleared out of the field to the north and made my way over there, hoping to find a pheasant emerging from cover and picking up some sloppy seconds. I remained on high alert, kicking every clump of long grass, working the field in a zigzag pattern as if I were pushing a lawn mower over it and realizing, with increasing urgency, how badly I wished I had a dog.

  I was happy to discover yet another field north of this second one and crossed a narrow but alarmingly deep ditch to get to it. When I pushed through a thin stand of trees and emerged into this third field, I’d swear I heard a choir sing in one of those moments of epic discovery. It was pheasant Valhalla, the holy grail of hunting grounds: tall grass chest high with two rows of corn planted along the woods to the east and heading north; the private cornfield to the west; and breaks in the tall grass to allow for reconnoiter and rest. It was as if everything I had read in the previous year, everything that had been described to me as the ideal habitat for upland game had been made real. My mouth actually began to water with anticipation.

  I could hear scurrying through the grass as I moved forward at a snail’s pace. Believing them to be grounded birds, I tried to follow them, keeping my gun held firmly in both hands in front of me and my eyes pivoting from side to side. For forty minutes, I was hyperalert. I knew, just simply knew, that at any moment a pheasant was going to pop up and I would finally become a hunter. I worked up a sweat and unzipped the fleece jacket I was wearing beneath my vest. I paused several times to take long pulls from my bottle of water. I gnashed my teeth and muttered unkind things about not having a dog. And, eventually, I ran out of time. I covered only a section of this perfect field and probably not all that well. I needed to get home to see my wife and kids. We had things to do. Errands to run, homework projects, and regular weekend chores. With great hesitation, I ran out of ways to justify staying longer. I knew that eventually I would come across something, if only I could spend the day. But I couldn’t.

  I made a vocal vow to return the next weekend and go straight to this third field—no screwing around with horse trails—and I’d already taken care of the trigger lock, so I wouldn’t waste any time there either. As I was walking along the fence line back toward my car, my brain registered some movement in the trees separating the first and second fields to my left. I snapped my gun to my shoulder and flipped the safety off, focusing on the point in the low brambles where the rustling came from. I wondered if I should yell “who’s there?” or simply wait, and, just as I flipped the safety back on to walk over and investigate, a rabbit took three steps out into the clear. My general hunting license allows me to shoot rabbit. Many upland hunters write about rabbit as an unintended benefit of hunting birds. They can be quite tasty, too, from what I understand. I’d read about them in my book on the field dressing and butchering of upland game. This was the first opportunity I’d had since the safety incident back in Iowa to take legitimate game. And it was right there. I would have had to try to miss in order to miss. I flipped the safety back off and drew a bead on the thing, which was just sitting there, waiting.

  I was just about to shoot when I thought about Rebecca and the kids. Had we lived in a place and time that required me to hunt for sustenance, they wouldn’t have thought twice about eating a rabbit. But we don’t and my wife and Jack, the eldest, are picky eaters. They had agreed only reluctantly to try pheasant and that was because I had assured them it was so much like chicken. A rabbit? Well, that’s Easter and Bugs Bunny and hours spent walking through the biggest park in our suburb looking for them and squirrels and ducks. I didn’t think I could justify it to them, and I wondered if Jack might think of me as a monster if I were to throw Pete Cottontail on the grill. I had long enough to ponder these and other things, like the possibility of simply lying to him, before I decided not to take the shot.

  I was returning, sadly, empty-handed. I got home less than an hour later and Rebecca called to say she and the kids were on their way home from church.

  “Did you get one?” she asked.

  “Nope, didn’t even see one, but I think I’ve found the perfect spot for next time.”

  “What the hell? When are you going to get something?” she said, an air of playful frustration in her tone.

  “I had a chance to shoot a rabbit. You didn’t want me to do that, did you?”

  “Well, you better shoot something soon,” she said with a hint of disdain. “I mean if we had to rely on you, at the rate you’re going, we’d starve to death.”

  That’s it, I thought, the next time I go out, something is going to die.

  18

  Lust

  Another December weekend and I’m up long before dawn. My brother-in-law and his girlfriend were visiting for a couple of days, fresh from winter finals and delaying as long as they could going home to be with their parents. I could and can identify. I used to love being among a very few students in my college town. Not having to wait for a pool table or a drink, having the run of the cafeteria. But also just delaying that reimmersion into life at home, which can be as shocking, though not nearly refreshing, as jumping from a sauna into a frozen lake. At any rate, I was glad that they were there. Rebecca and I had a
party to go to that night and between Christmas and Christmas parties—and the attendant babysitting—this month was already the most expensive of the last year, and it was not, as of then, half over.

  So I was up again. The previous weekend had been a good experience, getting out into the woods, feeling my way around the place, and in the days that followed I caught myself drifting off during meetings, imagining what it will feel like to finally and gloriously get my first bird. I had used a couple of lunch breaks that week to watch YouTube videos on how to clean and cook a rabbit, just in case. Rabbit wasn’t my ideal in terms of game, but I figured that if I didn’t come home with some protein and quickly, my patient wife would begin to assume I was not in fact hunting, but shacking up with someone else. There’s only so many times a guy can come home with stories of near misses and forgotten safeties before his wife starts thinking two things: (1) He is an idiot, not a real man. A real man wouldn’t flinch in the face of opportunity. He would seize it and come home to be rewarded with admiration and affection. And (2) He is not actually hunting at all, but cheating or, worse and more pathetic, doing something like playing fantasy football with his buddies. Rebecca was not quite to the point of assuming either of these yet, but when I bent down to kiss her cheek before slipping out of our still-dark bedroom, she muttered, “This time come home with something, will you?,” before rolling back over and going to sleep.

  The weather had changed a bit over the previous week. The previous week it had been chilly, but on this morning it was downright cold. The temperature always drops a bit the farther you get away from the city, but as I headed north out of town, I watched the thermometer readout on my dashboard drop from twenty-six degrees to eighteen before I parked in the same place I had a week earlier. This time there was no problem getting the gun put together, no problem at all. The gravel lot where I left my car was probably a half mile from the field I had discovered at the end of my previous trip, so I stamped my feet and flexed my gloved hands trying to revive feeling in my fingertips as I made a beeline for Bird Valhalla.