And Now We Shall Do Manly Things

by Craig Heimbuch

  My face was thoroughly numb, my fingers burning with the sensation of a million tiny pins being shoved into my skin, like getting angry tattoos from sadomasochists living inside my gloves, when I reached the field. The sun was just cracking the horizon, a slow-moving egg breaking into a pan and I was surprisingly, miraculously, completely alone. Where just a week before there had been parked trucks and flashes of blaze orange in nearby cornfields, there was nothing, no one. I had gotten up early to be sure I could get to Valhalla first, to stake my claim on it, but judging by the complete aloneness, I realized quickly that this had not been necessary. I wouldn’t see another soul until nearly ten thirty, and then it would just be a couple of guys in a truck asking if I’d had any luck and, by then, I will have become so accustomed to quiet that the interaction would feel like an intrusion.

  Valhalla was everything I had remembered and been quietly fantasizing about all week. Three or four acres of the kind of scrubby grass, winter wheat, and tall brambles that offers a lot of cover for birds, surrounded by a seven- or eight-foot-wide band of millet like a track around a high school football field, offering a steam table buffet for beaked critters. I assume it was planted for the very purpose of giving game birds a place to hang out and eat and make themselves available to be hunted. I made a quick mental note to thank the game warden for this nice little touch if I ever saw him and looked across the field, ringed on two sides by woods, a narrow stand of trees to the south and a dirt road to the west on the other side of which was a harvested cornfield. Lamenting again my complete lack of a canine companion, I contemplated a plan. I could try to zigzag my way up the field working lawn-mower style and hoping to scare something up. Or I could walk up the middle and work my way around. Or I could stand around wasting more time and freezing my ass off trying to decide what to do. I began walking along the millet and fell into a comfortable groove. The sun was up and I could feel my fingers and toes. My face was freezer burned, but I’ve never really liked my nose anyway, so maybe a little emergency plastic surgery would do me some good.

  I walked for a couple of hours around the track of thigh-high grain, ducking occasionally into it or the inner field. I began to understand what Dad was always talking about when he referred to the woods “waking up.” From the snapping cold stillness of those moments just before dawn, the field and adjacent woods seemed to change with each passing minute. First the leaves begin to rustle, then the songbirds begin singing their chipper morning tunes. Then the movement starts. The world begins to thaw, and what had been coated in a sheen of matte silver comes to life, the sun a slow drizzle of hot water clearing up the windshield of the world. Jesus, I was beginning to sound like Thoreau. Before I know it I’ll be sitting in a stream rubbing mud all over my face and proclaiming the majesty of the potato bug. I’m as romantic as the next guy, as awed by the sight of something beautiful and made by something other than man. I may even catch myself daisy-eyed and dreaming about adventures into the woods, but weepy about a sunrise? Not really, not ever. It must have been the cold or the fact that I hadn’t slept well the night before that was warming the chambers of my numb suburban heart. I wondered what it must be like to wake up every day not to the drone of that same oversized alarm clock you’ve had since college and all the expectations of schedule and responsibility, but to something else. Something more wide open. A life not dictated by all the shit a man has to do to build a career, nurture a marriage, raise some kids who don’t end up on America’s Most Wanted, and maintain a household. Or perhaps a life where all those things were tied into one. My life at this point felt so fractured, so striated into separate, never-to-overlap streams of need and duty. There was my work life and the hundred or so people involved with it. The meetings, the deadlines, the impatience of wanting to make things go better, run smoother, explore new opportunities and feeling like my hands, my coworkers, and clients simply can’t move as fast as my brain, leaving me wrestling with a sense that I could and should be doing better and thus was failing. My fatherhood life and the three kids I was trying awfully hard to spend equal amounts of time with and pay equal attention to. I was getting frustrated a lot. Frustrated about toys not put away. Frustrated at dinners not eaten. Frustrated about having to ask more than once, all the things that go into and along with parenthood. To make it worse, I knew that nothing the kids were doing or not doing was really why I was frustrated. I was frustrated because I hated where we lived and was tired of being the one who had to say, over and over, how lucky we were and hadn’t we made it such a long way? And we’re almost there. Just be patient. Trying to placate my wife’s wants and needs was exhausting and completely artificial, given that I too was frustrated. I really did think we were close—to having a house, to having a yard and a basement, to having the kind of life we grew up with and always wanted for ourselves and our children. Frustrated that we had come such a long way—all the credit card debt and student loan debt and credit counseling and extra work and staying home and late nights writing at Starbucks. I wanted to believe, really believe that it had all been worth something, for something—that things would work out for the best in the end, that the end would come soon, and that the end would really be a new beginning. I knew what I wanted and I couldn’t get at it. It’s like a bear being put inside of a cage and made to stare at a room service tray piled high with food placed on a table just out of paw’s reach. I wasn’t sure how long I could claw at the air and keep up hope that one day I would reach the jar of peanut butter.

  I felt ridiculous, circling this seven-hundred-yard track over and over, but, to be honest, I didn’t know what else to do. If there were birds to be had, I figured, they were in here where they had cover and food. The walking started to feel good, freeing. So it didn’t matter how ridiculous I felt, I also felt good. The longer I walked, the more attention I paid to the details around me and the less I thought about the next year’s taxes, the meetings I had coming up that week, and whether or not Dylan would ever eat spinach. It was like tuning out by paying attention to something else. I listened to the low cheeping of small songbirds and the creaking of the trees as they swayed in the gentle breeze. I watched the field go from a jumbled mass of brown vegetation to a complicated and diverse ecosystem of varied and distinctive natural architecture—the straight and tall chest-high grass that was almost yellow on the south end; the single tree with bent branches that almost touched the ground in the center; the short grass that looked like it had been mowed, though never watered. I began seeing things in the world around me—opportunities, hiding places, bent or broken branches that led me to believe something had been there. I saw small, narrow stars in the mud, like the Mercedes emblem and came to realize they were footprints left by birds after the last rain. The more I tuned out of my own head, the more attuned I became. In a life where sensory overload is the norm, where every turn is met by a billboard, every thought accompanied by a song pumped in on my iPod, I had forgotten all about what it meant to just be outside. I had forgotten what I had learned as a kid running around in the woods behind my parents’ house—that when you are out of doors, you are never without something to watch, something to hear, something to pay attention to; you just have to be willing to notice it.

  I had also forgotten about the amazingly free feeling of stopping where you are, unzipping and relieving yourself in the fresh air. It’s one of the central blessings of being a man and one of those things I imagine will be as satisfying at eighty-two as it was at twelve. I didn’t even move to a tree, just stood where I was, unloaded my gun, unzipped, and let fly. I believe I even whistled while I was doing it. How can anyone be worried or stressed when whistling while whizzing in the wild? It’s impossible, I assure you.

  After my brief interlude, I realized in a half-dazed sort of way that there were only two things to complain about. The first was an absolute fucking lack of birds and the second was a bunching of my socks under the arches of my feet. It had started a little annoying and worked
its way up to a lot annoying and a little bit painful.

  They don’t exactly put benches on hunting grounds, so I once again unloaded my gun and sat in the grass between the woods and millet on the north end of the field to pull up my socks and retie my shoes. I didn’t realize it would feel so good, but after five or six miles of walking in the cold, sitting was something bordering upon orgasmic in terms of sheer physical pleasure. So, I sat. It wasn’t like I had much else to do. I still had time before I needed to leave, and I had given up on the idea that I’d get a bird an hour before. Maybe I’d find a rabbit. Maybe. It wasn’t that I was ambivalent about it. I wanted to kill something that morning. It was just that I was out there. I was feeling pretty good and, on balance, that was the most I could really ask for with a clean conscience. I sat for twenty minutes or so, taking sips from the water bottle I had been carrying in my game bag and trying to decide the point of diminishing returns between the joy of sitting and the quickly plummeting temperature of my ass. Eventually, the ass won out and I rose, noticeably stiffer, pulled two shells from my pocket and dropped them into the empty chambers of the gun and snapped it closed. I took one step, one tiny step toward the millet, and the quiet morning air was fractured by the sound of five tiny helicopters blasting off from where I was about to step.

  That’s when it happened. A flush and whoosh of activity as birds sprang out before me from the millet. My heart jumped, my hands moved by instinct, raising the gun to my shoulder and flicking the safety forward. There were five of them. One went to the right along the woods, one took a sharp left, and another buzzed right by my head and straight behind me. The other two took off at an angle somewhere between twelve and one o’clock. I fired—cli-boom—and the first shot missed though I had no idea in which direction since I had pulled the trigger before my face was flush against the stock of the gun. I may have just missed or I may have missed by fifteen feet. I have no idea. I was looking out down the barrel when I pulled the trigger a second time. The birds were pretty far away by this point, but I knew they weren’t pheasant and thought perhaps they were ruffed grouse. A little smaller and more blandly colored than a cock pheasant, a ruffed grouse is as good a game bird as any and usually very hard to flush. They like to run—even more than pheasant do—so getting them up in the air without a dog is pretty tough. And they’re fast. Really fast. The way they took off, it was like they had rockets in their keisters.

  I picked out the bottom of the two birds for no reason other than I thought I saw it more clearly. My shot was on target, so pulling the trigger, I expected the thing to drop like a stone into the western edge of Valhalla. I’m pretty sure I hit it, since the grouse dipped a bit in its flight path, but it didn’t fall. Shit. I jammed my hand into my vest pocket to pull out some more shells, flipping my gun open like Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2 and not paying any attention to the spent shells as they ejected and flew smoking past my right temple. I slammed the new shells in and snapped the gun closed as I raised it to my shoulder in one fluid motion. I got my bearings back on the gun and knew the birds were too far away, but my adrenaline was pumping like a swollen river and I couldn’t help but squeeze off two more shots.

  The smell of nitrocellulose hung heavy around me, that tangy, sweet smoke heavier than the still-crisp morning air. My heart was pounding through my chest, my eyes were wider, and every sound seemed somehow louder, more distinct. Everything I mentioned before about the calm of being in the woods? Yeah, forget all that stuff. That was nice, but I could get those feelings by going for a walk through the neighborhood or listening to a James Taylor album in a dark room. This, this jacked-up rush—a combination of awareness and vigilance, fear and focus—this was what had been missing in my life. I could get used to this. I needed this. Sometime over the last decade of routine and under the constant if relatively slight crush of financial and familial pressure, the world had become a numb and colorless drone, my life like a slight case of tinnitus persistently buzzing in my ear. This new thing—this was a rush. Not an adrenaline surge like the kind you get when you’re walking down a dark staircase and miss the bottom step, but an awakening of purpose. Cliché as it may be, I felt suddenly somehow more alive than I had just a moment or two before those birds flooded out of the low bushes. I wanted more.

  I popped two more shells into my gun, pausing to notice that finally, after nearly a year of having it in my possession, I had a reason to clean it, looked forward to cleaning it in fact. Obviously, I hadn’t definitively killed anything. Not as far as I knew anyway. But I thought maybe I had winged the bottom of the two birds and so I walked off in the general direction they had flown to find out, stalking my prey. To my surprise, the rush held. I walked through the thick brambles and tall grass, down along the dirt road fully aware of my own awareness. I was looking for something—anything—that might indicate there was a wounded bird somewhere near me. After nearly half an hour, I hadn’t found anything, though I had managed to put a ring of sweat around the inside of the blaze orange stocking cap on my head and cuts on my upper thighs from walking blithely through the thornbushes, eventually coming to the realization that if I had hit the bird, it was gone and I could not have hurt it that bad or else I would have found it. It was right about this time that those two guys pulled up in their SUV and asked how I was doing.

  “Not bad,” I panted. “Flushed a few grouse a little while ago and thought I might have hit one.”

  “Probably tough to do without a dog,” said the man in the passenger seat. He was younger than the one driving, and I assumed they were a father and son.

  “Yes, sir, it is,” I said with a touch more enthusiasm than what would have been acceptably cool.

  “Yeah,” said the younger man, who, with some further inspection, wasn’t that young but probably about my age, “came all the way out here to try and work my dog.” He pointed his thumb toward a rear window where the slimy snout of a spaniel was leaving streaks on the glass.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I’m on my way out. Give me five minutes to get out of here and you can feel free to take this field.” It might seem like I was cowering somehow or giving in, but in truth, I wanted to go explore the woods and look for other fields. The longer my fruitless search for the phantom bird went on, the more convinced I was that I could and should shoot a rabbit. I can’t explain it other than to say that it was kind of like Vegas. You go to Vegas and on the first day you have grand visions of running a poker table. But you get over to the poker tables and you realize you’re not a high roller. What the hell?, you think. Poker isn’t really my thing; I’ll go clean up at blackjack. But the female Asian blackjack dealer separates you from most of your money over the course of a couple of days and then you’re at the airport. Your flight is leaving in twenty minutes and you are dead-set convinced that you were meant to win something while you are there. So you head to the slot machines looking for something, anything to justify your trip. You have to win. You’ve abandoned the idea of a big score at the tables. You’ll settle for five dollars in sticky nickels. Anything. That’s how I was feeling. I came looking for pheasant, but there were none around. I stumbled onto some grouse and took a shot. I won a couple of hands, but ultimately gave up and moved on. Now, I needed a score, something to bring home, to slake this lust that’s awoken in me. Rabbit, of which I have seen many in the wild and which are conveniently bereft of wings, would be fine with me.

  “Are you sure?” asked the older man, speaking across his son. “We don’t want to kick you out.”

  “Not a problem,” I said. “On my way out.”

  “Thanks so much,” he said.

  “Yeah, thank you,” said the younger man. “And be careful. I know how hard it is to play dog.”

  I nodded and headed back in the general direction of my car. I was twenty yards away and fully engrossed in the thought of shooting a rabbit before I understood his pun. Following the horse path I had noticed the previou
s week, I descended into the woods looking for rabbits where I had seen them. The rabbit shot was the toughest to hit and the bane of my time spent on the L.L.Bean range. To simulate the bouncing gait of a rabbit, a clay pigeon was thrown across the ground on its side. It would pick up speed and bounce every time it hit a pebble or an uneven clump of mud. Throughout the day of shooting, I think I may—maybe—have hit one. So I was trying to remember what the instructors had said about moving with the target as I came to the place where rabbits had been the previous Sunday. But the more I thought, I realized that the rabbit I had seen stayed largely still when I walked up to it. In fact, I’ve walked up on hundreds of the critters while hiking in the city park with Jack and Dylan and, usually, you can get pretty damned close before they scurry off into the underbrush. I can hit a rabbit, I thought. This is going to be easy.

  I spent another hour trudging through the woods, my boots sinking into the muck and mud as the air warmed and the ground melted into a mire of slop. My buzz was wearing off. I was coming down, and, try as I did to convince myself to remain alert, my attention was waning. I was pretty well done for the day. I climbed back out of the woods and crossed the road to where my car was parked. I don’t know how I had missed it the week before or even earlier that morning, but I noticed a trail running south from the small parking lot. Or, more precisely, a wide avenue of grass cleared through the trees. It was as wide as a one-lane road and manicured as if it had been mowed fairly recently. Holding on to the notion that I might yet find something to propel lead in the general direction of, I decided to take a little stroll. This part of the park, a promenade really, felt less like hunting than it did an easy meandering. I followed the manicured path for about two-thirds of a mile until it opened on an enormous clearing. Near the end of the trail, there was a sign indicating that this was a dedicated dove hunting area and that the season was officially over. There were four or five acres of grass and about two of the frozen, dried hulls of sunflowers bent against the weight of their own decay. I followed a tree line down a gradual hill and, peering through the branches, was amazed by what I saw.