He is the sportsman I always wanted to be. In the autumn before his 90th year, he is still out there. Dove hunting. Foraging for puff balls. Peering through the scoped .22, tracking grey squirrels fetching nuts along sun-dappled limbs of shagbark hickories.
For more than 75 years, he killed ruffed grouse, upwards of 100 each season in the glory of his prime, hunting nearly every day from October to the end of February. Rising early, he’d load the company van with gear and one cover-hardened English setter, slip by the store to get his crew lined out for the day, then roll south to coverts that scribed a long half-moon across the southeastern corner of Ohio. His impossibly long strides devoured those Appalachian foothills, hunting wide ranging dogs whose bell was seldom more than a faint jingle in the distance.
He shot a 12-gauge Superposed over his first dogs. Brittany Spaniels, we called them then. In photos, his look like Gaelic cage fighters, jaws square, chests burly, posed over another day’s limit of brown birds. A careless moment with a snow-clogged barrel took three inches from the bottom tube of that Belgian gun, but he killed birds with it that way for years, silent self castigation to a proud man.
Besides, he could really hit with it.
Later there were the mail-order AyA’s, affordable pieces of uneven quality, back when a fella with an easily-obtained FFL could have them delivered to his doorstep. The slim, Basque smallbores he favors now are fine guns with pretty wood, crisp double triggers, and slim, dark 26” barrels.
But the guns, even the dogs, were but accouterments. He killed grouse with his legs. The heart murmur that stamped him “4-F” never evidenced itself as he trekked miles of reclaimed strip mine country, stepping over deadfall, twisting through grapevine tangles, or busting multi-flora clumbs in his up-and-down-and-up-again-uplands.
Our first hunt together came during the school break between Christmas and New Year’s. We began the day casting the dogs across a fast, mean-looking creek rimmed with ice, swollen with recent rains. He stomped on a dead tree limb along the bank, sized it up, then used it as a wading staff, dancing over three round, slick rocks to make his crossing. He had just celebrated his 67th birthday, thirty years my senior.
He threw the limb back across to me. I made it to the second rock before slipping, managing to drench only my right knee before making a shaky third step and a clumsy hop, falling to my knees on the muddy bank. As I struggled to my feet, he was already moving off behind the dogs.
“Keeps the weakies outta the cover,” he growled, setting a pace we would keep up for three hours, ending up back at the creek for another perilous crossing, then climbing back into the van, making a short drive, and hunting another craggy stretch of brushy hillsides until dusk. We walked the flats when we could, tracing deer trails through the thickets. Sometimes we dropped down into hollows where old homesteads or mining company housing had once stood, hunting barnyards gone native long ago.
I was a runner, hunted these same hills nearly every Saturday, and played basketball at least twice a week with other teachers before school. When he dropped me off at my truck that evening, I took a long time crating my dog and finding the sleeve for my shotgun, long enough so that his van was out of sight before I tried to haul what was left of me up under the wheel. I remember it was tough getting undressed once I made it back to the farm, and I soaked in an Epson salts bath long into the night.
More than two decades later, a mutual friend told me there was a problem, that the man who wore out bootleather, bird dogs, and hunting buddies was finding himself stopping halfway down the driveway to check the mail. There was a hospital stay, his first ever, and treatments designed for comfort, not cure. Late in the summer, he fell several different times on the hill behind his stately white house, carrying water to the last of those big-going English setters. That’s when Mardi came to live with me.
A leggy, black-ticked beauty, she runs big, as his dogs always did. “I can flush the ones in front of me,” he’d mutter, shaking his head when one of my dogs checked in too frequently, or when he thought I was on the whistle too much.
His dogs, we never saw, from the time we cast them into the wind until we happened upon them standing high and hard in bird scent trance.
He kept no records of points or hits to misses, just a loose tally of a season’s bag. But he knew how to shoot grouse, mostly because he knew how to position himself and seldom got rattled, his first shot often breaking only after he’d given a winded companion the chance to pull twice.
And though he would get irritated over what he considered a fluffed gimme, a miss was usually just a chance for a follow-up. He was an absolute savant of sensing the direction and distance a flushed bird might go. When his gut told him we were in the area, we’d split up, circling to either side of where he figured the bird might have dropped back in. His re-flush rate was phenomenal, sometimes moving the same grouse three, even four, times.
A bonus to this method was his old adage, “Let a grouse lead you to more grouse.” Often a bird under pressure headed back to a particularly gnarly “home” patch; in the early season, when grouse were still in loose approximations of broods, or late in the year, when weather “yarded” birds into coverts offering superior protection or handier browse. Follow-ups on a single might lead to grouse launching like scattered thunderstorms. Guest dogs, unused to birds in these numbers, could be expected to pop stitches at every seam. For his, it was just another day at the office.
So he shot well because he shot a lot, could read his dog and anticipate the flush, kept his feet under him, took his time…and didn’t think the fate of the Free World was riding on every touch of the gunstock to his cheek. After all, he hunted every day, good dogs in good country back when we had birds. Miss this one, there was always another, or another two or three, just over the next hill.
He was interested in sporting clays, tried it a few times with his regular game guns, and was a good sport about the fact that he almost never shot a good score. He knew who he was, and knew sporting clays for what it is – a game played better with specialized equipment and a target specific approach to each shot, a stroke that is duplicated in a repetitive series. Some shots he and his little side-by-sides recognized instantly. For instance, anything he could see quartering away could be marked before he even stepped in the cage. Marks of a more technical nature had his number, and while he’d shake his head and grin stepping down from one of the tougher stations, there was always the acrid hint of a slow burn about him whenever the scorecard got a little ugly. He was a shooter, after all, and real shooters don’t miss.
Well, real shooters do…and the rest of us do a lot more, especially when we’re toting an upland gun on a competition-type clays course. But leaving the game gun at home when we shoot sporting only means we’re missing out on much of the fun, as well as a chance to become familiar enough with a favorite firearm.
A day on the range with an upland shotgun ought to be all about the chance to practice in volume with guns that are usually carried one heckuva lot more than they are fired. We can work on a consistent move to mount, keeping the gun out of our face until we’ve locked on to the bird. The artificiality of a known flight path is offset by a chance to learn what the optimum position for killing the target might feel like, so that when we are in the field, and a pheasant comes hurtling out of the cattails or a covey of quail claymores up from a fence row, we can resist the impulse to behave as if Mario Batali has ignited brandy in our brush pants.
Instead, we fight to get into that position we learned in the shooting stand. There’s time to focus on the leading edge of a bird, the bird. There’s time to take step toward where that bird is headed, opening and driving our hips, giving our shoulders the most room for a sure, short stroke.
During the season, some of us, where circumstances make it safe, keep our upland gun handy in our study or man cave, picking it up and doing the same snap cap dry-firing drills we would with our target gun between range visits. But that’s not the same as regularly (not just a sloppy session the week before hunting season) wringing out that sleek game gun on a variety of targets before and during the season, staying intimate with its dynamics and, far underrated, familiar with its trigger(s).
Again, that’s when we need reminded of who, and where, we are. We’re shooting in volume; the 20-gauge loads you favor for the three or four times you pull the trigger in the course of a day’s grouse hunt might just go all Manny Pacquiao on your face and shoulder over a 100-bird course. Stock up on so-called “trainer” or “featherlight” loads for range work…and then look again at the field loads you’re using, especially for quail, ruffed grouse, and woodcock. For many of us, quality one ounce loads in a 12-gauge well under 7 lbs., the 7/8 ounce numbers for the 16, and even ¾ ounce sweethearts for that trim 20-bore can be both revelation and salvation when packed with hard, small shot.
Lighten up in another way, too. Don’t be afraid to keep score as a means of comparing progress between outings. Just understand that if you are shooting tournament targets, results with your game gun might well be more uneven than those you’re used to swinging a gun built for the game. When the mood is right, shoot those targets anyway. When you do things right, you’ll break them anyway. Learn more about shooting, and about that little gun, pushing it ahead of marks you might never see in the field.
Best of all, book a game shooting lesson or, where offered, an actual preserve hunt with an inexperienced teaching pro. He or she can cut to the root of bad habits we pick up in the field, perhaps suggest improvements in stock fit, and take both of you through a primer of wingshooting tuition that will only add to your appreciation for, and enjoyment of, that good game gun.
The man who tracks Mardi’s wide swings through another new year isn’t half the woodsman, half the game shot, as the man who once walked behind her. But I had the chance to see what it all meant to that other guy – the challenge, the learning, the knowing, and the great good fun it was all supposed to be. When the bell goes still, I never hustle off in that direction without thinking of him, hoping we’ll have a story to tell, or maybe a grouse fan to admire, when we stop by the tall white house on the long ride home.