The Followin’ Lady
By Randy Lawrence
(Adapted from an article published July 2007 in Sporting Clays Magazine)
When Kathryn Harris Evans died ten years ago this month, four months shy of her 101st birthday, I was told her ashes were to be scattered near a Revolutionary War-era house set deep in the shade of towering hemlocks. There, Kay and her partner of nearly 70 years, George Bird Evans, had, in her husband’s words, “arranged (their) life around shooting” in laurel-laced grouse coverts near home.
Those trees gave their name to a bloodline of English setters and a private publishing company that for nearly two decades would offer an ongoing state-of-the-Evans-union reflection on wingshooting for grouse and woodcock. The Old Hemlock setters began in 1947 with Old Hemlock Ruff. Old Hemlock publishing marked its debut with An Affair With Grouse in 1982.
Both books and generations of those beautiful setters were born of rock ribbed convictions. As gracious and genuinely interested as George and Kay could be about other people’s humane methods with gun dogs or artist-friendly approaches to publishing, in their minds there was but one way to breed, train, and hunt a proper grouse dog, one way to write, edit, and market limited-edition sporting books: The Old Hemlock Way.
The Old Hemlock Way was a glimpse back to a time when wingshooting happiness was measured more simply, in George’s terms, “a dog, a gun, and time enough.” Numbers in George’s meticulous gunning diary weren’t merely about measuring; they were about remembering, too. His ledger noted the hunter’s moon, the cant of an abandoned house, the bone-weary relief of hiking out the hard way when one gets turned around in the back country.
Those recollections flavored the stark numbers. George Bird Evans didn’t guesstimate or presume: he could report exactly what each of his coverts had yielded in all the years he’d hunted them and under what weather conditions, the ratio of grouse moved to grouse pointed by his setters, the number of flushes per hour hunted, how many retrieves each dog had made.
Toward the end, those numbers would shape evidence George offered the world about what late-season shooting, along with the inevitable sprawl of population, had done to his Appalachian grouse hunting. There was a bitter edge to the later entries, written as George hunted into his 91st year – scarcity of game, his difficulties in getting around in the woods, the frustration of carrying, but not firing at grouse, the ultra-light Spanish 28-bore he went to after he could no longer easily shoulder his lovely Purdey 12-gauge.
But through most of George’s journal entries and the shooting books they spawned, there is wry humor and the irascible grit of a man who lived every day as a gift, who looked at advancing age not as an inevitable excuse but merely as a problem to be solved if he and Kay were to continue the fairy-tale life they’d carved for themselves out of art, music, writing, and hunting grouse over pointing dogs.
Kay Evans did not shoot. She hunted, though, ever bit as keen as George and their eager English setters. In The Upland Shooting Life, her husband wrote, “(Kay) is game as hell, going through cover where I couldn’t take most men, and though her gun is a movie camera, her involvement is intense. Most precious to me is her sense of the beauty and ethics of the sport. The companion who enriches a day is one who, after you’ve brought off a good shot, will say that it was good ormake an intelligent comment when the dogs handle a bird well. Kay does these things. Most of all, she is aware of a November sunset, of a colored leaf lodged on a rail fence…Kay shares everything I love about the birds and the dogs and gunning, and this, in part, explains why I’d rather shoot with my wife than with anyone else I know.”
In short, Kay lived what she wrote to her husband on a gift card one long-ago Christmas, “To the shootinest gent’man from his followin’ lady.”
Kay was really more leading lady in every act of George’s life. Together they co-authored five mystery novels under the names “Brandon Bird” and “Harris Evans.” Later, she was his buffer from all that threatened to steal time from writing and illustrating. She monitored visitors and answered the phone and responded to fan mail the couple received from readers, typing on the same 1949 Remington that produced all those books and magazine articles.
The Evans were convinced that shooting celebrity and friend Nash Buckingham burned out his writer’s chops with correspondence, and Kay fiercely protected George’s time and energies. Kay’s resolve, and her husband’s unquenchable urge to create, meant that even in the spring of his last year, he had a new book in mind.
Trusted confidantes pitched in with logistics – everything from ferrying George’s shotguns to and from gunsmiths and arranging breeding for Old Hemlock Manton to helping place the occasional litter of linebred puppies. The devotion of these good people meant that Kay and George very rarely had to leave their daily work routine, their candlelight dinners accompanied by favorite recordings of classical music, rainy day piano and guitar recitals, and, of course, bird hunting with the Old Hemlock setters. As George remarked in October Fever, for Kay and himself, “(t)here was no need to look for Heaven.”
Evans learned to shoot as most American men of his era did – in the field, on game. His mentor was his father George W., a stylish sportsman in high-laced Bean boots, canvas pants, felt Dobbs hat, and the obligatory necktie under his field jacket. In his father’s company, George, age 19, took his first grouse over a Llewellin setter named Speck, thereby “blooded” as a grouse hunter for life.
There would be only three guns in George’s adult life: a 12-gauge Fox Sterlingworth (“an uncomplicated sort of beauty”) he and his father purchasedin 1927 for $42.50; the famous Purdey #21390 George inherited in 1961 from his friend Dr. Charles Norris, and the 5 lb. AyA 28-bore he turned to in the late 1980’s when shoulder injuries and advancing age made mounting the Purdey impossible under field conditions.
Only three guns for an ardent shooting life seems remarkable, but, as usual, George had an opinion on those of us always on the scout for the firearm that’ll cure our shooting woes. “The trader,” he wrote, “is not likely to make a good shot because he thinks in terms of guns, not fit.”
George was obsessive about gun fit, shaping each of those three shotguns into an extension of himself, employing artisans like Ken Eyster, Melvin Forbes, and David Trevallion to handle the thornier gun problems George couldn’t solve on his own.
He was especially cognizant of comb dimensions on his grouse guns, particularly the cheek point: “The relation of cheek to stock is so delicate that clenching the teeth will bulge the jaw and push the face away enough to throw the pattern off target.” His own guns were fitted for him to shoot with his mouth agape, “...in part,” he wrote, “as compensating for amazement at a grouse’s flight.”
Restocking his Fox gun was an epiphany for George. With it, his average on grouse spiked 90% over his earlier percentages. The gun, in Evans’ words, became “the part of me I look with.”
I cannot help but think that George Bird Evans would have enjoyed the wingshooting instruction available to us today 0 if the coach would have been willing to make house calls to Bruceton Mills. George once admitted that in his lifetime of trial and error, he’d “learned to shoot about every way it is possible to shoot wrong.”
Still, from a mechanical lead-conscious maladroit, George coached himself into a dedicated and effective “instinctive” shot. He believed his upland marksmanship turned the corner when that old Fox gun finally fit him, and he learned not to snap shoot at the blur of grouse flight.
“It is essential,” he wrote, “both to see the bird and to think the hit…seeing the bird clearly before mounting…the trigger pulled with no dwell or riding-out the bird.”
On quartering grouse, George let his hands move with the bird and create the lead through the mount. He shot his own hybrid version of “swing-through/pull-away” on the occasional crossing mark: “I find it effective to pull a little after I am through the bird,” letting the slight acceleration account for lead.
According to Evans, the most pernicious hitch in his grouse shooting stemmed from stopping the gun by measuring lead, switching vision from bird to barrel. “If I missed,” he wrote, “it was usually because I had focused on my gun barrels…I use a large white bead, but I look through it, not at it, the way you look down at the floor without seeing your nose.”
In his prime, George was an iconoclast when it came to the convention of ultra-light upland guns with short barrels. For 34 years, he toted the 7lb.-plus Fox, a beavertail fore-stock on those 28” barrels. The gun was bored to print open, 40% patterns in the right barrel, 70% (!) in the left.
George sniffed at the notion that his Fox was unsuited for covert operations. “…(T)he gun doesn’t know that, and neither do I when it is in my hands,” he confessed in a chapter called “First Love” in 1987’s A Dog, A Gun, And Time Enough. “When, for one of my numerous, neurotic reasons, I go into a shooting slump with the little Purdey, I go back to the old flame of my youth, and she understands and comforts me. There is that mystique that defies analysis and makes a gun a living thing.”
For thousands of readers, George and Kay Evans brought art to the literature of bird guns and gun dogs – art and passion and knowledge, all gilded with a whimsical charm that we should pray never goes out of style. For me, the Evans’ upland shooting life lies on in several smudged letters, a shelf of good books and memories of setters carrying old Hemlock blood – Longhunter’s Arran Wind, Longhunter’s Dawn t’ Dusk, and Longhunter’s Wild Indigo. Indi, in particular, was a throwback to the lithe athlete George and Kay really favored, antithesis of the ponderous, phlegmatic stereotype that those who don’t know automatically associate with all Old Hemlock (and also erroneously, by association, Ryman) strains.
Dusk was a hammer to Indigo’s scalpel, as powerful, as beautiful, and as fiercely loyal as a 67-year-old romance played out in an 18th-century mountain hideaway. Dusk and Indigo hunted woodcock and grouse in season, pheasants and sharptails in South Dakota, Hungarian partridge on our local preserve, a number of those falling to a 16-gauge box lock Charles Boswell, and an Army and Navy hammer gun built the year George Bird Evans was born. Originally made for a British serviceman stationed in colonial India, she patterns 40%/60% where I look – my mouth most likely ajar at the forever wonder of a game bird’s flush over a staunch point.
In the lid of that gun’s fitted case is taped an excerpt from Catherine Harper’s thoughtful 1999 biography of George Evans, Life of a Shooting Gentleman: “Never a moralist, George…demonstrated that shooting days and non-shooting days alike are meant to be lived for the sheer, thumping joy of it. And he generously showed not only that his life was special, but he reminded readers that theirs could be as well.”
The Old Hemlock Foundation is a wonderful blend of land stewardship and celebration of the lives of George Bird and Kay Harris Evans. Along with keeping Old Hemlock house and the grounds open to visitors by appointment, the Foundation awards scholarships and financial support to Bruceton Mills, West Virginia, area schools, scholarships to students attending West Virginia University Medical School, and help for Preston County’s Humane Society. For more information on George and Kay, to donate to their Foundation, as well as learn more about the living legacy of the Old Hemlock setter line, please visit www.oldhemlock.org.
George Bird Evans: Life of a Shooting Gentleman by Catherine A. Harder has been published in limited edition. My copy is from Prairie Wind Press, Winterset, Iowa. Including is a detailed bibliography, not only of George's shooting books, but the mystery novels he wrote with Kay, anthologies in which his work appeared, as well as the complete listing of his magazine pieces.