Northern Borders (24 page)

“Unzip that shorter one,” the shooter told me.

Inside was a light single-shot .22.

“All right for a kid starting out,” the shooter said.

He stooped over and picked up a Coca-Cola bottle cap. He walked out around the brown cornstalks and frosted Kentucky Wonder pole beans and jammed the bottle cap into a rotten fence post at the base of Tatro's hill. He came back to the bench, put a shell in the .22, and fired without seeming to take aim.

I ran to get the bottle cap. One side was ripped flat, like a penny flattened by a locomotive on the Boston and Montreal tracks. I ran back to the shooter, who looked at the cap and scowled as though he'd missed it entirely.

“You ought to go on Broadway,” my uncle said.

“Kid gun,” the shooter said, shoving the .22 back in its case. “All right for gray squirrels and such.”

“There aren't any gray squirrels up here,” Rob said. “Too cold.”

“I believe it,” said the shooter, and turned up his jacket collar against a warm south breeze. “Man dear, it's chilly.”

He unzipped the second case I'd brought around and got out a .30–30 rifle. It was a bolt-action deer-hunting rifle, the kind my grandfather and Uncle Rob used. A couple of men moved up closer.

“You got a fifty-cent piece on you?” the shooter asked Cousin Clarence.

Clarence reached under his apron for his black change purse. He unsnapped it and stared inside for some time. Finally he removed a half dollar.

“I believe,” he said slowly, “that it is unlawful to destroy a coin of the realm.”

“Trade you Mr. G. Washington's picture for her,” the shooter said, going for his back pocket.

“That isn't necessary,” Clarence said in a dignified voice. “Heave it up?”

“Not too high. Wouldn't want to miss and pick off some hunter up top the hill.”

Two or three of the men chuckled at the thought of picking off a hunter.

“I thought you never missed,” Rob said.

“You say?”

“I said, I thought you don't miss.”

“Miss quite frequently,” the shooter said.

He slid a shell into the gun and rammed home the bolt. “Heave her.”

Clarence threw the fifty-cent piece out and up. It spun over and over, flashing against the red sumac and yellow popples on the hillside. The shooter fired, and the coin vanished in thin air.

“Yes, sir,” Clarence said with a note of finality.

“Anybody,” said my Uncle Rob, “can learn to do that. There's a trick to it, just like shooting a woodcock. You wait until it's at the top of its arc, then you've got a stationary target. All it takes is practice.”

“There you have her,” said the shooter and shoved the rifle back into its case like a man hanging an old saw up on a nail. “Practice is the main thing, all right.”

He took another sip of Southern Comfort. Then he unzipped the third case and slid out the loveliest gun I'd ever seen. It was a sixteen-gauge pump-action shotgun with a rich dark stock and a barrel the color of Lake Memphremagog on an overcast day in duck season, engraved with two pheasants flushing out of a wheat field.

The shooter looked at Clarence. “You got any spoiled hens' eggs on hand?”

“I do not. I don't pass spoiled eggs off on my customers. You want eggs from my store, you'll have to settle for grade-A fresh.”

The shooter considered. “All righty. I'll purchase half a dozen grade-A fresh hens' eggs.”

Clarence went inside. A minute later he came back with a half carton of brown eggs. The shooter gave him a dollar and Clarence handed him back sixty cents.

“It's on the company,” the shooter explained to the men and boys. By now there was a gallery of fifteen or so, lounging against the back wall of the store, hunkered down on the edge of the harvested garden. Among the men I recognized some who were crack shots themselves.

The shooter put six shells into the gun.

“How many eggs?” Clarence said.

“Try three. Three grade-A eggs. Fling them out away. They spatter.”

Three brown eggs sailed over the garden at intervals of less than a second. The shooter fired three times. Before the third egg left Clarence's hand, the first two had burst in midair into small, yellow omelettes. The third egg burst, raining yolk and white and fragments of brown shell onto a heap of dead pea vines. I scrambled for the ejected shells, smoking on the ground at the shooter's feet.

Uncle Rob was already haranguing the onlookers, patiently, yet with an argumentative edge to his voice. “What he is, boys, is fast. I don't say he isn't accurate; he's accurate enough for trap and trick shooting. But mainly he's fast. Out in the woods, fast isn't all that important. Accuracy is what counts in the woods.”

“I never was much of a hand to hunt in the woods,” the shooter said to no one in particular. “Sun never seems to get down between the trees and warm things up good.”

He shivered at the thought of the sun not warming things up in the woods. He extended the gun, barrel first, toward my uncle. “Care to try her?”

Rob jumped out of the way like an infielder avoiding a sliding runner. “Watch where you point that thing, mister. It's still loaded.”

“Safe's on,” the shooter said. “Go ahead.”

Rob took the gun, turned it around, and hefted it. “How many shells left in this cannon? Three?”

The shooter nodded. Some of the men squatting on their heels stood up.

“Three eggs,” Rob told Clarence, and snapped off the safety.

Clarence sighed. One, two, three eggs sailed into the air. Rob shot three times. A lone egg burst in the air. The others fell back into the garden. One landed intact on the pea vines, and the shooter went over and picked it up.

“Fetch me a glass, will you, bub?”

I went inside the store and got a clean coffee mug from the counter and took it out to him, and he broke the raw egg into it and swallowed it, yolk and white and all in two gulps. “Breakfast,” he explained to the crowd. “Only way I could ever get one of these down.”

He stuck the shotgun back in its case, and we started for his Pontiac. Singly and in pairs, the spectators came along behind.

“Sharpshooter!” Rob Roy called after him. “I'll bet you my brand-new Hudson Hornet with ten gallons of Flying A gasoline in the tank against that fancy shotgun that I can shoot two birds in the woods for every one of yours.”

The shooter kept walking.

Rob ran up and overtook him by his car. “You hear me, mister? My vehicle against your gun I can outshoot you in the woods.”

The shooter unlocked the trunk of the gray Pontiac. One by one, he laid the three canvas gun cases on the overcoat. He shut the trunk lid with a puff of dust and turned to look at Rob's Hudson.

“That your rig there?”

“That's my rig. Under four thousand miles on her, radio, doesn't burn a spoonful of oil.”

“Heater work good?”

“Mister, that automobile kicks heat like a Round Oak stove in a one-room school.”

The shooter walked around to the driver's side and looked in through the open window. The keys dangled in the ignition. He rested his hand on the door. “You mind?”

“No, sir. Go ahead and try her out. Take her for a spin down the country road, open her up wide. Whatever.”

The shooter got in and rolled up the driver's window. He leaned across the front seat and cranked the passenger window up tight. He switched on the key and stepped on the starter, and the engine popped right off. He gunned the motor a little. The Hudson idled smoothly.

I expected the shooter to pull away from the store; instead he reached down and turned on the heater. In the packed dirt parking area in front of Clarence's store it was a warm fall day. Inside the Hudson it was getting hotter. Beads of sweat stood out on the shooter's forehead and slid off the tip of his sharp nose. He bent over and turned the heater on full blast and the sweat rolled off his face like water and he gave a small grin like Sam McGee from sunny Tennessee and shut off the engine and got out of the car.

He took a round two-dollar watch out of his pants pocket and frowned at it like a hunter looking at his compass and wondering if he might be lost.

“Be here at two o'clock,” he said to Rob.

 

Evidently the shooter finished his run to Memphremagog early. At one-thirty Uncle Rob and I found him sitting on the porch steps of Clarence's store, drinking from a new pint of Southern Comfort and looking as though he'd just been informed on good authority that he had six months to live.

“Are we still on?” Rob said.

“If you say so,” the shooter said unenthusiastically.

My uncle pointed at me. “Austen wants to come too.”

“No doubt,” the shooter said without looking in my direction. “You boys lead the way. I'll follow along in my old icebox.”

Rob drove up the Hollow to my grandparents' place, and up the lane onto the ridge behind Gramp's sugarhouse. When we hit the lane, I looked back and saw the chrome Indian Chief on the Pontiac's hood bucking up and down like the figurehead of a ship in a stormy sea.

We left the cars in the puckerbrush at the upper end of the lane, where it petered out into an old logging trace. The shooter opened his trunk and took out his shotgun. He got a pair of rubbers out of his valise and sat down on the rear bumper and pulled them on over his scuffed brogans.

“The springs in your rig are shot all to hell,” I said.

“No call for barbershop talk,” he said, yanking at the heel of a rubber. “You was my kid, you'd be cutting a switch about now.”

“You ever have any kids?”

“No, praise be.”

He stood up and struggled into his overcoat and buttoned it up to the throat.

My uncle stared at him. “Aren't you going to be hot?”

“I hope so,” the shooter said. “But I doubt it.”

He loaded the shotgun and turned it upside down and shut one eye and squinted down the barrel with the other. I noticed that the safety was off.

“How is it,” he said into the gun barrel, “that you ain't off in college? A smart young fella like you.”

“I might go next year,” Rob said.

“He knows more than most of the professors do already,” I said.

The shooter straightened up and gave a sardonic cough.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Ask him a question. Any question at all.”

“I just did.”

“Ask him another one. Baseball. American presidents. Whatever.”

The shooter looked off through the fall haze at the hills. “All right,” he said. “Where are these so-called birds?”

On the way up through the dying steeplebush and orchard grass, Rob and the shooter agreed on ground rules. As the shooter put it, they would shoot turn and turn about. He would take the first flush,
Rob the second, and so on until one of them had his bag limit of four birds. No one mentioned anything more about two to one odds.

The remnants of an old apple orchard straggled thinly along the fence line between the grown-up field and the woods. The few apples they still produced were wormy and shriveled; nobody bothered to pick them. Here was where my grandfather had first brought me to hunt birds. It was a good spot to see game.

A dark, good-sized partridge flushed out of an ancient Red Astrachan tree a few yards ahead of the shooter. He fired twice after it had already disappeared into some thick softwoods to the left of the trace.

“Man dear,” he said. “What in Ned was that?”

“Grouse.” Rob grinned at me and winked.

“Why didn't you warn me ahead of time they made such a commotion? Sudden racket like that could give a man a stroke.”

We continued up the trace into the woods. It was mixed hardwoods and softwoods, with most of the softwoods sloping off to the left toward a deep ravine and a brook. To our right, maples and birches and beeches spread out over the hillside. Here and there among the tall hardwoods were coverts of barberry, shadblow, hazels, and wild roses with bright orange hips. It was ideal terrain for birds, plenty of feed with heavy cover nearby.

Rob didn't have to wait long for his first shot. Twenty feet in front of us a partridge was dusting itself in the trace. It flew straight out ahead, the easiest wing shot there is; probably he could have gotten it with the shooter's .22.

“One of this year's brood,” Rob said when I brought it in. “Poor little dummy. Easy shot compared to yours.”

“Don't be second-guessing yourself,” the shooter said. “You got him, didn't you?”

He took a drink, stumbled into a swaley depression, stepped over the tops of his rubbers, said “Ned” and “man dear,” fired three shots at a bird rocketing out from under a yellow birch into the softwoods and missed all three times. He looked down at his shoes and said with a certain degree of satisfaction, “Sopped through.”

“I probably wouldn't even have gotten off a shot,” Rob said, grinning at me again.

The shooter was picking stick-me-tights out of his overcoat sleeves. Without looking up he said, “Let's get on with this.”

We climbed higher up the ridge. The woods grew denser, the trace fainter.

“Good place to get lost in,” the shooter remarked.

“A man can't get lost in this country,” Rob said. “You just walk downhill, find a brook, and follow it out to a road.”

“Some of us,” said the shooter, “might freeze to death before we hit the road. Are we getting up toward the tree line?”

Rob and I had all we could do not to laugh out loud. It was so warm we'd both taken off our jackets and tied them around our waists.

We came into a scattered stand of beech trees. The beechnuts had started to fall, and their prickly brown husks lay open on the leaves around the bases of the smooth gray trunks. Rob stopped on the edge of the grove. I knew he suspected that a bird was nearby, feeding on the nuts. Maybe he'd heard one walking on the dry leaves.