Northern Borders (25 page)

“He calls this being his own pointer,” I whispered to the shooter. “If you're perfectly still, they can't stand to wait very long.”

“Neither can I,” he said. “Winter's drawing closer by the minute.”

A bird went up at the far side of the beech trees, a hundred or more yards away. It flew laterally to the trace, appearing in dun-colored flashes between the beech trunks. Rob's gun barrel followed its line of flight. He waited longer than you would suppose even a patient hunter could wait, and finally the partridge veered and came into the opening where the trace ran, and my uncle knocked it cleanly out of the air and into a small copse of fir trees on the edge of the gully.

Rob was ebullient. When I got back with the dead bird, he was saying he'd like to be a sharpshooter too, travel around putting on marksmanship demonstrations and selling ammo. He wondered if the shooter could use an assistant.

The Manchester Arms Company representative looked off in the distance at the red-and-yellow hills. Somewhere he had lost one rubber. His shoes and socks were wringing wet. His pants were
splashed with mud up to the fringe of the overcoat, which was bristling with several varieties of burrs. A livid welt zigzagged across his right cheek, where he'd been raked by a blackberry cane.

“Enough's enough, boys,” he said, and started back the way we'd come.

Before he'd taken a dozen steps, a partridge flushed out from under a lone wild apple tree we'd walked past not five minutes earlier, and came zooming straight back up the trace at our heads. The shooter took one wild shot, then dropped to the ground. I jumped aside. Rob ducked his head, whirled around, waited until the bird was far enough away for his pattern to spread, and dropped it into the leaves as leisurely as plugging a Campbell's soup can on a stump—turning a nearly impossible shot into a routine one.

“They do that this time of year,” he explained to the shooter, who was gulping Southern Comfort. “They get drunk on fermented apples and fly straight at you. Smash into car windshields, house windows, trees even. What do you think about that assistant's position?”

Without a word the shooter headed down the path toward his car.

When we were halfway to the field he stopped suddenly. “What's over yonder?”

“Over where?” Rob said.

“Yonder.” The shooter jerked his head toward the ravine.

“Oh, there. A brook runs down through there in the spring. It's mostly dried up this time of year. It's all full of brush.”

The shooter veered off the trace toward the gully. He walked purposefully and quickly for a winded and defeated man who had gone through a pint and a half of whiskey since mid-morning, and there was an alarming desperation about the set of his shoulders and the back of his head.

“Watch your step,” Rob yelled. “There's a big drop-off over there.”

The shooter stopped short at an old barbed-wire fence strung up to keep cows from falling into the ravine years ago when the woods were open pasture. I ran up beside him. We peered over a rusty, single strand of wire embedded inches deep in the trunk of a half-dead maple tree. Far below I could hear the trickle of the diminished brook, but I couldn't see it. It was concealed from bank to bank by softwood slash and brush, and brush trailed down the steep side of the ravine over boulders and stumps and dense berry thickets.

The shooter clicked off the safety of his gun. He put one leg over the fence, caught his overcoat on a barb, and tore a long jagged rent in the lining. He lifted his other leg and momentarily lost his balance. He did a rapid little dance astraddle the fence, waving his gun over his head like a baton. I was afraid he was going to pitch headlong into the ravine or accidentally shoot himself or my uncle or me. Then he was standing on the brink of the gully, looking as unhappy as an aging, wet, and exhausted salesman whose luck had played out at last could possibly look.

He got out his bottle of Southern Comfort and stared at it. There was less than a swallow left in the bottom.

“Story of my life,” he said, and flipped the bottle high into the air. It fell into a great pile of brush in the bottom of the ravine.

“Don't take it so—” Rob started to say.

He was cut off by a thunderous roar. The entire gorge seemed to be filled with birds. It was as if someone had tossed a springer spaniel into a covey of eight or ten partridges. In fact, there were only four; but four partridges flushing in four different directions can seem like forty.

I never saw the shooter's gun go up. That's how quick he was. His narrow shoulders swung right and he fired. They swung left and he fired again. He raised the barrel slightly and shot a third time and swung right again and killed the fourth and last bird of his bag limit just as it cleared the opposite bank. The air around us was full of smoke and the scent of gunpowder, and my ears were ringing.

The shooter's voice sounded small and faraway when he said, “Go out around and fetch them birds up, will you, bub? That hollow down there looks colder than Ned's Frigidaire.”

 

When we came back into the meadow where we'd left the cars, it was beginning to get dusky. In the hazy twilight, the bright fall leaves on the hills had faded to a tawny orange. Crickets were singing. It was as warm as an evening in late May.

“All right,” Rob said. “How did you know they were there?”

The shooter leaned his gun against the rear bumper of the Pontiac and began to unbutton his overcoat. “Them birds? I watched which way the ones I missed flown. They all flown off toward that quarter.”

Rob reached into his pants pocket and got out his keys.

“What's they?”

“You know what they are. You know damn well.”

“Oh, them.”

The shooter took the keys and unlocked the Hudson's trunk and peered inside. “Needs a good hoeing out, don't she?”

He handed Rob his baseball glove and spikes and two 38-inch Louisville Sluggers. He handed my uncle his three-piece fly rod and fishing basket and toolbox and his rolled-up sleeping bag. He unlocked the trunk of his Pontiac and transferred the cartons of ammunition and his valise to the Hudson. He took off his overcoat, picked out what burrs he could get, spread it lining-up on the floor of the Hudson's trunk, and put the gun cases containing the .22 and .30–30 on top of it. He picked up the shotgun and frowned at it.

“Coming back,” he said, frowning at the gun, “it crossed my mind to give this to you. Tell you to practice up, you could maybe be a shooter too.”

He put the gun back in its case and put the case on the overcoat and said, “Well, you couldn't.”

Rob and I stared at him.

“That's correct,” the shooter said in a voice that was almost cheerful. “Like you said earlier, it's ninety percent speed. And you ain't quite quick enough.

“Not quite quick enough,” he repeated, and for the first time that day he seemed happy.

He shut the trunk and went around and got into the Hudson. Leaving the driver's door ajar and one foot on the running board, he got a fountain pen and a pad of ammo orders out of his jacket pocket and wrote something on the back of an order blank and handed it and the pen out to Rob.

“Legal bill of transfer,” he said. “Sign it.”

Rob signed it and gave it and the pen back to the shooter. He did
not say a word, but he looked lower than I'd ever seen him look, after losing a ball game in the last inning, or losing a girlfriend, or losing a record trout.

“So,” the shooter said, “you ain't getting no nearly new demonstration model pump shotgun to fool yourself with for two, three years until you find out the hard way you ain't quite quick enough for gun club work, county fair work, and have to spend the next thirty years of your life selling shells or clerking in some sporting goods store.”

“I could leam,” Rob said.

The shooter shook his head. “Quick part can't be learned. Fella has to find what he does best and stick with her. But not this thing. Not for you.”

He shut the door and rolled the window partway up and started the engine. Rob turned away.

“You hold on a minute,” the shooter said out the top half of the window.

He wrote something on the order pad, tore off the sheet and handed it and the Pontiac keys out to my brother.

“Round one goes to the boot,” he said. “Heater's shot. Keep up the Valvoline, she'll get you where you need to go.”

He rolled the window all the way up and pulled off the hand brake. Then he unrolled the window six inches. “You might land on your feet yet,” he told Rob Roy. “I doubt it. But you might.”

He cranked the window back up as far as it would go, leaned over to turn on the Hudson's heater, and drove unhurriedly down the lane and out of sight in the dusk.

 

The shooter's Pontiac ran all right, on what seemed to me like nearly equal amounts of gas and oil, for the next four years, while Rob was away at the state university. When Rob left Vermont for Alaska, I inherited the car and got another couple of years out of it. Neither of us ever managed to fix the heater so it would work.

The shooter never returned to Kingdom County. His replacement, a young salesman in a white shirt and necktie like any other salesman, knew little about guns. He told Cousin Clarence that our
man had requested a transfer to a warmer territory but it was denied and a few months later he'd checked himself into a sanatorium in New Hampshire. The next time the new salesman passed through he said the company had received a burial bill from the sanatorium for two hundred and thirty-five dollars. According to office scuttlebutt, it had been returned unpaid since the company was having financial troubles.

The following fall Manchester Arms stopped sending a representative this far north and Clarence defected to Remington. He was still mad that the company hadn't paid the two hundred and thirty-five dollars, financial difficulties or no; and besides, he told us, Remington shells were eight cents a box cheaper, and probably just as accurate.

7

By the early 1950s, my grandparents' way of life in Lost Nation was already long outmoded, even by rural standards elsewhere. With few exceptions farms throughout the rest of Vermont and the nation had already been mechanized for two or three decades, though in Lost Nation we still used horses instead of tractors. For some years after electricity arrived in the Hollow we continued to milk our cows by hand and light the house and barn with kerosene lanterns, and we pumped our washing water by hand throughout my youth on the Farm.

We weren't cut off entirely from the rest of the world; we took our milk to the cheese factory on the edge of the Common three times a week, and our mail was delivered daily to our mailbox just down the Hollow at the end of the lane leading up to my Aunt Maiden Rose's place. But my grandfather's daily paper from St. Johnsbury, forty miles to the south, arrived a day late, so we were
usually twenty-four hours behind the news from the rest of the state and nation, as if we lived in an altogether different time zone. Not that it mattered much since most of the natives of Lost Nation and the Kingdom tended to regard themselves as belonging to a separate entity, anyway. Our lives and work were linked much less to Montpelier and Washington than to the harsh yet lovely cycles of the natural world around us.

Spring began each year in Lost Nation with the first strong run of maple sap. Sometime at the end of March or the beginning of April, when the snow still lay deep under my grandfather's eleven hundred maples, there would be two or three sunny days in a row when the temperature would soar into the high thirties, followed by clear, sub-freezing nights. The narrow dirt road connecting us to the outside world thawed into a river of mud. The pond behind the sawmill dam began to thaw, and snowbanks melted, sending dozens of sparkling rivulets rushing down the hillside gullies.

“When the water runs down the hills, the sap runs up the trees,” my grandfather would announce. He and I would then pay a visit to his sugar bush, wading up the ridge behind the house through the deep snow to see if the red squirrels had come out to clip off the tender twigs at the ends of the maple branches to drink the new sap. “The squirrels are hanging out their sap buckets, Austen,” my grandfather liked to say. This was the sign that it was time for us to tap the maples, and hang our buckets, too.

Like showing our cattle at the fair, maple sugaring more than doubled our regular daily work on the Farm. At the peak of sugaring in the Hollow, school closed for a week or ten days. Everyone helped out. My Big Aunt Maiden Rose, who owned half of the family sugar bush and shared the proceeds with my grandfather, presided over the operation. My little aunts and Uncle Rob helped gather sap. My grandmother's jolly younger sister, my Great Aunt Helen, visited from Boston to help Gram cook for the extra people needing to be fed, including our old cousins, Whiskeyjack and John Wesleyan Kittredge.

Gathering sap was a backbreaking job, and during a big run we gathered all day and sometimes far on into the night. Maiden Rose's matched Morgan team, Henry David and Ralph Waldo, pulled the
huge gathering vat on a sledge with wooden runners up and down the steep, snowy slope through the trees. The horses stopped and started on voice commands, but I often had to thrash a hundred yards or more up to my chest in snow to carry the full sap buckets to the vat on the sledge. Snow got down my felt boots, down my wool pants, down my neck. My woolen gloves were sopping wet within an hour. By mid-morning my back ached and by late afternoon my legs felt like lead and I silently cursed the deep snow and the fast-flowing sap and all maple sugaring operations everywhere.

After evening chores and a quick supper, I'd go back to the sugarhouse at the foot of the ridge, where a white plume of steam rose up through the twilit maple branches, and my grandfather and I would hard-boil eggs in the sap and scoop up dippers of snow to eat with fresh hot maple syrup dribbled over it. Then Gramp, who loved sugaring time better than any other part of the year, would tell me stories about the big spring log drives on the Connecticut River of his youth, when he'd run away from Maiden Rose's school to help take one hundred and fifty million feet of logs all the way from the Canadian border to Long Island Sound, and stories about his days as a chainman on crews surveying the American-Canadian Line in the Rocky Mountains, and surveying the border between Labrador and Ungava Quebec.