From the May/June 2006 issue of Sporting Classics.
I picked him up at the condo he’d rented on the Lake Michigan beachfront. It was more like March than May, a raw wind blowing off the lake, scudding clouds that spat occasional volleys of needle-sharp rain. He wanted to see my dogs run.
“Jesus, Dad,” I said, scowling at his low-cut tennis shoes. “We’re going to be in woodcock cover. Where the hell are your boots?”
“They’re around somewhere,” he shrugged.
“I couldn’t find them.”
What he meant was that he couldn’t find them within the ten minutes—fifteen, max—that he’d allotted to pack for his week-long visit to Wisconsin. That was Dad: He traveled light.
He always had a camera, though. They’d gotten progressively more rudimentary over the years, from the nice Olympus rangefinder he’d had when I was a kid (he’d bought it in Japan during his hitch as an artilleryman in Korea) to the disposable jobs that Ansel Adams himself couldn’t have snapped a decent picture with. There seemed to be one for every pocket of every garment he owned. He was forever saying, “Wait a minute—I need to get a picture of that.”
So when Ernie went on point way back in the thick stuff, he was bound and determined to get a photo.
“It’s too tough in there, Dad,” I protested. “You’ll never make it.”
“Bullshit,” he growled.
Imagine a smallish scarecrow with knobby, arthritically enlarged joints, and you’ve got a reasonably accurate picture of Dad. Age and affliction had wasted his body; walking on open, level ground was about the most strenuous exercise his wobbly pins could tolerate, and even then his ravaged heart wouldn’t carry him far. But there he was, haltingly but tenaciously picking his way through as nasty a cover as I care to hunt. He fell once, hard, when the limb he’d grasped for support broke off in his hand, but he got up under his own power—“I’m okay” —and pressed on. He sloshed through puddles, filling his tennis shoes with ice water; he struggled through the raking cedars and tamaracks, the clutching alders and red osier.
“The way your dad could run,” his old friends from Sioux City marveled, the ones who’d been his football teammates at East High or cheered him from the stands in 1945, the year he made All-State. “The way he’d fake, and cut on a dime, and make those defenders look silly. It was something to see . . . ”
But I don’t know that anything Dad did on the gridiron, in the flower of his youth, was as good, or as gutty, as what the frail old man with the ruined heart did to get to Ernie’s point.
It took a while, but he got there. It was one of Ernie’s customary high-tailed affairs, his forelegs splayed as if he’d hit the scent hard and stopped in his tracks, frozen.
“Wait a minute,” Dad said, extracting one of his cardboard-and-plastic wonders from the pocket of his jacket. He crouched, aimed through an alley in the interlaced limbs, and clicked the shutter. It was so dark in there that the flash went off. That was my cue to flush the bird, a woodcock that helicoptered above the canopy and, with that unmistakable thrilling of wings, twittered away.
Dad didn’t see it—but he didn’t need to.
“That’s a great sound, isn’t it?” he remarked, his face breaking into a broad smile.
“It sure is,” I replied.
“Good boy, Ernie!” he called at the white blur streaking past. Then, turning back to me, he said, “How the hell do we get out of here?”
Dad’s given name was Harlan, although most of his older friends knew him as Hoss. He’d acquired the nickname as a kid, and while it didn’t fit—a wiry 5’9”, he wasn’t exactly horse-like—it stuck for the rest of his life. A three-sport standout in high school, he went on to play defensive back at Yale. The New York Times described him for the ages as “Harlan Davis, diminutive Eli safetyman.” One of his teammates recalled him singing Cole Porter tunes in the shower—not what they expected of a guy from Sioux City, Iowa.
Drafted into the Army shortly after graduation, he was commissioned a second lieutenant and ordered to Korea, where he served as a forward observer in an artillery battalion. Dug in on the side of a mountain, closer to the enemy lines than to his own—a lot closer—he dodged sniper fire on a daily basis. But there were compensations. Just a couple years ago he sent me a photo he’d discovered of a youthful Lt. Davis with his arm around the waist of a raven-haired, ruby-lipped stunner in khakis and a white t-shirt, a shirt that clearly delineates her impressive ordnance.
The sticky note he attached to it read “Did I ever tell you war is hell?”
Dad eventually returned to Sioux City, where he became a successful businessman and a semi-prominent member of the community. He was a low-handicap golfer, a superb tennis player (he’d slice you like a ring bologna), a decent if not terribly serious fisherman—and quite possibly the lousiest wingshot I’ve ever seen. As a kid who’d grown up thinking that his dad could do anything, this wasn’t just a shock. It was a kick in the stomach.
Years later, long after he’d quit carrying a gun, I diagnosed Dad’s problem. Shooting was one of the three things he did left-handed, the other two being eat and write. He did everything else—all the things he excelled at—right-handed. He was right-eye dominant as well, which meant that where he was looking and where his shotgun was pointing bore very little relationship to one another.
Still, Dad taught me gun safety, and sportsmanship, and respect, and the other truly important lessons. He showed me the way, put me on the right path. He (and my mom) also indulged my whim to own an Irish setter gundog, going to absurd financial and emotional lengths to make this starry-eyed dream a reality. The dog—Sheila, I called her—never panned out as a hunter. But we had great adventures together, back in those days when the fields began literally behind our garage, and my red dog could just run and run and run, her mahogany coat rippling in the burnished autumn light. And I have my parents to thank for that.
Dogs have a way of reaching corners of our souls that are walled off and thus rarely accessed, regions of the heart whose very existence we’re reluctant to divulge. This is common knowledge among dog people, and not just gundog people. But I’ve never seen as dramatic an example as the effect my old English setter, Zack, had on Dad. My father liked all my dogs—the queenly Emmylou; Traveler, who had the jowly mien of a pensioned British colonel—but he adored Zack.
Part of it was that Zack was the first really good bird dog Dad saw in action. This tends to be a signal event in a sportsman’s life, revealing grand, previously unimagined vistas, inducing a sense of wonderment. Dad was no different, and because he’d retired by the time Zack entered his prime, circa 1985-’90, he joined us often on our hunting excursions. Although he’d given up carrying a gun, he walked many a mile behind Zack, mostly in Wisconsin but also in Iowa and South Dakota; watched him cover a wealth of country and point a boxcar load of birds (some of which I shot and a few of which Zack retrieved); shared motel rooms and truck cabs and once even a tent with him.
Along the road, something about Zack got to Dad in a way nothing else did. It was probably a combination of qualities – his style and pride, his cranky independence and indomitable spirit, the gallantry he exuded—and as Zack began to show his age the feelings Dad had toward him only intensified. I suppose at some level Dad saw himself in the dog: the old warrior, at last betrayed by the body that had served him so splendidly, encumbered by its husk but gamely pressing on. Resolute. Unvanquished.
In Zack’s final autumn, when he was nearly 14, Dad came to Wisconsin to stay with him while I went on a hunting trip out West. By then Zack was deaf as a post and barely able to manage a shuffling trot, but one Indian Summer afternoon Dad loaded him into the car, drove to a woodcock cover a couple miles from the house, and turned him loose. Fortunately, Dad remembered to hang a bell on his neck—and when the bell went silent, Dad pushed through the alders to find Zack standing in a ragged patch of sunlight, his head high, his flag outstretched, his hindquarters quivering as they fought to support his weight. He was proudly, even defiantly, on point. He had the bird nailed, too, although before he flushed it Dad stopped, as usual, to take a picture.
When Dad related this story upon my return a few days later, he said, “It had to be . . .”
He stopped, cleared his throat, and continued, “It had to be one of the greatest points he ever made.”
Dad kept the framed photograph of that point—one of his better photographic efforts, actually—in his apartment. Now I have it. I found his boots, too, good L.L. Beans, hidden beneath a pile of blankets in the closet of his spare bedroom. They still have a lot of wear in them, and they’re just my size.
But I’ll never be able to fill them. Not in a dozen lifetimes. Not in a thousand years. +++
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