From the 2014 Guns and Hunting issue of Sporting Classics.
I have been a hunter since I was four years old, and a fisherman for even longer. And though now I can’t recall my first fish, I could never forget my first hunt.
It was just Dad and me. He’d come in from work at the coal mine and gotten cleaned up and we’d had our supper. Then he had fetched his 12-gauge Marlin over/under from the kitchen pantry, asked Mom to get my coat and cap, and he and I headed out the door, across the road and up Brewster Hollow.
It was a total surprise for me, finally getting to go hunting with him. I had watched him leaving with the big gun for as long as I could remember, always wondering why I could never go with him.
He always took me everywhere else he went—up Long Row to Granny’s house, down to the Company Store, across Stoney Ridge to Tazewell, and of course trout fishing.
But not when he left with the big gun.
He’d usually be back by dark, or at least not all that long afterward, most of the time with a few squirrels or rabbits, and occasionally a grouse, that he’d let me pull from the game pouch of his hunting coat. I would watch as he cleaned and dressed them, knowing full well how good they would taste when Mom cooked them.
But now everything was different. Now I was going with him.
It’s hard being quiet when you’re four years old, especially when you are as excited as I was that evening. Twenty yards into the woods he knelt down in front of me, eye-to-eye, man-to-little-man, then laid his big hands on my small shoulders and explained how together we were going to “sneak up on them ol’ squirrels,” and told me I would have to help him be very, very quiet as we eased up the trail.
I understood immediately. I had played hide-’n-seek long enough to know about being quiet and sneaky, though now I do remember wondering how he’d been able to manage getting all those squirrels on his own without me there to help him. He assured me that those old squirrels would be on high alert once they saw a buckaroo like me coming after them, and so I should stay directly behind him where they couldn’t see me.
And of course, be very, very quiet.
So we proceeded, my Dad and me, carefully easing up the hollow. I had never known him to be so tall or to move so slowly, me tucked in close behind him with my head extending barely above the backs of his knees.
He cradled the big gun lightly in his arms and across his broad chest, and it seemed to span the entire sky above us from ridge to ridge. At first there were no squirrels, and I felt bad for him. I kept reminding him that we had to be very, very quiet, and he kept agreeing with me and saying “yes, we should,” and I could hear the rustle of his big canvas coat every time he’d look back when I tried to show him something or ask a question or kick a rock or stomp a stick.
I thought perhaps it might be better if I walked beside him and held his hand so he wouldn’t feel so alone up there all by himself. Then suddenly he actually heard a couple of squirrels squacking somewhere ahead and instructed me to sit down and be very still while he tried to ease up on them.
Now I really began to get worried about him as he slowly crept away without me—first 10 yards, then 20, then 30, until the great man began to grow smaller and smaller as the woods grew ever more imposing, and finally I couldn’t bear it any longer and called for him to come back.
We didn’t hear them ol’ squirrels any more.
Three years later, I was hunting beside him with my own shotgun, a little 20-gauge Beretta single-shot he had found for me, and as the decades progressed there would be many more guns. Some were tools and some became treasures. Some I still have and some were sold or swapped or otherwise lost to time.
Then in the fall of my 57th year, there came the new little Italian.
It really wasn’t her fault. After all, it was I who first wanted her.
She was also a 20-gauge, well-shaped and winsome, if somewhat aloof, irresistibly proportioned, discreetly trimmed in gold, light and delicate and easy to hold, with a perfectly voluptuous set of barrels and triggers the likes of which every good gunner dreams. And when she came to my cheek, she pressed against it with all the warmth, charm and seduction that her Brescian heritage had promised.
But alas, we just didn’t fit.
And so on that final evening, I took her down and cleaned her and gently laid her back into her soft, wool-lined case and knew that she and I were finished. The problem was that I had been counting on her for my last day afield in the classic quail country of Rio Piedra, just east of Camilla, Georgia. The only other 20 gauge I had with me was that old single-shot Beretta my Dad had given me when I was seven.
It had been part of a multi-gun trade he’d pulled off in the summer of 1957, three years after our first hunt up in Brewster Hollow.
I still remember the night he and Verlin got home with the trove; rifles, shotguns, a pistol or two, and some odds and ends that now I can’t remember. And as our fathers carried the guns inside and spread them across the living room floor, my cousin David and I just stood there in awe, for we had never seen so many guns all in one place.
With each of us having just turned seven, David and I had been tagging along with our fathers for as long as we could remember. But up until now, we’d only seen four guns in our entire lives—the two pairs of rifles and shotguns that Dad and Verlin each owned.
Finally, unable to contain our curiosity any longer, one of us had to ask, “What’cha gonna do with all them guns?”
“Well, I guess I’m gonna sell ’em,” Dad said with a mischievous twinkle in his eye as he and Verlin glanced at each other.
And then he did it.
He knelt down and picked up that little Beretta, broke it open and angled its breech toward us so we could clearly see that it wasn’t loaded, then held it out to me and said, “. . . but this one’s yours.”
There are times in a young man’s life when you suddenly can’t breathe. The adrenaline is scorching your scalp, and you find it difficult to maintain your equilibrium. I tried to be cool. Honest I did. But to this day I really don’t think anyone who was there bought it for a second.
I took the little gun in hands that until then had never trembled, carefully keeping it pointed in a safe direction as Dad and Verlin went about cleaning and organizing the others, their eyes constantly yet discreetly scanning back in my direction. And when Verlin and David left that evening, Dad sat down with me and the little shotgun and we talked long into the night.
A few weeks later and with Dad at my side, my first squirrel fell in Brewster Hollow, and by the time I was 10 the little gun had contributed many more squirrels and rabbits to our table.
When I was 13, I was allowed to take it out alone. Throughout high school, the gun rode wrapped in an old Indian blanket in the trunk of my Oldsmobile, and the teachers and principal knew about it and didn’t seem to mind. It was, after all, a more innocent time.
My first woodcock came courtesy of the little Beretta from over in Kenner’s Woods where the flights drifted through each fall. It was Betsy’s first woodcock as well. She pointed it along an old honeysuckle row, held until I flushed it and dropped it, and then to my great surprise she retrieved it, no one having yet explained to her that eight-month-old Brittany spaniels aren’t supposed to like the taste of woodcock.
By the time her career was complete 13 autumns later, we had long-since graduated to vintage side-by-sides, and the little single-shot, while still a personal treasure, rarely saw a hunter’s sky.
With Betsy gone, I gave up bird hunting for years, for it was too tender a thing to go without her. But eventually my work led me to the classic quail plantations of the Carolinas and southern Georgia, hunting with the finest dogs, finest friends and finest shotguns a reborn bird hunter could desire.
Rio Piedra Plantation lies along the Flint River, dead center in the heart of Georgia’s legendary Plantation Belt. There is no better place on earth for a wingshooter to ply his passion. My friends Bill and Annie Atchison, owners of Rio Piedra, had invited me down for the last hunt of the season, and as I was packing up the Purdey and the A. Hill and, of course, the new little Italian vixen that had just come into my life, the thought occurred, Why not take the old Beretta as well?
Still wrapped in its tattered blanket, the Beretta found a place with the other guns in my car, and I was off to a quail hunter’s paradise.
For the first two days I alternated between my two old and trusted side-by-sides, the Purdey and the Hill. The birds flew magnificently, exploding from cover and deftly tearing through the longleafs and live oaks and skirting the Spanish moss, and falling from the air in clouds of feathers more often than I had any right to expect.
By the time we headed out for our last morning, I had already cleaned and packed away the Purdey and the Hill, determined on this final day to put the new Italian side-by-side to the test. But as Bill was sliding her into the gun rack on the hunting vehicle, I suddenly had an errant thought: I’m dedicating this day to the new little 20 gauge . . . but why not take the old Beretta along as well?
And so I ducked back into the lodge, unwrapped my old squirrel gun from its threadbare blanket and carried it out to the Jeep.
It seemed so right, and for a moment I could see my father’s sly grin 50 years earlier. The two guns rode together like bookends of a bird hunter’s life as we made our way deep into the most classic quail habitat this side of an Aiden Lassell Ripley watercolor.
When we stopped and loosed the dogs, I took the prissy new double and followed Bill and Annie into the sedge and longleafs. The first point of the day came in the cool misty air, and seven birds blew out on my side. A quick left, a quick right, and all seven kept on flying, with not so much as a feather being disturbed.
But that was okay; the gun was still new, and I trusted that before the morning was done we’d get used to one another. But three singles and four coveys later, I still had nothing to show, and I began to feel as though the little wench was toying with me. By the time we got back to the hunting vehicle, even the dogs were looking at me funny.
Our second swing was no better. The shots were challenging, but I knew I should at least have hit something. As we headed to the lodge for lunch, my mind began wandering back to Brewster Hollow and my first squirrel years earlier.
With lunch a pleasant memory, we returned to the field where Bill selected two new dogs, a beautifully matched brace of English setters. But this time I too made a new selection, cradling my old Beretta single-shot lightly in my arms and across my chest, where it felt so right.
The first point came where the golden sedge transitioned into thicker, darker cover. A single quail towered high into the sun, and now I can’t remember firing, only the brilliant cloud of feathers exploding backlit against the deep blue shadows beyond.
The quail fell for me that afternoon like they had seldom fallen before. Some tore out barely above eye level through the trees, and some soared like rockets into the clear evening sky. But bird after bird tumbled one-by-one into the sedge and wiregrass and thick matted ferns.
Finally, the sun scribed its full amber arc and settled warm and golden into the gently swaying longleaf pines as Bill and Annie and I made our way back to the Jeep and the lodge and a dinner fit for princes and queens.
And late that night when everyone else had drifted away to bed, I sat outside by the big patio fireplace, alone beneath the stars as I cleaned the old gun by the light of the flames and wrapped it in its frayed and faded blanket, then held it in my arms and across my chest and looked to the heavens and silently thanked the man from whose loving hands it had come.
