For restless years I harbored an unrequited craving for a 28 gauge. It came from reading too much Mcintosh, and misconceptions, perhaps, of life and love.
In a hundred fantasies, the little 28 would come as breathlessly to shoulder as my high school heartthrob, a maiden-waisted, fairy-weighted bit of sidelock artistry, alluringly clad in Circassian walnut, and adorned with birds and dogs in floral scroll. It flattered my shooting instincts as if it were born of me, and in its company. I would execute crisp, impressive doubles on daring flushes, relishing the panting glances of my friends.
All this, you see, when I was quite vulnerable. I was into my 50s, plagued with physical reapportionment and obliging reflexes that diminished as swiftly as my ability to spring over honeysuckle heads. At a distance, two birds loomed a flock. When the dog pointed right, the beeper sounded left.
I was no longer as good as once I was, at most anything, and suddenly everybody and everything were changing. Kids were getting younger and peers were getting grayer, and people and things that had been vital and propelling all my life became… well … overly familiar and uninspiring. It happened without exemption, so abruptly it was alarming.
Somehow nothing seemed to fit. Even my beloved Parker 16. Entangled in the misperceptions of crisis, the vivacious and compelling sweetheart of my shooting years grew strangely tired and plain. Sometimes when I held it, the thrill was gone. The 12s fared worse. Gone to seed in the gun cabinet, they appeared overdue for Jenny Craig Even the 20s were as tired as last year’s beauty queen.
And every night the 28 kept cooing promises of youth and excitement in my ear.
I knew the danger.
One gunning acquaintance, normally steady as a Rolex, left a perfectly faithful Perazzi 12 for a hot little dish by Arrieta and never went back.
“It’s all fresh again,” he said.
“But there’re places you wouldn’t want to be seen with it,” I ventured tactfully, thinking of pheasant and chicken.
“Nowhere I wanna be,” he retorted.
Another flighty chap, I’m told, took a lovely, full-figured Belgium. Superposed to a round of clays for their 20th anniversary, and slipped away with a friend’s petitely bored, tournament grade Remington 1100! His bewildered buddy had to drive the Superposed home.
For a time, I had temptation stemmed with reason. It was simple, slap-in-the-face arithmetic. The birds had grown 54 percent smaller, flew 67 percent faster, and 73 percent more confoundingly. Consequently, I missed them 29 percent more frequently. While I pined over some dainty young thing with 43 percent less load and pattern!!?? Passion lost its blossom.
Then, innocently, I sat down with a warm copy of Classics. It got loose in my lap and fell to the wrong page. Mcintosh again.
“Just right,” he says, of Ruger’s new Red Label 28, drooling in his beard over its voluptuously proportioned frame. One look and I was lost. It was all so perfect I mean it just happened to fit the momentary disposable income in my gun fund. It wasn’t exactly the girl of my dreams, but heck, we were meant to be.
On our first date, we went quail shooting. With the first find, two Bobs blew away opposite the other in twisting pirouettes It was just like the dream. The little gun came so willingly into my hands and so quickly to cheek that both birds were suddenly on the ground and only a memory of feathers drifted the air. It took my breath away.
We were inseparable for a time. I adored the very sight and sound of it, its every presence. I caressed it by the dancing fire light in an old southern manor. Cradled it over my arm at sunset on a high, quiet ridge of the Alleghenies Gentled it to my knees as we lingered on a stone wall in a quaint corner of New England.
Two full seasons passed before I found that it gathered powder smudges around the cheeks like any other gun. Before I discovered that I kept having birthdays, and had to give in to bifocals after all. Before I knew the 28 could miss too, and tired of the expectations, and began to realize that something was lacking.
As the euphoria flickered, I kept searching for the absence that rested so uneasily at the pit of my stomach. Gradually, it came to me. What was missing was the history Without it, I was no longer me.
Soon afterwards, I received an invitation from an old friend to a plantation bird hunt. Come departure time, I opened the doors to the gun cabinet, flushed with the moment… the moment when you finally slip your fingers intimately around a rapture of wood and barrels, lift it gently to hand, and know that for a short, special time you will be together again. As ever, the svelte and tony 28 was beguiling, and I started to reach for it. But the timeless grace of the gun behind stopped me, quietly soliciting my attention as it had 34 years before when first we met.
My eyes wandered the persuasive grain of its age-darkened walnut, the soft, pewter-gray sheen of its receiver…the faint white scratches there from my wedding band. I felt my heart flutter again I picked it up and held it, and it came as naturally to me as breathing Not in a rush of passion, but with a whisper of belonging I hardly noticed the blemishes now, only the beauty. I saw that the greatest of it lay undisclosed, in images of how we came here together. The way we were.
I remembered a picture Loretta had taken one evening while I was at leave from Fort Sill. I was twenty-three, posed on a hand-me-down couch with the Parker in one hand and my first birddog in the other. Later, I shouldered it successfully over her first point. Another photo, a few years afterwards, has it broken over one knee. A brace of mallards lies in the foreground. On the other knee is my daughter, and beside us is our dear Lab, Squaw. Another, dated January ’71, pictures us with a trio of grouse and my venerable mentor, Benny Yates. In my mind, I see others Some glossy on photopaper, most printed only to memory. Of the old man who entrusted it to me. Of every-day strife and struggle, gradual ways and means. Of days and birds over Pat and Cindy and Gabe and Jill and Becky… and Ben. Right down to the woodcock over the last puppy, just two years before.
I pondered at length, sorting it all through.
The next afternoon I was happily at home again in South Georgia pines, the gunning conversation pleasantly interrupted by the evergreen call of “P-o-i-n-t!” My host pulled his Winchester 21 from the rack and eased off the wagon Reaching over my shoulder, I slid my gun from its case and stepped off behind him.
He looked at me for a moment, and smiled. It was the smile of a knowing old friend I smiled sheepishly back.
“What of the 28?” he asked discretely.
Shouldering the Parker, I meditated briefly. “Something, I guess, about leaving with the one you came with,” I replied.
He smiled once more, and we turned for the birds.
I felt a warmth grow inside. I knew he had recognized me again.
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the 1998 Sept./Oct. issue of Sporting Classics.
From A Higher Hill finds Mike Gaddis atop the enlightening vantage of almost eight decades. Looking back over the vast and enthralling sporting landscape of a life well lived. And ahead, to anticipate and savor whatever years are left to come. Buy Now
