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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
October 5, 2008
Published as Family History
in a Gramma Letter dated October 10, 1995.
© 1995, 2008 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Leaf in Fir, 1979
© 1979 by Bud Grossmann
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ESSENTIALS OF SHOOTING
Tuesday, October 10, 1995
Dear Gramma,
If I turned out to be a pretty good photographer, I must thank my Grandpa Grossmann and his rules for squirrel hunting. Make the first shot count was Grampa’s basic instruction.
I loved the early mornings in early autumn when hunting season had first opened and the corn-fed tree-dwellers in the oaks beyond your barn had not yet grown overly cautious. When I got up, on those school days in 1963 and ’64, you and Grampa were awake and talking softly in your bed, but my mother and my siblings were still slumbering. Dad was in Korea, on an “unaccompanied” assignment with the Army Signal Corps.
In the warmth of your darkened dining room I shined a flashlight through the window to check the thermometer outside, above your flower box. Brrr! An extra pair of socks would be nice, but I didn’t want to go back up the creaky steps to my bedroom to get them. I shook a handful of .22 shells out of a box and put them in my jacket pocket. Then I opened the bolt on the same rifle my dad had carried to bring many a meal to your table when he was a boy. When I tugged on the nickeled knob of the wooden, windowed door of your tiny mud room, a whoosh and a rattle came forth as the chilly night air buffeted the aluminum storm door.
Outside, Spike, your big white German Shepherd, gave one throaty bark to greet me. He was chained to his straw-strewn shelter; he couldn’t run free because he ate sheep instead of shepherding them. I patted Spike’s head with my gloveless hand, but I left him chained. He was a burglar deterrent, not a squirrel hunter. I loaded a single cartridge in the rifle (although the tubular magazine could hold fifteen) and crunched my way across the frosty, brittle brown grass beside the sand-and-gravel driveway. Gray light in the eastern sky began to give shape to trees and tractors and the double row of fencing between your truck garden and the north pasture.
In my hip pocket I had a Wisconsin Game Management booklet listing each date of the hunting season and specifying the exact time—thirty minutes before sunrise—when a hunter could legally discharge a firearm. I wore a watch, but, by the time I could make out the fine print in the booklet, the season would be open for the day. Squirrels would soon be looking for breakfast, and I’d have enough daylight then to match up the front and rear sights on my rifle.
Squirrel hunting, without a dog and without a partner, was a game of patience. Stay still, keep alert, and make the first shot count. Grampa wanted no wounded wildlife on his place, so he insisted we use rifles instead of the shotguns some folks prefer. A squirrel’s head was our only permitted target. When we did it right—which was almost always—there was no spoiled meat.
Two years later, when I was a high school senior, my dad gave me a good camera. I started taking pictures with it, blasting away, clickety-click. But the film was troublesome to load, and it came only twelve shots to a roll. I soon began to apply what I had learned from my grandfather about that other kind of shooting.
The rules worked, and they still work. I keep aware of what’s around me, wait for the right moment, and squeeze off my shot. And whether I’m holding a .22 or a twin-lens reflex, I seldom demand that my subject look straight at me and smile.
♦
I miss you, dear Grandmother. I think of you every single day.
Love,
Buddy
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