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Pretty much all of my experience as a hunter took place in the fall of 1963 or 1964, when I was fourteen or fifteen years old. On my grandparents’ Wisconsin farm I shot one Canada goose, one wood duck, one mallard, one woodcock, one ringneck pheasant rooster, and a whole lot of squirrels. For reasons I might someday explain to you, I am not positive what year it was, but it was one or the other, ’63 or ’64, the year that my brother Bruce and I became fabulously wealthy raising cucumbers in a two-acre sandy field south of Gramp and Gram’s farmhouse. We sold those cucumbers under a contract with the H.J. Heinz Company. Five days a week, when the cukes were crated but not yet graded, Gramma hauled them the fourteen miles to Portage in a white wood-sided two-wheel trailer behind her ’55 Studebaker Conestoga, and received twelve dollars a hundredweight for the gherkins, and less for the larger ones, all the way down to just thirty cents a hundredweight for the monsters we’d waited too long to pick.
I did most of that hunting with my cousin Terry, who is one year younger than I and who to this day remains extremely outdoorsy. I did the squirrel hunting with a bolt-action, tubular magazine .22, battered but reliable, that my dad had used when he was a boy, and I did the bird hunting with a Savage 720, Browning style, semi-auto 12-gauge, which I bought used, at the end of the pickle season, downstairs in the Portage J.C. Penney’s for the princely price of eighty-some dollars. The story of why I don’t still have it we’ll save for another day.
I no longer remember if it was the goose or the mallard that prompted me to write out this story for you just now, but I will ask Terry if he remembers, and, I guess, come to think of it, and as my Uncle Phil, Terry’s dad, used to say at this point in a story, “Ahhh, I suppose maybe it doesn’t matter.”
But, anyway, Terry and I were out one icy, foggy morning, hunkered down in the marsh, other side of the creek—there was a footbridge below the house in those days—and a pair of birds, geese or mallards, as I say, I don’t recall which, announced their arrival with honks or quacks and dropped down out of the fog toward the open water, and we, Terry and I, raised our guns and each fired one shot in just the same instant. One bird dropped. The other turned and flew away.
“Good shot, Buddy!” Terry hollered. I didn’t know and I still don’t know which one of us hit that bird, but that’s just the kind of guy Terry is.
“Thank you!” I said. Because that’s just the kind of guy I am.
The bird, when Gramma cooked it, tasted good, I do remember that. Had to chew gently. Hurts to bite the birdshot, you know.
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