As far as I knew, Gramp had never hunted big game. He always said, “We’ve never been so poor that we needed to take an animal’s life.”
I didn’t want to sound like a smart-alec and tell him I had learned in Science class that birds were also animals. For whatever reason, though, deer, elk, moose and bear were all safe from us. Cattle, pigs and occasionally sheep would still appear on our table, of course. I guessed it was okay because we didn’t kill them. We just bought parts of them at the butcher shop, like everybody else.
“Birds are different,” he told me once. “Hunting birds is just another way of taking a chicken from the coop, or a duck or goose from the pond. As long as the bird gets plucked and gutted and cooked, and ends up on the dinner table for us to eat, that justifies our taking its life. It will have met a noble end.”
I wasn’t sure what justifies or noble meant, except that it made Gramp feel okay about hunting birds. He never took more than his limit, and always hunted by the rules. Once he bought his licence, he believed he was obliged to follow the laws. Being only eleven, I didn’t need a licence and wouldn’t until I turned sixteen, but I always had to be with an adult whenever I hunted with my new shotgun. Anything I did with my BB gun wasn’t real hunting.
By noon the day after a hunt, every bird Gramp shot would be cleaned by him and ready for the pot. Just like when we fished, the rule was that if you caught it, you cleaned it. I had never cleaned a game bird yet because I had never killed one. I did sometimes help with the plucking.
The pot the birds would be ready for might mean our big cast iron pot, or roaster, or it might be some other one that belonged to a friend or a neighbor. In the end, there was never a drumstick or a wing or a slice of breast meat ever wasted. Gramp saw to that.
The beginning of a new hunting season meant a lot more to Gramp than putting food on the table. It also had to do with words I was just beginning to understand, like tradition and ritual. The first one, tradition, I kind of knew was the part about how he and all those before him had grown up together.
Gramp was born back East in Kenora, Ontario, but by the time he was six, his father had moved everyone to the Prairies. Gramp’s whole family, which was him, his mom, dad, three younger brothers and a baby sister, packed up and traveled by train to a small, but growing town only a couple hundred miles from Buffalo Crossing. His dad then built their general store with his own hands. It was there that hunting became an important part of who my grandfather was.
With wildlife of every kind so plentiful back then, it took very little to bag animals, especially birds. Every fall, by the time he was my age, Gramp was not only hunting birds, he was harvesting them. That was the word he used.
Over fifty years ago there were no licences or laws about hunting, and most of the men in their town were capable of shooting their own game. There was also a widow, or a doctor or banker, though, who would sooner buy a bird than trek around the countryside trying to shoot one. Some chicken farmers did sell door-to-door, but lots of townsfolk, especially in the fall, preferred a wild duck, goose, partridge or prairie chicken. That meant Gramp’s dad, my great-grandfather, could give over a part of his cold storage chest to stocking game birds, which were shot and plucked mostly by Gramp and then cleaned by his father. The time spent preparing the birds in the evenings was worth it because they could make money with each sale. Buying ice and a few shotgun shells was nothing compared to what the old lady down the street paid for a plump, grain-fed duck, a prairie chicken ready for the roaster, or—especially—a brace of Hungarian partridge.
One game bird that Gramp said he would love to take one day was a ring-necked pheasant. I had never seen one, but people said a few had migrated up from the southwest. They were the offspring of a bunch brought from China by men who went there to hire workers to help build the railway. Pheasants were “the ultimate upland game bird quarry,” Gramp said, whatever that meant. Like me, he had also never seen a real one. Our only look at them came from books.
A bonus to all the hunting he did as a kid meant that the cost of shells kind of went down for him. Gramp proudly boasted, “Better shot, less ammunition.” He got better and better with the single-shot twelve-gauge his dad bought him when he turned nine, and didn’t miss as often. He eventually wore the gun out, he said.
A different single-shot that my great uncle bought for him when he came back from the First World War sat at the back of Gramp’s bedroom closet. It looked pretty bare next to the Browning twelve-gauge automatic, which actually came from Holland and had a special leather case of its own. But he cleaned the single-shot every time he cleaned his beloved automatic, and would bring the old gun along on every hunt to fall back on in case the automatic ever broke down. I thought one day the single-shot would be mine, but after getting the Mossberg .410 for my birthday, I was happy with my new prize. I thought maybe one day I could save up for my own Browning twelve-gauge automatic.
One of Gramp’s favourite memories of using the old single-shot was when he was able to flock-shoot by firing one single shell into a cloud of ducks, and retrieving as many as four birds at a time from the grain field. I guessed that there were a lot more birds around when he was a kid.
As a young boy hunting on his own back then, he liked to hunt next to a field instead of beside a slough. Fields didn’t have creepy bogs that you had to strip and wade into to scoop up a duck that had landed in the water. Later, he always wanted a black Lab retriever for that instead, but Nan wouldn’t let him spend hard-earned money on a pet dog.
Farmers were usually happy to let Gramp hunt in their fields when he was a kid. It took a lot of hard work and long hours for them to prepare the soil and plant a crop. Then they had to hope that their seeds were not gobbled up by greedy pests before they even got out of the ground, or that hail or hordes of grasshoppers would not destroy the shoots of wheat or barley. Before heavy frosts or an early freak blizzard came along, there was also the backbreaking work of harvesting the precious grain. Back then, harvesting grain meant cutting it by hand and piling it into stooks to be picked up with horse and wagon later. Most farmers hardly had time enough for farming, let alone hunting. But they were happy to have hunters like Gramp help to keep ducks and geese from eating the grain before they got it into the bins.
When he was my age, any time Gramp knocked on a farmer’s door to ask permission, with his trusty shotgun cradled in his arms, he was not only allowed to hunt, but was encouraged. By the time the sun had set and the hunt was finished, Gramp usually had a few birds for himself and a couple for the farmer, who would share his appreciation with a generous handshake. Then Gramp would begin the few-miles walk down a dark road back to town alone, his own birds tied together and draped over his shoulder.
It wasn’t that Gramp never got to hunt with his dad. He had started when he was six, and went as often as his dad could sneak away from the store. It took hours and hours of their tramping along the edge of wood lots, or hunkering down by a wheat field or a pothole, for my great-grandfather to teach his son the lessons of the hunt. The way Gramp told it, it was a time that he loved a whole bunch. Once the lessons were learned, though, he didn’t need to have his dad with him all the time, so hunting became what he called a “solitary pleasure”. I couldn’t ever see that happening for me. The part I loved the most about hunting was being with Gramp.
On top of his hunting becoming a bonus to his father’s business, it turned Gramp into one heck of a shot. By twelve, he was not only good with his shotgun, but was excellent with a .22 repeating rifle. He used the repeater to pot-shot prairie chicken, grouse and partridge. He said that just after dawn or just before sunset, when the birds left the woods and entered the edge of grain fields to feed, he would prop the .22 on a fence post and pick off as many birds as his father had ordered, using just one bullet per bird. Tiny .22 shells were a lot cheaper than shotgun shells, too.
That kind of hunting lasted until Gramp’s early twenties, when he had to trade hunting birds for hunting men. When Canada joined the First World War, Gramp enlisted in the infantry. It must have been a big change from working alongside his father in the general store, where he had been since leaving school at sixteen. He never talked about what—or who—he shot during those four years in Europe. From the stories I read in my history books, I knew it must have been a terrifying experience.
Nan let a few details slip when Gramp got really sick once with bronchitis. She said his lungs weren’t strong anymore because he got hit with mustard gas in the war. That was the reason he never smoked, and why he always argued with Mom and Aunt Bud, trying to get them to quit. He called it a filthy habit, but they told him they couldn’t quit if they wanted to. I never understood why someone wouldn’t want to quit a habit that was filthy.
It was after Gramp came back from the war and married Nan, who had already been his sweetheart before he left, that he decided to work on the railroad. He had lost one of his younger brothers to the war, but another who had joined up came home safely. His sister had been helping in the store, and that brother who returned took over from her. The general store had become a booming business, and it took a lot of the load off their father to have one of the boys working with him. Gramp’s youngest brother had already died of some sickness before he was a teenager.
Always good with his hands, Gramp easily became a mechanic for the big steam engines. That was why he and Nan moved to Buffalo Crossing. Railroads by then were so important to the country that the railroad company needed workers badly. It turned out that Gramp had picked a good trade because when the Depression hit in the thirties, he was one of the few men who was never out of a job.
That wasn’t the case with many, many others. Out-of-work men showed up all the time at Nan and Gramp’s door. Being so close to the rail yard probably had something to do with it. Men offered to do any odd job in return for something to eat. Nan could hardly say no. Maybe the way she and Gramp so easily gave to others was why they never owned their own house or car.
The Depression eventually killed Gramp’s dad, Nan told me. The general store he had worked so hard to build went bust. Although everybody still needed to eat, few people could pay their bills. Gramp’s dad couldn’t see people with kids go hungry, so he kept allowing them to buy food on credit. It was his own debts that killed him, Nan said. He got so heartsick when he had to close down the store, and his spirit was so broken, that he simply chose to die. He was barely sixty at the time.
Gramp continued to hunt birds on his own while living in Buffalo Crossing, at least until he met Del Weist, who became his steady hunting partner. The hunting tradition, which stretched back through Gramp’s past to the times spent with his father, still lived on.
The ritual of hunting was something Gramp mostly created by himself. It always started on a Saturday morning before the end of September, and on the year of my going into sixth grade it was no different. He brought out his Browning twelve-gauge automatic and the trusty, old single-shot twelve-gauge, along with the cleaning rod, oil, paste wax, and rags. He quietly broke each gun down and spread their parts on top of a flannel sheet covering the kitchen table.
Each and every metal part was then rubbed, almost lovingly, with soft strips of a worn flannel bed sheet that had been sprinkled with gun oil. The cleaning rod, topped with an oily patch of rag was plunged down each barrel two or three times. He would check how clean a barrel was by holding it up to the light and looking down the long steel tube. With his bare fingers, he then rubbed paste wax into the guns’ stocks and wood grips that locked onto each of the barrels. When the wood had a honey glow, he put the pieces of the puzzle back together again. His dependable friends lay glistening, and looked like they were begging for opening day.
Now that I had my Mossberg, I wasn’t just a spectator anymore, and I got to take part in the gun-cleaning ceremony for the first time. After he had let me watch him care for his guns, he left the rags and other cleaning gear on the table. He laid my .410 in front of me and said, “Go to it,” and then sat back on a kitchen chair and watched.
“But the gun’s brand new, Gramp,” I said. “It doesn’t need to be cleaned yet, does it?”
“A good hunter wants to know everything he can about his gun. Taking it apart is one of the ways he can do that. And adding a little lubricant will just protect it that much more,” he answered.
I loved the smell of the gun oil and the feel of the smooth steel and wood. The crosshatch carving on the grip and stock of my .410 perfectly fit my hands. Gramp had already shown me how to take my gun apart that summer, just after I got it as a birthday present, so I was able to quickly scatter my shotgun into pieces on the table without any help. It was a simpler weapon than Gramp’s Browning, and within an hour I had stroked each piece with care and easily put the gun back together.
“Good job, Buddy!” The one single comment from him, along with the tousling of my hair, filled me with pride. “Now let’s go and see if you know how to shoot,” he said, smiling.
My heart felt like someone had thumped it from the inside, and it settled into a constant drumming. Up until that Saturday, I had only ever shot my B.B. gun and Gramp’s .22. He had never let me hold the Browning or the single-shot, and I hadn’t even seen my .410 since my birthday two months earlier in July.
Being September 19th, the calendar said that summer was trying to hang on for just a wee bit longer. But, if the weather were the thing that decided, we would fall gently into autumn by sunset. The air was clean, as if it had been put through a strainer of heavenly blue sky. Although the sun was bright, there was a bit of a chill in the air. Nights had been cool enough to create a light frost that helped plants understand winter was not that far off. Bushes were still sucking energy into their roots, storing it in the ground for future life, so most of the growth above the soil was dying and turning brown and brittle. Except for evergreens, all other trees were losing their summer coats, their leaves turning to gold here and there, and thinning out.
The brittleness caused crunching sounds under our boots as Gramp and I hiked on the prairie grass down the hill to the flats, near the river. The flats were about a mile from home and also a mile upriver from the market garden that was tended by a Chinese family.
I felt really proud to be plodding alongside such a good hunter. Gramp wasn’t wearing hunting gear on this outing, though. He wore only his usual light blue striped shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a pair of grey wool pants held up by suspenders, and black boots. He was halfway through his last year of work before retiring from the railroad, but his muscles still showed through his shirt, and he carried his almost six-foot body strongly, like the hockey player he used to be. There was no cap on his balding head, which had long wisps of grey on top and a rim of the same coloured hair around the rest. He was clean shaven like he always was, and I caught whiffs of his Old Spice shaving lotion when the breeze sent it my way.
Gramp had left both of his own guns in his bedroom closet, where none of us kids were allowed to go. It was an order I never thought about disobeying. The shells for his guns were hidden somewhere else, and as we left, I had seen him come out of his room with exactly six .410 shells, which he put in his pants pocket. He lugged a small flour sack in his right hand with a half dozen empty tin cans in it.
I carried nothing but my new friend. The Mossberg stock seemed to hug my shoulder, and its butt end was tucked comfortably into the palm of my hand. Gramp had shown me in the last hunting season how easy it was to switch from this marching position, with the gun over my shoulder, to aiming quickly at a flushed, fleeing partridge. I wanted to impress him with my memory of that past lesson, so I walked along like a soldier in a marching drill.
Gophers were still scurrying across the hillside in the late summer morning. They would stop to stand and pipe in front of their burrows, before finally squirting down the hole if we plodded by too closely. A few insects also buzzed about, and a meadowlark treated us to a short song. But after that the day became soft, clear and silent. Only the odd clanking of the tin cans in Gramp’s sack disturbed Nature’s quiet.
As we walked, Gramp began to talk. “Your .410 holds three shots, Buddy, but the bolt action is tricky to catch onto. So, for your first season, I want you to treat it as a single-shot and have only one shell in it at a time. We’ll see if you learn enough to allow you more shots next year.”
I immediately went to the place inside me where disappointment was easy to find. But before I got to say anything, Gramp added, “Don’t be getting upset about it. In the heat of the hunt, when a flight of ducks is breaking air for a landing, you’ll find you can get very excited. The last thing you need is to be jacking a shell into the chamber with the bolt action, and forget whether your safety is on or where you’re pointing the gun. It’s safer to treat it as a single-shot until you get the hang of ejecting a shell and keeping the gun in a safe position, okay? Understand?”
“Yeah, I do,” I said. “But if I get good at it fast, can I maybe put in at least one more shell?”
“We’ll see,” he answered. His we’ll see was a lot like my probably. He’d use it whichever way it suited him.
“Also, you need to know that a box of shells for your gun costs more money than your allowance will cover. That means every time you fire a round, it will be like shooting dimes out the barrel.”
I didn’t know if he was suggesting that I needed to collect more pop and beer bottles to pay for my ammunition, or whether he was saying that I had to be sure when I took a shot not to waste it. I figured it was a little of both.
“Another good reason for shooting a single-shot is that you’re more focused when you shoot, because you know you’ve got to make that one shot count. That means you’ll not only be a better shot sooner, but you’ll also waste less ammunition. Get it?”
“Yep,” I answered. “And shooting less ammo means saving money.”
“You do get it,” he said. “But don’t say ammo. It sounds too much like something they said in the war. We’re not at war here, Buddy. We’re just celebrating time together with Mother Nature. And if we respect her, she might just let us enjoy a feast afterwards.”
We arrived at the flats, which were grassy meadows in front of a rim of forest with the river on the other side. Next to the meadows was a marshy area with a large pond in its middle. Clusters of evergreens along the riverbank stood proud, like they were ready for a cold winter ahead. All the others, mostly big poplars and cottonwoods, were already changing colour and getting ready to drop their leaves.
Gramp dumped the sack of cans onto the ground.
He didn’t have to talk about or teach me how to hold a shotgun, how to keep the stock close to my cheek and to sight down the barrel, or how to use my left hand for balance on the grip under the barrel and keep my right elbow high. He didn’t have to go over all that because I had watched closely while he did all those things. And I had mimicked them all in the shooting I had already done with my B.B. gun and his .22. I knew, though, that before the day was out, he would talk about and show me a lot more.
“Your .410 is kind of a junior shotgun, Buddy,” he said.
I didn’t like hearing that, even though I understood why it was so important for him to keep me safe.
“It doesn’t kick very much. The shot doesn’t travel very far. And you can probably tell by the size of the shell, that there are nowhere near the number of pellets in there as in my twelve-gauge shells.”
“So that means I’m going to have a hard time hitting anything,” I guessed.
“Well, it’s just not going to be as easy for you to knock down a bird with your gun as it is for me with mine.”
“I’m going to have to make sure my aim is perfect then, right?”
“Right,” answered Gramp. “But it won’t be like trying to shoot a duck in flight with just your B.B. gun—or even the .22. You are, though, going to have to think about your shot until the action, the rhythm of shooting, becomes natural. Do you understand?” My shooting lesson was already well underway, even though I had yet to load my gun.
His first rule was an old one. “Remember how I told you that you were never to point a gun at anyone?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Well, if you accidentally shot somebody with your B.B. gun, you could hurt them very badly ⎯ blind them even. But it’s unlikely you would kill them. Right?”
“Right,” I answered, instantly recalling the pain both below my left eye from years earlier and in my hind-end from when Dennis, that dumb kid from New York, had shot me over the summer.
“You could kill somebody with a .22, though, if you hit them in the right place. Do you understand?”
He was ending each instruction or fact with a question, I guessed to make sure I was paying attention. I was, but I was also itching to take my gun in my hands and aim and shoot at something.
“Right,” I echoed.
“Well, with a shotgun—even a .410—you could accidentally blow someone’s foot off. Or you could rip their chest apart and demolish their heart.” He was looking squarely into my eyes while he talked. “You could wipe a face from a skull. Understand that, and think how terrible that would be. Just saying those things makes me wonder if I haven’t started you too early.” There was no question this time.
Although I knew he was trying to put a bit of worry in me about the dangers of using my new gun, I was really starting to get frightened.
“So, realize this: if at any time, from this moment on, I see you accidentally or deliberately pointing a gun at anyone, I will immediately take your gun away, and you will not hunt again that season. Whether that happens this season, next season, or any season after that. Understood?”
He didn’t wait for me to answer. “And there will be no arguing, no whining, no crying, no questions. It will simply be that you need to think more about how to safely handle a weapon.”
I knew instantly that this was one rule I dared not break, but still he went on.
“I know we play the three-strike rule regarding any bad behavior from you, Buddy. But in this case, there will be only two. If you make the same mistake a second time, I will take your gun from you and we will never, ever hunt together again. I really need to know you understand how serious this rule is. There’s no negotiating it. It is etched in stone. In fact, your mother and grandmother would likely make it only one strike. Now you don’t need to agree, because you don’t have a choice in the matter, but I do need you to understand. Do you?”
“I do, Gramp, and I promise to be so careful that you’ll be proud of me. Honest.” I meant it.
“I believe you will, Buddy. I believe you will…”
And for the next two hours, I made Gramp proud of me.
His next rule was almost fun, because I almost got to handle my gun. It was about pointing, but not with a gun. Instead, the .410 lay on the prairie grass at my feet, while I pointed the first finger on my right hand at the half dozen cans flying past me, one-by-one, from beside, behind, and in front. Then, when Gramp had tossed them all over again, moving around more than he ever did when we practiced my pitching, he made me point as if I was standing and holding a gun in my arms as the cans flew past again.
Finally, after a half-hour had passed, I found myself holding a real gun. My brand new, bolt-action, three-shot, Mossberg .410 shotgun! But, I still wasn’t allowed to load shells into it—yet.
Even though I hadn’t really done much of anything to cause me to sweat, my armpits were soggy. I could also feel trickles of sweat tickling my spine. My palms were clammy, too, and my fingers itched as I locked them onto my new friend.
With gun in hand, we went through exactly the same drills as before, but this time Gramp explained the difference between pulling the gun from right to left, and pushing it from left to right. The difference began with which shoulder I snuggled the gun into. I held mine to my right shoulder because I was right-handed, which meant it was easier to make an accurate shot when I swept the gun from left to right.
Then Gramp talked about leading the target. “Only practice will help you figure out how much to lead the different kinds of birds. Hungarian partridge are the toughest upland game bird to bring down,” he said. “That’s because they are so small and so fast, and fly so erratically.” He dipped and doodled with his hand to show me what erratically meant. “The same can be said for teal, as far as migratory birds go, especially ducks. You have to lead these birds because of their speed, and then they also dodge and weave, so you end up missing them as often as not.”
He really made a point about how a hunter should move through his shot, and continue to swing the gun in the same direction with the same speed after shooting. I believed him when he explained this rule, but had to admit that I didn’t really understand it.
When it finally came to loading a shell into my gun, a full hour after we had started, we first had to get closer to the river. We walked towards the biggest poplar tree at the edge of the forest that grew along the riverbank.
Ten yards from the tree, he stopped, took a shell from his pocket and the gun from me, and then showed me how to load the shell into the gun’s chamber. The clacking of the bolt as it was flipped upright and jacked back into a locked position got my heart throbbing again. The smell of the gun oil escaping when the bolt opened and showed the breech added to my excitement. The day was pretty much the same, but I felt a lot warmer.
“You just slip the shell into the breech and let the bolt slide it into the chamber. Then you immediately put the safety on.” He snapped the safety on as he said this. “And you never snap the safety off until you’ve got the gun to your shoulder and you’re ready to pull the trigger. Get it?”
“Got it,” I answered.
“Good,” he said.
I laughed a little because I realized we had both answered with words that started with g.
“What are you laughing about?” Gramp asked quickly. “This is not a laughing matter. Get it?”
“I’m sorry. I understand.” He obviously didn’t want any interruption during this hunting lesson in the outdoor classroom. So I worked hard at shutting down my laughter, even though he had accidentally led me again into what made me laugh in the first place.
Gramp looked back to the .410. He flipped the safety above the trigger off and worked the bolt, which caused the shell to pop out and land on the ground. “Don’t ever fiddle with a live or a spent shell when it’s in the breech. Release it with the bolt and let it fall to the ground.”
“What if I’m standing in water, like in a slough?” I asked.
“Good question. For now, whether you are taking a live shell out of the chamber and breech, or whether you’ve fired the round, walk back to dry land to eject the shell. Eventually, you’ll learn how to shield the breech with your hand while you lever the bolt and let the shell pop into it.”
I knew that this was really the time I should be paying the closest attention, but my stomach started growling and I was getting hot as the sun climbed. I had to fight my mind to stop it wandering off on its own.
Gramp handed back my gun, and then picked up the shell from the ground and gave me that, too. It was time.
“Okay, load your gun and shoot that tree,” he ordered, motioning over his shoulder with his thumb at a big poplar tree that was about fifteen yards away.
“That tree? Really?”
“Really,” he said.
In that burp of a few words, I knew my test had begun. My heart began to churn like Nan’s washing machine.
Gramp was standing between the tree and me, so the first thing I did was lower the barrel of the shotgun and point it at the ground. Without loading the gun, I walked around him until he was well behind me.
“Good,” he said.
Once I was in the clear, I tucked the stock under my right arm and held onto the grip underneath the barrel with my left hand. Holding the shell between the first two fingers and thumb of my right hand, I then slid back the bolt with that hand, using it and the other two fingers to open the breech. Gramp looked over my shoulder as I dropped the shell in, closed the breech, and brought the shotgun to my right shoulder.
“Nope. Don’t you move!” Gramp yelled out.
I stood still, but turned my head to look back at my teacher.
“I said, don’t move! Not even your head,” he added.
I froze. “What’s wrong?” I asked. My voice sounded weird, as if I was close to tears.
“Unload your gun,” he commanded.
I did as he asked, working the bolt and popping the shell out, which fell on the grass at my feet.
“Now, think. What were the steps I told you to go through? Pick up the shell and start over.”
I took a deep breath and started again. I opened the breech first, then bent down to pick up the shell. With the gun aimed generally in the direction of the tree, I stood up and dropped the shell back into the breech. Slowly I slid the bolt forward and locked it down. That action pushed the shell into the chamber.
It may have been the clunk of the bolt closing that clicked open my mind. This time, just before I brought the gun to my shoulder, I thumbed the safety on. Then I raised the shotgun to a shooting position.
“Good! You remembered,” Gramp said. “You must always put the safety on as soon as you load your gun. Never forget that.”
“I’ll try not to,” I said, relieved.
“No, Buddy. There is no trying with this. You either do or you don’t. Do put on your safety, and don’t forget.”
“I understand.”
“Good,” Gramp said. “Now go ahead.”
I shouldered the gun, took careful aim at the tree, which wasn’t all that difficult because it wasn’t going anywhere, and squeezed the trigger. The gun didn’t fire.
I squeezed again. Nothing.
“What’s wrong,” I asked, without moving an inch.
“The good thing about a safety is that you can’t accidentally shoot someone. The bad thing is that you can’t shoot a bird either unless you click it off before you plan to shoot.”
I groaned out loud and felt really foolish.
“Fortunately, that tree hasn’t moved,” he added. “Fire when ready.”
My knees started to tremble. I hadn’t expected to be so nervous. I aimed again, this time poking off the safety with my thumb. Expecting an explosion into my shoulder, as well as into my ears, I squeezed the trigger again.
The sound was more what people would call a loud report, and the recoil was nowhere as bad as I thought it would be.
“Wow!” I said, noticing some little round marks on the trunk of the tree in front of me.
“Now, eject the spent shell, close the breech, and put your safety on again,” he said. “Then pick up that empty and put it in your pocket. We don’t need to spoil Nature with our garbage.”
I did as he said.
Then I asked, “Why put on the safety again, Gramp? There are no shells in gun.”
Gramp walked over to stand beside me. “But your gun does hold three shells,” he said. “Get used to using the safety on a gun the same way you use your buttons on your fly, and it will keep you out of trouble.”
He laughed at his own joke, so I figured it was safe to laugh with him.
As he walked us over to the tree, I told him how surprised I was at how little the shotgun kicked and how quiet it sounded.
“That’s exactly why I bought you a .410, Buddy. I didn’t want you to be lugging around a heavy weapon that you would be afraid of, whether of getting hurt by the recoil or the noise of the report, so as to make you flinch when you fired it.”
We stopped in front of the tree I had shot.
“You’ll get used to this one quickly and more safely. Who knows? In a couple of years you might be ready for a sixteen-gauge.”
“Not a twelve?” I asked.
“In due time, Buddy. In due time.” I had no idea what that meant.
The way the pellets from the shotgun shell splattered the tree trunk showed me how good a shot I was going to have to be to bag a bird. At ten yards, the spread of buckshot was about three feet up and down the trunk. The pellets easily covered the width of the tree, a big poplar, which was just over a foot wide. I realized I would have to shoot in front of a bird flying God-knows–how-many-miles an hour, and hope that it flew into a circle of buckshot at least three feet across, at just the right time. To me, the chance of downing a bird seemed like a pig-in-a-poke, which is what Nan said when there wasn’t much chance at all.
Yet, I had seen Gramp knock down a partridge at thirty yards in a couple of seconds. And a partridge was a bird that looked like a bee in a windstorm when flying. If he could do that, I had to hope that with practice—and in due time—I could, too.
For the next half hour, I imagined shooting birds as they flew in front of me from left to right, right to left, and from behind me, going away. I had to imagine because the shotgun wasn’t loaded while I aimed it at tin cans that floated across the sky. Gramp stood to one side or the other, and sometimes behind me, throwing the tin cans for me to “shoot” at. He sometimes added small stones to the cans to give them more heft, making them fly with a bit more speed.
I could see he was getting pretty pooped, so much so that he needed to toss the cans underhanded and take a lot longer to pick them up. His old hockey-knees must have been killing him.
Finally he said, “Let’s make it more real,” and handed me a shell. “But wait until I get to my spot,” he added, moving so that he was exactly to my left, about ten feet away. “Then, when I say so, load the gun, put on the safety, and wait for my signal. Always point your gun to the front when it’s loaded, and again, never at anyone. Shoot when you think you’re ready.”
Four of the five remaining shells later I hadn’t hit a single can. I was feeling kind of dumb.
“Not as easy as it looks, is it?” Gramp asked.
“No,” I answered. I couldn’t keep the disappointment out of my voice.
“Don’t get discouraged. You can practice on your own—without your gun. If you point your finger at even a sparrow as it flies by, you’re practicing. And practice does make perfect!”
When he kind of suggested shooting at a sparrow, I remembered the one I had shot in the Caragana hedge with my B.B. gun. It caused me a whole lot of grief when Maisie went bonkers at seeing the little dead bird and told Nan. After that, I decided I’d aim at pigeons and fake that I was shooting at them instead.
“One last shot, though,” Gramp said. “One last kick-at-the-can, so to speak.”
He moved behind me, and told me to get ready. I loaded the last shell, poked on the safety, and raised the gun to my shoulder. Without warning, the can sailed high over my right side, rising in an arc into the powder blue sky, getting smaller by the moment.
I flicked off the safety, slid the barrel in line with the tin can target, and just as the make-believe duck reached the peak of its flight, I squeezed the trigger. At almost the same instant as the bang sounded in my ear and the shotgun bucked against my shoulder, the can jumped in mid-air and spun around, causing the rocks in it to fly in different directions. Then it dropped out of the sky and bounced off the grass.
“Yay! Wow! I did it!” I screamed, as my hands started doing things on their own.
“Yep, ya did. Well done, Buddy. But even more importantly, look what else you’ve done.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“You didn’t even realize that you just ejected the spent shell and closed the breech, all the while keeping the gun pointed away from me. In no time at all, it will be natural for you to also put the safety on.”
“Oh, sorry.” I started to deflate.
“No, don’t feel badly. You’ve learned more in a few hours than other kids probably would with weeks of practice. You did a good job today. Feel proud.”
I did.
“Let’s head home. I’m so hungry I could eat the arse end out of a skunk,” he said, winking.
I laughed and said, “Me too.”
We started back up the hill, me carrying my shotgun, and him carrying the sack of tin cans. The spent shells felt good in my pocket.
“When we get home, you might want to put that can you peppered on top of my dresser in the bedroom. It’ll be there to remind you about the mighty hunter you probably plan to become, and to remind me about hunting with my favorite companion who understands the importance of safety. Of course, first you’ll want to show it off and brag to everybody about how you hit a flying target on only your fifth try.”
I smiled at the thought. “Thanks for today, Gramp. I’ll remember it as one of my best days ever.”
“Me too, Buddy. Me too.”
In another month or so, the brief and wonderful time we knew as Indian summer would try to remind us of warm summer days again. But, for now, the sun was as high as it gets at that time of year, and was still working hard to give off a late summer heat. The sky was the colour I had seen in pictures of icebergs, and the hillside quietly hummed with afternoon life. Gophers scattered in front of us as we chugged up the hill. They knew to get out of the way of two mighty hunters.