23—To Seek a Bear and Find a Boy

 

 

The expectation of excitement, the Old Man used to say, is better than the fulfillment thereof, or in his precise words candy in the window is better than candy in the belly, because you can’t catch a bellyache from just looking.

“But,” he said, “there are certain differences between eager anticipation and ducking responsibilities. The happy medium is to approach the candy with caution, enjoy it, and avoid the bellyache. This is a perfection that very few colored folks and no white people at all ever achieve.”

This had come to be known to me as November talk, when my mind was not really on algebra but was sweating profusely over the imminence of the hunting season. My nose was hot and I had a tendency to quiver, like a pointer dog that can’t wait to get out of the kennel on an autumn Saturday afternoon.

“There ain’t but two things really worth-while,” the Old Man continued. “Anticipation and remembrance. But in order to remember, you have to include execution of the anticipation. This means, roughly, that you got to take the dare. You got to bet your hand. You got to put your courage on the block and invite everybody to take a whack at it. And a brave coward is like a force-broken retriever. He may not like his work, but he’ll force himself to do it, even if he’s gun shy too.”

This came back to me as I was headed for Alaska to shoot a bear, and was wondering slightly if I hadn’t stretched my luck a little. After achieving the untender age of the mid-forty’s I have never been disappointed in anything that ever happened in the field or on the stream, and I didn’t want this bear, to whom I had not yet been introduced, to let me down. He was to be the last big bugabear that I intended to shoot, except in self-defense, and I must confess I was quivering as eagerly as on the eve of opening day of the bobwhite season.

The Old Man could get real windy on occasion, but mostly there was a solid kernel of sense in his vocal finger exercises. “What you remember,” he said, “is the end result of practiced anticipation. Nor do I mean just triumph. That kind of remembering is bragging. Any bum can brag, because all you have to do is remember the girl you kissed and forget the one that slapped you flat. Experience comes from an acute recall of your mistakes as well as your successes.”

I caught a fair point there. That last year I had started off with a flashy streak of quail shooting. Man, I had that quail thing down to a point where all I had to do was close my eyes and loose off both barrels and at least three birds would fall into my coat pocket. Then I hit a slump. One day I missed thirteen straight birds, one of which was sitting in a tree. Old Frank, the setter, took a final disgusted look at me and went home.

Then the panic set in. Just walking up behind Frank or Sandy or Tom was such a venture into terror that I began to invent excuses not to go hunting. I even mentioned that I was behind in my schoolwork, which fooled nobody at all, since schoolwork ranked next to embroidery in my disesteem file. The Old Man scourged me into what the Spaniards call the “moment of truth,” and literally forced me at gun point to walk up behind those damn dogs—which I now regarded as enemies every time they pointed—and blast away. Fortunately, finally, my timing came back, and I executed what could only be called a snappy double, and then went on to fill my limit with a minimum of misses. The jinx was broken, and I was okay again.

But I noticed that I refused to remember the series of raging misses. All I wanted to recall was the first part of the season, when I could have shot a teal with a slingshot. That, as the Old Man said, was the bragging section. I had closed off the failure, in my own mind, as securely as if I had slammed and dogged down the door.

I believe that one of the first signs of mellowing is when you start remembering your failures—remembering not only with honesty but with pleasure, because they were as much a portion to the day as the mad triumphs or the competent performance. For instance, I have two enormous tiger trophies, and the bigger of the two gives me a tremendous lift every time I see him or even think of him stretched skyward on my wall. But my favorite tiger is the one that is stretched skyward only on the wall of my memory. Because he is the one that got away.

This is the one that has now grown in my reveries to be at least twenty-two feet long, with teeth like railroad spikes, and a ruff twice the size of a zoo lion’s mane. It must be true, because I killed that tiger and he was dead for at least twenty minutes. Vanity prevented my giving him the other barrel as he lay slumped over the carcass of a buffalo, but I didn’t want to spoil the hide. And he was dead, wasn’t he, shot precisely through the neck just like the other two?

So I thought. So thought Khan Sahib Jamshed Butt, who was perched with me in the tree in the black night of the Madhya Pradesh. This tiger—at least forty-four feet long from nose to tail tip—was stone-dead, with his face pillowed snugly on the buff’s behind. Khan Sahib informed me that I was a Sahib Bahadur, the greatest tiger slayer since the late Jim Corbett, and I agreed with him freely.

And then this tiger, which was eighty-eight feet long if he was an inch, got up, snarled, and disappeared. It was a very long walk home, because the cobra-filled jungle now contained a wounded tiger, and anyhow, I am afraid of the dark. I was even more afraid of facing the two Texans sitting on the veranda of the dak bungalow, who would be certain I had missed the tiger when they heard only the one shot.

It has taken some time, but I find I can now face the memory of this beast, which was a hundred and sixty-six feet long and weighed over ten tons, without cringing and even with pleasure. Because the tiger has grown and I have gotten older and can realize that a damn fool is a damn fool, and also that foolishness does not necessarily spoil the entire picture of the trip.

I could cite you some more of the same sort of stuff. I was shooting perdices—the big, fast Spanish partridge—a while back, and missing everything that passed. On my right my friend Ricardo Sicré was keeping two guns hot and nailing everything that approached. Señor Sicré and I had shot grouse earlier in Scotland, and here, too, I was the bum, Ricardo the star.

But late that afternoon I shot a passing bird over my shoulder, going fast and far away, and the tumblers clicked and I was on the beam again. On the last drive of these transplanted Hungarians I was zeroed in and pulled twenty-two birds out of the flight.

Now, this is nice to remember. But what makes it so nice is that I remember the morning when I couldn’t have hit a trapped elephant, and the Scottish trip, which cost a fortune and from which I accumulated little but embarrassment and a magnificent hangover from dancing on the green with the locals. When I finally started hitting again I was so relieved I really enjoyed recalling the shocking state of my shooting hand before.

This also applied to greater kudu. I have spent the last seven or eight years doing everything possible wrong with that magnificent, double-curl-horned African antelope, and now that there’s a decent one on the wall I remember all the mistakes and tragedies and grim post mortems, but also the beauty of the days in Tanganyika and all the wonder of the birds and animals.

I think it really takes a Pollyanna to be the kind of hunter or fisherman who gets the most out of the expedition, rather than the result. I don’t think the result, though necessary, is one-half so important in retrospect as all the side-bar fun and the little incidents that go to fill in the holes. I was certain that Alaska, which I had never seen, would be fabulous.

The bears might possibly eat me, and the fish might get away, and I would fall off a mountain or into a stream, and the geese might nibble me to death, but out of the whole ordeal was sure to come a series of possible triumphs that would plant the forty-ninth state more firmly in my memory than an oil strike or a gold mine.

Whatever the outcome the Old Man remains firmly in my head. “You can’t enjoy it or be sorry about it unless you try it,” he said. “Whether it’s bobwhites or possums, whether it’s a war or a job, you got to be in it to know about it. And unless you know about it, it didn’t happen, and there you are as lonesome as an old maid who never got off the front porch for fear she might meet a man.”

The Australians put it more succinctly. Around the race courses in Sydney there is a saying, “You’ve got to be in it to win it,” and a common phrase is “I’m in it,” no matter what it applies to.

I was in it in Alaska, and a most unusual thing happened. I ran into a kid, who but for a change in time might have been me.

I became very young this time in Alaska, when I met a youngster named Jerry Chisum, age about fifteen. He was a quiet youngster, good-looking, blondish, blue-jeaned, and competent to be a man with a gun or an airplane or a hunting camp.

Jerry’s father is Jack Chisum of Anchorage, Alaska, who runs a flying service and an earth-moving operation with his brother Mark. Both are veteran bush pilots and sourdoughs in the better sense of the word, hunters and fishermen, hard-working, gnarled-fisted men who can grease an airplane into a tricky landing as easily as they might once have handled a sled and a team of huskies.

We were goose hunting together, after a chance meeting in, of all places, a bar. I had met Jerry’s father earlier in Kodiak, where I was shooting a brown bear. When we bumped into each other in Anchorage it seemed natural enough to climb into a plane and ramble off to an island to belabor a goose or so. The other members of the party were Mark Chisum, young Jerry, and Paul Choquette of Homer on the Kenai Peninsula.

We took off from Anchorage in a float plane with added wheels, a Cessna 180, and because the water was rough we switched to a true amphib, a Widgeon. And we hit a hunting camp that carried me back about thirty years. It was a rough shack, comfortable enough, with crude bunks and a heat-quivering stove, and there were the usual hurried preparations for food and drink in the local store at Homer. Nobody had shaved that day, but I noticed the pilots had taken not so much as a short beer for a minimum twelve hours before flying. Bush flying in Alaska is a sketchy business at best, and a hangover doesn’t help you much when you are flying mountainous passes in a float plane or landing downwind from necessity in rough water.

At first I was a little surprised to see the kid, carrying his full share of the duffel, scramble into the plane, and figured him for a passenger. Then something struck me as vaguely familiar. The kid, young Jerry, was a full-fledged hunting partner, a man among men. Apart from being taller and better looking and of course apart from using aircraft instead of T model Fords, he might very well have been me, thirty years ago. That is, if Alaska in any way resembles Southport, North Carolina.

His father and his uncle made no patronizing effort to explain him. Conversation was earthy, and none of it was curried because of Jerry’s presence. We drank and told men’s stories in camp, and there was none of this “not in front of the boy” business. Young Jerry performed a certain number of chores, in perhaps a little heavier ratio than the grizzled men; but apart from the utilization of his young legs for a little firewood fetching, apart from the fact that he was not invited to share the communal jug, he was one of the bunch, equal before the law and hunting society.

The birds were not flying overmuch that weekend, and much of the hunt was conducted in the warmth of the shack. But young Jerry was off prowling on his lonesome with his gun on the odd chance that there might be some action, while parents, so to speak, slept. That struck a reminiscent chord too. One of my brightest young dreams was to slope off, while the grownups tackled the fruit jar and told stories, to come triumphantly back with the biggest gobbler, the hatrackiest deer in the entire history of hunting. This dream never matured into reality, but it was not for lack of sturdy legs and sturdier effort.

I became interested in Jerry, who is an only boy in a family that includes three sisters. It seems he has been naturally accepted as a mature man since he was about six, and has known how to fly a variety of planes since he was eight or nine. There has never been any effort by his pa and his uncle to make an outdoorsman of him, apart from certain instructions in gun handling and hunting etiquette, and a full expectation that he’d carry his weight in the camp chores. Association with the hairy adults doesn’t seem to have damaged his character any, and though he is not profane I imagine his retentive store of colorful language is considerable.

Mostly I was impressed by the way the adults kidded him, and by the way he returned the kidding without being either overbrash or what might be called smart-alecky. They joshed him as a man, and he joshed them right back on their own grounds, also as a man. He was polite to me as a guest, but not oversolicitous because of the difference in our ages. He was, in short, completely integrated to adult society and responsibility, and some credit must go to his father and his uncle for making a man of a boy in easy, exciting stages.

Jerry Chisum’s world is a world of modern outdoor glamour, since his vehicle is the aircraft, as everybody’s vehicle in Alaska is the aircraft. Where I once saw quail and squirrels he sees ptarmigan and geese. My biggest game was white-tailed deer and an occasional wild hog. Jerry has been teethed on brown and grizzly bear, moose and wolves. He has seen perhaps the finest fishing in the world, where I perforce settled for smaller fry. But there is not much basic difference in the way we were raised.

Perhaps it was luck that kept a lot of us country boys out of jail, but I like to think that a considerable part was played by the horny-handed adults who raised us as equals and imbued us with a love for the bush. Pool halls and corner gangs never interested us. A knife was not a weapon but a handy utensil that must be kept sharp and could cut you if you whittled toward you or otherwise used it carelessly. A gun was for killing, and at all times had to be considered a deadly weapon. It also had to be kept clean. Camps were to be left neat, and in a permanent camp a certain amount of basic supplies was to be left for the next occupants.

All these rules still apply to young Jerry Chisum, but in addition, today, he knows that nobody but a fool will fly a plane with a screeching hangover or a snootful of booze. He checks the instrument panel as automatically as his pilot-father does. He knows that lack of meticulous maintenance of that aircraft will surely kill him, for he pilots in the strange and wonderful weather that makes Alaskan flying a science unplumbed by ordinary aviators.

In my day we watched wind and weather too, but mainly for its effect on game. In Alaska wind and weather are active enemies, positive friends. There used to be a saying among the old bush pilots that you carried an anchor in the plane. When you were flying in heavy fog you dropped the anchor, and if you heard it splash you knew you were over water. Modern navigational aids—a full instrument panel—have changed that somewhat, but even today the standard plane for travel is a single-motored job which is little fancier than the old Tin Liz of my time.

When I see a kid like young Jerry I have little use for the beat generation and not too much time for the massed delinquents of the cities. If such kids were subject to heady fare—a land where you wash gold out of the creek, wolves howl, bears rob the meat safe, tough people abound, and the close recall of the dog-sled, gold-rush days is something more than just a legend—I’m sure they’d get carried far away in the opposite direction from beat.

There is as much temptation in a frontier nation as there is on a city street corner, and an incipient bum makes his own community. I am no psychologist, but I do think that a certain rule of thumb on child-raising can be made. Give a boy a sense of fitness, of belonging, and impress him with the responsibilities that go along with that belonging, and the transition from boy to man comes without a wrench.

My early mentors—God bless them all, black, white, drunk or sober, educated or unread—never once diminished my enthusiasm because it had all been done by them before. My first deer was, in their eyes, bigger than a mastodon, and my first fox squirrel achieved the proportions of a black leopard. A coon was a tiger, a rabbit a lion. I remember being violently sick to my stomach when I shot my first quail over a pointing dog, but nobody laughed—and nobody ventured that I probably fired at the whole covey (which I undoubtedly did) and dropped a bird by accident.

There was considerably more to my inclusion in adult hunting and fishing parties than an education in caution. A lot of practical conservation was hammered into my knotty skull because, as the Old Man used to say, if you shot it all there wouldn’t be any for next year, and if you were careless with fire and burned down the woods there wouldn’t be any forest to hunt in.

Mainly, though—and here we depart from the modern “progressive” child and certainly from the delinquent—I think that good manners were as vital as any aspect of our training. You didn’t hog a quail shot. You didn’t loose off a gun across your partner’s bow. You didn’t deafen him in a duck blind by exploding a shell in his eardrum. The left-hand man took the first duck, and in case of a possible tie on a single bird or animal you honored your partner’s presence.

“If a dog can be taught to honor another dog’s point,” the Old Man used to say, “there’s no reason for a man to be a game hog.”

I like to think that the time and trouble my elders took with me on etiquette and caution, on conservation and just plain good manners may have kept this particular youth out of the Jimmy Dean set. It is not terribly difficult to translate the first basics of the woods and waters into drawing room or business behavior.

As I mentioned earlier, the association needn’t be on a Fauntleroy basis. I could have cussed as good as any stevedore when I was ten, because I knew all the words. Whisky, I knew, was for drinking, but somehow it seemed a little impolite for me to be in a mad rush to cuss and drink in front of people until I had earned the right in terms of years. My hunting partners were often crude men, fisherfolk and sailors, but a certain gentleness pervaded and always a certain discipline obtained.

I had a plain wonderful time with young Jerry Chisum and his folks in Alaska, although no trophies resulted from the weekend hunt. In this age of jets and rockets to the moon, of juvenile gang wars and what seems almost total confusion it was wonderful to see a modern rerun of what I remember so clearly as the Old Man and the Boy, even with the bird-dog homing device on the instrument panel replacing the bird dog on the ground.