Home from the Hill (7 page)

He slowly spread open the mouth of the sack and holding it towards us, commenced to whistle—short, rapid little peeps. His face, very white in the glare and against the blackness into which his black hair melted, showed nothing. Perhaps we sat in the car watching him and listening to his whistling for a minute; it seemed longer. We stole a glance at the Captain's face. He was absorbed in the spectacle and very faintly smiling.

We got out at last and slunk through the beam of light and followed the Captain around the edge of the pond. The boy did not budge, and only when we had all come to him did he leave off whistling. Dick Macaulay relieved him of the sack, and before dropping it to the ground, looked into it, as if half expecting to find it full. The Captain put his arm around his son's shoulder and they began to walk back to the car. We started, but Macaulay stood still, so we all stopped. The Captain heard us stop, turned and looked at us and said, “Well?”

None of us spoke.

“Well?” he said.

“Thanks, Cap,” said Macaulay. He looked around at the rest of us in the glare of the headlights, and satisfied with what he read in our faces, turned back. A grin spread across his face. “I reckon us snipe'll walk,” he said.

It was Pritchard, speaking for all of us, the next time Theron came downtown afterwards, who called him “Lieutenant.”

He liked that. But, “Sergeant will do for now,” he said.

Not “Private,” you'll notice.

8

He was Mrs. Hannah's only child, but he was his father's son. From this distance in time it is possible to say that perhaps there was nothing so very self-sacrificing about it, but rather more self-satisfaction; but whatever her motive, true to her word, Mrs. Hannah said nothing to the boy against his father. If on the other hand she did not say quite as much
for
him as she liked to think, and as she had told her mother she did, why, this must have struck Theron as the only fitting praise for a man to whom no words could have done justice.

Growing up meant just one thing: he thought always of the time when he would sit beside his father in that ring of men, hunters—the two words were synonymous for him—on the corner of the town square on Saturday afternoons, or above a smouldering fire deep in the woods listening to the hounds run foxes, of the time when he would have a gun of his own, when he would shoot over the fine bird dogs, read the animal signs, know the weather, find his way in the big woods.

He lived out of doors, in all weathers, from the time he could dress himself; when in the house, making his model airplanes or mounting his stamps or just dreaming, he was in his father's den. It was too rough a room and his father too plain a man to call it a den; that was his mother's word. It was a big room, forty feet long, and had no ceiling. From the exposed beams hung all manner of hunting gear. In the center of the room hung a two-man boat, a double-pointed duck punt, and scattered throughout the room hung trotlines and steel traps, boat oars and a fish seine like a giant spider's web spun between two beam struts, and in clusters of a dozen or so strung together by the necks hung over a hundred wooden duck decoys: greenhead mallards, redheads, pintails, canvasbacks—hens and drakes.

In the gun cabinet were five guns, two shotguns, two rifles, and a pistol. The bird gun was English, a Purdey, a famous make, a double barrel 12 gauge, and had been custom built for his father at a cost of over a thousand dollars. But it was the other shotgun that was really fabulous. It too was a Purdey. It too had been custom built. It had cost nearer two thousand dollars. It was a magnum 10 gauge double with barrels thirty-three inches long and weighed just under fourteen pounds. No man but the Captain, it was said, could take the punishment it dealt the shoulder in a day in a duck blind, and on the still damp foggy air of a good duck day in the marshes it could be heard for miles, like the boom of a cannonade. The rifles were a Model 94 Winchester .30-30 carbine with the blue worn completely off, and a Remington hammerless pump .22 squirrel rifle. The pistol was a .22 revolver, a Colt Single Action Army, that had killed untold rattlers and cottonmouth moccasins, and with which Theron had seen his father hit a bottletop spun high into the air.

Over the floor of the room were scattered deer hide rugs, and in front of the gun cabinet was a black bearskin rug with the head attached. There were foxhides, gray and red, and polecat, bobcat, and coon skins stretched and tacked on the walls. Beside the fireplace hung his father's shapeless, blood-stiffened old hunting coat. Beside the coat stood an old chiffonier with the drawers hanging permanently open, containing relics which as a boy his father had dug from the Indian burial mounds, and on top of which stood the skull of an Indian with a hole in his right temple. Until he was ten years old Theron had the idea that his father had shot that Indian.

But it was glory enough that he had shot the wild boar whose head was mounted over the mantel, looking as if he had charged through the wall, covered with black, white, and gray bristles like porcupine quills, the long blunt black snout drawn back in wrinkles baring the long yellow tusks. And to have shot the deer whose antlers were mounted over each of the room's ten windows—all prizes, one of eighteen points.

It was a disorderly but clean room, man-kept, with things left lying about to be seen and handled and enjoyed rather than put away in closets and drawers. It was rich in smells, the banana odor of nitro gunpowder solvent, the manly smells of leather and steel and gun oil and boot grease, the smells his father brought in, of the woods, damp and mouldering, the strong, hot, rutty reek of game, and the odor of dogs, for there were always three or four dogs there, brought in from the pens outside to recover from scratchings got in a coon fight, or retired there full of scars and honors, too old to run the foxes or point the birds anymore.

Even in a place where everybody kept lots of gun dogs, the Captain's kennels were notable. He kept a pack of about fifteen foxhounds, and he liked to have one or two of all breeds on a chase for the harmony of their differently pitched voices. He had Black and Tans, Redbones, Goodmans, Blueticks and Redticks, Walkers, Triggs, a pair of Plott hounds that he had sent Chauncey after all the way to North Carolina, and even one of the fabulous, blue-spotted, glassy-eyed Catahoula hog dogs, sometimes called leopard dogs, which he had hired stolen for him, named Deuteronomy, after the passage, 23:18: Thou shalt not bring the hire of a whore or the price of a dog into the house, which the people of the Catahoula Lake district in Louisiana interpret to forbid the selling of a dog. Separated from these trail dogs in pens of their own were the bird dogs, the Captain's own bred line of rangy, smoky-gray pointers and his milk-white setters lightly flecked with black.

Theron began early to help Chauncey give the bird dog pups their yard training. Then they were taken by his father for their training in the field. He saw them return from each hunt having made a gain in dignity and control, saw them become hunters. He would become a hunter worthy to shoot over them only after going through a training much more rigorous than theirs. But first he too must have his yard training. There were things he could teach himself, things his father would expect him to know when his time came. The street the house was on, Main Street, the oldest street in town and paved with bois-d'arc bricks, came to an end not many houses beyond, so that near at hand were woods and fields. There he could find not just boy's game—butcher birds and tree lizards and jays; nor just big boy's game—mourning doves and cottontails; but real game, men's game: gray and fox squirrels, a few, occasionally a coon hungry enough to come marauding that close to town, coveys of quail out of season that he could watch, learn about, but knew he must not molest with his slingshot or blow-gun or homemade crossbow or his air rifle. But he could observe them, learn what kinds of trees they favored, what nuts and grasses they ate, where they spent the different seasons of the year and the different hours of the day, and he could bring back the seedpods and the berries they fed on and learn from Chauncey their names and how to recognize them in leaf, in blossom, and in fruit. He could try to imitate their calls. One warm morning in early fall in his twelfth year, answering the whistles of a covey of bobwhites, he was able to bring one up to within ten feet of where he sat with his back against a pecan tree on the edge of a brown field where peas had grown in summer.

He taught himself the trick of skinning squirrels and trained himself not to mind the blood and the entrails. He rose at daybreak on wet Sunday mornings in the fall and watched his father's preparations, helped chain the frisking bird dogs in the car trunk. On those mornings he awoke early as surely as if his own day had come. Chauncey, whose age kept him at home now, was up at three to get Cap'm's breakfast, and Theron was up then too, ate with the two of them silently in the lighted kitchen, held his father's waders for him, and helped sling the two ropes of decoys over his shoulders, carried the big heavy duck gun to the car while his father strode ahead in the dark with the decoys clacking woodenly together with a sound like the far-off call of a flight of ducks. In the evening when his father returned, Theron would empty the game from his hunting coat, the ducks or the squirrels or the quail, and his father would tell him the details of the killing of the biggest one or the one with the odd markings, and he would smell that peppery, strong, hot, bloody smell, which seemed to belong to his father now rather than to the game, and feel it send down his spine a tremor of awe and excitement, of intolerable longing and of secret dread for his own approaching time.

For he knew, had always known, that it was not just being able to line up the front sight in the rear one, not just the meat you brought home for the table. It was to learn to be a man, the only kind of man, to learn it in and from the woods themselves and from the woodsmen, the hunters, who had learned it as boys from their fathers there—and so back through the generations, making you a link in the long strong chain of men of courage and endurance, of cunning and fairness, of humility as well as becoming pride. It was not to be confused with sportsmanship. He knew that too without being told. They were not sportsmen, those men in whose midst his father reigned there on the corner of the square on Saturday afternoons; they were hunters. He had a scorn for sportsmen. For among the hunters, he knew without ever having sat amongst them, was a bond of fellowship which no mere sportsman could ever know or share in, since for him hunting could at best be the thing he enjoyed most in life, while for the hunters it was life itself.

Those men, the ones in whose midst his father sat in the litter of curly red-and-white-streaked cedar shavings (that clean, pungent odor was always to be associated in his mind with manhood and the company of men), all figured in the tales that Chauncey, his Uncle Remus, the Captain's worshipful man-of-no-work and the most hyperbolic of old Negroes, told him by the hour. Stories with titles, like
How Cap'm Wade Hunnicutt Killed the Last Wild Boar in East Texas; The Time Jake Clark Got Lost; How Alligator Lennox Got His Name; How Clarence Lennox Lost His Left Thumb; Cap'm Wade's Most Famous Shot; Young Wade's First Trip through Sulphur Bottom
(an epic in itself, this one, in twenty books, one for each day of the trek, Theron's favorite, and the one on which Chauncey really gave his imagination the reins, as he had to do since he had not been there, and as he might do since no one else had either, to contradict anything he might tell)—each of the tales containing the beginning of the next, so that they were not so much separate stories as a kind of run-on legend, a heroic cycle, set always in Sulphur Bottom, a kind of Sherwood Forest, with all the men becoming, in the endless retelling, figures as lovably invariable as Friar Tuck or Little John, each enshrined in an anecdote or two, staunch members all of his father's merry band, each unique, but all equally possessed of courage, endurance, fidelity and a kind of comradely awe of their Captain. Romantic, no doubt, but without any yearning for such days of old when knights were bold, because he had Texas, not little England, and Sulphur Bottom, bigger and infinitely more mysterious and dangerous than any Sherwood Forest, a crew of lesser heroes of legendary marksmanship with guns more beautiful, more powerful, and more accurate than any stick with a string tied to it, and he had his own indomitable father, Captain Wade, a hero as much better than a Robin Hood as Robin himself was better than the Sheriff of Nottingham.

“Let's go fox hunting,” he would say, and Chauncey would grumble and pretend he thought it was childish and then he would say, “Oh, ver' well. Git yoself settled.”

Then he would begin. “Well here we is down in ole Sulphur Bottom. Hit's a moonlight night—good night for chasin' foxes. Us men done all had supper—squirrel stew kilt by the Cap'm an cooked by yo's truly, Ole Chauncey. Lots of pepper in it, cooked till all you got to do is jes suck the meat off the bones. Ain't it larrupin? An now the fire died down so we build it up again, an off down in the woods ole hootowl go, ‘I cook for myself, who cook for you-all?' An now the hounds begin to stir an—”

And from his jumper pocket he would draw his battered old French-harp, green with age, and tap it in the palm of his hand and blow the pocket lint out of the reeds and sound a chord on it and tap it in the worn yellow palm of his hand again and put it to his mouth, and the hounds were cast.

He commenced blowing softly, low and faint, so that you could not be sure how big a pack was running tonight, they were all so far away and the trail only barely warm, slow, only the leader giving any tongue, the rest trailing quiet. Then they ranged nearly out of hearing altogether. Then the trail doubled back your way and they came closer and closer, and suddenly the trail was hot and the whole big pack opened out as though the tuning-up was over and a baton had been raised and brought down, and they all sang out their parts, while above them all came the lead hound's hoarse excited bellow, and this was the moment when you were sure to hear old Charley Hexam cry, “'At's my ole whomper-jawed Rip hound! Lissen to im go!” And now they were in chorus, like a church choir with a conductor, the deep booming bass of the Black and Tans and the contralto of the Blueticks, and the liquid, clear soprano of the Walker hounds. They would get almost out of hearing, then the trail would swing back and then ran, it seemed, right around the base of the hill where you sat before the crackling fire, and then away, growing faint—but away on a false trail, foxed. For now you heard the taunting, exultant bark of an old and wily fox right below you, he enjoying the chase as much as the hounds, and having rested while his mate ran them for a while, calling them back now for more. And here they came, mad now, on a wide swooping bellowing swing, clearer-toned than ever in their pell-mell excitement, like the church bells all over town pealing out together on Easter Sunday morning. And then a stop. Then instead of the long baying you heard them all commence to yap, and you heard the men sitting around you cry with one voice with your own, “Gone to earth!” Then they barked and they howled and they yelped and they whined, and you could just see them pawing at the dirt of the foxhole, and then the leader, Old Blue, the old Bluetick, let out a single, prolonged rousing bugle-note, and you knew that the fox had gone out his back door and the chase was on again, and again swinging wide and fading and swelling and fading and pausing while they crossed water and found the scent on the other bank, and then coming to a long sighing pause, when a new note was heard from the pack, a few puzzled whimpers, a whine, then a series of disappointed howls, a general howl, and, exhausted, you breathed, “Faulted!” The fox had treed. The hunt was over.