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"My
South is a much, much lonelier place without him at every turn. Too
bereft of his melody. Far and away shadowed by his absence."
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But the old gun was in there, with a few cousins. Leaning in a
corner like a clutch of old men, some drunk but most just aged and
staggering under the weight of forgetfulness. All I could feel from them was
shame.
I dug out the little shotgun first, caked with dust, and my
heart sank at the ocher hue of the barrel. Next came two old twenty-twos, a
Winchester and a Remington, both single-shot bolt actions; then a bolt
four-ten shotgun; pulling up the rear, a hammered twelve-gauge side-by-side.
Family lore has it that it killed three men, all by hands of my ancestors.
My father referred to it as Mankiller, and had last used it to dispatch the
neighbor's chickens that had grown fond of my father's fishing worm beds in
the back yard.
In the workshop, I scrutinized the little crack-barrel four-ten
with regret. My grandfather gave it to me. It was his brother's. Marked
"Volunteer" it was probably of Iver Johnson manufacture. Maybe a
Savage. Certainly it was very old, like the rest of them.
When had I last handled it? Probably when I moved into my
grandmother's house, an inheritance stretching back some 160 years. The
house was built by my great-great-great uncle, an Indian chief, and had
remained in the family.
A decade earlier, I fled the remains of a broken life and taken
refuge in that house, and the old guns came with me. They sat there,
forgotten, until that day I sifted through the flotsam and jetsam of the
past to find them leaning in a corner like weary, battle-worn soldiers.
My grandfather stood on the porch of the same house when he
gave it to me. I was twelve. I was given a BB gun when I was eight, a
Benjamin pellet rifle when I was ten and the little four-ten followed. I was
afraid of it, and he was mightily disappointed that I couldn't pull the
trigger. He would go to his Creator before I found the courage to fire the
first round, and learned it wasn't nearly as intimidating or loud as I
feared.
Steel wool and gun oil relieved it of rust, and stock oil
revived the walnut. Restoring the cold bluing is a long process and requires
great patience, but retribution was due.
Not long after I learned to shoot it, my father donated a worn
carpenter's belt and bag to my forays afield. "Head out to the cane
fields," he said. Though I had never known him to hunt - a devout
fisherman by all I knew of him - he spoke with convincing authority.
"Walk the ditch banks and the fence rows. You'll scare up some quail
out there, I'll bet."
No dog, but I didn't know anything about dogs and bird hunting
then. I tucked away his tutelage and set out, out into a world where it was
still safe to let a fourteen-year-old boy loose with a shotgun and an old
carpenter's pouch in search of quail in the sugar cane fields of south
Louisiana. I was addicted after the first adventure! Right as rain, there
were quail out there, Gentleman Bob, as Havilah Babcock called him. The
first covey erupted at my feet when I stepped into it, and the great
explosion of deafening wings and swarming birds nearly made me run. I didn't
even fire.
But there were more coveys and before long I learned to pick a
bird rather than try to shoot all of them at once with a single-shot gun.
Not much longer than that I was bringing home a dozen birds every trip,
which my mother would smother down in onions and gravy and serve over rice.
Now and then I'd run into a farmer, and he'd tell me the
locations of a few respectable communities of bobwhites to plunder. Usually
he'd send me home with a few ears of fresh corn or turnips. Even if I never
saw him, sitting on his tractor in the distance, to be sure he saw me. If I
were handling my gun in an unsafe way, or shot a mocking bird, my father
would have known it before I got home. That was my world, my era, back when
I shouldered that little four-ten.
Bluing the gun took days. In between sessions, I started
talking up quail hunting with my buddies who roam afield.
"There's very few quail anymore," they told me, and
my heart sank lower into my chest. "Been gone for years."
I couldn't fathom it. I turned to the great realm of cyberspace
to verify the awful truth: Bob was mostly gone, had been in steady decline
since the 1980s. New farming practices and a preponderance of fire ants,
bobcats and coyotes, among other predators, had done the little gentleman
in. It was unthinkable. What was the South without Bob? As empty as a Jack
Daniels bottle turned on end. As silent as a burned-out plantation home. As
lonely as an elderly statesman, the landed gentry, holed up in a rest home.
After I outgrew the little four-ten, thinking I would venture
into waterfowl, I acquired a Savage Fox in sixteen gauge. A beautiful old
side-by-side, but I never made it to the duck blind until my twenties, where
I learned that sitting idle for hours in thirty-degree weather was not for
me. Besides, where was the explosive flight at my feet? The drumming wings?
Where, after all, was Bob?
There was no pitting to the metal of the little shotgun, and I
was glad of that. It was choked full, and belatedly I realized my adequate
marksmanship had been cultivated by shooting wild exploding quail with a
little shotgun that might as well have been a rifle, the shot package was so
tight. By the time I hit my adolescence, though, with an eight-cylinder
Mustang and girls bounding all over high school, the hunting diminished,
then stopped altogether. My father's addiction to fishing, particularly
bull-nosed bream on the fly rod, became my own as well. By the time I was in
my early twenties, the guns were put away or sold.
Dismissing college, I took a job with a newspaper in town and
started a career that filled me with interest in politics and government. I
moved to the city, found it was not to my liking, and came home. I made a
stint in radio news, but returned to my first love, the broad sheet press. I
married, became a father, and divorced, fleeing to my grandmother's house on
the reservation. My grandparents left this world, and my father followed.
Long chains of events, long roads between that last quail hunt and finding
old soldiers in a corner of the junk room.
In that time, Bob had departed, too. Without my knowledge. I
have learned that the four-ten is a crippler and an unworthy gun for upland
game, a fact I didn't know when I was sixteen and shooting quail in sugar
cane fields where a casino sits today. I left few if any cripples. I have
also discovered that quail are best found on hunting refuges for hundreds of
dollars a day, or crowded public management areas.
The little four-ten, and all its kin, revived beautifully. I
took a box of two-and-a-half inch shells to the bayou side and fired off a
few rounds, and the slight recoil and the smoke and the oil conjured me back
to my days with Bob. They say quail were thick as mosquitoes in the South
before I was born. Now he's scarce as hen's teeth.
The few land owners I spoke to cast their eyes down, stuck
their hands in their pockets and kicked at the dirt sheepishly.
"You know," they said. "Lawsuits, insurance and
all that. You understand."
I understood. No place for quail in this New South. No place
for little four-ten shotguns. No place for a man to follow the boy he once
was along a fence row or ditch bank. The old haunts swarm with four-wheelers
now, not Bobwhite in frantic flight. I wander anyway to some of the public
places, and listen. It's not silent, but it might as well be. There's no
familiarity to it in the absence of the shrill call: Bob-WHITE! Bob-WHITE!
I miss him as much as I do my own blood.
One fall day, the guns oiled and safely tucked away with
remembrance, I loaded my wooden pirogue into the back of the truck,
searching for out-of-the-way bayous or borrow pits or ponds to fly fish. Out
behind a vast woodland along an old dirt road, I stopped to survey a wet
spot through the trees. As I was walking back, I stopped dead in my tracks.
Illusion, I thought. A trick of time. But there it was again.
And again.
Bob-WHITE! Bob-WHITE!
I smiled to myself, and the boy that was smiled back.
Perhaps I could pick up the gun again, but I doubt it. To what
end? That part of my life, that part of the South, is gone. Relegated to
history books and memory. The gentleman's bird, the little statesman, only
found in abundance near the pens where he was raised, or the public lands
where he struggles to maintain a foothold.
Remnants of Bob are still out there, here and there, hither and
yon. Better to leave him be, for me at least. Like a pair of magnolias
standing roadside where the entrance of a plantation once began, or a
rusting and rotting sugar mill in a thicket of Chinese tallow, or a dried-up
marsh and silted bayou, Bob is a vestige of a South that has folded itself
up and withered. Fast retreating to the way of memory.
My South is a much, much lonelier place without him at every
turn. Too bereft of his melody. Far and away shadowed by his absence.
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About the Author:
 Roger
Emile Stouff is the son of Nicholas Leonard Stouff Jr., last chief of
the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana, and Lydia Marie Gaudet Stouff, a
Cajun belle. He has been a journalist for 25 years and author of the
award-winning column "From the Other Side" in the St. Mary
and Franklin Banner-Tribune. He is the author of Native Waters: A
Few Moments In A Small Wooden Boat, a memoir, and Chasing
Thunderbirds, a collection of short fiction. He has been featured on
"Fly Fishing America" in 2006. He currently resides on the
Chitimacha reservation. |
