Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/801177
42 • S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S But pretty soon they had company. "I could hear bellering and busting brush," Big John hung his lip over the mug, took a long sip, "Two bulls were hot on our trail. They smelled that cow blood, and they smelled us. Long-horned, long-haired devils, all matted up with sticks, stickers, and briars like washboards. They nosed the wind and gave us the stinkeye, just like . . . ." He paused, rubbed his chin with his free hand. "What are those African critters I seen on Carl Perkins?" "On TV? Wild something or other. Cape buffalo?" He snapped his fingers, "That's right, Cape buffalo on Wild Kingdom. You got any more of that brandy?" I did. "They were fixing to come right in that corn crib, and they come at a pretty good clip till John Newsome turned them with buckshot." "How in the world you get those carcasses back to the boat?" "Carcasses? Son, there weren't no carcasses to worry 'bout 'cepting ours! I seen the water fly in a fine spray when the buckshot hit the first bull. He bellered and crow-hopped and shook, and I swear to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the buckshot fell right out onto the dirt!" Big John didn't swear much, for a Marine anyway, so when he did, you'd best believe. "The bulls made four or five runs at us there in that corn crib, and we turned them each time. But by and by we were running short of buckshot and daylight." The Jeep was a half-mile away, the Higgins boat farther, daylight fading fast when the bulls finally lost interest, grumbling away into the darkness. "Me and John Newsome come out of the thicket back-to-back, only three loads of buckshot between us. We'd swap off when one of us got tired of walking backwards. We told the Colonel we only saw one cow and we'd shot it, and nobody asked nothing about what happened to all that buckshot." "That's one hell of a story, Big John." "Yep, and the skeeredest I ever been." "You're kidding me, right?" He took one last pull on the mug, smacked his lips, threw the grounds into the coals. They hissed and steamed and smelled good. "Nope," he said. I threw another log on the fire. n Higgins showed his boat to the Marines. They bought a few for testing. By 1939 Higgins was feeling so flush he bought the Philippines' entire crop of mahogany, on credit. It was a wild bet but a good one when the Japs overran the Philippines in '42 and there was no more to be had. A half-inch of steel over an inch of mahogany, a Higgins boat would soak up bullets from revenuers, Japs, or Germans. The government eventually bought some 20,000 of them; in military jargon, the LCVP, Landing Craft Vehicle and Personnel. Deployed in amphibious landings from North Africa to Okinawa, Ike called it "the boat that won the war." Big John's trench gun was the Winchester 97, modified from the civilian model with a bayonet lug, ventilated handguard, and 20- inch cylinder-bored barrel. It raised so much hell amongst the Germans, Kaiser Wilhelm wrote a personal letter of protest to President Wilson, which was ignored, of course, as the Germans were then employing poison gas and flamethrowers. The 97 had no trigger disconnect and could be "slam-fired" fast as you worked the slide. Fifty-four .33-caliber lead balls at a thousand miles an hour in about three seconds; look out Gerhart. But there was no slam-firing when Big John and John Newsome nosed their Higgins boat up onto the Cat Island beach. About the time they dropped the landing ramp, a herd of wild cattle came gamboling down the beach. Newsome dropped a thousand-pound cow with a single buckshot charge behind the shoulder. Her knees buckled and her chin plowed sand as she fell. The men rigged a line, dragged her upon the landing ramp, field-dressed her with their Ka-Bar fighting knives, hauled her aboard, then backed the Higgins boat off the beach and set an anchor so they would not be stranded by the falling tide. The Jeep proved useless in the woods. Cat Island had been farmed, river to creek, and when the owners went broke the woods took over, and the yellow pine, red oak, and wax myrtle scrub grew in an impossible snarl upon the old fields, criss-crossed here and there only by the tails of the wild cows. The men had walked a half-mile into the tangle when it commenced a steady, drizzling rain. A careening corn crib offered minimal shelter, and the men hunkered inside. It was a "set rain," Big John said. "It set in, and you could set and watch it all damn day."