Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/116174
LIGHTNING He was old, ugly and stunk to high heaven, but when he hunted he became a beautiful, awe-inspiring creature. Walt Hampton first one foot and then the other while Dad and Glen smoked and talked about the hog-killing that was coming up and the price of corn and a thousand other things that had nothing to do with hunting. About the time I couldn't stand it any longer Glen said, "Well, if you want to wear down the boy some, there are three coveys in the buckwheat and Lightning needs some exercise. I'll loan him the Fox if you'll bring me a bird or two. I have to go to the stock sale and can't hunt with you." The Fox was a 20-gauge Sterlingworth, a gun that I'd come to love over a muddy, pathetic excuse for a waterhole during the September dove season, a place for a kid to hunt without bothering the big men on the nearby cornfield. The little double fit me to a "T." It floated to my shoulder and I could shoot it about as good as a kid can shoot. In anticipation of this possibility I had talked Dad into buying a few extra 20-gauge shells "just in case." With the gun in the station wagon along with Dad's Model 58 Remington, we walked out to the kennel to get the dog. The kennel was an ancient tool shed, gray weathered boards and tin roof with a small fenced lot attached to it, divided for the beagles on one side and the setters on the other, situated between the garden and the orchard. The old gate-post to the pens was covered with Wythe County kennel licenses dating back to 1940. The beagles greeted us with uncontrolled joy, and Suzi, the English bitch that had just put down six pups, stood wagging politely on her side, but Lightning was nowhere to be seen. We knew he was in the kennel, however, because we could smell him. From 50 yards away. No, he wasn't dead, he just smelled that way. Lightning had a long and unremembered fancy name from the great lineage of champion dogs from which he ogs and guns go together, and I am a dog man just as I am a gun man, the only difference being that a gun never broke my heart. I have had the distinct pleasure of hunting with dogs since childhood; in fact, my love of them stems from my job as a 10-year-old to feed and water the beagles and setters on my Great-Aunt's Four Winds Farm, dogs that would later figure prominently in my first hunting memories. In those days there were very few deer in southwestern Virginia; most were confined to the national forests where they'd been restocked, a few in the New River bluffs, and a small population on Buck Mountain. If you wanted to hunt in our area you went after small game – squirrels and grouse in the mountain forests and rabbits and quail on the broomsage and briarpatch hills or, if you were lucky, on small farms like my aunt's place that left brushy fencerows and standing small grain margins around the fields. By the time I was 12 I'd shown my father that I could be trusted with a gun. I had graduated that fall from groundhogs and squirrels with the .22 to doves at the pasture waterhole. As reward for my good manners, I was told that I could now be included on rabbit, quail and grouse hunts, where dogs and other men would complicate the issue. With this news I counted myself among the luckiest boys in the world. O n a bright November morning, just as the sun was painting the ridgetops, Dad and I arrived at the farm where Glen, my Mother's cousin, met us in the farmyard. I stood on S P O R T I N G C 130 L A S S I C S on the scent by gustav muss arnolt cOURTESY of winfieldgalleries.com by