Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/116174
my momma's baby brother and only a couple of years older, it was only natural that we should take to hunting together. In that distant, innocent time, I would, in season, take my old brown-barreled Lefever double to school where it stood propped in a corner until we took the school bus to his home near Stellaville, which wasn't a "ville" at all, just a dusty crossroad in the middle of nowhere, roughly equidistant from Zebina and Matthews. Luckily for me, there was nothing between his home and mine but woods and fields sparsely punctuated by the occasional tilted tenant house. As soon as the rusty yellow bus squealed to a stop we'd bail out, gun and all, and race to open the gate and release Flash, the spare-ribbed, grizzled old pointer whose scarred hide and gray muzzle revealed that he had, in his time, seen much better days. Then we'd hunt the sere broomsedge and lespedeza fields around the ramshackle clapboard house where the Swan family lived S from the timber company and have a hunting club, and so we did. And now we were going back. Alex, Dave and I. The last of us, returning to where Alex once allowed that he had spent the happiest days of his life. We had intended to say a few words at the campsite, but when the time came, the words would not come, and our tribute was voiced instead by the gabble of geese in the big swamp, and the hush of the wind sliding through the pines. A handful of dust, a Mason jar buried in the fire ring, and the tears dammed in the eyes of old gray men said all that could be said, and so we simply stood for a while. And when it was done, Dave and I turned and left in silence like a couple of old drake mallards banking into the wind on their final pass, and the stillness was broken only by the barking of a fox on the far side of the river. Alex, according to his wishes, stayed behind. until the sun began to drop and the air began to chill, and then I'd walk the four miles to town alone, "jump hunting" until the light failed. In the '50s and '60s the country was rife with bobwhite and doves, with a few ducks in its wilder places. We hunted every day that we could and a few that we couldn't, and shot as much as bare cupboards and lean wallets would allow. And we learned the gun together as we grew. In those days shells were cheap, and since the doves came in clouds and 20-covey days were commonplace, if you tried just a little and you weren't dumb as a clod, you learned a little about shotguns and what they would do. When we "got grown," Dave and I went off to the University of Georgia to learn how to be barristers and Alex went off to visit Korea as an employee of Uncle Sam. Not long after he got back, we stumbled upon the place on Goosepond Creek. Since it was brimming with game, it seemed like a good idea to lease it P O R T I N G C 56 L A S S I C S