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S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 2 0 near-death encounters, to be the last Confederate officer to stand down at Appomattox. Only to die to a coward's shotgun blast a few years after his return to the beloved ground he fought for. W e sat on the veranda of Mister Eddie's lodge in the mixed beauty and melancholy of twilight that evening, listening to the peepers and night sounds that grow along the river in early spring—it would be planting time soon—and celebrated the day, and its way, with an amber dram. A two-and-a- quarter century plantation bird- shooting tradition, fashioned and passed down by men like Bryan Grimes. Passed down Southern. And in this place and space, I couldn't help thinking—had the South won the War, would we perhaps have cherished it more, held it the more sacred, and kept it the more authentically and faithfully alive? As he strove to do. Have fought for it a little harder? Have dedicated more of our lives to the cause? The most disheartening deprivation of my life has been the landscape decimation of our native bobwhite. We have let the Old South lose more than the War, my rebel companions. We've surrendered a porch and a rocking chair at the end of a day honestly in hand with the land, and the uncomplicated and peaceable benediction of a bob-white in the gathering of dusk from the edge of our garden. Thinking, too—that in the few more years when I'm gone, I'll not leave wishing myself back to the future. Thinking, rather, how much an anachronism I really am, always happiest when I'm closest to the plantation past and not in any fine hurry to come back. Thinking, if I make it, Heaven better not be a lot of miles from Dixie. For there, 200 yards east rests before they jumped, running to advantage under the bicolor and briers. Prodding the limits of gun range when they lifted. Though the dogs had been handsomely their match, roading in pace as we advanced swiftly abreast and ahead either side to prod the hoofing bevies to air. We had acquitted ourselves respectably, bringing a dozen and more birds to bag. Including several reds, which we had not seen in a while, their buoyant, rust-red plumage offsetting richly their neat little white chin-aprons. Handsome birds, from the stalwart old Confederate State of Tennessee. The Volunteer State, which had sacrificed many a farm lad to brave the center of the mile-long charge at Gettysburg, to take the fiery rain of death and hell from the Federal cannonade atop those high hills, and fight ever on to deliver the battle bloodily hand-to-hand, breaking the Federal line for a time at its stone-wall center. For it was that kind of day, a day for remembering, for contemplating echoes of the Old South as we made our way home, back across the river to Mister Eddie's plan'ation at Grimesland. Arriving as the sky was deepening and the night-cap of the sun sank into its now blood- orange bed covers over the General's graveyard. Where the bones of his great warhorse, Warren, were interred under a stone cairn only a few feet south of his own. The steadfast gelding that had carried him safely across the churling waters of Sayler's Creek that one perilous day of so many, the last man to cross, holding intact the rear guard for General Lee's retreat. While a firestorm of bullets from pressing calvary fire sought to cut him down. The horse now constant through eternity, serving him as well, on the other side. "Our cause is just, for it I will fight, even for it I am willing to die." W ith those words, Bryan Grimes—on 16 May, 1861—a handsome young planter of resolute jaw and piercing gray eyes, left the gentility and comfort of upper-class agrarian graciousness, to join the Confederacy as a major with regimental command of the 4th North Carolina Infantry. He did not leave to fight for a political ideology, but to be left alone. Honor-bound to protect and preserve the riverine eastern Carolina way of life he and his family had cherished and cultivated for a hundred years. He had no formal military training, yet rose to become Lee's last major general, and one of the most colorful, largely unsung and heroic figures of the War. Bearing arms with some of the South's most famous, including Longstreet, Early, Jackson, and Stuart, and fighting in every major engagement of the Army of Northern Virginia except Sharpsburg. Meanwhile, he had six horses shot from under him, survived severe battlefield injuries, near-fatal disease, and an incredible succession of other Major General Bryan Grimes joined the Confederacy in 1861.