Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/742011
22 • S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S for butter-money, sold me to another attorney, a James Davenport, in Dorchester. He was a grouse hunter too, but shot them on the roads, and only casually at that. I fell from grace, and he rarely wiped me down, and there was nothing ever between us really. It hurt. I felt shamed. I think he only wanted a Parker so he could say he had one. "I never liked him. "I was glad, when five years later I was sold again, to the proprietor of the hardware store there in town, Calvin McCafferty. But he didn't hunt. Had only bought me to put on his shelf, at a luxurious price no ordinary resident could expend. There I languished for over a year, immensely bored—pardon the pun—praying by-the-hour that some good shooting fellow would soon come along and rescue me. "How I missed the Old Man and his dogs. "Finally, one day a dapper chap from Pennsylvania was traveling through and stopped by to buy apples. I don't think he was really thinking for a gun, but he walked by as he ate a Pumpkin Sweet, paused, and turned back again. And I could tell he was staring at me. I stood as tall and proud as I Iowa walnut, 14.7 inches LOP, 1.75 at comb, 2.75 at heel. My buttplate, Standard: black, hard rubber, pointer-with-snipe. "When all was said and done, my father stamped a "V" on my flats, pinned a little silver shield to my toe, proof-tested and pronounced me fit, blessed me heartily and shipped me out the door. "I was light and I was fast, and I spent the first 12 years of my life with my Godfather. We hunted mountain partridge behind Jess and Jacob, his two Gordons, and, merciful heavens, did the birds fall. He was good and I was good, and we were good together. I was treated well, cherished as a partner. It was a grand, grand way to start a new life, and I imagined it to last forever. "I could not know then that life could be as cruel as it could be happy, and that the Old Man, who was 74 when I came, was not given to live as long as I would. That is the great sadness of our lives, you know— most as it is with a man and his dog—that our first shooting partner, no matter how kind or how young—cannot be our last. "So it was that in the 13th year of my life, Mahlon Tuttle died, and that the Old Woman, "In spiritual terms, he was a grouse hunter, and I was the altar-child fashioned under his cross. "By whatever jurisdiction, he pieced together the $47.50 it took back then to see me into the world. "He was an eccentric, mountain-tough, and cantankerous old cuss. So that when his order reached my father, it was a bit unusual from the others. In the making, when I stood beside them, I sometimes felt like the red-haired stepchild. For while they stood taller, most generally on 30- and 32-inch barrels, and rarely below 28, I was a shorty at 26. Not a burly 12, but a lightweight 16. Slight and slender, on a #1 frame. "And while everybody else was bored a deeply throated modified-and-full, Tuttle demanded that mine would be baritone: cylinder and improved. My tubes of Vulcan steel, he declared, and since he didn't care for ejectors, my leverage left to extractors. Harboring no particular taste for frills, he specified only the simple line engraving that was default for my station. "At first, I felt pretty plain. "My furniture was left to lightly figured