Guts Page 4

  He had sat a whole night and shaped the limbs carefully until the bow looked beautiful. Then he had spent two days making arrows. The shafts were willow, straight and with the bark peeled, and he firehardened the points and split a couple of them to make forked points.

  HATCHET

  I can remember the first game I ever shot with a rifle. I had bought a .22 caliber single-shot rifle. It was a Remington with a rotating safety on the rear of the bolt, and the bullets cost eighteen cents a box for longrifle cartridges. They were called Federals and had lead-colored bullets instead of the copper-colored ones that came years later. I bought the shells at Nelson’s grocery and then rode on my Hiawatha bike seven miles out of town to an area filled with small swamps and stands of poplar. It was fall and the big flocks of ducks and geese had started to fly south. I also knew that there were grouse in the poplars and thought I might have some luck there. I pedaled along until I saw some ducks off in a field full of shallow water. The day was sunny but it had rained hard the day before. I laid the bike down in a ditch at the side of the country road. I took a shell from my pocket and put it in the rifle, making certain it was on safety. Then I crept along in the ditch on the side away from the ducks until I was opposite where they were swimming. I peeked over the edge for one quick look, then pulled back. There were four mallard ducks about thirty yards away— three on the left and one on the right. The three were hens, plain colored and drab, and the other, set off three feet, was a drake. I twisted the rifle off safety and crept up to the edge of the ditch again, brought the rifle to my shoulder and slid the barrel out through the low grass in front of me. I aligned the small bead of the front sight in the dimpled notch of the back, then set the bead on the body of the drake and squeezed the trigger. There was a large splash—I did not hear the rifle fire—and a short second or two of flopping. The three hens took off, bursting vertically with the sound of the shot, but the mallard drake lay there, still, dead. I ran across the water and mud and grabbed him and held him up and carried him home and plucked him and baked him in the oven and ate most of him that night.

  It was all wrong, of course, and illegal and very unsporting. To use a rifle on a duck, to shoot it sitting. All wrong. I would hunt ducks many more times, with a single-barrel 12-gauge shotgun, and I would shoot them flying with No. 4 shot, and I would remember some of them, many of them.

  But not like the first one. I recall every aspect of that hunt with clarity and detail—the colors of the leaves, the temperature of the air, the soft cold wind riffling the water—and I point it out not because it had a specific bearing on how Brian lived in Hatchet (he did not, after all, use the rifle even when he found it) so much as to show how incredibly important hunting was for me when I was young, when I was Brian’s age.

  Hunting virtually became my life—sometimes with other boys, though few of them seemed as devoted as I was to it, but more often alone. Hunting, along with fishing, was all I lived and breathed for, all I was or wanted to be.

  At that time I lived in a small town in northern Minnesota near the edge of the bush—untrackable miles of wilderness—and everything in my life phased into hunting or fishing. Every day when school let out, after I finished my work selling newspapers, I made for the woods near town. On Friday nights I set pins for the bowling league; after closing then, at eleven, I would sometimes take off on my bike and pedal out of town and set up camp near the river that flowed out of the wilderness and through town so that I could get an early start on the weekend hunting or fishing.

  The wilderness pulled at me—still does—in a way that at first baffled me and then became a wonder for me. I never thought of where that river went after it passed through town—down to where it joined the Mississippi, I supposed, and then through other towns and cities and gone; I really didn’t care. But where it came from—that was all that mattered. Somewhere north, somewhere in the woods, somewhere wild—that’s all I cared about, all I wanted to see, to know.

  I hunted a great deal with rifles and shotguns and I trapped and snared animals for a living. There are people who say that is wrong, and perhaps they are right—though virtually nothing in nature dies of old age except man and I’m not sure of the morality or immorality of their claim or why it is better for a coyote to kill a rabbit than it is for a man who will also eat the rabbit—but these questions did not exist then for most people. Trapping was considered an honorable way to make a living and those of us who could live from the woods did so. We could sell snowshoe rabbits (called snowshoes because of their large feet, which enabled them to run on top of the snow) for ten cents each. This sounds like a paltry amount but it was possible to take twenty rabbits a day with stovepipe-wire snares (there were thousands upon thousands of rabbits), and two dollars a day in those days was as much as I made working on farms in the summer; men worked in factories for only eight dollars a day. So the two dollars went a long way toward buying school clothes or food, and though this experience of mine didn’t point directly to Brian, it led that way. What I learned trapping and killing game was how to see things: how to look for a line, for a curve where there shouldn’t be a curve, for movement where nothing should move, and these things became useful, became lifesavers for Brian.

  But I soon became disenchanted with firearms. I continued to use them when hunting because they provide a very efficient way to get wild meat for the table and it was important to have the meat. In most respects, when used correctly, firearms are a humane way to kill an animal—more humane certainly than nature, which can be astonishingly slow and cruel when it comes to death. One needs only to watch a wolf kill a deer to know this.

  But the noise! There is nothing worse than what the sound of a gun does to the woods. One second there is the wonderful almost-silence of the forest—birds, rustles of leaves, soft sighs of wind in the pines—and the next instant there is the crashing crack, worse than thunder, alien to everything that is in the woods, harsh and cutting and loud, and warning everything within a mile that you are there.

  Terrible. Even from the first, using only the .22, which has a small sound compared with shotguns or high-velocity, big-bore rifles, I did not like the disruption that came with firing a weapon. Everything stops. All sounds and movement cease—it’s as if the noise of the rifle kills the whole woods. And it does not return to normal for a long time. If you are hunting small game, rabbits for instance, and shoot fairly often, the woods never have time to return to a normal state. Everything from small birds to large game is in a constant panic. Consequently, if you hunt with a firearm it’s possible to be successful, to take a lot of game and kill it humanely, yet never know what the woods are really like, how animals move, why they do what they do or when they do it.

  With a bow there is silence, or near silence—only the soft twang of the string when released—and all the purity of the forest remains. And here is perhaps one of the great paradoxes of hunting. If the hunter is very good and uses modern equipment—some of the new broadheads are truly deadly—the kill can be efficient and relatively fast. But it cannot be as fast as a rifle because an arrow lacks what the military calls the hydraulic shock of impact that a bullet has when it hits flesh. Unless the arrow is almost perfectly placed, it can be a very slow death indeed for the animal.

  Still, early in my hunting life I decided that I would rather hunt with a bow than a rifle. Luckily for Brian, I started using a bow well before the advent of all the modern technology that has embraced archery (and everything else, for that matter); compound bows were still a quarter of a century in the future and even laminate bows of modern materials—fiberglass and wood strips—were only beginning to come on the market. Fred Bear was just starting his company and the first so-called modern bow that I bought was a Bear Cub of forty pounds pull. Forty pounds was the minimum legal pull-weight for large game in Minnesota although deer had been killed with much lighter bows. It is generally acknowledged that the weight of the bow is not as important as the sharpness of the broadhead on t
he arrow.

  When I started to hunt with a bow I could not afford to buy one. Even a Bear Cub model was more than thirty dollars, almost a full week’s wage for a man working at an adult job. Setting pins at the bowling alley, I made seven cents a line, and if I worked two lanes I might make four lines an hour— twenty-eight cents. To get a bow I would have had to set pins for more than a hundred hours and not used the money for clothes or food or school supplies.

  And so I made my first real hunting bow. I wasn’t limited to the primitive methods that Brian was because I had much better tools available at a neighbor’s wood shop, but the results were not too far removed from what Brian achieved. There was a famous archer named Howard Hill back then. He was incredible, doing things like hitting quarters in the air, shooting two arrows into a target so that the second arrow split the first—and hunting. The man was a hunting maniac. He hunted all the great game of the world, taking elephants, rhinos, bears, lions—everything. A lot of what he did was show-offy stuff, but he brought many young people to archery and tried to make it widely accessible by publishing pamphlets on how to make bows and arrows.

  Hill swore by wood from lemon trees for his bows because he said it kept its spring best and would not “take a set,” that is, stay bent when unstrung the way some other woods did. So I ordered a lemon-wood stave one and a half inches square with straight grain and no knots, which was just two dollars from the lumberyard. Following Howard Hill’s instructions, I used a small hand plane and then pieces of broken beer bottles to shave the limbs into shape, finishing them with sandpaper, working down from coarse to very fine. I found an old tennis racket, unwrapped the leather handle and used that for the bow handle. I used a small rat-tail file to cut nocks—notches for the string—and prestretched nylon fish line, twisted on itself, became a bowstring. When I first strung it the bow was unbalanced, one limb bending more than the other, so I unstrung it, per Mr. Hill’s instructions. I shaved a bit off the stiff limb, and kept working that way, stringing and unstringing the bow, until the limbs balanced. I never tested it accurately, but according to a crude fish scale the bow pulled between thirty-five and forty pounds at twenty-six inches of draw. That was a stout bow for a thirteen-year-old—what Brian would have called a war bow.

  Arrows were a bit more of a problem. I tried making my own shafts out of pine dowels and they worked, but not well. For two dollars and some change I sent for a cheap little sheet-metal jig that would allow me to glue on three feathers at one time in a relatively straight fashion. Feathers came from a slaughterhouse near the edge of town. They were always killing chickens but now and then they would run turkeys through, and on one of those days I went down and pulled feathers from the right wings of turkeys (again, per Howard Hill) until I had several hundred. You must use all feathers from either the right or left wing because the feathers curve to cup the air, and the curve has to be consistent.

  Of course the feathers don’t come ready to use. Each feather has a wide side and a narrow side. The wide portion is the one you keep, and you process each feather by putting it between two pieces of wood and cutting off the narrow band with a razor, then sanding the round quill down flat so that it will glue well to the wooden shaft.

  Then it is a simple matter to use a small rat-tail file to nock one end of the arrow for the string and (I learned after several broken shafts) to smear the nock with glue. This toughens it up so that the arrow can take the shock of the string’s striking it without splitting.

  The arrow point was a problem at first, and sometimes I just sharpened the wood and fire-hardened it the way some primitive tribes used to do it. But without a separate point, the shafts split easily when they hit hard dirt or rocks. They needed some metal to strengthen them, but I could not afford to buy points. However, I quickly found that the word point kept me from the real solution. When you use an arrow on small game, you don’t want a pointed end but a blunt one. When a blunt strikes, it causes much more shock and a quicker kill. The blunt still goes through the animal, even though it’s not sharp, and it has some knockdown potential. Then I found that used .38 Special cartridge cases from the pistol range out of town slipped perfectly over the shafts and made as good a blunt tip as any I could buy. There were plenty of empties there, so I quickly found enough to last years, and in a short time I was in the woods hunting small game.

  I soon found there is a great deal of difference between hunting game with a homemade bow and actually killing game. There’s a frustration index with arrows that you don’t have with guns. If a gun is aimed correctly and held steady and the trigger squeezed correctly, the bullet will almost always strike where it is pointed. An arrow can be aimed correctly and held properly and released exactly right and still miss the target completely because of wind or a tiny branch sticking in the way or, apparently, just bad luck.

  That first time I went out hunting with my new homemade lemon-wood bow, I had ten arrows, all with blunts. It was fall and the leaves were changing and there cannot be a more beautiful time to be in the woods. You walk through dappled color and streams of light and the air is crisp and clean, with none of the soft mugginess of summer, and I remember feeling as I still do when going into fall woods: Everything is new and out ahead of me and only good things can come.

  I worked out along the river. I had a fried-egg sandwich wrapped in waxed paper (there were no zippered bags or plastic wrap then) and a boiled potato in a paper sack, both tucked into the pocket of my army-surplus field jacket. On my back I had a leather quiver made from an old leather jacket sleeve with a piece of shoe sole laced in for the bottom.

  I had not gone a mile before I saw a grouse. It was sitting back in some willows, and I caught a slight movement of its head before it froze, or I never would have seen it. I worked in close, then closer, until I couldn’t have been more than ten feet away. I raised the bow, drew the shaft, held for the outline of the bird and released.

  The arrow snapped clean from the bow, followed my sight line down to the grouse and . . . missed—not by much, an inch to the right of the grouse, so close the shaft nearly rubbed it. Even with the blunt tip the arrow stuck in the soft ground and quivered. It didn’t seem possible. But the grouse sat there, still, unmoving, not a feather different. I held my breath, slowly raised my arm back over my shoulder and took another arrow out of the quiver. Moving ever so slowly, I nocked another arrow; raised the bow; drew, using a solid three-finger hold on the string; held until I knew I couldn’t miss, and released.

  The arrow plowed into the ground slightly to the left of the grouse. The bird sat there, not moving, frozen, waiting.

  Another arrow. Up. Draw. Hold. Release.

  Miss.

  Hmmm, I thought. This was not possible. The grouse still sat there. And if it seems unbelievable that a grouse would hold still for all this waving a bow around, arms over shoulders grabbing at arrows, bow-raising and hissing arrows, it must be remembered that grouse have evolved over millions of years to use the freeze defense, and it has worked against predators so well that they have it locked into their genes. At a much later date, I would see a grouse in a tree about eight feet off the ground and have time to cut a long stave with a hunting knife, carve one end into a needle point—all while the grouse watched—and spear the same grouse and have it for dinner. Once I took a grouse off the ground with my bare hands.

  Still, this particular grouse was especially long-suffering. I pulled another arrow, raised the bow again, drew, released.

  Missed.

  With all ten arrows. They were around the bird like a cage and I simply could not believe it, could not believe that I could miss that many times from not ten feet away. It just wasn’t possible.

  I was out of arrows and the grouse was still there and I thought of using the bow like a club or maybe finding a rock—I certainly was never going to kill this bird with an arrow unless I walked up and stabbed it with one. Then I decided to reach forward carefully and pull one of my arrows out of the ground and us
e it over again. Later in my life this would work, but this time I wasn’t that lucky.

  I moved forward slowly.

  It sat there, carved in stone.

  Five feet away, then three—I could have just fallen on the bird and would have done that, except that I would have landed on all my arrows. So I crouched, leaned almost directly over the grouse and laid my hand on one of the arrows.

  And a mass of feathers exploded into my face.

  Anybody who has heard a grouse take off will never forget it. Along with its freeze defense it has evolved a takeoff that is, to say the least, startling. The wings cup air and beat at a tremendous rate, creating a concussive explosion so loud it sounds like an artillery round going off.

  In this case, it was directly in my face. I almost wet myself. Then I fell backward, nearly somersaulting as the grouse flew past where my head had been and vanished into the dappled leaves.

  Clearly, I thought, I am doing something wrong.

  I hunted all that first day and shot at several rabbits and two more grouse and missed them all. Then I decided to find out what I was doing wrong. I moved to a clearing in the woods and found a gopher mound with soft dirt that wouldn’t hurt the arrows—I was down to eight now, having lost two that had snaked beneath the grass and disappeared— and put a leaf about the size of my palm in the dirt for a target and shot at it from about ten feet away.

  And missed.

  I kept trying, slamming away the dirt until at last I realized that if I simply looked at the leaf in general I would miss it. Sometimes I would come near it, but I would still miss. At that time almost nobody used a sight, unless you counted using the tip of your arrow as a kind of aiming point. Everybody shot by instinct, simply looking and “feeling” where the arrow would go, so there wasn’t a distinct spot to aim at.

  There had to be a better way. I started thinking of exactly where the tip of the arrow would go, not just in general terms but exactly in what spot. I did not look at the whole leaf but at the tiniest part of the center of the leaf and I imagined the arrow hitting there, right there where I was looking, in the center of the center of the leaf.