And Now We Shall Do Manly Things (26 page)

C'mon, Heimbuch, get your head in the game,
I thought, though I had to admit that just being in the woods was pretty great. Dad used to talk about getting to a deer blind early, long before the sun comes up, and being there to experience the woods “waking up.” The sounds of songbirds, the rustle of leaves, the branches groaning in a light breeze. He was and is on to something there. Those few minutes I spent just standing there, just being, were so peaceful. It's a shame I nearly ruined it with my urgent need for blood.

I worked the field I started on for another half hour, seeing nothing larger than a starling but mounting my gun with every perceived movement on the off chance it would be a pheasant or a grouse, which I had decided to settle for if need be. I could see through the trees that the group of hunters had cleared out of the field to the north and made my way over there, hoping to find a pheasant emerging from cover and picking up some sloppy seconds. I remained on high alert, kicking every clump of long grass, working the field in a zigzag pattern as if I were pushing a lawn mower over it and realizing, with increasing urgency, how badly I wished I had a dog.

I was happy to discover yet another field north of this second one and crossed a narrow but alarmingly deep ditch to get to it. When I pushed through a thin stand of trees and emerged into this third field, I'd swear I heard a choir sing in one of those moments of epic discovery. It was pheasant Valhalla, the holy grail of hunting grounds: tall grass chest high with two rows of corn planted along the woods to the east and heading north; the private cornfield to the west; and breaks in the tall grass to allow for reconnoiter and rest. It was as if everything I had read in the previous year, everything that had been described to me as the ideal habitat for upland game had been made real. My mouth actually began to water with anticipation.

I could hear scurrying through the grass as I moved forward at a snail's pace. Believing them to be grounded birds, I tried to follow them, keeping my gun held firmly in both hands in front of me and my eyes pivoting from side to side. For forty minutes, I was hyperalert. I knew, just simply knew, that at any moment a pheasant was going to pop up and I would finally become a hunter. I worked up a sweat and unzipped the fleece jacket I was wearing beneath my vest. I paused several times to take long pulls from my bottle of water. I gnashed my teeth and muttered unkind things about not having a dog. And, eventually, I ran out of time. I covered only a section of this perfect field and probably not all that well. I needed to get home to see my wife and kids. We had things to do. Errands to run, homework projects, and regular weekend chores. With great hesitation, I ran out of ways to justify staying longer. I knew that eventually I would come across something, if only I could spend the day. But I couldn't.

I made a vocal vow to return the next weekend and go straight to this third field—no screwing around with horse trails—and I'd already taken care of the trigger lock, so I wouldn't waste any time there either. As I was walking along the fence line back toward my car, my brain registered some movement in the trees separating the first and second fields to my left. I snapped my gun to my shoulder and flipped the safety off, focusing on the point in the low brambles where the rustling came from. I wondered if I should yell “who's there?” or simply wait, and, just as I flipped the safety back on to walk over and investigate, a rabbit took three steps out into the clear. My general hunting license allows me to shoot rabbit. Many upland hunters write about rabbit as an unintended benefit of hunting birds. They can be quite tasty, too, from what I understand. I'd read about them in my book on the field dressing and butchering of upland game. This was the first opportunity I'd had since the safety incident back in Iowa to take legitimate game. And it was right there. I would have had to try to miss in order to miss. I flipped the safety back off and drew a bead on the thing, which was just sitting there, waiting.

I was just about to shoot when I thought about Rebecca and the kids. Had we lived in a place and time that required me to hunt for sustenance, they wouldn't have thought twice about eating a rabbit. But we don't and my wife and Jack, the eldest, are picky eaters. They had agreed only reluctantly to try pheasant and that was because I had assured them it was so much like chicken. A rabbit? Well, that's Easter and Bugs Bunny and hours spent walking through the biggest park in our suburb looking for them and squirrels and ducks. I didn't think I could justify it to them, and I wondered if Jack might think of me as a monster if I were to throw Pete Cottontail on the grill. I had long enough to ponder these and other things, like the possibility of simply lying to him, before I decided not to take the shot.

I
was returning, sadly, empty-handed. I got home less than an hour later and Rebecca called to say she and the kids were on their way home from church.

“Did you get one?” she asked.

“Nope, didn't even see one, but I think I've found the perfect spot for next time.”

“What the hell? When are you going to get something?” she said, an air of playful frustration in her tone.

“I had a chance to shoot a rabbit. You didn't want me to do that, did you?”

“Well, you better shoot something soon,” she said with a hint of disdain. “I mean if we had to rely on you, at the rate you're going, we'd starve to death.”

That's it,
I thought,
the next time I go out, something is going to die.

18

Lust

A
nother December weekend and I'm up long before dawn. My brother-in-law and his girlfriend were visiting for a couple of days, fresh from winter finals and delaying as long as they could going home to be with their parents. I could and can identify. I used to love being among a very few students in my college town. Not having to wait for a pool table or a drink, having the run of the cafeteria. But also just delaying that reimmersion into life at home, which can be as shocking, though not nearly refreshing, as jumping from a sauna into a frozen lake. At any rate, I was glad that they were there. Rebecca and I had a party to go to that night and between Christmas and Christmas parties—and the attendant babysitting—this month was already the most expensive of the last year, and it was not, as of then, half over.

So I was up again. The previous weekend had been a good experience, getting out into the woods, feeling my way around the place, and in the days that followed I caught myself drifting off during meetings, imagining what it will feel like to finally and gloriously get my first bird. I had used a couple of lunch breaks that week to watch YouTube videos on how to clean and cook a rabbit, just in case. Rabbit wasn't my ideal in terms of game, but I figured that if I didn't come home with some protein and quickly, my patient wife would begin to assume I was not in fact hunting, but shacking up with someone else. There's only so many times a guy can come home with stories of near misses and forgotten safeties before his wife starts thinking two things: (1) He is an idiot, not a real man. A real man wouldn't flinch in the face of opportunity. He would seize it and come home to be rewarded with admiration and affection. And (2) He is not actually hunting at all, but cheating or, worse and more pathetic, doing something like playing fantasy football with his buddies. Rebecca was not quite to the point of assuming either of these yet, but when I bent down to kiss her cheek before slipping out of our still-dark bedroom, she muttered, “This time come home with something, will you?,” before rolling back over and going to sleep.

The weather had changed a bit over the previous week. The previous week it had been chilly, but on this morning it was downright cold. The temperature always drops a bit the farther you get away from the city, but as I headed north out of town, I watched the thermometer readout on my dashboard drop from twenty-six degrees to eighteen before I parked in the same place I had a week earlier. This time there was no problem getting the gun put together, no problem at all. The gravel lot where I left my car was probably a half mile from the field I had discovered at the end of my previous trip, so I stamped my feet and flexed my gloved hands trying to revive feeling in my fingertips as I made a beeline for Bird Valhalla.

My face was thoroughly numb, my fingers burning with the sensation of a million tiny pins being shoved into my skin, like getting angry tattoos from sadomasochists living inside my gloves, when I reached the field. The sun was just cracking the horizon, a slow-moving egg breaking into a pan and I was surprisingly, miraculously, completely alone. Where just a week before there had been parked trucks and flashes of blaze orange in nearby cornfields, there was nothing, no one. I had gotten up early to be sure I could get to Valhalla first, to stake my claim on it, but judging by the complete aloneness, I realized quickly that this had not been necessary. I wouldn't see another soul until nearly ten thirty, and then it would just be a couple of guys in a truck asking if I'd had any luck and, by then, I will have become so accustomed to quiet that the interaction would feel like an intrusion.

Valhalla was everything I had remembered and been quietly fantasizing about all week. Three or four acres of the kind of scrubby grass, winter wheat, and tall brambles that offers a lot of cover for birds, surrounded by a seven- or eight-foot-wide band of millet like a track around a high school football field, offering a steam table buffet for beaked critters. I assume it was planted for the very purpose of giving game birds a place to hang out and eat and make themselves available to be hunted. I made a quick mental note to thank the game warden for this nice little touch if I ever saw him and looked across the field, ringed on two sides by woods, a narrow stand of trees to the south and a dirt road to the west on the other side of which was a harvested cornfield. Lamenting again my complete lack of a canine companion, I contemplated a plan. I could try to zigzag my way up the field working lawn-mower style and hoping to scare something up. Or I could walk up the middle and work my way around. Or I could stand around wasting more time and freezing my ass off trying to decide what to do. I began walking along the millet and fell into a comfortable groove. The sun was up and I could feel my fingers and toes. My face was freezer burned, but I've never really liked my nose anyway, so maybe a little emergency plastic surgery would do me some good.

I walked for a couple of hours around the track of thigh-high grain, ducking occasionally into it or the inner field. I began to understand what Dad was always talking about when he referred to the woods “waking up.” From the snapping cold stillness of those moments just before dawn, the field and adjacent woods seemed to change with each passing minute. First the leaves begin to rustle, then the songbirds begin singing their chipper morning tunes. Then the movement starts. The world begins to thaw, and what had been coated in a sheen of matte silver comes to life, the sun a slow drizzle of hot water clearing up the windshield of the world. Jesus, I was beginning to sound like Thoreau. Before I know it I'll be sitting in a stream rubbing mud all over my face and proclaiming the majesty of the potato bug. I'm as romantic as the next guy, as awed by the sight of something beautiful and made by something other than man. I may even catch myself daisy-eyed and dreaming about adventures into the woods, but weepy about a sunrise? Not really, not ever. It must have been the cold or the fact that I hadn't slept well the night before that was warming the chambers of my numb suburban heart. I wondered what it must be like to wake up every day not to the drone of that same oversized alarm clock you've had since college and all the expectations of schedule and responsibility, but to something else. Something more wide open. A life not dictated by all the shit a man has to do to build a career, nurture a marriage, raise some kids who don't end up on America's Most Wanted, and maintain a household. Or perhaps a life where all those things were tied into one. My life at this point felt so fractured, so striated into separate, never-to-overlap streams of need and duty. There was my work life and the hundred or so people involved with it. The meetings, the deadlines, the impatience of wanting to make things go better, run smoother, explore new opportunities and feeling like my hands, my coworkers, and clients simply can't move as fast as my brain, leaving me wrestling with a sense that I could and should be doing better and thus was failing. My fatherhood life and the three kids I was trying awfully hard to spend equal amounts of time with and pay equal attention to. I was getting frustrated a lot. Frustrated about toys not put away. Frustrated at dinners not eaten. Frustrated about having to ask more than once, all the things that go into and along with parenthood. To make it worse, I knew that nothing the kids were doing or not doing was really why I was frustrated. I was frustrated because I hated where we lived and was tired of being the one who had to say, over and over, how lucky we were and hadn't we made it such a long way? And we're almost there. Just be patient. Trying to placate my wife's wants and needs was exhausting and completely artificial, given that I too was frustrated. I really did think we were close—to having a house, to having a yard and a basement, to having the kind of life we grew up with and always wanted for ourselves and our children. Frustrated that we had come such a long way—all the credit card debt and student loan debt and credit counseling and extra work and staying home and late nights writing at Starbucks. I wanted to believe, really believe that it had all been worth something, for something—that things would work out for the best in the end, that the end would come soon, and that the end would really be a new beginning. I knew what I wanted and I couldn't get at it. It's like a bear being put inside of a cage and made to stare at a room service tray piled high with food placed on a table just out of paw's reach. I wasn't sure how long I could claw at the air and keep up hope that one day I would reach the jar of peanut butter.

I felt ridiculous, circling this seven-hundred-yard track over and over, but, to be honest, I didn't know what else to do. If there were birds to be had, I figured, they were in here where they had cover and food. The walking started to feel good, freeing. So it didn't matter how ridiculous I felt, I also felt good. The longer I walked, the more attention I paid to the details around me and the less I thought about the next year's taxes, the meetings I had coming up that week, and whether or not Dylan would ever eat spinach. It was like tuning out by paying attention to something else. I listened to the low cheeping of small songbirds and the creaking of the trees as they swayed in the gentle breeze. I watched the field go from a jumbled mass of brown vegetation to a complicated and diverse ecosystem of varied and distinctive natural architecture—the straight and tall chest-high grass that was almost yellow on the south end; the single tree with bent branches that almost touched the ground in the center; the short grass that looked like it had been mowed, though never watered. I began seeing things in the world around me—opportunities, hiding places, bent or broken branches that led me to believe something had been there. I saw small, narrow stars in the mud, like the Mercedes emblem and came to realize they were footprints left by birds after the last rain. The more I tuned out of my own head, the more attuned I became. In a life where sensory overload is the norm, where every turn is met by a billboard, every thought accompanied by a song pumped in on my iPod, I had forgotten all about what it meant to just be outside. I had forgotten what I had learned as a kid running around in the woods behind my parents' house—that when you are out of doors, you are never without something to watch, something to hear, something to pay attention to; you just have to be willing to notice it.

I had also forgotten about the amazingly free feeling of stopping where you are, unzipping and relieving yourself in the fresh air. It's one of the central blessings of being a man and one of those things I imagine will be as satisfying at eighty-two as it was at twelve. I didn't even move to a tree, just stood where I was, unloaded my gun, unzipped, and let fly. I believe I even whistled while I was doing it. How can anyone be worried or stressed when whistling while whizzing in the wild? It's impossible, I assure you.

After my brief interlude, I realized in a half-dazed sort of way that there were only two things to complain about. The first was an absolute fucking lack of birds and the second was a bunching of my socks under the arches of my feet. It had started a little annoying and worked its way up to a lot annoying and a little bit painful.

They don't exactly put benches on hunting grounds, so I once again unloaded my gun and sat in the grass between the woods and millet on the north end of the field to pull up my socks and retie my shoes. I didn't realize it would feel so good, but after five or six miles of walking in the cold, sitting was something bordering upon orgasmic in terms of sheer physical pleasure. So, I sat. It wasn't like I had much else to do. I still had time before I needed to leave, and I had given up on the idea that I'd get a bird an hour before. Maybe I'd find a rabbit. Maybe. It wasn't that I was ambivalent about it. I wanted to kill something that morning. It was just that I was out there. I was feeling pretty good and, on balance, that was the most I could really ask for with a clean conscience. I sat for twenty minutes or so, taking sips from the water bottle I had been carrying in my game bag and trying to decide the point of diminishing returns between the joy of sitting and the quickly plummeting temperature of my ass. Eventually, the ass won out and I rose, noticeably stiffer, pulled two shells from my pocket and dropped them into the empty chambers of the gun and snapped it closed. I took one step, one tiny step toward the millet, and the quiet morning air was fractured by the sound of five tiny helicopters blasting off from where I was about to step.

That's when it happened. A flush and whoosh of activity as birds sprang out before me from the millet. My heart jumped, my hands moved by instinct, raising the gun to my shoulder and flicking the safety forward. There were five of them. One went to the right along the woods, one took a sharp left, and another buzzed right by my head and straight behind me. The other two took off at an angle somewhere between twelve and one o'clock. I fired—
cli-boom
—and the first shot missed though I had no idea in which direction since I had pulled the trigger before my face was flush against the stock of the gun. I may have just missed or I may have missed by fifteen feet. I have no idea. I was looking out down the barrel when I pulled the trigger a second time. The birds were pretty far away by this point, but I knew they weren't pheasant and thought perhaps they were ruffed grouse. A little smaller and more blandly colored than a cock pheasant, a ruffed grouse is as good a game bird as any and usually very hard to flush. They like to run—even more than pheasant do—so getting them up in the air without a dog is pretty tough. And they're fast. Really fast. The way they took off, it was like they had rockets in their keisters.

I picked out the bottom of the two birds for no reason other than I thought I saw it more clearly. My shot was on target, so pulling the trigger, I expected the thing to drop like a stone into the western edge of Valhalla. I'm pretty sure I hit it, since the grouse dipped a bit in its flight path, but it didn't fall. Shit. I jammed my hand into my vest pocket to pull out some more shells, flipping my gun open like Schwarzenegger in
Terminator 2
and not paying any attention to the spent shells as they ejected and flew smoking past my right temple. I slammed the new shells in and snapped the gun closed as I raised it to my shoulder in one fluid motion. I got my bearings back on the gun and knew the birds were too far away, but my adrenaline was pumping like a swollen river and I couldn't help but squeeze off two more shots.