And Now We Shall Do Manly Things (14 page)

I read ahead through the final chapter of the book—a real page-turner about bag limits and habitat reconstitution—and was finished with the review questions before Arthur had finished covering the review of the four tenets of hunter safety. I couldn't stop my fingers tapping as I waited impatiently for the old man to finish his duties and was crestfallen when he announced that we would take the test after lunch. It was like waking up early on Christmas morning and being told you couldn't open your presents until after Great-Aunt Sylvia put on her face.

W
hen it finally came time to take the test, Arthur took his sweet time reading the one paragraph of instructions on the cover of the test, telling us three mildly disturbing stories about accidental dismemberment, and admonishing anyone who dared use a pen.

I was prepared. I had my number two pencils sharpened. I was locked, cocked, and ready to rock. I tore into the exam with such eagerness, I nearly grunted marking my first answer.

The test itself is composed of one hundred multiple-choice questions. Perhaps thirty-five of these questions are true or false. The rest cover everything from naming parts of particular weapons to short situational paragraphs in which a hunting tragedy has occurred and the test taker must identify the likely cause.

A passing grade is 80 percent or greater. Matt made himself available to read the questions to those who had difficulty with reading comprehension—mostly younger children, though not exclusively. The instructors also had the authority to retest those who scored between 70 and 79 on the spot, but they would only ask those questions which the people missed.

Did I mention that a significant portion of the questions were true or false? This reinforced my doubt about the rigorous standards that these tests measure. As I understood it, for anyone scoring in the “C” range, an instructor might pass a person through by asking them a question they know they got wrong the first time, but for which there were only two possible answers.

Forgive my incredulity here, but seriously? It's possible for someone to be sanctioned by the State of Ohio to carry a lethal weapon into the wilderness with the intent of taking a life, and they only need be smart enough not to get a true or false question wrong twice on the same day?

All that is neither here nor there. I was not going to need any retesting. I could feel the knowledge coursing through my veins and into my pencil as I completed the first two pages of questions—nineteen in all—in slightly under three minutes.

The next page was true or false, and I managed to get through those in about thirty seconds before coming to a series of questions related to situational awareness. There were four or five of them, and though Tim had been careful to point out every sentence of the course book that would appear on the test—from the structural difference between a flintlock and inline black powder rifle to the distinction between field dressing and dressing out an animal—he never mentioned that there would be questions requiring logic.

I had a moment of panic when reading the instructions, but by the time I was through with the first question, my mind was at ease. I can't recall the exact wording, but it went something like this:

“You are planning a day of pheasant hunting with your friends. You've prepared a hunting plan, and on the day they come to pick you up, you notice empty beer cans on the floor of the truck. When you arrive at the place where you are going to hunt, your friends each take out another beer, chug it, and stuff a few more into the pockets of their hunting vests. What do you do?”

a. Join them and suggest a quick bump of cocaine because you always shoot better when you're drunk
and
stoned.

b. Shoot them both in the face for insulting your honor, then go have your way with a nearby sheep, thus proving you are both noble and mighty.

c. Cancel the hunting trip and call another friend for a ride home.

You can see why I was not terribly worried about this small wrinkle, particularly given that this question was the most nuanced and tricky.

In total, I spent a hair over fifteen minutes completing my test and was, by a margin of more than ten minutes, the first one done in the class. This, in and of itself, was reason for concern. Had I missed something? A second booklet of questions perhaps? Had I gone too fast and skipped some?

I made a quick scan of my answer sheet and checked that all hundred blanks had been filled in, then handed my completed test to Arthur for grading and returned to my seat in nervous anticipation.

What would have taken any reasonably competent teacher fifteen seconds to grade required fifteen minutes of Arthur's careful study, and the more I sat there, the more I questioned my answers. I only had a 2 percent margin to beat my brother, so if I missed more than two questions, I would forever bear the shame of having failed at this manly undertaking. I might as well join a nunnery to escape the relentless mockery from my younger sibling.

I was on the very edge of a panic attack when I heard Arthur call a name: “Chris Hindburge?”

Given that I had been done first, I figure he was simply misreading my sometimes-sloppy handwriting. I stepped to the table and awaited the verdict.

“Chris?” asked Arthur.

“Actually, it's Craig, Craig Heimbuch.”

He looked down at the registration form and exam in front of him and shook his head with an “oh, yeah, right.”

“Congratulations, Kyle, you passed.” He handed me my registration card.

“By how much?” I asked.

He took a moment to process this, not because he was particularly slow, but because I'm not sure a student had ever spoken directly to him before. He consulted the answer sheet and appeared to do a little math in his head before returning his gaze to me.

“One hundred,” he said. “You got a hundred. Congratulations.”

I shook Arthur's, Matt's, and Tim's hands furiously, thanking them all for an enlightening weekend. I was skipping out the door when Arthur called after me.

“We're having an NRA info session afterward if you want to stick around,” he said.

“Not a chance,” I replied. “But thanks anyway.”

I ran to my car and got out my phone to call Kosta.

This just couldn't wait until Thanksgiving.

11

The Interstitial Time

T
hough I was now a licensed hunter, hunting season was still months off, which left me with a good bit of time to dally and daydream, but little in terms of opportunity to put to practice my theoretical knowledge. It is hard to picture yourself on a cool fall morning dressed in warm clothes and intently following your hunting dog toward an unseen pheasant when the temperature is roughly that of the surface of the sun and the humidity is enough to turn your skin into a spigot of sweat. Summers in southwest Ohio are my least favorite time of year. It is awfully, almost unbearably hot, and the air is thick with moisture, pollution, and, to my great and constant chagrin, allergens. The summer weather in Cleveland was very similar, but there we had relief in the form of Lake Erie. One could always take a dip, provided you were willing to swim amid cast-off syringes and municipal waste. But Greater Cincinnati offers no such recreational relief. I may be brave enough and even enjoy submersion in the lake, but swimming in the Ohio River is an act of pure madness. Rebecca and the kids spent their days at the community pool or the amusement park near where we lived while I perspired my way through twice-daily commutes and long hours trying to find a cool spot in the offices where I work to take advantage of purloined moments of Internet research on the topic of hunting and sportsmanship.

In mid-July, we did something we had never done as a family, had not done, in fact, as a couple since our honeymoon. We took a vacation. No parents or siblings. Just Rebecca, the kids, and me and our closest friends, Anne, John, and their three kids. We all rented a house in coastal North Carolina and had what was for me, the trip of a lifetime. Born in northern Wisconsin and raised in northern Ohio, I was culturally trained to hate the beach. For that matter, I've never much enjoyed the sun because it seems to hate me and my pasty epidermis. But an entire week spent sipping coozie-wrapped beers and bobbing up and down in the waves with Jack and Dylan turned out to be an ideal I could never have imagined. Each night we ate as if the next day were our last and every morning began with a cocktail. We didn't drive anywhere, apart from a trip to a nearby seafood purveyor to pick up some crabs and an ill-advised trip to discover that Myrtle Beach is, in fact, the missing ring from Dante's vision of hell. We didn't have anywhere to be and, because we were in a house and not a hotel, I found myself perfectly content to do nothing more than sit on the couch or sit on the porch and sip scotch. I was amazed how quickly I fell into the habit of taking long showers in the outdoor stall before bed and how good the warm water and cool night air felt on my freshly pinked skin. I felt, well, free and, judging from the constant smiles on the faces of my children and wife, like a real man, a father, a family provider in a way I had never felt before.

Our trip was halfway over before I got a chance to sit for an extended period on the beach, beer hidden from sight and buried in the sand next to me, to read. I had made a promise to myself that I would finish the volume of Hemingway's
The Nick Adams Stories
that had sat on my bedside table for more than four years. It felt somehow appropriate and important. My parents were in the midst of buying their retirement home in northern Michigan, less than fifty miles from the place where Hemingway spent his summers and where his most famous (and some argue autobiographical) character, Nick, was born and raised.

I'll admit that I have for a long time been enamored by the Hemingway mystique. In my younger years and in college, this feeling was something I would never admit; certainly not to my friends or the liberal feminists in my English classes. Hemingway represented the stoic old misogynism, the drunken depressive chauvinist we've all worked so hard to move past. And when one of my professors or classmates would launch into an anti-Ernest tirade, I would find myself nodding and making polite sounds that indicated at least tacit agreement. But I loved Hemingway, or at least I loved the idea of him.

I first came across his work in high school. I was a junior and already a fan of Henry Miller and some of the other American expats (though I wouldn't admit that either since Miller's books were all very graphic and sexual and not something I was willing to discuss with anyone) and was assigned a project in English class to read and report on Hemingway's last and unfinished-by-him novel,
Islands in the Stream.
There had been a list of books to choose from—
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Canterbury Tales,
and others, the random selection of which probably says something about the quality of a public school education at the time—and the title sounded familiar. Of course, I was disappointed later when I realized the book had nothing obvious to do with the Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton song. I procrastinated like all good high school students do, so long in fact that two nights before the paper was due I had yet to even locate a copy, let alone begin reading. I panicked. I began calling libraries in the area looking for a copy of the book and ended up driving more than forty-five minutes—halfway to Toledo—to get an audio recording of the book and drove around town for more than three hours trying to listen to it in a single sitting.

I believe I got a C- on the paper.

So my introduction to Hemingway was inauspicious at best, but it did plant a seed. In college, I picked up a used copy of his collected short stories—“Hills Like White Elephants” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” quickly became favorites—and even skipped studying for a history exam because I made the mistake of beginning to read
The Sun Also Rises
and didn't stop until I was done. After graduation, I bought a copy of
The Old Man and the Sea
for a dollar and have read it every March since. But I had never read the Nick Adams stories, not all the way through anyway, so I sat on the beach for a couple of hours, not noticing the severe sunburn rouging my shoulders or the fact that a tiny, spiderlike crab had taken refuge in the hole left by my long-empty beer, and read.

I couldn't stop turning the pages. The writing was so dense and heavy, so serious and without a trace of whimsy, not exactly your typical beach reading, but I wasn't in the frame of mind to plow through a mindless novel. Vacation had relaxed me, but that relaxation only clarified my focus on learning to hunt. When I came to the last story in the collection, “Fathers and Sons,” it was as if this long-dead and personally denied writer were speaking to me directly, laying out the ideal of a youth I had never had but was now picturing as if it were a fond memory. Nick is driving with his young son, returning to the Michigan of his youth and remembering what it was like to grow up there with his own father, a doctor and outdoorsman. It's only a few lines, but Hemingway writes about how Nick learned to hunt pheasant from his father, how to shoot and how to be a sportsman. I began to feel a pang of regret. My own dad would have loved to have taught me all those things, but I was too unwilling to learn. I began to wonder what I had missed out on, but more than that, what I had denied him by not taking any interest in what he wanted to show me. And I understood that his random gift of a gun, his encouragement when I told him about my plans to learn to hunt, all of it, was him feeling like he might get to make up for lost time and there was still a chance to have those kinds of experiences together.

I hoped there was.

Regret quickly morphed into renewed vigor, but not before I put down the book, grabbed a fresh beer from the cooler, and, after a long slug, ran into the ocean to play with my sons. What had started off as an inkling, an experiment—learning to hunt—was now a multigenerational pact and I needed to keep it.

W
e spent a few days in Iowa before July was over—a family reunion—and I finalized my plans with Mark and Tommy to come out at the beginning of November. We did some shooting and Mark began to pressure me to get in the game.

“How are you going to do all this and not buy a gun?” he asked.

“Well, Dad gave me one to use,” I told him.

“Yeah, sure, but are you really gonna get into this using your old man's gun?”

“Um, yes?” I said.

“Well, you seemed to like that Buckmark (a semiautomatic pistol) at the NRA show.”

“I did,” I said, though in that moment I was having a hard time figuring out what the hell he was referring to.

“I got one I'll sell you,” he said. “Why don't you come out tomorrow and we'll shoot some guns and see what you like.”

I was, of course, in no way prepared to buy a gun. The thought had not really occurred to me, not since Dad gave me one of his. But, at the same time, I knew he was right. I did need to buy a gun. I needed to make that investment, but more important, that commitment if I was going to not just play at being a hunter and sportsman, but actually become one.

The next day, he, my uncle Roger, and I shot together at the range in the back end of the property, the same place where I fired my first gun and the place I have always associated with guns. I tried a couple different models and wanted so badly to be able to shoot the sleek and sophisticated semiautomatic Browning Mark had referred to the day before. But the truth is that I could not have hit the broad side of a barn with that thing if I ever found myself in a situation that required me to shoot the widest part of a storage building in order to, say, save a busload of orphans from a fire. Okay, it is admittedly hard to imagine that situation, but you take my meaning. Plus, the way I hold a pistol, the position of my arms and the angle of my elbows were not what Mark described as “a strong enough base” to facilitate the semiautomatic action. These kinds of weapons require resisting force in order to reload properly and my arms, hands, and upper body simply gave too much with every shot. I was, in other words, too much of a weakling to fire a small-caliber weapon and make it work. He recommended I try out a couple of revolvers.

“Roger and I prefer revolvers,” Mark said. “We just think they're cool.”

“Yup,” acknowledged the seemingly always quiet Roger. “We're old school.”

I felt like an old-time Chicago cop stepping up to the line with the nine-shot Taurus .22-caliber revolver, like I should have an Irish accent and be on the lookout for whiskey runners. Sort of ridiculous actually. But I cocked the hammer and pulled the trigger and it felt good. I emptied all the chambers and walked down to the paper target to discover I had shot a nice grouping. It was love at first shot. I couldn't buy the gun at that moment, but I made a weak promise to Mark that I would buy it someday.

Getting back to Cincinnati, we quickly fell back into real life after our vacations and more than three thousand miles driven. Rebecca and the kids made the most of the last days of summer and I settled back in at work, a little tanner and a whole lot less stressed. I continued to look for opportunities to improve my essential hunting skills, and though they were few and far between, I managed to find some.

One night, Rebecca was tired and didn't feel like cooking or ordering a pizza, so she called me on my way home and asked me to stop at the grocery store to pick something up.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“Oh, whatever, just bring it home quick. We're starving.”

I was walking through aisles of frozen food and couldn't help but think of what I had learned about the McRib, which made every single scrap of it repelling to the point of revulsion. I didn't feel like grilling since the idea of standing over flames on the hottest day of the year was as appealing as a tax audit during a community theater performance of
The Lord of the Dance,
and I was just about to give up and order Chinese when a smell came to me like a smoke signal from God. I followed my nose and soon found myself in front of a warmer oven chock-full of rotisserie chickens. And they looked as good as they smelled, all wrapped up in cellophane and paper bags, dripping with their own juices and glistening under the heat bulbs. I quickly grabbed one and the makings for a salad and went home to surprise the family.

The directions on the package said to remove the bird from the bag and place it breast up in a pan, heating it for twenty minutes or so. And as I was situating the carcass in the foil-lined pan, I realized something—this looked familiar. Very familiar. I had seen this before and not just under these circumstances. I wiped chicken grease off my fingers and went to the bookshelf in the living room to retrieve my copy of
Field Dressing and Butchering Upland Birds, Waterfowl, and Wild Turkeys
by the exquisitely named Monte Burch. I flipped to a dog-eared page that contained step-by-step line drawings demonstrating how to remove meat from bone on a pheasant. It looked about the same as the chicken, so when the timer went off and the pan came out of the oven, I held the book open with a salt cellar and a bottle of gin and followed the directions. I felt so smart, so innovative, so much like a surgeon practicing on a cadaver.

“What are you doing?” Rebecca asked me as I slowly slid my knife between the breast meat and wishbone. “Hurry up, we're starving.”

I tried to hurry, but I wanted to make sure I got it right. I felt like I had an opportunity and didn't want to waste it. It took me nearly as long to carve the bird as it did to cook, but when I was done I admired my serving dish of moist, succulent chunks of chicken and my trash bag full of neatly and near-completely cleaned bones.

Take that, hunting season. Who's the man now?

T
here was something else I wanted to do before the summer was over, another source I wanted to turn to. I've mentioned my childhood obsession with the L.L.Bean catalog. What if, I thought, I called up L.L.Bean and asked if they would teach me how to hunt?

I knew I wouldn't know everything by the time I went to Iowa. There is, after all, only so much you can learn from reading books and dissecting rotisserie chickens. But I wanted to be more prepared than someone who had never done this kind of thing before. I wanted to close the gap between the twelve-year-old me who didn't know anything and the thirty-three-year-old me who should know something by now, and I had a hunch that L.L.Bean could help me.