Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (34 page)

Ritual isn’t a New World strong point. We resist it. In Europe—in England, make it, where formalities are born— hunting and fresh-water fishing stopped being root economic activities a long long stretch of years ago. Their leisure classes spent pleasant centuries building stone walls along the limits of what one simply does or doesn’t do with gun and rod. Innovation collides with reluctance or refusal. Izaak Walton had heard of reels, but had no wish to use one. Around the turn of this present century Lord Walsingham (“a thousand and seventy grouse to my gun in a day,” he boasts of somewhere, and he meant every one on the wing, with a sweating loader helping him to keep the hot guns shouting) fought hard against smokeless powder, chilled shot, and choked barrels. He lost that one, but by and large today in England and to a lesser, imitative degree on the Continent, to own a repeating shotgun is to risk one’s caste, and no one who is anyone fishes for trout or salmon with anything but artificial flies, or levels down on horned beasts with telescopic sights, or chases foxes except by those rules which, in essence, had been distilled by the early Middle Ages.

The fact that a single small class, until lately a ruling one,
sits astraddle most of the rights to European hunting and fishing probably makes it easier to keep them sports. We over here haven’t had an influential class much interested in ritual except along a skinny strip of the east coast, and haven’t wanted one, and furthermore aren’t more than fifty or sixty vcars away from the idea of wild game as family meat or as a market harvest. The limitations we accept, unwillingly for the most part, are legal rather than voluntary. They have less to do with subjugating ends to means than with the chunky fact that if we’d kept on killing things at the bloody clip our grandfathers maintained, there wouldn’t be anything left to kill by now.

We have a kind of sporting ideal, British in root. It shows up on the covers of the November issues of outdoor magazines (showcases, most of them, for the technological innovations with which manufacturers keep hacking at the fringe of the law’s limitations) as pictures of a couple of sunburned Anglo-Ams moseying with a dog and their battered pet shotguns through golden autumn cornfields, dropping a few pheasants from the air with sweet skill and restraint.

Most of us who hunt and fish do espouse that ideal, if only guiltily. As often as not, reality is more hoggish and less organic. Americans regularly shoot from automobiles and fast motorboats and even airplanes when wardens aren’t in prospect. Most would use machine guns or electronic compensating gun sights if they could get hold of them. The old Brazos’s dynamiters and telephoners are merely symptomatic of what a good many other people would do if they had the equipment and the nerve.

And, faced with the choice between a risky ritualistic shot and a certain sitting one, with a Thanksgiving supper in the
scales, had not one American let the grandfather syndrome rule him and shot the sure thing?

For which did he feel more shame—for the unsporting shot that brought good dead meat to the pot, or the ap-provable gesture that maimed a wild thing to no purpose?

For the latter, certainly …

One was, then, no true sportsman?

Not on the river, it seemed … Not consistently. Not while out for meat and no more meat than his belly could hold.

Some grabblers whom Davis Birdsong knew—do I remember that James Lemmon, deceased, was among them?— once located an enormous yellow cat at the spot where Squaw Creek and the Paluxy come together into the Brazos. Though he would let them touch him without moving, there was no question of anyone’s being able to wrestle him out from under the deep-hollowed bank where he dozed, nor did such offerings as a ripe dead kitten on a great hook attached to sash cord even make his whiskers quiver. Wanting him with that heat of desiring that has nothing really to do with meat, and digs back so far in the relationship of man to beasts and gets so tangled with “sport” that it disrupts all agreeable semantic theorizing, they puzzled. One, inventive, went into Glen Rose and got a blacksmith to make him a short iron harpoon. He tied it with a rope to an empty oil drum, and followed by his companions and the blacksmith and that considerable fragment of the town’s population who’d gotten wind of the affair, went back to the river. Shrugging off help, he stripped and jumped into the water with his apparatus, dived bearing the spear back into the monster’s dim cavern, jammed it into his side, and got his
shoulder broken in two places as the big fish came out, well stuck. Whooping along the shore, splashing through the shallows and swimming when they had to, the rest of the crowd chased the bobbing, racing drum for a half-mile down the river. When it stopped and the catfish rolled up to the surface dead and they took him out, he weighed 117 pounds.

Maybe that’s the shape of pretechnological American sportingness. There was risk, and the guts to plunge against the risk. There was ingenuity, and practically no ritual. There was joyous illegality. There was success, and a hell of a hunk of meat in the end. If it was a long way distant from that pink-coated, view-hallooing pursuit of the uneatable by the unspeakable that Surtees ironically loved and Wilde satirized, it was at least something in its own right. Is still, even …

And then you could take up hound people. God knows they do have ritual, and not any ruling-class kind either. Sport is quite a subject, if not much of a word.

The big live oak’s branch hung solid above me. I reached up and touched its roughness. The foliage of the upper limbs, frost-proof, shut out the moon and stars and reflected faint green firelight down, enclosing the sandy patch of space that held me and the fire and the tent’s black yawn. On the embers, small dead branches I’d torn off smoldered fragrant; their smoke, unlike that from other oaks, doesn’t smart the eyes.… It’s a good tree, the live oak, the one I like best of all with that unreasoning affection one gets for breeds and species of things. The feeling is tied up with the big mossy ones in South Texas we used to climb as kids, to coon along the high branches barefooted and then to sit up there, unseen and we hoped unsuspected, sucking hot clandestine
corncob pipes and flipping acorns at our tethered ponies below. It is linked, too, with a good pair of years that I spent once in Spain where on parts of the Castilian meseta and thickly to its southwest, in Estremadura, the mottes of black-green live oaks they call robles stain tawny hills, and under them mast-eating half-wild swine run lean and wary.

Nearby, though directionless, a horned owl was communing (with relatives? with victims-to-be? with himself? with me?) in that velvet hoot-hooting so much less savage than the hooter. Thinking of robles had stuck a song in my head, a scrap from an un-flamenco Andalusian charcoal-vender chant:

which in its turn was drowned in another song that a twist in the air brought me in the voice of the mill rapids just downriver. More whimsicality, I know, but rapids, and one’s head, do have voices.… Baptistly, poundingly, this one was singing “Beulah Land.”

It was a woman who’d taught me the carbonero song, a pretty one, sailboating on a Mediterranean bay. Yes, ma’am, I too have heard the mermaids calling across the blue foreign waters, and once or twice at least I thought I knew what they were saying.

On the river alone, though, mermaid thoughts seem not to stick you deeply. Each day’s fatigue accrues into a drained satisfaction at night. Not seeing any mermaids, you tend not to feel their pull. Not feeling the pull, you forget its strength. Likely it would be different if you stayed out longer, for months or years. Saint Henry himself, if I’ve read aright one
passage in him, felt the pull and the itch and the barb, and fought Pilgrim-puritannically against them.…

On the fire the Red Gods squeaked, out of key.…

N
EXT MORNING
in the predawn a hoarse and hollow shriek awoke me. Half dozing, I wondered about it—a little like the hunting, hovering scream of the red-tailed hawk, except that no hawk would fly abroad so early. I lay wondering, and then when it repeated itself, clipped and end-upturning unlike any red-tail, I remembered a winter in an old house by a creek when the barn owls had yelled and talked all night long in the cold moonlight beside the stable, and it fell into its place.

Later, with light, a Carolina wren came flicking from perch to perch along the shore, singing at each stop. He paused for a few phrases on the handle of my ax stuck in a log. Though good objective naturalists have taught me rightly to resist the anthropomorphic translation of wild things’ doings, what the wren did sing was:
Good morning, good morning, good morning!—

Or maybe it was only that I felt in the mood to hear him say it. They can be a disagreeably blithe bird when you’re not in the humor to listen to them. Russet, the wren sought bugs
in a crack of the log for a moment, found something, and flitted on to sing again farther along the bank. I eased out of the bag into the cold, quiet, perfect air of morning, and dressed. The pup, cured but washed-out, stayed in bed.

Skim ice dulled the bucket water’s surface and had hardened the small gravel of the bar when I went down, and frost lay white on the canoe’s varnished gunwales. I kicked a thick long section of elm loose from its grip, and as I twist-heaved it up to my shoulder to bear to the fire, said aloud: “By God, there you go, Bill Briggs!”

But knew as I spoke that despite memory’s magnifications it hadn’t a third of the weight of some of those pole-sized trunks that he, pine woods bred, used to pick up without even breathing hard and carry to our fires in that same place. Where he’d fried those wondrous eggs …

We’d been about ten when we started going out there with him, in an old low-slung German car that Hale’s father entrusted to us; it would go only forty-five before jumping out of gear, and would get hung sometimes on hump-backed dirt roads and would sprawl there, pawing air, while we hunted brush and stones to give it traction. In those times still, no one much cared if you crossed his back pasture to get to the river. At Falls Creek we would camp in slovenly style with quilts and tarps and jars of bacon grease and ketchup and cans of city water on the gravel bar by the river, where one of the old head rises should have caught us but none ever did. The river was red-muddy then more often than not. We would put out lines, and with rods would fish the clear creek’s pools for a mile or so up.

“Aw, naw,” Bill Briggs would say mildly when we wanted to do something we had no business doing, like—tired of
fishing—swimming in the river when it was running strong, or—tired of fish—swiping a pullet from a farmer’s flock, or—tired of chopping hard resistant driftwood—trying out our ax on the big shade trees above the bank. “Aw, naw. Y’all go run ’at line. Us ain’ got no supper fish yet, you know?”

And though we would holler back at him sometimes, we did not often gaingo his soft injunctions. He had a quiet authority, stiffened at long range by the authority of Hale’s father.… Periodically he would vanish for six months or a year or so, and when he came back he would have been cooking on the Pullman dining cars, where he was in demand, drifting about the country. Hale’s family’s house was base for him but he was migratory, urged by some interior thorn of sadness or homelessness or womanlessness (he never kept one long) to search from time to time across the continent’s spraddle. He was huge, flat-faced, dark brown, and altogether gentle. Falls Creek is not one of the hotly Anglo-Am parts of the river country, and farmers would welcome us in his care who later, with right, looked at me and Hale by ourselves inhospitably.