DOVE HUNTING

I loved to play football and I was pretty good at it. (I know you’re wondering about the connection between football and dove hunting. I’ll get there.) In the fall many of my friends were out practicing on the football team after school. I would have loved to be with them but my mother absolutely forbid me to join the team. There were just a few things that my mother took this hard a line on. Drinking, swearing and smoking were on this list but these were cardinal sins. Football was just a game and I pleaded with my mother until I was blue in the face to let me play. It did no good. I appealed to my father to intervene but he wasn’t about to get between my mother and me on this one.

A little Slippery Rock High School history may help to understand her position. You see in the distant past (perhaps the 1940s) a young man had died playing football for our high school. That was enough for this small town to kill the program as well. Slippery Rock had no football team until my sophomore year. My mother was born to worry. She worked in concern the way Rembrandt did in oil. She was indeed a master worrier and she was scared to death that if she signed that football team release form I would surely be the next casualty that killed the program once more.

The football coach was an uncompromising man. He knew that I had a natural talent for the game and wanted me on the team. I told him that my mom wouldn’t sign the release form and told him to take it up with her. He knew my parents as they went to our church and his wife and Mom were friends. However, he took the route of making my life a living hell in gym class instead. Typical tactics were to pit me against an arch enemy much bigger than me in a wresting match or to make me “attempt” to climb the rope to the top while others watched. He certainly succeeded in the “hell” part but my mom never budged. And so I resigned myself to the fact that the marching band would be as close to the football team as I would get.

Like my father (a bugler in the Army) and my brother, I played the trumpet. I wasn’t great but good enough for a small high school band. There were a lot of trumpet players so when I graduated from junior to senior high I took up the baritone horn as there were only two other baritone players in the band. (Okay, we’re getting close to the dove hunting part now.) Jerry Ralston was one of the baritone players. He was a year younger and one of the craziest kids in the band. He had a great sense of humor, and we were always goofing off. When there was a commotion in the ranks, Mr. Arnold, the band leader would always look our way first. Jerry was an avid hunter and lived just on the other side of the abandoned strip mine from our house. Often we would decide to skip out on after-school band practice and hit the fields instead.

Doves were some of the hardest game to shoot. They didn’t inhabit heavy cover like grouse did. Instead they were normally found in open fields. But they were fast and they never let you get very close before they flushed. You can solve some of this problem with a good bird dog but neither Jerry nor I had one. Besides, we weren’t really intent on bringing home any dead doves to eat. We just loved to shoot at them, and we burned up a lot of 12 gauge shells doing just that. Ammunition wasn’t a problem for me because Dad (being a league trap shooter) was also a re-loader of shotgun shells.

On the day in question I skipped out on band practice and hurriedly walked the quarter mile home from school. I threw on my old brown (this was before the blaze orange mandate) hunting vest and selected my dad’s Winchester model 12 from the gun cabinet. Dad had bought this trap-grade shotgun a few years earlier from a guy at the trap league. The fellow had just won it in a raffle and needed some cash. Dad “stole” it for $125. It had a full choke and a 30-inch barrel. Not a typical dove gun but I was getting tired of missing birds that got out of range too quickly with the Browning skeet gun I typically used.

After downing a quick glass of milk and a handful of cookies from my mom’s old white cookie tin, I quickly covered the ground between our house and the strip mine, where I met Jerry. It was a beautiful fall afternoon with clear blue skies not typical in cloudy western Pennsylvania. The kind of day when you can forget your troubles (like gym class and the football coach) and makes you feel glad to be alive and outdoors (not marching with a baritone horn in your hand). I much preferred carrying a shotgun, although the Winchester was much heavier than the Browning. Jerry was his jovial self, cracking jokes almost continually. He found just about anything funny, and I enjoyed his company almost as much as the pursuit of doves. For me the social aspect of hunting is a lot like golf. I don’t mind going by myself but I much prefer someone to share the experience with.

We found some fields of standing corn, around which doves seemed to like to hang out. There was no use walking through the corn, as you couldn’t get a shot off even if you did flush a bird. Jerry and I were about 30 yards apart moving past the edge of the corn when a groundhog darted from the edge of the field in front of me, angling out in front of Jerry. Now a groundhog at that time was both the most hated of animals by the farmers and one of the most desired targets for a boy with a gun. (I suppose that’s why the movie, Groundhog Day, is my all time favorite.) Farmers hated the large rodents for the many holes they dug in their fields. Groundhog hunters ordinarily liked to pick off these varmints with a high powered rifle from long range. (My brother’s friend, Roy Corso, had a hole in the trunk lid of his 1958 Olds 88 from laying across the back end of the car to shoot at a “pig” in a road-side field. The 270 bullet passed right through the decorative rib behind the rear window. I don’t remember if the shell hit the desired target after passing through the car.)

But I digress. The groundhog startled me a split second before I was able to level the shotgun and squeeze the trigger. At about 20 yards I hit the pig with a pretty good pattern of 7 ½ shot (designed for small birds not large rodents), which he absorbed, rolled, got up and reversed his field. Now he was angling away from me toward Jerry. Jerry didn’t like groundhogs anymore than the farmers did so he took careful aim to try to finish the pesky creature off. The problem was that Jerry wasn’t looking at anything but the groundhog and neither was I at that moment. I was leveling for a second shot, following the wounded pig as he raced right between Jerry and I. Luckily for both hunters we were just far enough apart that when both shotguns discharged at the same time, dirt, and not lead, was the only thing that splattered both of us. The wounded groundhog kept going as we both stared at one another, mouths agape (after briefly exclaiming in unison something like, “holy shit.”) Now normal hunters might have cut their losses, figured they were lucky to be alive and headed home. That would be normal hunters not “Tom and Jerry” who bore more of a resemblance to the mayhem in the cartoon show than just by name.

Brushing the dirt stirred up by the simultaneous 12 gauge blasts from our clothes we moved on, joking about the fact that we had almost killed one another and wondering out loud what people would have thought when they found our bodies. They certainly would never have thought we would be stupid enough to shoot at a wounded groundhog that had run directly between us. In a few moments the incident was forgotten, tucked away to be relived in the brass section of band practice the following day. There were doves to shoot. (Note that this was almost 45 years before the vice president accidentally shot his friend while hunting.)

As we approached the lane to a nearby farm we could see doves sitting on the telephone lines than ran along side. They seemed to mock us with their mourning coo (they don’t call them mourning doves for nothing). Jerry and I looked at one another and immediately knew we both had the same thought. Would we continue our run of stupidity and try to pick the birds off the wire? No, surprisingly enough, we both shook our heads in the negative. I’m not sure that we were smart enough to know that shooting at telephones lines was a bad idea or we just figured the birds would fly before we go close enough for a shot.

We proceeded through some good cover and were able to jump a few doves in shooting range. I let Jerry shoot first and if he missed, which he normally did, I would take the next shot at longer range. We downed a few birds but mostly we just shot up a lot of ammunition. We were having a great time and not missing band practice at all. Soon we came to the edge of a high wall from the abandoned strip mine. It was time to sit down for a break. We sat near the edge of the precipice and felt the cool breeze waft up from the valley below.

Jerry pulled out a can of beer from the game pocked of his vest. This was to be expected as Jerry was a big beer drinker, even at 14. I was not a beer drinker as my parents had convinced me that one drink would send you straight to hell, as well as the county jail. I think there was also some sort of family disownment penalty involved if Mom or Dad ever smelled it on your breath. My vice was smoking a pipe. In that day they frowned on selling cigarettes to minors but nobody seemed concerned about pipes and pipe tobacco. I guess they believed you must be buying it for an adult. I pulled out my pipe, tamped some Cherry Blend into the bowl, and thoughtfully lit it with a kitchen match. Life seemed good for two kids who had skipped band, escaped death, and settled down to enjoy the cool air on a sunny autumn afternoon, thoughtfully sucking on a beer or drawing on a pipe. If it hadn’t been years before the Old Milwaukee beer commercial we might have said, “It doesn’t get any better than this.” That is until we realized that the field behind us was on fire. The match I had casually tossed over my shoulder had fallen into some dry grass. Wooden kitchen matches have a nasty tendency to stay lit after they’re discarded, unlike the cardboard ones that come in a matchbook. The breeze that felt so cool just a moment before was now fanning the flames and had created a pretty darn good grassfire. We figured we better try to put it out ourselves. If we had to call the fire department I figured I would have preferred to be found dead from the shotgun blast. I suggested that Jerry open another beer to sprinkle on the flames. He just looked at me like I was nuts. We took our vests off and proceeded to stomp and beat the flames, which sort of had us hemmed in around the rim of the high wall. It seemed like a long time but I think it was just about ten minutes or so of intense stomping and beating that it took to get the fire out. For the next half hour we stood around and watched for flare-ups. Jerry drank a second beer. I kept my pipe (and my matches) in my pocket as we stared at our melted rubber boots.

It was time to head home for supper. Not only would it be dark soon but my dad would be getting home from work and that signaled suppertime. I bid Jerry goodbye and told him I was glad that I hadn’t killed him by either lead or fire. He shrugged as though it was all in a day afield. When I arrived home my melted boots and smoky clothes were pretty tough to explain away without admitting involvement in a grassfire. I lied that Jerry had been smoking and caught the field on fire. My mother was horrified that I had actually been close enough to a fire to stomp it out with my boots. She began to ask innumerable health questions (remember that worrying was her forte). My dad immediately asked if the shotgun had been damaged in any way. When I assured him it hadn’t he went back to reading his Butler Eagle.

Dinner consisted of a meatloaf and scalloped potatoes, not roasted dove. As routine my brother and I carried the conversation around the table. We each discussed our day’s events but I didn’t bring up the shooting incident and tried to downplay the fire. After Bonanza was over on TV that evening I went to bed and drifted off to sleep thinking about how exciting life could be for a 15 year old kid.

The next day when Mr. Arnold asked Jerry and me why we missed practice the day prior, we said in unison, “We were putting out a fire.” He just shook his head in amazement.