The Hobo And Me

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The first two corkscrewed out of an overgrown apple orchard and disappeared along the edge of my father’s beanfield. Octobers were different then. The dog was a brassy Norwegian Elkhound, and there was no double gun. I wouldn’t have even known they were woodcock had it not been for the mount in Uncle Will’s living room.

I set foot in Uncle’s house but twice while he lived and I never saw the woodcock. My grandfather’s younger brother loved guns, but did not hunt. He lived lonely and long in eccentric bachelor squalor; empty plastic cider jugs were piled halfway up his basement steps, and he kept the blankets anchored at the foot of his bed with a stout-barreled muzzleloader. My mother found the dusty, bug-eyed relic behind a decade’s stack of National Geographic in the living room after Will died.

A handful of years and six hundreds miles from my Uncle’s house, young Jesse bumped another woodcock holding tight on an Upper Peninsula hillside. I knew better than to shoot a bird the dog didn’t handle, but knowing better and doing better, as my brother says, are two very different things. I thought I saw the woodcock drop at the frantic stab of a heavy Italian over/under.