Over the door, on brass hooks that cost more than the rifle originally did, screwed to a log wall of eight-inch Colorado spruce, hangs a 45-70, a trapdoor Springfield that belonged to my great grandfather. Just like the one Geronimo has propped on his knee in that famous last-of-the-breed photograph: short-barrel and cut-down stock for horse cavalry scabbard, for ease of use from the saddle.
"1873" shows clearly on the trapdoor. The rifle has grown dark and notched with use and age, the high hammer thumbed shiny. Great grandmother, bless her long-gone soul and when you could understand her Carolina cottonfield-accented mumble, spoke of how often her husband carried it. I grew up on the edge of cottonfields and swamps, but I never met my great grandfather.
Grandpa let me fire it once, about the time my eyeballs reached his belt buckle, nearly a half-century ago. Leaning way back to counterbalance its weight, the cannon roar threw me stumbling into the side of the smokehouse. Hot lead flew over the cottonfield and into the swamp. Grandpa's soft good-natured chuckle drifted after the smoke, and erupted again when I ate Grandma's breakfast, of thick biscuits and homemade chocolate syrup, with the wrong hand. After breakfast we loaded cane poles in a creaky wooden johnboat and paddled over moss-shadowed water, drowning worms in search of bluegill and stumpsucker, my ears still ringing.
By the time I was old enough to tote a gun during whitetail season, Grandpa had retired from hunting, and Pa had given me a Remington 12-gauge, with a deep bellow, and a handful of buckshot. I graduated to the sharp crack of a bolt-action 30.06, and the trapdoor Springfield was forgotten. Grandpa died and passed it on to his oldest daughter, my aunt, who died and left it to her son, my cousin, whose untimely death sent it my way more than four decades later.
Rowe, the local gunsmith, says it's in fine shape, but he thinks a factory load might split the 120-year-old barrel. He says he can pack a lighter load for me, and I can hear it again, a far piece and a far time from South Carolina. This morning I wonder if the boom will match the preciseness of my recall.
My 23rd Rocky Mountain elk season opens tomorrow, and yesterday I shot three rounds from the Weatherby into a black circle at 100 yards, making sure the scope remained on target. Thunder from the exploding powder echoed satisfyingly down a narrow valley, and my shoulder bucked a little. This morning my stuffed pack leans against the wall, and the rumble of Quartz Creek out back creates a faint pleasant strain on the silence. Dawn rises cold, and creamy orange clouds are whipped up over a distant snow-whitened ridge. I lay in that crunchy snow yesterday, peering through binoculars, watching 18 elk feed across a sun-warmed mountain flank, hoping to hear one more soul-stirring bugle, thinking about the solid snick when the trapdoor flies open.
Last night the cabin filled with the scrape of knife on whetstone, the tinkle of ice in the straight Kentucky bourbon, the crackle of resin-rich pine in the fire, the sizzle of trout in the cast-iron frying pan, talk of elk and mulies and trajectories: comfortable sounds, not much changed from a night before Georgia dove season opened 25 years past, or the night before my first elk hunt, or a night here one year ago.
Sounds rekindle memories, and stoke the flames of passion. Hissing windsong, rising and falling through a tight growth of young spruce, once caused me to abandon a stalk and sit for an hour among the dark needles.
Chatter of Canada jays takes me joyfully back to the first morning one entered camp to land on my knee and cautiously eat crumbs from my hand. I fed birds until the sun shone on my "early" start. Full moon howls of coyotes lift me to a dozen cold mountain nights in a warm bag. Shotgun on shoulder, rustling across a tall dry grass meadow of fall, I remember vividly the first nervous buzz of a rattlesnake that doubled my pulse.
There are some sounds that can only vibrate in yesterday. The drawls of Grandpa and Grandma, the high-pitched laughter of my aunt that my cousin inherited, have faded from existence forever...but for the ear of the mind.
Great grandfather's trapdoor Springfield hangs silently. It will remain silent, I have decided, except in my heart where the sound of the hunt never dies.
Copyright (c) 1996 Buck Tilton. All rights reserved.
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