My game-shooting season ended with all the small rituals that go with what I foolishly call "putting things away." The gunning coats are gone through, and all the miscellaneous knickknacks that hunters somehow accumulate are sorted out: pieces of rope; plastic sandwich bags; papers of pipe tobacco with only a half a bowlful left and saved for who knows what reason; matches that will never light; pocketknives that have needed sharpening for two seasons; pipe cleaners that have turned a strange and deadly-looking shade of brown.
The dog whistles are taken out and probed for feathers and then hung up on a dowel covered with an empty red-paper shell. The duck and goose calls are probed for feathers and have the dog hair and tobacco crumbs banged out and hung on a dowel covered with an old blue-paper shell. (You can see right away I have a place for everything!) Gloves that have not seen their mates for almost a year are reunited. Shooting glasses are discovered; the missing cases are tracked down and paired off with their rightful contents. And for the first time in many months the 28-gauge shells are separated from the 16s, and the 16s are separated from the 12s.
I am overcome with an incredible energy. Even the hip boots are taken outside and hosed off, then hung upside down on their proper hangers like olive-drab chimneys. The grand finale with the whole orchestra playing is the cleaning of the guns. Linseed and turpentine are rubbed carefully over the wood. The working parts are hosed down with Hoppe's No. 9 until the whole room is dizzying with the one smell that, more than almost any other, makes me already nostalgic for an autumn that is months and months away.
The closing of the gun-cabinet door and the turning of the lock serve as some kind of amen to this little ritual that has come to be as patterned as an ancient Mass. But the dogs who watched me go through the moves of putting things away for years seem completely unconcerned. They accept it for what it is, a small ritual that marks a change of pace--the end of the season being a little kind of sadness for us all. But the old dogs know me too well for them to shed a tear for auld lang syne. It'll be a week or two at worst until the whistles are shucked off the red brass-headed peg, and we're off for a romp. The carefully glistened shotguns will bark or roar, all in turn and turn again in the back field over our somewhat inefficient trap. The shooting glasses will begin another long journey away from their rightful cases, and the hip boots will be rechristened with mud and left to stand, tops turned down, in the hall. Gloves will be scattered from coat to coat, and the red and yellow and green and blue and violet shells will again be randomly nestled together like pocketsful of Christmas lights.
So ritual follows ritual, each more similar than different, and "putting away" seems only the start of "taking all the things out," so that the ceremony never really ends. I'm sure that these are the rituals we enjoy so much for themselves that we end up like some witless cleric, forever fumbling around in outdoor trappings and robes, forever celebrating a succession of magical rites that by now we are helpless to avoid. The Irish poet Yeats may have had the likes of us in mind when he asked the question: "How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
Indeed, our rituals have rituals within themselves--the excitement of studying maps, the commitment of buying a license, the beguiling mysteries and promises of catalogs, the discoveries of the new and the recalling of the past. I know for a fact that, to a great deal of the world, our comings and goings are trivial and pathetic. They are a lot of silliness with dogs and guns and such--most of it is not understandable and that which is understandable is frequently seen as a rather pitiable effort to stay with what we can of our youth. Well, so be it.
I don't feel a great need to be understood by the rest of the world and would be happier if it would just leave me alone--alone to enjoy my small pleasures amidst my curious toys. Right now, the call of the mourning dove will stand me in good stead for a daily hymn, and to sit watching a woodcock worming along the brook in the meadow is to witness a miracle that I cannot pretend to understand. And things like these I need as part of my rituals--perhaps they are the sole reason for having rituals at all. What is commonplace to one person is to me in every sense wonderful. I find my own explanation of power and glory in the rainbow flushing of the pheasant, the sweet pipings of a string of ducklings and the magic of puppies.
And, hoping I will never know better, I shall go forth with my acolyte dogs and old friends along the banks of spring runs, under longleaf pines, through the ancient muskiness of swamps, finding what I want and getting what I need from the cathedrals of alder and birches. My whistles and calls will be slung around my neck like ancient beads. My old gunning clothes will serve as robes. My leaking boots and frozen fingers will mortify my flesh and the fragrance of Hoppe's will serve as incense. I will be there to serve and learn among the things, creatures, times and places that, for some little part of my life, have come to make me happy and grateful for what I am. And to prepare myself against the frequent, unnamed sorrows that come to haunt my shallow sleep, I have found that I have places to hide--in a willow thicket with my friends the woodcock or above the clouds and below the moon with my friends the geese.
This story originally appeared in Mostly Tailfeathers by Gene Hill.
Copyright (c) Gene Hill 1971-74. All rights reserved.