What, I thought, like every grouse hunter has thought, what if I could fly, could glide through the spruce leaders and smile down into the smug, feathery faces like an old ogre confronting the darling princess. The view from the ground was green bottlebrushes, impenetrable, confusing, secretive, against a sky the color of an old galvanized pail. No birds.
The dull afternoon smothered a faraway shotgun blast from some distant ridge, quickly followed by another. He missed the first time, I thought. It was less a sound than a feeling in the bone, muted strokes like a maul driving fence posts. I wondered if it were Banger. Banger would not have missed the first shot. It must have been a double.
Even now, as I stood listening to the locked silence, he was probably taking the second bird from his dog’s mouth, fanning the tail, smoothing down the broken feathers and opening the crop to see the torn leaves of mitrewort and wood sorrel spill out. I could imagine him talking to the dog, to the fallen bird, to his shotgun. I felt an affinity to that distant grouse hunter that I could never feel for the downtown talker.
In the weeks that followed I often hunted that ridge where the beech spread into the spruce like outstretched fingers. I heard the increasingly familiar shotgun from the second ridge beyond mine. I put up birds and I took some down.
Too many times I had to crawl on hands and knees through slash where a wounded bird had dropped, praying it hadn’t crept into a stump where I could never find it, where it would die. One I did lose. Five hours of beating back and forth in a swamp, poking into rotted logs, kicking heaps of slash and damning the lack of a dog and my atrophied sense of smell. Again that maul stroke from the second ridge, a single shot, and I envied Banger his dog. I had to leave my bird unfound.
The loss of the bird spoiled that place for me, and I decided to work over to the lean spine of rock where Banger and his dog hunted. I was sure by now that my distant hunting companion was Banger, mythical friend, sprung from the echoes of a firing mechanism, the unknown Banger imprisoned in the loudmouth’s shell.
The first early snows came and melted and we were into Indian summer. The sky was an intense enamel blue, but the afternoon light had a dying, year’s-end quality, a rich apricot color as though it fell through a cordial glass onto an oak table, the kind of day hunters remember falsely as October.
It was a day for birds. They would be lounging in favorite dust bowls, feeding languidly on thorn apples like oriental princes sucking sugared dates. A late patch of jewelweed with a few ragged blossoms in a wet swale caught my eye halfway up the ridge. There was a thick stand of balsam at the far end. The jewelweed had a picked-over look, and the balsams had good ground openings for walking birds. It felt birdy.
I breathed shallowly to keep my heartbeat from vibrating the air. I knew the birds saw me, knew that I knew they were there, and I waited for the wave of adrenaline to pass, for the hot blows of blood to subside. I slid the safety off.
The birds were invisible in the runways under the firs, resting after a morning of snapping off the jewelweed flowers that burst halfway down their throats. Young birds, I thought, into the jewelweed. They would fly up as soon as I took a step forward.
I stayed still, never quite ready, the moment taking me. I waited too long, and a delicate pattering in the leaves of the hardwoods beyond the balsams like the first tentative drops of rain told me the birds had walked away, young tender grouse with pinkish breastbones who might have been flushed, might still be flushed, but who had won this particular encounter. Let them have the jewelweed and the October sunlight this time.
I skirted the balsam stand and came out on the back of Banger’s ridge. When I looked down I saw Stone City.
There are some places that fill us with immediate loathing and fear. A friend once described to me a circle of oaks behind a farmhouse in Iowa that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. Later he heard that the body of a murdered child had been found there, half-covered with wet soil, a decade earlier. I felt something evil tincturing the pale light that washed my first view of Stone City.
It was an abandoned farm lying between two ridges, no roads in or out, only a faint track choked with viburnum and alder. The property, shaped like an eye, was bordered on the back by a stream. Popple and spruce had invaded the hay fields, and the broken limbs of the apple trees hung to the ground.
The buildings were gone, collapsed into cellar holes of rotting beams. Blackberry brambles boiled out of the crumbling foundations and across a fallen blue door that half-blocked a cellar hole.
I came cautiously down the slope to the fields. The grass hummed with cicadas, crickets and grasshoppers that had escaped the early frosts. The buzzing stopped as I stepped into the field. The soil looked thin. A long backbone of rock jutted from the pasture. Something of the vanished owner’s grim labor showed in a curious fenceline that would stand another hundred years; the fence “posts” were old iron wagon axles sunk deep into holes hand drilled in the granite ledge.
There was no wind. Yellowjackets were at the rotten apples under the orchard trees. The light fell slow, heavy. Inhaling the sharp odor of acetic, rotted fruit I stepped into the honey-colored field. I remembered the feeling I had as a child, of sadness in the early fall.
A bird tore from the apple tree with a sound like ripping silk straight toward the narrow neck of field that closed into trees. Feathers made a brief aerial fountain and I marked the bird’s fall into quivering grass as I dropped the gun. A second, a third and a fourth roar, the air was full of birds, breakers of sound over my head, bird flight and shotgun beating against the walls of hillside and birds falling like fruits, hitting the ground with ripe thumps. Only the first of them was mine.
A bell tinkled and a Brittany came into the field to pick them up. Banger said, “You stepped out just the same time as I did. You the one I hear shootin’ up in the Choppin’ Swamp these past weeks?” He didn’t look at me. The dog brought all the birds to Banger.
“Nice shooting,” I said. The birds were good-sized. “What is this place?” There were three hens and a smaller cock.
Banger looked around and twisted up his mouth a little. He took up a bird and gutted it.
“This place, this old farm, is a place I used to hunt when I was a kid. I was run offa here three times, and the last time I was helped along with number six birdshot. Still got the little pick scars all acrost my back. Old man Stone. Shot me when I was a kid, trying’ to run me off.” He pulled the viscera of the second bird from the hot cavity.
“Place used to be called Stone City. I still call it that. Stone City. The Stones all lived up here—three or four different families of them. Their own little city. Tax collector never come up here. No game warden, nobody except me, a kid after the birds. There’s always been birds here.”
“What happened to the Stones?”
“Oh, they just died out and moved away.” His voice trailed off. I didn’t know then he was lying.
The afternoon sun streamed over Banger’s dog who sat close to his leg. His hand went out and cupped her bony skull. “My dog,” he said. “All I got in the world, ain’tcha, Lady?”
He squatted on the ground and looked into the dog’s eyes. I was embarrassed by their intimacy, by the banal name, ‘Lady,’ by the self-pity in Banger’s voice. No, I thought, there was no way I could be Banger’s hunting companion. He had his dog. So it was a shock when the dog walked over to me and licked my hand.
“My Jesus,” said Banger. “She never done that in her life.”
He didn’t like it.
We walked back past the cellar holes toward the spruce at the end of the fields. Banger’s dog walked beside and one step behind him.
“Give you a ride,” said Banger.
His