My grandfather died while I was home on mid-tour leave from Iraq. With the “Surge” into Baghdad in full swing, I felt I shouldn’t have left. However, as the lowest ranking of my troop and with a mid-tour leave schedule to adhere to, I left my friends to spend two weeks at home. I remember surprising my mother, who immediately burst into tears, only to dry her eyes, smile for a moment, and then return to tears to tell me about her dying father. I remember my anger. I found myself angry a lot in those days. I’m unsure whether my grandfather's death or the insurgency lay at the root of it all. Either way, I distinctly recall looking up at the giant painting of his father, an avid quail hunter, flushing birds with their German Shorthair Pointer. It hung beneath his aged Remington Model 12 on their living room wall, memorializing a past long gone.
Of all of my grandfather’s progeny, I arrived first. My cousins never got to know him as I did; never flushed a bird with him; never heard his shotgun roar. Deprived of the truth, they saw just an old man, enfeebled, then buried. But I knew something of the man who yearned to test himself against the world and found those tests on a Navy aircraft carrier in the typhoons off the Korean Peninsula. I flushed coveys with the man who returned home to run the family store and walk what remained of the family’s farmland. With each step, he tried to connect with his past, following through on the birds attempting to escape his Model 12.
My Grandfather and I hunted together. We never met as often as I would have liked, but once together my grandfather showered encouragement on me. This trait made hunting with him distinctly different from hunting with my usual, more rough around the edges crowd. My grandfather’s approach to upland bird hunting was something I only knew from magazines and associated with affluence, both of which excluded me. Squirrels, deer, and ducks became the sporting latticework I wove myself into as I matured. Yet, in the back of my mind hung a memory of a different way of life, a different mentality.
Now, few things resonate with me as much as those moments I spent hunting with him while growing into the man standing in his shadow. I vividly recall encountering a barbed wire fence as we hunted an open pasture. With him behind me, I unloaded my shotgun, handed it to him, and then climbed the fence. Taking my shotgun and his, he repeated the same. He bragged to everyone for years about my execution of the task in a textbook fashion. For the me his approval meant the world.
On our last hunt together, we killed nothing, save one cottonmouth that pursued me as we passed it lying in a creek. My grandfather watched it come out of the creek and head towards me before introducing the snake to a hail of birdshot. Soon after, my grandfather caught West Nile, and though it refrained from killing him, he never completely recovered, becoming a prisoner of fatigue. The community’s tent pole; a man with unending jokes; a great quail hunter, was suddenly locked in a jail cell that reclined so he could listen to talk radio in some level of comfort. He never pulled the trigger again and his approach to hunting drifted into the ether for my family. When he died, even our governor paid his respects. Since then, I’ve reflected on my grandfather’s life.
Despite living in the land of Walmart and cheap beer, he remained the quintessential Southern gentleman. Through casual conversations and experiences with him, I learned about politics, business, and wing shooting. He tried to remain in the background, shunning the limelight despite his peers' attempts to elevate him in keeping with his position as the last in a line of influential men like my great-great grandfather, a man who served as the secretary of agriculture for our home state and owned more than half of the county where I grew up.
Through a depression and two world wars, that wealth eroded, and with it, political influence. My grandfather was the heir to a legacy that saw my great-grandfather sell most of the land and start a men’s clothing store. With that transition, flushing birds devolved from an everyday affair into a Sunday afternoon away from the city. Though his move to sell fine hats, suits, and shoes succeeded in preserving family’s status, abandoning the land slowly changed the family's soul.
By the time I came along, life’s stress rendered my grandfather balding and tired. In the late 1980s, he sold his father’s store as fashion shifted from the three-piece suit to things with which he refused to associate. With that transition, the slow decay that began generations before dealt its final blow to his way of life.The gentleman's ethic all but faded into the past, and with it, the excitement of wing-shooting quail along the banks of the Red River. With the birth of each of his four daughters, he grew more certain that he was ending the line of proud and accomplished men who preserved the heritage of those that came before him. Then I came into the world.
My grandfather, in his old age, saw one last chance to pass on his family’s traditions by teaching me to bird hunt. He planted seeds of birds and shotguns in me that grew into passions long after his death. As I continue to search for the trails my grandfather left, I hope I can flush a bird or two along the way.
About the Author
Brandon is a freelance writer and National Guard Chaplain. He grew up fishing and hunting in southern Arkansas, but today enjoys hunting and fishing across the world. You can contact him at bbsanders.com