Gerard Donovan - Julius Winsome

I repeated them now, speaking low, as if afraid the words would take shape and walk off the page. And so many of them, pages and pages, hundreds of words.

I saw the shape in my coat draped on the wall hook and pulled out the hunting magazine and perused it after stoking the fire into an orange crackle. The pages felt glossy and expensive in my hands, large photographs and advertisements for weaponry, bows and guns, boots and fatigues, Rifle Association badges, patriotic emblems, statistics on bullets, trajectories, different load weights, error rates in flight. Enough statistics to make you dizzy. A gentleman with gray hair kneeled with his gun behind a bear splayed out on a mountain. The caption: “Jake Larson harvested this very nice black bear with a 12-gauge shotgun and the Federal saboted slug load.” Articles on the hunting life, another fellow dangling two fat dead rabbits, big as two hands, at the end of a string. Next page, a deer’s head and a polished black and gold shotgun leaning against a tree trunk, with three shells fanning out from the butt: “I took this big buck at seventy yards with the Winchester saboted slug and the Browning Gold shotgun. The deer dropped where it stood and did require a finishing shot.” The deer’s eyes were open, the belly’s fur matted around the gunshot. A long essay on rifle choices for the beginner: the centerfire rifle, the pump gun, the double barrel (side-by-side or over-and-under), and the autoloader, along with prices and makes, advantages and disadvantages, types of game for each. And everywhere, photos of men in baseball caps.

I studied the magazine in some detail, delaying at the descriptions, losing myself in the riflery and the camaraderie. A one-page announcement of the new Remington slide action, 12-gauge model 870, Special Field Edition. I read the phone numbers for the advertisements, the area codes, the small print and the policies, as I had been taught to read everything closely, even the footnotes, for therein often lay the true tale. It was obvious: there was much that could be termed passion in these men’s pursuits, a few women too. They loved their cold winter days in the field, the outing, the man and his gun in the wild, the open weather, the venture into danger. Good luck to them, I thought, for they gain excitement in the hunt, this much is obvious. And they were decked out in clothes and assisted by equipment that my grandfather or father never had going into the great battles that decided the fate of nations. I closed the magazine and slotted it between Victor Hugo’s The Retreat from Moscow and Les Miserables , since my father had also instructed me never to throw away the written word.

AT TWO-THIRTY IN THE AFTERNOON ON THAT SAME day I tired of sitting in the cabin, namely because the same restlessness came back to haunt my blood, my eyes, my hands, so much so that there was nowhere I could look where restlessness was not; and moreover the manner I had of breathing above ground when my friend and companion of late lay breathless under that same ground seemed unfair and brought his loss closer, made me seek another place to spend the hours. I therefore made my way to the barn, spread a handful of dripping seed for the birds that come night would be wanting for heat and food, and sure enough they came from all sides at once, seeing as I had the habit of doing this every day, and then I took the Enfield to the woods, walking the same trail that led me to the same place, singing a song from the great war I learned when a child: “It’s a long way to Tipperary, it’s a long way from home, it’s a long way to Tipperary, to the sweetest girl I know.” I sat by the same two crossed trees, saw a buck through the trees in the field.

MY GRANDFATHER JOINED THE WAR IN PROGRESS, that is to say, he joined the war when the American army did, in 1917, hopped on a transport ship and crossed the Atlantic. And they gave him a good rifle, a Springfield .30 caliber. At the end of the war he made a trade with a British soldier, a man who had roamed the trenches with a Lee-Enfield for a year, picking off Germans with the Pattern 14 sniper version, chambered for .303 ammunition with a telescopic sight.

The last time my grandfather killed a man was in the Second Battle of the Marne when he fired at German troops crossing the river. They took heavy losses, and after that, as my father explained, my grandfather never seemed to be able to hit his targets, firing wide or too high, and he proceeded to miss his way through to the end of the war. On the last day of fighting, November 11, 1918, he sat with his friends counting down the minutes to the Armistice at eleven o’clock. A British soldier left his position and approached the German lines on a reconnaissance mission. His friends called him back. The Germans waved him back, told him to wait. He did not. The Germans shot him. The war ended sixty seconds later. Everyone got out and shook hands. My grandfather traded the rifle that had lately been off target so often for the British sniper’s Enfield, called it an exchange of blood, remarking that the sniper said he had twenty-eight kills with the Enfield in almost two years.

So it came to pass that my grandfather arrived back in Maine early in 1919 carrying a rifle he never shot that had killed twenty-eight men, and though he kept it in good condition, he never shot it at any time after the war either, because he had seen enough of that, and smelled enough cordite, he said, and the war had bred all the gunnery out of him. And when he died and my own father officially owned the rifle, he in turn never fired it, only taking it from the wooden case for cleaning every few months.

When I was twelve he brought me out to the barn and took the rifle from its wooden case and leather wrap, brought me with him into the woods and taught me how to use it. On that day I became the first to shoot that rifle since 1918, and I had a hard time even lifting it straight, it weighed almost a pound for every year of my life. My father told me that the rifle I was holding had certainly ended the life of a number of German soldiers in the trenches, most of those officers whose wives and children received letters in small German towns and villages in the weeks that followed, letters that expressed official regret. When he told me this, the rifle seemed to get even heavier. He said that I was qualified to use the rifle when I felt mostly comfortable with a little fear mixed in. And never forget, he said, to fire from the shoulder and breathe as you pull the trigger.

Standing in the woods with him and the rifle, barely holding it up straight, I felt mostly fear. I looked down the sights and instead of the bright woods of Maine saw the shadows of gray battle dress six hundred yards away across a mud-drenched battlefield, ghosts of men long dead still hovering in the sights. At that point the rifle was at its heaviest. I smelled powder, I thought, but my father said that the powder was long gone, the bore and action well cleaned.

He laughed as I faltered and told me that a gun held nothing more than bullets; it took a man to hold the gun, an eye to train it on a target, and a finger to pull the trigger and set the bullet in flight. He said a gun will shoot a tin can or a president and was no more good or bad than the people who used it.

I SAT WAITING IN THE WOODS AND IGNORED THE BUCK in the field. Some time passed, not much. The man who eventually came into view moved as though from out of the trees themselves, so quietly did he walk. I saw nothing, but I heard him. I lifted my eyes only and did not stir another muscle in any part of me, and even then the seconds went by and he was still invisible, and I thought he was a part of my mind coming toward me and not in the woods. In the end, the boots gave him away: he was wearing new or recently polished boots, I heard the tiny squeak, and then I saw him, dressed in fatigues, camouflaged well against the dark brown and green undergrowth, carrying his gun in both hands, angled upward and ready for a quick shot, his index finger laid across the trigger housing like a soldier trained in warfare. This was a man who liked to stalk his prey, to walk with it, shadow it, strike in a moment like a thunderbolt. I surmised his weapon to be therefore loaded, and it looked like a slug gun, lethal up to a hundred yards, a wound mortal for sure. He was moving at ninety yards from me I gauged, and he seemed taken with the big buck now feeding in the open field, and he stared at it, head down, and lifted and brought down each leg with silence and cunning, a feat for a big man wide at the shoulders and with a neck used to carrying for a living, a construction man from appearances. Red stubble uniform on his skull. He should have been wearing an orange vest: that was careless of him.