the brothers, my boy sometimes took him into the woods, and rode him in
the wandering bridle-paths, with a thrilling sense of adventure. He did
not like to be alone there, and he oftener had the company of a boy who
was learning the trade in his father's printing-office. This boy was
just between him and his elder brother in age, and he was the good
comrade of both; all the family loved him, and made him one of them,
and my boy was fond of him because they had some tastes in common that
were not very common among the other boys. They liked the same books,
and they both began to write historical romances. My boy's romance was
founded on facts of the Conquest of Granada, which he had read of again
and again in Washington Irving, with a passionate pity for the Moors,
and yet with pride in the grave and noble Spaniards. He would have given
almost anything to be a Spaniard, and he lived in a dream of some day
sallying out upon the Vega before Granada, in silk and steel, with an
Arabian charger under him that champed its bit. In the meantime he did
what he could with the family pony, and he had long rides in the woods
with the other boy, who used to get his father's horse when he was not
using it on Sunday, and race with him through the dangling wild
grape-vines and pawpaw thickets, and over the reedy levels of the river,
their hearts both bounding with the same high hopes of a world that
could never come true.
XIII.
GUNS AND GUNNING.
ALL round the Boy's Town stood the forest, with the trees that must have
been well grown when Mad Anthony Wayne drove the Indians from their
shadow forever. The white people had hewn space for their streets and
houses, for their fields and farmsteads, out of the woods, but where the
woods had been left they were of immemorial age. They were not very
dense, and the timber was not very heavy; the trees stood more like
trees in a park than trees in a forest; there was little or no
undergrowth, except here and there a pawpaw thicket; and there were
sometimes grassy spaces between them, where the may-apples pitched their
pretty tents in the spring. Perhaps, at no very great distance of time,
it had been a prairie country, with those wide savannahs of waving grass
that took the eyes of the first-comers in the Ohio wilderness with an
image of Nature long tamed to the hand of man. But this is merely my
conjecture, and what I know does not bear me out in it; for the wall of
forest that enclosed the Boy's Town was without a break except where the
axe had made it. At some points it was nearer and at some farther; but,
nearer or farther, the forest encompassed the town, and it called the
boys born within its circuit, as the sea calls the boys born by its
shore, with mysterious, alluring voices, kindling the blood, taking the
soul with love for its strangeness. There was not a boy in the Boy's
Town who would not gladly have turned from the town and lived in the
woods if his mother had let him; and in every vague plan of running off
the forest had its place as a city of refuge from pursuit and recapture.
The pioneer days were still so close to those times that the love of
solitary adventure which took the boys' fathers into the sylvan wastes
of the great West might well have burned in the boys' hearts; and if
their ideal of life was the free life of the woods, no doubt it was
because their near ancestors had lived it. At any rate, that was their
ideal, and they were always talking among themselves of how they would
go farther West when they grew up, and be trappers and hunters. I do not
remember any boy but one who meant to be a sailor; they lived too
hopelessly far from the sea; and I dare say the boy who invented the
marine-engine governor, and who wished to be a pirate, would just as
soon have been a bandit of the Osage. In those days Oregon had just been
opened to settlers, and the boys all wanted to go and live in Oregon,
where you could stand in your door and shoot deer and wild turkey, while
a salmon big enough to pull you in was tugging away at the line you had
set in the river that ran before the log-cabin.
[Illustration: "ALL AT ONCE THERE THE INDIANS WERE."]
If they could, the boys would rather have been Indians than anything
else, but, as there was really no hope of this whatever, they were
willing to be settlers, and fight the Indians. They had rather a mixed
mind about them in the meantime, but perhaps they were not unlike other
idolaters in both fearing and adoring their idols; perhaps they came
pretty near being Indians in that, and certainly they came nearer than
they knew. When they played war, and the war was between the whites and
the Indians, it was almost as low a thing to be white as it was to be
British when there were Americans on the other side; in either case you
had to be beaten. The boys lived in the desire, if not the hope, of some
time seeing an Indian, and they made the most of the Indians in the
circus, whom they knew to be just white men dressed up; but none of them
dreamed that what really happened one day could ever happen. This was at
the arrival of several canal-boat loads of genuine Indians from the
Wyandot Reservation in the northwestern part of the state, on their way
to new lands beyond the Mississippi. The boys' fathers must have known
that these Indians were coming, but it just shows how stupid the most of
fathers are, that they never told the boys about it. All at once there
the Indians were, as if the canal-boats had dropped with them out of
heaven. There they were, crowding the decks, in their blankets and
moccasins, braves and squaws and pappooses, standing about or squatting
in groups, not saying anything, and looking exactly like the pictures.
The squaws had the pappooses on their backs, and the men and boys had
bows and arrows in their hands; and as soon as the boats landed the
Indians, all except the squaws and pappooses, came ashore, and went up
to the court-house yard, and began to shoot with their bows and arrows.
It almost made the boys crazy.
Of course they would have liked to have the Indians shoot at birds, or
some game, but they were mighty glad to have them shoot at cents and
bits and quarters that anybody could stick up in the ground. The Indians
would all shoot at the mark till some one hit it, and the one who hit it
had the money, whatever it was. The boys ran and brought back the
arrows; and they were so proud to do this that I wonder they lived
through it. My boy was too bashful to bring the Indians their arrows; he
could only stand apart and long to approach the filthy savages, whom he
revered; to have touched the border of one of their blankets would have
been too much. Some of them were rather handsome, and two or three of
the Indian boys were so pretty that the Boy's Town boys said they were
girls. They were of all ages, from old, withered men to children of six
or seven, but they were all alike grave and unsmiling; the old men were
not a whit more dignified than the children, and the children did not
enter into their sport with more zeal and ardor than the wrinkled sages
who shared it. In fact they were, old and young alike, savages, and the
boys who looked on and envied them were savages in their ideal of a
world where people spent their lives in hunting and fishing and ranging
the woods, and never grew up into the toils and cares that can alone
make men of boys. They wished to escape these, as many foolish persons
do among civilized nations, and they thought if they could only escape
them they would be happy; they did not know that they would be merely
savage, and that the great difference between a savage and a civilized
man is work. They would all have been willing to follow these Indians
away into the far West, where they were going, and be barbarians for the
rest of their days; and the wonder is that some of the fellows did not
try it. After the red men had flitted away like red leaves their memory
remained with the boys, and a plague of bows and arrows raged among
them, and it was a good while before they calmed down to their old
desire of having a gun.
But they came back to that at last, for that was the normal desire of
every boy in the Boy's Town who was not a girl-boy, and there were
mighty few girl-boys there. Up to a certain point, a pistol would do,
especially if you had bullet-moulds, and could run bullets to shoot out
of it; only your mother would be sure to see you running them, and just
as likely as not would be so scared that she would say you must not
shoot bullets. Then you would have to use buckshot, if you could get
them anywhere near the right size, or small marbles; but a pistol was
always a makeshift, and you never could hit anything with it, not even a
board fence; it always kicked, or burst, or something. Very few boys
ever came to have a gun, though they all expected to have one. But seven
or eight boys would go hunting with one shot-gun, and take turn-about
shooting; some of the little fellows never got to shoot at all, but they
could run and see whether the big boys had hit anything when they fired,
and that was something. This was my boy's privilege for a long time
before he had a gun of his own, and he went patiently with his elder
brother, and never expected to fire the gun, except, perhaps, to shoot
the load off before they got back to town; they were not allowed to
bring the gun home loaded. It was a gun that was pretty safe for
anything in front of it, but you never could tell what it was going to
do. It began by being simply an old gun-barrel, which my boy's brother
bought of another boy who was sick of it for a fip, as the half-real
piece was called, and it went on till it got a lock from one gunsmith
and a stock from another, and was a complete gun. But this took time;
perhaps a month; for the gunsmiths would only work at it in their
leisure; they were delinquent subscribers, and they did it in part pay
for their papers. When they got through with it my boy's brother made
himself a ramrod out of a straight piece of hickory, or at least as
straight as the gun-barrel, which was rather sway-backed, and had a
little twist to one side, so that one of the jour printers said it was a
first-rate gun to shoot round a corner with. Then he made himself a
powder-flask out of an ox-horn that he got and boiled till it was soft
(it smelt the whole house up), and then scraped thin with a piece of
glass; it hung at his side; and he carried his shot in his pantaloons
pocket. He went hunting with this gun for a good many years, but he had
never shot anything with it, when his uncle gave him a smoothbore rifle,
and he in turn gave his gun to my boy, who must then have been nearly
ten years old. It seemed to him that he was quite old enough to have a
gun; but he was mortified the very next morning after he got it by a
citizen who thought differently. He had risen at daybreak to go out and
shoot kildees on the Common, and he was hurrying along with his gun on
his shoulder when the citizen stopped him and asked him what he was
going to do with that gun. He said to shoot kildees, and he added that
it was his gun. This seemed to surprise the citizen even more than the
boy could have wished. He asked him if he did not think he was a pretty
small boy to have a gun; and he took the gun from him, and examined it
thoughtfully, and then handed it back to the boy, who felt himself
getting smaller all the time. The man went his way without saying
anything more, but his behavior was somehow so sarcastic that the boy
had no pleasure in his sport that morning; partly, perhaps, because he
found no kildees to shoot at on the Common. He only fired off his gun
once or twice at a fence, and then he sneaked home with it through
alleys and by-ways, and whenever he met a person he hurried by for fear
the person would find him too small to have a gun.
Afterwards he came to have a bolder spirit about it, and he went hunting
with it a good deal. It was a very curious kind of gun; you had to snap
a good many caps on it, sometimes, before the load would go off; and
sometimes it would hang fire, and then seem to recollect itself, and go
off, maybe, just when you were going to take it down from your shoulder.
The barrel was so crooked that it could not shoot straight, but this was
not the only reason why the boy never hit anything with it. He could not
shut his left eye and keep his right eye open; so he had to take aim
with both eyes, or else with the left eye, which was worse yet, till one
day when he was playing shinny (or hockey) at school, and got a blow
over his left eye from a shinny-stick. At first he thought his eye was
put out; he could not see for the blood that poured into it from the cut
above it. He ran homeward wild with fear, but on the way he stopped at a
pump to wash away the blood, and then he found his eye was safe. It
suddenly came into his mind to try if he could not shut that eye now,
and keep the right one open. He found that he could do it perfectly; by
help of his handkerchief, he stanched his wound, and made himself
presentable, with the glassy pool before the pump for a mirror, and went
joyfully back to school. He kept trying his left eye, to make sure it
had not lost its new-found art, and as soon as school was out he hurried
home to share the joyful news with his family. He went hunting the very
next Saturday, and at the first shot he killed a bird. It was a
suicidal sap-sucker, which had suffered him to steal upon it so close
that it could not escape even the vagaries of that wandering gun-barrel,
and was blown into such small pieces that the boy could bring only a few
feathers of it away. In the evening, when his father came home, he
showed him these trophies of the chase, and boasted of his exploit with
the minutest detail. His father asked him whether he had expected to eat
this sap-sucker, if he could have got enough of it together. He said no,
sap-suckers were not good to eat. "Then you took its poor little life
merely for the pleasure of killing it," said the father. "Was it a great
pleasure to see it die?" The boy hung his head in shame and silence; it
seemed to him that he would never go hunting again. Of course he did go
hunting often afterwards, but his brother and he kept faithfully to the
rule of never killing anything that they did not want to eat. To be
sure, they gave themselves a wide range; they were willing to eat almost
anything that they could shoot, even blackbirds, which were so abundant
and so easy to shoot. But there were some things which they would have
thought it not only wanton but wicked to kill, like turtle-doves, which
they somehow believed were sacred, because they were the symbols of the
Holy Ghost; it was quite their own notion to hold them sacred. They
would not kill robins either, because robins were hallowed by poetry,
and they kept about the house, and were almost tame, so that it seemed a
shame to shoot them. They were very plentiful, and so were the
turtle-doves, which used to light on the basin-bank, and pick up the
grain scattered there from the boats and wagons. One of the apprentices
in the printing-office kept a shot-gun loaded beside the press while he
was rolling, and whenever he caught the soft twitter that the doves make
with their wings, he rushed out with his gun and knocked over two or
three of them. He was a good shot, and could nearly always get them in
range. When he brought them back, it seemed to my boy that he had
committed the unpardonable sin, and that something awful would surely
happen to him. But he just kept on rolling the forms of type and
exchanging insults with the pressman; and at the first faint twitter of
doves' wings he would be off again.
My boy and his brother made a fine distinction between turtle-doves and
wild pigeons; they would have killed wild pigeons if they had got a
chance, though you could not tell them from turtle-doves except by their
size and the sound they made with their wings. But there were not many
pigeons in the woods around the Boy's Town, and they were very shy.
There were snipe along the river, and flocks of kildees on the Commons,
but the bird that was mostly killed by these boys was the yellowhammer.
They distinguished, again, in its case; and decided that it was not a
woodpecker, and might be killed; sometimes they thought that woodpeckers
were so nearly yellowhammers that they might be killed, but they had
never heard of any one's eating a woodpecker, and so they could not
quite bring themselves to it. There were said to be squirrels in the
hickory woods near the Poor-House, but that was a great way off for my
boy; besides the squirrels, there was a cross bull in those woods, and
sometimes Solomon Whistler passed through them on his way to or from the
Poor-House; so my boy never hunted squirrels. Sometimes he went with his
brother for rabbits, which you could track through the corn-fields in a
light snow, and sometimes, if they did not turn out to be cats, you
could get a shot at them. Now and then there were quail in the
wheat-stubble, and there were meadow-larks in the pastures, but they
were very wild.
After all, yellowhammers were the chief reliance in the chase; they were
pre-occupied, unsuspecting birds, and lit on fence rails and dead trees,
so that they were pretty easy to shoot. If you could bring home a
yellowhammer you felt that you had something to show for your long day's
tramp through the woods and fields, and for the five cents' worth of
powder and five cents' worth of shot that you had fired off at other
game. Sometimes you just fired it off at mullein-stalks, or barns, or
anything you came to. There were a good many things you could do with a
gun; you could fire your ramrod out of it, and see it sail through the
air; you could fill the muzzle up with water, on top of a charge, and
send the water in a straight column at a fence. The boys all believed
that you could fire that column of water right through a man, and they
always wanted to try whether it would go through a cow, but they were
afraid the owner of the cow would find it out. There was a good deal of
pleasure in cleaning your gun when it got so foul that your ramrod stuck
in it and you could hardly get it out. You poured hot water into the
muzzle and blew it through the nipple, till it began to show clear; then
you wiped it dry with soft rags wound on your gun-screw, and then oiled
it with greasy tow. Sometimes the tow would get loose from the screw,
and stay in the barrel, and then you would have to pick enough powder in
at the nipple to blow it out. Of course I am talking of the old
muzzle-loading shot-gun, which I dare say the boys never use nowadays.
But the great pleasure of all, in hunting, was getting home tired and
footsore in the evening, and smelling the supper almost as soon as you
came in sight of the house. There was nearly always hot biscuit for
supper, with steak, and with coffee such as nobody but a boy's mother
ever knew how to make; and just as likely as not there was some kind of
preserves; at any rate, there was apple-butter. You could hardly take
the time to wash the powder-grime off your hands and face before you
rushed to the table; and if you had brought home a yellowhammer you left
it with your gun on the back porch, and perhaps the cat got it and saved
you the trouble of cleaning it. A cat can clean a bird a good deal
quicker than a boy can, and she does not hate to do it half as badly.
Next to the pleasure of getting home from hunting late, was the pleasure
of starting early, as my boy and his brother sometimes did, to shoot
ducks on the Little Reservoir in the fall. His brother had an
alarm-clock, which he set at about four, and he was up the instant it
rang, and pulling my boy out of bed, where he would rather have stayed
than shot the largest mallard duck in the world. They raked the ashes
off the bed of coals in the fireplace, and while the embers ticked and
bristled, and flung out little showers of sparks, they hustled on their
clothes, and ran down the back stairs into the yard with their guns.
Tip, the dog, was already waiting for them there, for he seemed to know
they were going that morning, and he began whimpering for joy, and
twisting himself sideways up against them, and nearly wagging his tail
off; and licking their hands and faces, and kissing their guns all
over; he was about crazy. When they started, he knew where they were
going, and he rushed ahead through the silent little sleeping town, and
led the way across the wide Commons, where the cows lay in dim bulks on
the grass, and the geese waddled out of his way with wild clamorous
cries, till they came in sight of the Reservoir. Then Tip fell back with
my boy and let the elder brother go ahead, for he always had a right to
the first shot; and while he dodged down behind the bank, and crept
along to the place where the ducks usually were, my boy kept a hold on
Tip's collar, and took in the beautiful mystery of the early morning.
The place so familiar by day was estranged to his eyes in that pale
light, and he was glad of old Tip's company, for it seemed a time when
there might very well be ghosts about. The water stretched a sheet of
smooth, gray silver, with little tufts of mist on its surface, and
through these at last he could see the ducks softly gliding to and fro,
and he could catch some dreamy sound from them. His heart stood still
and then jumped wildly in his breast, as the still air was startled with
the rush of wings, and the water broke with the plunge of other flocks
arriving. Then he began to make those bets with himself that a boy hopes
he will lose: he bet that his brother would not hit any of them; he bet
that he did not even see them; he bet that if he did see them and got a
shot at them, they would not come back so that he could get a chance
himself to kill any. It seemed to him that he had to wait an hour, and
just when he was going to hollo, and tell his brother where the ducks
were, the old smoothbore sent out a red flash and a white puff before he
heard the report; Tip tore loose from his grasp; and he heard the
splashing rise of the ducks, and the hurtling rush of their wings; and
he ran forward, yelling, "How many did you hit? Where are they? Where
are you? Are they coming back? It's my turn now!" and making an outcry
that would have frightened away a fleet of ironclads, but much less a
flock of ducks.
One shot always ended the morning's sport, and there were always good
reasons why this shot never killed anything.
XIV.
FORAGING.