A boy of fourteen, alert, but too full of life to move slowly and
cautiously, is walking along an old road in the woods, a road that winds
here and there with meanderings that now seem vagrant and purposeless
but once led to the various piles of cordwood and logs for whose
harvesting it was hewn. Goodly trees have since grown up from saplings
that the judicious axe then scorned. Beeches, whose flat branches are
shelves of old gold; poplars, turned to towers of brighter metal by the
same alchemy of autumn; and hemlocks, pyramids of unchanging green,
shadow the leaf-strewn forest floor and its inconspicuous dotting of
gray and russet stumps. How happy the boy is in the freedom of the
woods; proud to carry his first own gun, as he treads gingerly but
somewhat noisily over the fallen leaves and dry twigs, scanning with
quick glances the thickets, imagining himself the last Mohican on the
warpath, or Leather-Stocking scouting in the primeval wilderness.
Under his breath he tells the confiding chickadees and woodpeckers what
undreamed-of danger they would be in from such a brave, were he not in
pursuit of nobler game. Then he hears a sudden rustle of the dry leaves,
the _quit! quit!_ of a partridge, catches a glimpse of a rapidly running
brown object, which on the instant is launched into a flashing
thunderous flight. Impelled by the instinct of the born sportsman, he
throws the gun to his shoulder, and scarcely with aim, but in the
direction of the sound, pulls trigger and fires.
On the instant he is ashamed of his impulsive haste, which fooled him
into wasting a precious charge on the inanimate evergreen twigs and sere
leaves that come dropping and floating down to his shot, and is thankful
that he is the only witness of his own foolishness.
But what is that? Above the patter and rustle of falling twigs and
leaves comes a dull thud, followed by the rapid beat of wings upon the
leaf-strewn earth. With heart beating as fast he runs toward the sound,
afraid to believe his senses, when he sees a noble grouse fluttering out
feebly his last gasp. He cannot be sure that it is not all a dream that
may vanish in a breath, till he has the bird safe in his hand, and then
he is faint with joy. Was there ever such a shot? Would that all the
world were here to see, for who can believe it just for the telling?
There never will be another such a bird, nor such a shot, for him. He
fires a dozen ineffectual ones at fair marks that day, but the glory of
that one shot would atone for twice as many misses, and he need not tell
of them, only of this, whereof he bears actual proof, though he himself
can hardly accept it, till again and again he tests it by admiring look
and touch.
Years after the killing of grouse on the wing has become a
matter-of-course occurrence in his days of upland shooting, the memory
of this stands clearest and best. Sixty years later the old wood road
winds through the same scene, by some marvel of kindliness or
oversight, untouched by the devastating axe, unchanged but by the forest
growth of half a century and its seemly and decorous decay. A thicker
screen of undergrowth borders the more faintly traced way. The
golden-brown shelves of the beech branches sweep more broadly above it,
the spires of the evergreens are nearer the sky, and the yellow towers
of the poplars are builded higher, but they are the same trees and
beneath them may yet be seen the gray stumps and trunks mouldered to
russet lines, of their ancient brethren who fell when these were
saplings.
The gray-bearded man who comes along the old wood road wonders at the
little change so many years have made in the scene of the grand
achievements of his youth, and in his mind he runs over the long
calendar to assure himself that so many autumns have glowed and faded
since that happy day. How can he have grown old, his ear dull to the
voices of the woods, his sight dim with the slowly but surely falling
veil of coming blindness, so that even now the road winds into a misty
haze just before him, yet these trees be young and lusty?
As they and the unfaded page of memory record the years, it was but a
little while ago that his heart was almost bursting with pride of that
first triumph. Would that he might once more feel that delicious pang of
joy.
Hark! There is the _quit! quit!_ of a grouse, and there another and
another, and the patter and rustle of their retreating footsteps,
presently launching into sudden flight, vaguely seen in swift bolts of
gray, hurtling among gray tree trunks and variegated foliage. True to
the old instinct his gun leaps to his shoulder, and he fires again and
again at the swift target. But the quick eye no longer guides the aim,
the timely finger no longer pulls the trigger, and the useless pellets
waste themselves on the leaves and twigs.
The woods are full of grouse, as if all the birds of the region had
congregated here to mock his failing sight and skill. On every side they
burst away from him like rockets, and his quick but futile charges in
rapid succession are poured in their direction, yet not a bird falls,
nor even a feather wavers down through the still October air. His dim
eyes refuse to mark down the birds that alight nearest; he can only
vaguely follow their flight by the whirring rush of wings and the click
of intercepting branches.
He is not ashamed of his loss of skill, only grieved to know that his
shooting days are over, yet he is glad there is no one near to see his
failure. He makes renunciation of all title to the name of a crack shot,
too well knowing that this is no brief lapse of skill, but the final,
inevitable falling off of the quick eye and sure hand. Slowly and sadly
he makes his way to where the shaded path merges into the sunny
clearing. There, from the cover of the last bush, a laggard bird springs
as if thrown from a catapult, describing in his flight an arc of a great
circle, and clearly defined against the steel-blue sky.
Again the gun springs instinctively to the shoulder, the instantaneous
aim is taken well ahead on the line of flight, the trigger pressed in
the nick of time, the charge explodes, and out of a cloud of feathers
drifting and whirling in the eddies of his own wing-beats, the noble
bird sweeps downward in the continuation of the course that ends with a
dull thud on the pasture sward.
The old sportsman lifts his clean-killed bird without a thrill of
exultation--he is only devoutly thankful for the happy circumstance
which made successful the last shot he will ever fire, and that not as a
miss he may remember it. Henceforth untouched by him his gun shall hang
upon the wall, its last use linked with the pleasant memory of his last
shot.