A December Memory by Larry D. Wright

He was a salty old gentleman. His face and frame showed the age he had lived and the miles he had walked behind some of the best bird dogs in the South. Those that knew him best said, "If he was your friend, then you had a good one. But, if he didn’t like you, he wouldn’t have anything to do with you." It sounds a lot like a trait he had picked up from the volumes of Pointers he had trained in his lifetime.

Close to the end, it was the cancer that showed the most and proved to be the invisible foe he couldn’t beat. I just turned sixteen when he died but I remember him well.

Most folk around town called him "Mr. Jim". Some still refer to him by the nickname of "Bird-dog" because men for miles around trusted him with one of their most valuable assets.... a quail dog. They talk of him as if he were still around even though he has been dead for years. I called him Granddad. I never had the privilege of hunting with him personally, but the stories about his knowledge of dogs, Bob White quail, shotguns and wing shooting, have warmed and entertained me for years. He gave me my first dog, a Black English Setter that I named "Andy".

One of my favorite tales involved him, my dad, and an uncle. Granddad was well up in years and couldn’t walk the rough cover like in years past. Late one afternoon, the three of them saw a covey flush wild into a draw filled with briars and honeysuckle vines. As Dad, Uncle Jimmy, and the dogs went in hot pursuit, Mr. Jim decided to wait and rest beside an old logging road. The cover in the draw was so thick and the quail so fast, that the two gunmen could only get off an occasional wild shot as the spooky singles were flushed.

From the direction they had left, Mr. Jim’s twenty-gauge would periodically ring out. They wondered why he was shooting. It was not until they came back to get him that they learned the story. Every single that was flushed turned and flew straight down that old logging road. Mr. Jim sat in the same spot and killed eight birds! Lying where they fell, you could cover them all with a blanket. He claimed that he didn’t know that they would do that, but I have a sneaky suspicion he let the two younger men do all the work and he employed a little "quail psychology" on those birds!

There are many other stories that are told about this old quail hunter, but as I mentioned, I never had the privilege of experiencing any of them first hand. I will tell you what I do remember. It was a cold day in December and close to my birthday. The gas heater had the frame house so hot I could barely breathe. When I walked inside, I saw a familiar sight. There he sat dressed in a wool shirt perched in his favorite chair beside that heater. Across his lap was a shotgun. He wasn’t a person of many words, so he looked up to me and said, "Here. I want you to have this." I didn’t know what to say. In fact, I’m not sure to this day what I did say. But I took it into my hands, and held it tightly. It was my first shotgun; a Belgium made 16 gauge Browning automatic. I have long since retired it from active duty, but it served me well during those early hunting days.

There is something special about a boy’s first gun. And that gun was special, indeed. There was a different way he looked at it that spoke volumes. It held a lot of memories for an old man and many hopes for a young one. His hunting days were over. Mine were just beginning. He knew then that he would never hear another covey rise, or see a Pointer stretched out like a statue frozen in time, or feel the autumn wind on his cheek, or watch a wedge of mallards fly overhead. His life was past and mine was future. He handed me that gun like a runner passing off a baton to a teammate. The race wasn’t over but his part in the event was almost finished. It was time to hand a piece of his heritage to another

and who better than a grandson.

As I look back on that day, I guess he was having more difficulty in knowing what to say than I. I never knew him to be a man of prayer, but I wonder if under his breath, he offered one on that day... "Lord, help this boy to enjoy the outdoors as I have. Allow him to see the beauty in a sunrise, know the companionship of a good dog, understand that hunting is more than killing, and living is more than dying." I wonder. I don’t know.