Of Woods and Waters: A Kentucky Outdoors Reader

An Excerpt from Aleck Maury, Sportsman (1934)

CAROLINE GORDON An Excerpt from Aleck Maury, Sportsman (1934) IT WAS WHILE I was training Gy that I made another acquisition —the best gun I ever had. That, too, came to me from Pat Henry. I found it in Sid More's gunshop, standing in a corner with two other breech-loaders. I saw the rosewood stock first and I picked it up just for the pleasure of handling it. Sid was in his corner, working, his back to me. I stood there and examined the gun. It was fourteen gauge, thirty inches long, and weighed six and three quarters pounds. My first reaction was pleasure in its lightness . You could hold it in your hand and shoot it like a pistol. Next I examined the platinum ventholes. Then I saw the beautiful contrivances to carry caps in. "Where'd you get this Greener, Sid?" I asked. Without turning around he replied that it belonged to Colonel Henry. He had bought one of the new breech-loaders and had told him to sell the Greener. He didn't know what Pat was thinking about. The Greener was a better gun any day. He added that it had been made in London to Pat's order and had cost a hundred and fifty dollars in gold. I set the gun down in its corner. We talked for a few minutes about other matters, then I went back and picked it up again. "I'll give you twenty dollars for it," I said. Sid squared around, pushed up his spectacles, and stared first at me and then at the gun. 274 "He told me to get whatever I could for it," he said slowly, then grinned. "You better take it, Professor. You'll never get a better gun." I walked out of the shop carrying the Greener. I had eleven miles to drive but I got home that afternoon—in December it was, the last of the season—early enough to take the gun out. I carried a cut-off powder flask and a double shot pouch, cut off. I found I could load that gun, walking along, both barrels, almost as fast as any man could break a breech-loader and load it. I flushed two coveys that afternoon on the edge of the woods and I bagged nine birds. I've never seen birds cleaner shot. We found later that you could always tell whether a bird had been shot with the Greener or a breech-loader. There was always more shot in the bodies of the birds killed with the breech-loader than with the Greener. I acquired the Greener in the days before smokeless powder came in, but I found later that it shot smokeless powder perfectly. I didn't have to clean it but once a season either. At the beginning of the season when the birds were young I'd get them usually in the head or wing. Three out of five birds would tower. As the season progressed I changed to No. 8 and wound up with three drachms of powder and an ounce of No. 7 shot. Three times in my life, using that Greener I've killed twenty-six birds out of twenty-four shots. I must anticipate my story to tell of its fate. I shot it for ten or fifteen years before a hole came in the right-hand barrel—a man naturally shoots the right-hand barrel oftener than the left. Sid put a beautiful patch on the hole for me. The gun was as good as new—I might have gone on shooting it as long as I was able to carry a gun—but one day I was fool enough to lend it to my brother-in-law, a fine fellow and a good farmer but a poor shot. He set the gun down in the cellar near a cask of vinegar. Some drops of vinegar fell on that beautiful barrel. . . . He brought it CAROLINE GORDON 275 back to me rusted. I took it out in the garden and buried it. Even to this day melancholy steals over me when I think of its fate. I could not ask better of life than to be walking again over the fields that lie between the Tink woods and Merry Point house, the Greener resting in the crook of my arm, Gy quartering the field ahead of me...