Last Hunter: An American Family Album

Chapter Four

26 will weaver kinds. These included cowboys and Indians as well as “Germans .” The latter involved “grenades,” which we made from corncobs and chicken feathers. Take one shelled cob; find three White Rock (or equivalent) chicken feathers of equal size; insert their vanes into the soft, pale core of the butt end of the cob; twist the feathers slightly outward in a spiral pattern so that the cob will rotate when lobbed (a well-­ constructed corncob grenade should fly with a rifling effect). Our game of grenades was always more about flight performance than accuracy. However, when the missile was launched the intended target had to freeze. No dodging. No running. A hit, of course, meant death. From rubber-­ band rifles we worked our way upward to slingshots. These we made from the forks of box elder branches: find a branch about thumb thick with a perfect Y fork; cut to size for comfort in your hand; peel and lightly notch the top of each fork; cut two thin strips of inner-­ tube rubber; from tanned deer hide, cut an egg-­ sized oval of soft buckskin (this will be the pocket, or cup, between the rubber bands). Make a small slit just inside the edges of the pocket. Insert ends of tire rubber into buckskin slits, fold, stretch, and tie with fishing line (this requires four small to medium-­ sized hands). Attach catapult rubber bands, one each, to the notched, upper forks with fishing line (use four hands, as above). Be sure to stretch the rubber band tightly before tying the fine line as close as possible to the wood. This is a crucial step: an improperly tied rubber band on a finished slingshot will, at full draw, let loose and slap your face as it has not been slapped before. We ranged freely with our slingshots and were always on the lookout for the perfect stone—smooth, a little bigger the last hunter 27 than a marble, and with some weight to it (not all stones have the same specific gravity). We were good shots. Good enough to knock a pigeon off the ridge roll of a dairy barn. Pigeons were dirty birds—hard to keep out of the hayloft, where they shit on the hay bales—and, along with sparrows, my first true targets. Slingshot stones were not good in the hayloft (they could break a light bulb), so my weapon of choice was a bow and arrow. It was a single-­ curve, wooden longbow. The two ends were bent toward each other and strung tautly with a window shade cord that more than once peeled a patch of skin off the inside of my forearm. Late summer was the best time to hunt pigeons in the loft; the mountain of sweet-­ smelling new hay bales reached two-­ thirds of the way to the rafters of the cavernous room, and their green, stubbly sides made a staircase for climbing. Pigeons, not totally dumb, fluttered off at first sight of a boy with a bow and arrow, but the end game was patience. I hid myself among the bales and waited for their return. It sometimes took an hour or more, but eventually pigeon claws scraped atop the tin ridge roll, and soon enough the birds fluttered back inside to their nests high up on the back wall. If alone, I had time for one good shot. With Gerry, we employed another tactic: we waited, then bolted out, shouting and ­ waving our arms. The frightened pigeons often forgot their way out of the loft, and we then had our personal shooting gallery. As the frantic birds fluttered back and forth we shot again and again (our wooden arrows were too dull to lodge in the wooden rafters). Finally, exhausted, the blue and gray birds sat for a killing blow. English sparrows in the granary were also fair game. The problem lay not in the grain they ate, but their ­ droppings 28 will weaver that fell into it—black seeds of shit mixing with the oats, which were a staple feed for the dairy cows. Sparrows received no quarter. The granary was the old-­ school kind, tall and square with a rectangular commons area just inside and high wooden bins around. Each bin had removable slide boards on its inside face and a small, shutter-­ type door on the exterior wall through which we shoveled grain and, later...