NOVEMBER 19, 2020 – Dad wasn’t a hunter or a gun owner, but a day arrived when he needed to borrow a gun. A short while later arrived the day when he fired the gun.
I wasn’t directly on hand when he pulled the trigger. I was nine years old and riding my oversized bike up and down our driveway. When I heard the reverberating shot I laid down a patch of rubber, then the bike itself and tore around the front of the house to the backyard. There stood dad, still grasping the borrowed .410 shotgun and gazing over our boundary into the neighbors’ vegetative entanglement that used to pass for a garden.
“Dja get it?!” I asked.
“Not sure,” said Dad. “I was waiting for ’im, and when I saw his head poke up out of his hole, I let him have it. I haven’t seen any sign of ’im since.”
The “him” that Dad had tried to blow to kingdom come was a woodchuck, which had taken up residence next door. The animal had savaged my mother’s garden, and one summer evening while my parents were visiting with Lyle and Betty, friends who lived down the street, the woodchuck problem entered the conversation. Lyle happened to hunt ducks and pheasants and owned several shotguns. Dad returned home that evening with Lyle’s .410 and a box of shells.
Every evening after work for the following week or two, Dad would take a few shells out of the box, which he’d stored next to his fedora in the front-hall closet, lift the shotgun out of the same closet, and go patrol the border near Mother’s garden. He pulled the trigger only once. The woodchuck was never seen or heard from again.
Lyle congratulated Dad on his marksmanship and followed up with the idea that “the men”—the two actual men plus Lyle’s son John, who was 10 and my buddy, and I—should “shoot clay pigeons.” I had no idea what Lyle was talking about, but John explained as he and I rode our bikes down the street.
The next Sunday afternoon, the four of us headed out to Dad’s hobby tree farm north of town to “shoot clay pigeons.” It was a blast, you might say. I watched as Lyle flung the clay discs skyward and Dad took aim, then fired. It didn’t take long for Dad to get the hang of it.
The gun was too much for me, however. The kickback was so strong against my young shoulder that I might as well have been shooting blindfolded. But Lyle had come prepared. He’d brought the funny pages from the Sunday paper to fashion an easier target. John and I stuck them on one of Dad’s big brush piles and took turns firing away with an older shotgun that Lyle had brought along. We blew the funnies to shreds.
(Cont.)
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
