Creatures of the Kingdom: Stories of Animals and Nature by James A. Michener
‘Take him over by the big tree,’ Hathaway said, and the black man carried the chair and its contents to the spot indicated. There he scraped the ground with his foot, making a level platform, and on it he placed the owner of the farm and one of the best shots in this meet. ‘We’s ready,’ the black man cried, and the judge gave his last instructions: ‘If you see a dove that the men near you don’t, call “Mark!” Keep your dogs under control. And if the dove flies low, absolutely no shooting in the direction of the man left or right.’
The men took their positions. It was half after one in the afternoon. The sun was high and warm; insects droned. The dogs were restless, but each stayed close to his master, and some men wondered whether there would be any doves, because on some days they failed to show.
But not today. From the woods came six doves, flying low in their wonderfully staggered pattern, now in this direction, now swooping in that. Jake Turlock, taken by surprise, fired and hit nothing. ‘Mark!’ he shouted at the top of his voice. Tim Caveny fired and hit nothing. ‘Mark!’ he bellowed. In swift, darting patterns the doves dived and swirled and twisted, and three other hunters fired at them, to no avail, but as the birds tried to leave the field old Lyman Steed had his gun waiting. With a splendid shot he hit his target, and his big Chesapeake leaped out before the bird hit the ground and retrieved it before the dove could even flutter. Bearing it proudly in his mouth, but not touching its flesh with his teeth, he trotted back, head high, to his master and laid the bird at the old man’s feet.
‘That’s how it’s done,’ Tim Caveny whispered to his Labrador.
There was a long wait and the hunters began to wonder if they would see any more doves, but Hathaway Steed, walking the grounds to police the action, assured each man as he passed, ‘We’re going to see flocks.’
He was right. At about two-thirty they started coming in. ‘Mark!’ one hunter shouted as they passed him before he could fire. Jake Turlock was waiting and knocked one down, whereupon Hey-You leaped out into the open field, pounced on the fallen bird and brought it proudly back. Jake looked at Tim, but the Irishman kept his eyes on the sky. He did whisper to Lucifer, ‘Any dog can retrieve in an open field. Wait till one falls in the brambles.’
On the next flight Tim got no chance to shoot, but Turlock did, and this time he hit a bird that had come over the field, heard the shooting and doubled back. This dove fell into the brambles. ‘Fetch the dove!’ Jake told his Chesapeake, but the bushes were too thick. That bird was lost.
But now another dove flew into Tim’s range, and when he fired, this one also fell into brambles. ‘Fetch the dove!’ Tim said calmly, his heart aching for a good retrieve.
Lucifer plunged directly for the fallen bird but could not penetrate the thick and thorny briars. Unlike Turlock’s Chesapeake, he did not quit, for he heard his master calling softly, ‘Circle, Luke! Circle!’ and he ran in wide circles until he found a path back to the brambles. But again he was stopped, and again his master cried, ‘Circle, Luke!’ And this time he found an entrance that allowed him to roam freely, but with so much ranging that he had lost an accurate guide to the fallen bird. Still he heard his master’s voice imploring, ‘Circle, Luke!’ and he knew that this meant he still had a chance.
So in the depth of the bramble patch, but below the reach of the thorns, he ran and scrambled and clawed and finally came upon Caveny’s bird. He gave a quiet yup, and when Tim heard this his heart expanded. Lucifer had passed his first big test, but on the way out of the patch the dog smelled another fallen bird, Turlock’s, and he brought this one too.
When he laid the two doves at Tim’s feet, the Irishman wanted to kneel and kiss his rough black head, but he knew that all the hunters in his area were watching, so in a manly way he patted the dog, then prepared for his moment of triumph.
It was a custom in dove shooting that if a hunter downed a bird that his dog could not retrieve but another man’s dog did, the second hunter was obligated to deliver the dove to the man who had downed it. It was a nice tradition, for it allowed the second man to make a show of carrying the dove to its rightful owner while all the other hunters observed his act of sportsmanship. Implied in the gesture was the comment, ‘My dog can retrieve and yours can’t.’
Proudly Tim Caveny walked the hundred-odd yards to where Jake Turlock was standing. Lucifer started to follow, but Tim cried sharply, ‘Stay!’ and the dog obeyed. The other hunters took note of this, then watched as Tim gravely delivered the bird, but at this moment another hunter shouted ‘Mark!’ and a whole covey flew over.
Automatically Jake and Tim fired, and two birds fell. Jake’s Hey-You was on the spot, of course, and proudly ran out to recover the dove his master had knocked down. Lucifer was standing far from where his master had shot and was so obedient to the earlier command ‘Stay’ that he did not move. But when Tim yelled, ‘Fetch the dove,’ he rushed directly to the fallen bird and carried it not to where Tim was standing but back to his assigned location.
The hunter next to Tim on the down side of the field called, ‘You got yourself a dog, Tim.’
When Caveny returned to his location and saw the dove neatly laid beside his pouch, he desperately wanted to smother the dark beast with his affection, but he said merely, ‘Good dog, Luke.’
‘Mark!’ came the call and up went the guns.
The day was a triumph. Luke hunted in marshland as well as he had in the brambles. He proved he had a soft mouth. He circled well in woods, and on the open field he was superb. And with it all he displayed the sweet disposition of the Labradors and the Cavenys.
It was the tradition on these dove shoots for one member at the end of the day to provide refreshments. At a quarter to five, religiously, the hunting ceased. The dogs were put back on leashes, and if the owners had come by wagon, were stowed in back while their masters ate cold duck and drank Baltimore beer. Turlock and Caveny, having come on foot, tied their dogs to trees, and as they did so the former muttered, ‘Doves ain’t nothin’, Caveny. It’s what a dog does in ice that counts.’
‘Lucifer will handle ice,’ Tim said confidently.
‘On the bay proper, my Chesapeake is gonna eat ’im up. Out there they got waves.’
‘Your Labrador looks like a breed to be proud of,’ old Lyman Steed said as the black servant carried him into position to share the duck.
‘Has possibilities,’ Judge Hathaway Steed said. ‘But we won’t know till we see him after geese.’
Each man complimented Tim on what he had accomplished with his strange dog, but each also predicted, ‘Probably won’t be much on the bay. Hair’s not thick enough.’
Tim did not argue, but when he got Lucifer home he hugged him and gave him chicken livers, and whispered, ‘Lucifer, geese is just doves, grown bigger. You’ll love the water, cold or not.’ During the whole dove season, during which this fine black dog excelled, Tim repeated his assurances: ‘You’re gonna do the same with geese.’
The test came in November. As the four men and their dogs holed up in a blind at the Turlock marshes, Jake reminded them, ‘Geese ain’t so plentiful now. Can’t afford any mistakes, man or dog.’ He was right. Once the Choptank and its sister rivers had been home for a million geese; now the population had diminished to less than four hundred thousand, and bagging them became more difficult. Jake, a master of the goose call, tried from dawn till ten in the morning to lure the big birds down, but failed. The hunters had a meager lunch, and toward dusk, when it seemed that the day was a failure, nine geese wheeled in, lowered the pitch of their wings, spread their feet and came right at the blind. Guns blazed, and before the smoke had cleared, Jake’s Chesapeake had leaped out of the blind with powerful swimming motions and retrieved the goose that his master had appeared to kill. Lucifer went into the water, too, but many seconds after Hey-You, and he was both splashy and noisy in making his retrieve of Tim’s goose.
‘Sure doesn’t like cold water,’ Jake said contemptuously.
‘Neither di
‘A Chesapeake is born lovin’ water, colder the better.’
It became obvious to the hunters, after eight mornings in the blind, that while Tim Caveny’s new dog was exceptional with doves on warm days, he left much to be desired as a real hunter in the only form of the sport that mattered—goose on water. He displayed a discernible reluctance to plunge into cold waves, and they began to wonder whether he would go into ice at all.
Talk at the store centered on his deficiencies: ‘This here Labrador is too soft. Can’t hold a candle to a Chesapeake for hard work when it matters. You ask me, I think Caveny bought hisself a loser.’ Some hunters told him this to his face.
Tim listened and said nothing. In his lifetime he had had four major dogs, all of them Chesapeakes, and he understood the breed almost as well as Jake Turlock did, but he had never owned a dog with the charm of Lucifer, the warmth, the love, and that meant something —‘I come home, the room’s bigger when that dog’s in it.’
‘Point is,’ the men argued, ‘a huntin’ dog oughtn’t to be in a room in the first place. His job is outside.’
‘You don’t know Lucifer. Besides, he’s sired the best lot of pups in the region. This breed is bound to catch on.’
The Patamoke hunters were a suspicious clan. The most important thing in their lives, more important than wife or church or political party, was the totality of the hunting season: ‘You got to have the right gun, the right mates, the right spot, the right eye for the target and, above all, the right dog. And frankly, I doubt the Labrador.’ The pups did not sell.
Tim had faith. He talked with Lucifer constantly, encouraging him to leap more quickly into the cold water. He showed what ice was like, and how the dog must break it with his forepaws to make a path for himself to the downed goose. Using every training trick the Choptank had ever heard of, he tried to bring this handsome dog along step by step.
He failed. In January, when real ice formed along the edges of the river, the men went hunting along the banks of the bay itself, and when Jake Turlock knocked down a beautiful goose, it fell on ice about two hundred yards from the blind—‘Hey-You, get the bird!’
And the big Chesapeake showed what a marvelous breed he was by leaping into the free water, swimming swiftly to the edge of the ice, then breaking a way for himself right to the goose. Clutching the big bird proudly in his jaws, he plunged back into the icy water, pushed aside the frozen chunks and returned to the blind, entering it with a mighty water-spraying leap.
‘That’s what I call a dog,’ Jake said proudly, and the men agreed.
Lucifer did not perform so well. He retrieved his goose, all right, but hesitantly and almost with protest. He didn’t want to leap into the water in the first place; he was not adept at breaking ice; and when he returned to the blind, he ran along the ice for as long as possible before going back to the freezing water.
‘He did get the goose,’ Jake admitted condescendingly, and for the rest of that long day on the Chesapeake the two dogs performed in this way, with Hey-You doing as well as a water dog could and Lucifer just getting by.
Tim never spoke a harsh word. Lucifer was his dog, a splendid, loving, responsive animal, and if he didn’t like cold water, that was a matter between him and his master. And toward dusk the dog found an opportunity to repay Tim’s confidence. Jake had shot a big goose, which had fallen into a brambled sort of marsh from which Hey-You could not extract it. The dog tried, swam valiantly in various directions, but achieved nothing.
In the meantime Lucifer remained in the blind, trembling with eagerness, and Tim realized that his Labrador knew where the goose was. After Hey-You had returned with nothing, Tim said softly, ‘Luke, there’s a bird out there. Show them how to get it.’
Like a flash, the black dog leaped into the water, splashed his way through the semi-ice into the rushy area—and found nothing. ‘Luke!’ Tim bellowed. ‘Circle. Circle.’ So the dog ran and splashed and swam in noisy circles and still found nothing, but he would not quit, for his master kept pleading, ‘Luke, circle!’
And then he found the goose, grabbed it in his gentle mouth and swam proudly back to the blind. As he was about to place the goose at Tim’s feet the Irishman said quietly, ‘No!’ and the dog was so attentive to his master that he froze, wanting to know what he had done wrong.
‘Over there,’ Tim said, and Luke took the goose to Jake and placed it at his feet.
The feud between the two watermen continued. The men at the store fired it with unkind comments about Lucifer’s deficiencies, but once or twice Caveny caught a hint that their animosity was weakening, for at some unexpected moment a man would see in Tim’s dog a quality that made him catch his breath. Outwardly every hunter would growl, ‘I want my dog to be rough and able to stand the weather and ready to leap at anyone attackin’ me,’ but inwardly he would also want the dog to love him. And the way in which Lucifer stayed close to Tim, anxious to detect every nuance in the Irishman’s mood, tantalized the men at the store. All they would grant openly was ‘Maybe Tim’s got somethin’ in that black dog.’ But Jake Turlock would not admit even that. ‘What he’s got is a good lapdog, and that’s about it As for me, I’m interested solely in huntin’.’
Aside from this disagreement over dogs, and a fist-fight now and then, the two watermen maintained a respectful friendship. They hunted together, fished together and worked the oyster beds in season. But it was the big gun that cemented their partnership, giving it substance and allowing it to blossom.
In these decades when the Eastern Shore thrived, the city of Baltimore also flourished. Some discriminating critics considered it the best city in America, combining the new wealth of the North with the old gentility of the South. The city offered additional rewards: a host of German settlers who gave it intellectual distinction; numerous Italians who gave it warmth. But for most observers, its true excellence derived from the manner in which its hotels and restaurants maintained a tradition of savory cooking: Southern dishes, Northern meats, Italian spices and German beer.
In 1888 the noblest hotel of them all had opened, the Rennert, eight stories high with an additional three stories to provide a dome at one end, a lofty belvedere at the other. It was a grand hostelry that boasted, ‘Our cooks are Negro. Our waiters wear white gloves.’ From the day of its opening, it became noted for the sumptuousness of its cuisine: ‘Eighteen kinds of game. Fourteen ways to serve oysters. And the best wild duck in America.’ To dine at the Rennert was to share the finest the Chesapeake could provide.
Jake Turlock and Tim Caveny had never seen the new hotel, but it was to play a major role in their lives. Its black chefs demanded the freshest oysters, and these were delivered daily during the season by Choptank watermen who packed their catch in burlap bags, speeding them across the bay by special boat. When the boat was loaded with oysters, its principal cargo, the captain could usually find space on deck for a few last-minute barrels crammed with ducks: mallards, redheads, canvasbacks, and, the juiciest of all, the black. It was in the providing of these ducks for the Rennert that Jake and Tim began to acquire a little extra money, which they saved for the larger project they had in mind.
One night at the store, after arguing about the comparative merits of their dogs, Jake said, ‘I know me a man’s got a long gun he might want to dispose of.’
Caveny was excited. ‘If you can get the gun, I can get me a couple of skiffs.’
Turlock replied: ‘Suppose we get the gun and the skiffs, I know me a captain who’ll ferry our ducks to the Rennert. Top dollar.’
Caveny completed the fantasying by adding, ‘We put aside enough money, we can get Paxmore to build us our own boat. Then we’re in business.’
So the pair sailed upriver to the landing of a farm owned by an old man named Greef Twombly, and there they propositioned him: ‘You ain’t gonna have much use for your long gun, Greef. We aim to buy it.’
‘What you gonna use for money?’ the t
‘We’re gonna give you ten dollars cash, which Tim Caveny has in his pocket right now, and another forty when we start collectin’ ducks.’
‘Barrel of that gun was made from special forged iron. My grandfather brought it from London, sixty-two years ago.’
‘It’s been used.’
‘More valuable now than when he got it home.’
‘We’ll give you sixty.’
‘Sixty-five and I’ll think about it.’
‘Sixty-five it is and we get possession now.’
Twombly rocked back and forth, considering aspects of the deal, then led them to one of the proudest guns ever to sweep the ice at midnight. It was a monstrous affair, eleven feet six inches long, about a hundred and ten pounds in weight, with a massive stock that could not possibly fit into a man’s shoulder, which was a good thing because if anyone tried to hold this cannon when it fired, the recoil would tear his arm away.
‘You ever fire one of these?’ the old man asked.
‘No, but I’ve heard,’ Turlock said.
‘Hearin’ ain’t enough, son. You charge it with three quarters of a pound of black powder in here, no less, or she won’t carry. Then you pour in a pound and a half of Number Six Shot, plus one fistful. You tamp her down with greasy wadding, like this, and you’re ready. Trigger’s kept real tight so you can’t explode her by accident, because if you did, it would rip the side off’n a house.’
The two watermen admired the huge barrel, the sturdy fittings and the massive oak stock; as they inspected their purchase, the old man said, ‘You know how to fit her into a skiff?’
‘I’ve seen,’ Turlock said.
But Twombly wanted to be sure these new men understood the full complexity of this powerful gun, so he asked them to carry it to the landing, where he had a fourteen-foot skiff with an extremely pointed bow and almost no dead rise, chocks occupying what normally would have been the main seat and a curious burlap contraption built into the stern area.