Life. Black Powder

The storyteller is talking about hunting. He asks, "Black powder? How many of you have gone on a black powder hunt?" and I raise my hand. I don't always raise my hand when the tellers ask questions. Questions like,
"I had a friend when I was young. Any of you have friends?"
"How many of you have ever yelled at someone, been really angry?"
"Have any of you ever had a parent?"
Sorry, but nope. I know they're trying to ease into their story but, no, not gonna grace that with a response. My youngest leans over, concerned. "Mom, you have a parent. You yell. You should raise your hand," and she tugs at my arm.
I push it down. "No, honey. I don't have to be in this conversation." She worries about me. It's because where she is dutiful, loving and good, I am allergic to annoyances, to accidentally picking up obligations, like cat hair on a black sweater.
But this one's different, this is a legitimate question. This I'll answer. Turns out, if they are to be believed as they lift their hands, a surprising number of audience members hunt or have hunted with powder and shot. Or, I don't know, this is Utah, maybe it's not so surprising. My friend turns to look at me, sitting up and back, a bit, in surprise. "Black powder? Seriously?"
Well, yeah. My father had no sons, I remind him, so, of course I've hunted that way and every other way. Of course I have. Obviously. Only I suspect from the architecture of his expression that he has not hunted with powder and shot although he comes from a family of all sons, where his dad could have reveled in male hunting parties one stalking and shooting season after another all through the year. So, the black powder hunt is not a given after all, I guess. It seemed that way to me, in our house growing up.

Black powder. Seriously.

He never reproached us for being girls. He liked us. We knew he was lonely, though we didn't know why, at first, didn't know there was a difference between boys and girls. We might have been anything that wore a dress to church, while he wore a suit but that seemed more a lapse in judgment on his part than a hard and fast barrier between us. While I can't speak for the sisters, my baby opinion was that my not wearing a suit was a firm matter of preference, nearly of morality. Dresses and tights were nasty enough, well, not the dresses, I've always worn dresses of my own free will, but the tights were hellish and slips, too. Just imagine a belt and tie. Suits have all those parts. And shoes you couldn't slip on. He wore wingtips. Horrors. Though our little-girl bedroom was pink and red madness that meant nothing to us, we had not been consulted in the matter, those colors were imposed upon us and we did not feel defined thereby. I don't know how it would have worked out if we'd been asked. Blue and green, my favorites, would have caused trouble, would have screamed BOY COLORS and yellow, the nice safe gender neutral of my childhood, gave me a bad headache and a little bit of a stomach ache. (It's better now, between me and yellow, but I have to be careful. It is kind of fun, though, like there's a whole new color in the world now that I am old.) So. We didn't at first get it about not being boys because we thought we were just people. He wore a suit to church and we wore dresses like our momma and he carried a gun to work but I carried a lunch to school and the sisters were too little to do anything so they played all day and our mom cooked and sewed because she was in the house with the stove and the sewing machine handy. We were all different. Differences that might have occurred in any group, that might have been coincidental or preferential. And then, too, in the early years none of us realized we were part of a pattern worked in one color, girl on girl. It was not till later, till the fourth sister came along when I was about ten, that I really began to take it in. No boys, no sons. Not ever.

So, black powder. Seriously.

In case you don't know and want to, but just very briefly so you won't be driven to a design blog in despair, what you (probably) think of as a bullet is actually a cartridge, containing bullet (or shot), powder, and a primer (also called a cap) in one tidy package called a casing or shell. You find spent shells when you go on hikes; you use them for whistles and carry them home in your pockets because your dad reloads them. More on that later. If you put that package, that cartridge, in a gun and the package is facing the right direction when you pull the trigger the pin in the gun's hammer will connect smartly with the cap (remember I said this was simplified) causing a small explosion in the casing which hurls the dense lead part, the bullet, out the barrel of the gun and on its way to whatever end you had in mind. Or perhaps to some end you never even considered, but that would be your fault and nothing to do with either the bullet or the gun. Fortunately for us all, you cannot load a bullet (cartridge) backwards and if somehow you did, nothing could happen.
Now, in the old days, cap, shot and powder had each to be loaded separately and most carefully into the gun every time it was fired. Laboriously and painstakingly, powder had to be measured, poured down the barrel (or muzzle) of the gun, covered with a cloth, pounded into place, the bullet sent down the muzzle and pounded also, then the cap set carefully on the firing pin. That was a loaded gun. This had to be done each time a gun was fired before it could be fired again. You remember this, you read this process in Little House in the Big Woods. Originally a cartridge was a paper tube containing a measure of powder (called a round or a charge), the end of which a soldier bit off to pour into his gun. If you watch movies with cannons that shoot cannon balls you'll see this same process on a large scale. In the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan there is a gorgeous costume on display, Turkish (as I recall), the chest covered by two double bandoleers covered with hand carved wooden cartridges, each fitted with a cork held by a little string. Think how much time you'd save on the battlefield, with all that pre-measuring. Of course, you have to reload standing up straight and tall and making a marvelous target for, let's say, a guy with a slingshot (the "shot" used in a slingshot is the same word as the "shot" which is a bullet).
There you are, the history of gunpowder warfare from, like, ancient Egypt (look it up on Wiki) through roughly the American Civil War, when they started using breech loading rifles (which you could reload while lying down), and after which guns firing cartridges in the modern sense quickly became the norm. A gun requiring the old fashioned sort of labor intensive loading is commonly called a muzzle loader and the hunts dedicated to this type of gun are referred to as muzzle loader or "black powder" hunts.

OK?

That's what the storyteller was talking about, asking who'd been on a black powder hunt. DON"T YOU LOVE LEARNING THINGS? I know I do.

What sort of person, you're asking yourself, hunts like this?
And what sort of person knows this stuff?
And, why?
Your answers, in order of asking, are, my dad, his girls and I really could not tell you.

The sort of person who'd lug powder, shot and caps with him is my dad. The purist, in it for the shooting experience. Get your deer on the first shot, there won't be a second one. Or, kill the cougar or bear coming after you with that one shot. When hunting with a muzzle loader you aren't required by either the laws of the land or your own common sense to wear traffic cone orange, which no deer in its right mind ever, ever wore in nature. As with the bow hunt, on the black powder hunt you can disguise yourself as a tree, or as brush, or as a deer, and this because neither arrows nor lead shot ever hurt anybody. I mean, think about it. Examine our history. Usually bow hunters manifest in camouflage and for black powder you look like a mountain man. I think that's a big draw, the costumes. Back in the day my dad hunted all of everything (bow, muzzle loader, doe, buck, elk, moose, elephant, python, Kodiak bear, cannibal, and a bunch I've forgotten) but now you have to draw out for your hunt so he only goes once. If he's lucky. When I was small, though, there was plenty of hunt for everyone.

We all went, the sisters, one time or other. I don't think any of us ever carried a gun. They're heavy, you know, and we'd have had to take hunter's safety courses and all that nonsense and for what? I think my middle sister got her licence when she was old, I don't remember. Maybe they all did and we just never discussed it at the dinner table. Or I put it out of my mind. Really, I think most of us turned out to be girls, in the end. Certainly all the sons-in-law and (I think) all the grandsons have had licences, even Noah who I'm not sure could kill something if his life depended on it. Maybe if someone else's did, his sister's, maybe. The youngest sister. For me as a child, hunting was about keeping my dad company, about feeling he was very lonely in some far off way and wanting badly to do something other than sort of stand around aching for him about that.

My clearest memories of those hunts were of hiking, of eating the lunches he carried for us and of being told to sit and wait very quietly till he got back.

The hiking was fraught, much more so than at other times, with the awareness that while you and your dad were creeping along quietly and carefully, all around you were other people, possibly hundreds of other people, moving quietly and carefully who very much wanted to shoot something which would be dressed in brown, like you were, and which would also be moving along quietly and carefully.
I say it was more fraught than at other times because we were very well aware that in the mountains of the American west there may at any time be people creeping about who want to shoot things, maybe you. But at those other times they might be distracted, and there would not be near so many of them as in the fall of the year, when they were likely also unusually focused. So you had to be careful. For me, being careful meant keeping my dad between myself and whomever might be wanting to shoot at me and as I never knew from moment to moment where these people might be I had to shift my position frequently as we glided along. Shifting as often as I felt was necessary for safety hampered my gliding abilities and got me into trouble with my dad who wanted me to pick a spot and glide in it. And sometimes there was a little sister tossed into the mix; was she then an additional shield or a civilian requiring my aid and comfort? Striving in vain to avoid examining the huge dilemma of sheltering behind living people in the first place. Suppose I shifted at the crucial moment, triumphed and it was my dad who was shot, not me? What then? I knew how to find a stream and knew that in Utah all streams lead to people, but, for reals? That's what was going to happen? And what about the questions my mother and the police would inevitably ask regarding my position at the time of the shooting? Knotty moral conundrums I could wrestle around, distracting myself from freezing feet and fingers.

The lunches he brought remind me of outfits I see on people in the street. I often ask people (in my mind, only in my mind) what they were hoping for when they assembled those articles of clothing and how they were able to tell when they had finished. What, I ask them silently, was this supposed to have done for you, had it gone well? My little girl self felt like that about the lunches. My momma's lunches were organized around a theme, say, tuna sandwiches, and had accessories appropriate to that central idea, cut up apple perhaps, potato chips and milk. A cookie or two for after if you ate enough apple and fish. My dad's lunch choices appeared to be completely random gatherings sharing only two defining principles.
1-You could carry it without mess in your pockets.
2-You seldom or never saw this food on our table at home.
Notice that none of the considerations were
3-Little girls will eat this,
which was how I first met kippered snacks and learned hunger is not the worst thing that can happen to you, not by a long shot (archery term). The best lunch memory is of my dad carefully opening a can of Vienna sausages so that the pull-off top stayed connected on one side, making a handle. He balanced the can on the edge of the fire (always build a fire. always) so the sausages would heat up in their own juices in their own tiny pot and he could lift them from the fire and spread them on bread. I was so impressed by his cleverness, his canny way with food and fires and cans. I did not know it but I felt just like I was in a Hemingway story with Nick. Big Two-Hearted Creek. My dad was so cool. Warmed up Vienna sausage on bread was not chosen because little girls would eat it, but it carried nicely in the pocket and was certainly not something that would ever show up on our table at home.

After lunch and more gliding there always came a point when I was positioned on a rock and told to wait quietly till he came back and no matter what not to move from that spot. I'd sit on the rock and watch him gliding away, brown on brown, till I could no longer see him moving through the trees. I suspect now that I am old this was the only real hunting time on days when he was blessed with company. For me it was alone time for more philosophical reflection. Ruminations on mortality and the certainty of death, on the human tendency to worry and imagine the worst and the fruitlessness of making contingency plans, and some serious puzzling over the oddness of an obviously lonely person wanting to leave a companion and go off to be by himself. I wondered how he would ever remember where he left had me (though I doubted less after I saw his wilderness cooking skills) and adopted the technique, which I have used ever since, of setting an arbitrary deadline, of deciding when to turn worry into action. If he isn't back by the time the sun touches those trees...
Now I use it with my kids. And the painter. If he hasn't called in an hour...if the fever goes up another degree...if she comes home crying one more time...then...
I'll find the stream and follow it home.

Black powder. Seriously.

Not last weekend, because I was listening to stories last weekend, but the one before that, I took my youngest child camping. With some of the sisters and their families and my folks and my brother-in-law's folks. It's important to camp with Mike's parents so someone brings the seriously good food. On the last day they got out the rest of the eggs (they brought waaaaay too many eggs, funny thing) and shot them with a BB gun. Eggs give a tiny jump and then explode softly when shot. Silly, wasteful and very cool. Everyone was taking turns except some of us old people who were just watching and my little girl, who stoutly refused to join in. Oddly. Because, it dawned on everyone at the same time, she didn't know how to shoot and didn't want to learn in front of everyone. Not that she wouldn't have had enthusiastic teachers. I think that was the problem, too many coaches.
Now here's the thing. I felt horrified, a failure, like I do when I realize she knows almost no nursery rhymes. What's with that? How could that have happened? I don't congratulate myself when she discusses The Winter's Tale or her favorite museums in Amsterdam. Feels normal. But not knowing how to shoot? I was at a loss. She did give in, finally, after her aunt convinced her a BB gun never, ever kicks. I watched my dad watching her shoot. There had been a disagreement (elbow lifted and held out straight (an archer's prejudice) or tucked in tight (sensible)) and he stood close as her aunts taught her how to sight along the barrel at the eggs. I was behind, watching her, watching them, watching my dad stand with his hands in his pockets, letting somebody else do this, teach this. He doesn't shoot as much anymore, he doesn't see well.

Time was a gun dealer would bring a gun newly in his possession to my dad, to shoot, to break down, to give his opinion. But he won't wear glasses. Some of us think maybe he is a little vain. He watches my girl getting advice from everywhere at once. Not much from him, though he weighs in on elbow position (up).

Time was he loaded his own cartridges, tables covered with presses, casings rolling around or standing in ordered rows like soldiers, containers of shot and of powder, tiny, grainy, black spills. He could tell you, by the sound, the gun that had just been fired. Movies really bothered him. "You don't get a ricochet in the middle of a sandy desert." "That pistol wasn't used in that war." "Wrong caliber!" Grrr.
"Careful where you point that," he bellows suddenly, "I don't care whether it's loaded or not!"

Time was he would go shoot for the joy, for the exercise of his will and his wit, to blow off frustration and to be better and better where he already excelled. He stands with his hands in his pockets, thin, hunched in his shoulders. A cold wind has come up, blowing us out of our camp. My little girl is taking aim (badly) and breathing deeply. She's anxious, I wonder why. I hear him telling me to shoot between my breaths.

ping

She's smiling and asking if she can shoot again and she does, again and again. She's in love with that BB gun. Never hits an egg. Hits the watermelon they set up next, though. She's delighted. My dad looks back at me, smiling, pleased, wondering. I remember asking him, why, why shoot? Why get good at it? For war? Aren't we supposed to be spending all our time trying to be like God? So why? And him looking at me with his left eye over his left shoulder and asking back at me, you don't think God's a good shot? and blowing away the Miracle Whip bottle set up on the top of an old nasty bureau at the dump. bam smash tinkle slither

Time was he shot at man-shapes in the FBI firing range.
Time was he kept a gun under the seat of the car.
Built his ammunition. Shot with black powder. Fed us the meat he hunted off the mountain.
Time was he shot for discipline, for precision, for perfection.
He brought the watermelon. I watch him standing, watching his grandkids filling it with lead. Strange family outing. Never will be entirely sure why he brought the melon.
Time was you could only vacuum under the sofa with difficulty, what with the guns lurking there. Not like that anymore. I own a gun because of him. So does the painter. I'm fully expecting my lovely little daughter to ask for a BB gun this Christmas. Along with the pocket knife she's been begging for, along with a blow dryer and make up and glitter and fairy dress ups. He stands watching his daughters shoot, their children waiting impatiently for a turn. Stands alone. The shooting's not perfect anymore. He watches. I watch him, both of us alone.

Sit here on this rock and don't move till I come back.

Black powder. Seriously.


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