“I’ll get ‘em, I need to stretch my legs anyway,” and pulled himself out of the pit before the big guide could put his gun down. “I’ll go get ‘em.”Ĭhris thumbed the safety on his empty gun, barrel still warm and leaned it against the pit’s wall next to his father. He grabbed for Chris’s father’s hand and pumped it twice. “All right!” Beau laughed, eyes shining in that too red face. “Ooook,” his Dad said and smiled and Chris smiled back and slapped his arm above the elbow. Instead he was aware that this felt normal, like before, and it had been a long time since he’d felt like that and then the goose honked and he was just a man with a gun hiding in a hole in a field again.Ĭhris was up, the geese coming in huge, flaring cruciform in the weak January sun, and he covered one and his father shot and the bird was punched one way as he pulled the trigger and punched the bird back the other way, and it never failed to be like that, they always locked up on the same bird, and now the other bird was wheeling around the way it’d had come, ungainly but deceptively fast, wings beating double time and Chris fired but Beau was already blasting away and the bird folded in the air and fell boneless to the cornfield. He always did that a moment earlier than Chris liked.Ĭhris edged the barrel of his gun up between the slats, knowing he’d had that exact thought every time they went hunting, and for a half a heart beat he was out of that thoughtless awareness where the world was only the wet clay smell of the pit, and the dry scrape of his father’s boots on the plywood floor and the light through the slats. He glanced at his father and his father smiled back and pushed his shotgun’s safety “off”. He heard his father shifting on the balls of his feet, readying for that lunge out of the pit, something neither of them had really mastered. “They’re locked up-get ready.”Ĭhris stared at the narrow slash of sky between the slats, waiting for the birds, waiting for Beau’s word. The geese honked again, and Beau answered, “Hu-WUP, HU-WUP-WUP, HU- WUP-WUP!”īeau grinned. He held his breathe and reached up and pulled the slats tighter together. Chris heard a whirring buzz and caught a flash of brown through the slats as the birds flew over. The geese answered with single honks, and Beau dropped to a crouch, holding the pit’s camouflage cover up an inch or two to see out. Down.Ĭhris crouched next to his father, knees aching, finger on the outside of the trigger guard.īeau had the call to his lips, the big man’s cheeks puffing like Dizzy Gillespie’s as he blew- “Hu-WUP, Hu-WUP-WUP, HU-WUP-WUP!” Beau snapped the flag right, left, right again, and then dropped it flat to the side of the pit.īeau did it again.
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