“Sure, Grandma. I got the time.”
“You still going into work?”
“I gotta, Grandma.”
She nodded and gave me a glimmer of a smile. “You take care of yourself.”
“I will.”
Grandma nodded and shut the door.
I slipped out of bed and took another long, hot shower, scrubbing my skin until it was a bright shade of pink. I stayed in there until the water had gone cold, and only then reluctantly climbed out.
Grandma had dug a pair of Grandpa’s old black boots out from somewhere and set them in the hall. There was no sign of my tennis shoes, and I figured it was for the best. Grandpa’s boots were a little big, but with two pairs of socks, the creased leather molded around my feet just fine.
A giant tomato and onion omelet was waiting for me on the counter in the kitchen. After last night, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be hungry again, but I surprised myself and inhaled the breakfast.
I checked the clock. Seven-thirty. It was time for a few squirrels to meet their maker. I opened the front hall closet. More than two dozen boxes of shells were stacked neatly on the floor next to the encyclopedias. I could remember when the closet was full of Grandpa’s guns: Winchesters, Rugers, Remingtons, a couple of Browning shotguns, a Colt 1911 .45, and even an ancient Model 1885 High Wall single shot. They were all gone, all sold to pay for rent and food. Grandma cried when she had to sell the Highwall rifle, Grandpa’s favorite. That was the only time I ever saw Grandma cry.
All that remained was the Browning .10 gauge shotgun and Grandpa’s Springfield 30.06, the two guns Grandma refused to sell. I grabbed a box of shells and the rifle case. Nestled in threadbare red imitation velvet waited my grandfather’s 30.06. Bolt action, with a five-round clip. Walnut stock. Iron sights, grooved slots of metal at the end of the barrel.
I never liked using scopes. Looking through a scope always made me feel sort of disconnected from the rifle somehow. I felt much more comfortable sighting down the barrel, through the iron sights. It felt as if the rifle and I were working together, instead of screwing a chunk of glass on the top and using that to find your target. You never knew where the scope was aiming; if it was off just a little, you wouldn’t know it, you couldn’t feel it, but by sighting down the barrel, you knew roughly where you were putting the bullet. For long-distance shots, I used a pair of binoculars, just to double-check that the tiny brown blur in the distance was, in fact, a squirrel and not just a knotted root. Shells were too expensive to waste on killing a piece of wood.
The second reason was that using a scope felt too much like cheating.
The term “thirty-aught-six” simply meant that the rifle was a thirty caliber, that is, 308 thousandths of an inch wide, and the aught-six signified the year it was invented—1906. Besides loading her own shotgun shells, Grandma also kept me supplied with plenty of shells for the 30.06, using a 150-grain bullet, propelled by 52 grains of 4064 Dupont powder. This was a deer-hunting load, a huge load to inflict on the squirrels, but Grandma never changed or reduced it. For one thing, that was how Grandpa had set up his loading bench and dies, and Grandma got nostalgic about things like that.
The other was that she felt kind of sorry for the squirrels, even though they weren’t anything but country rats—these weren’t cute, fluffy gray tree squirrels, just disease-ridden rodents that lived in giant colonies of tunnels in the dirt.
“I won’t let them eat my garden, but I don’t see any need making ’em suffer either,” Grandma said.
Well, the squirrels sure didn’t suffer much when hit by a 150-grain bullet. They never even knew what hit them; the bullet usually just turned them inside out instantly. One second, they’re sniffing around in dust, and the next, they’re climbing that great oak tree up into the sky. They never felt much of anything.
Still, I can’t say I enjoyed killing them. I liked shooting, loved it, lived for it most days, but I never thought drawing blood when you pulled the trigger was much of a sport. It was too easy. I’d rather just throw some old golf ball as far as I could toward the foothills and shoot at that for a while. But we had to protect our food.
Grandma’s garden came first. And so, every month or so, I’d grab the Springfield and a box of shells and head into the knee-high Johnson grass beyond the garden to a level spot under the dead oak tree out in the middle of the field.
The tree was a monster; it had been out there forever. Lightning had struck it once or twice, and the branches grew out into the clouds in dizzying, twisted patterns because of the jolt. I don’t know what finally killed it. I like to think it was old age. It had been dead a couple of years now. The tree had also survived a few grass fires, and I could just make out the dim lines at various points along the thick trunk that spoke of floods in years past. Some of these lines were above my head.
About sixty yards past the tree to the north, the field dropped into a dry creek bed, nothing more than gray gravel and red mud. I’d never seen any water come down the creek, just puddles that collected after heavy rains. The foothills rose on the other side of the creek bed. This was where the squirrels lived. Over the years, before they built thedam and created the Stony Gorge reservoir, the creek had sliced chunks of the hills away, and now crumbling dirt cliffs rose out of the gravel, some nearly twenty to thirty feet high. Giant colonies of squirrels, some numbering into the hundreds, maybe even thousands, lived in there, in complicated mazes of holes that periodically opened out into the dirt face of the cliff. And there, when I walked out to the old oak tree, was where they died.
I leaned the rifle against the tree and studied the sky. No rain yet, but plenty of fat, angry clouds rolled across the low sky. I squatted down and got comfortable, mashing the tall grass down to form a cushion, my back to the tree, dirt cliff slightly off to my left. Sometimes, just to make things interesting and give the squirrels a sporting chance, I’d shoot standing, or off-hand as the old-timers called it, but today I was too damn tired and in too much of a hurry. I just wanted to kill a few squirrels and get to work before Fat Ernst got mad. Again.
I settled into the grass, feet planted firmly, knees bent at a 45-degree angle. If the holes in the cliff were at twelve o’clock, then I faced more or less toward the two o’clock mark. You always turn a little sideways to what you’re shooting so you can support the gun easier. If you face the target head on, then your left arm has to hang way out there, holding on to the end of the forestock, supporting the barrel. You can’t keep it steady. But if you turn sideways a little, then the rifle is resting across your chest, allowing you to draw your left arm in a little, so you can brace that elbow on something like, say, your knee if you’re sitting.
The key to holding any gun steady is in your posture. The idea is to build a series of solid supports, using your bones, locking them into place, from the ground up to the gun. I don’t care how strong you are, holding a rifle steady only using your muscles while firing at a target a hundred yards out is damn near impossible. You’ll shake too much. You need to relax those muscles, you need to be calm, breathing nice and slow and relaxed. Even your pulse can throw off your aim. It doesn’t have to be much. Moving the barrel a fraction of an inch could translate into missing the target by nearly a foot at a hundred yards.