A Resonant Echo in the Smoky Hills

“Chickens. He got it for chickens. These Smoky Hills were full of ’em.”

The man’s comment startled me a little, although it shouldn’t have. I mean, I knew he was standing there, but my mind had been miles—and years—away.

In my hands lay the most immaculate old L.C. Smith I had ever laid eyes on. Sleek, nimble and stunning in every detail, it couldn’t have weighed more than 6-1/2 pounds—a featherweight in both name and feel. The bluing on the slender barrels was luminous; so bright, in fact, that I almost could make out the color of my eyes in the reflection it cast. A mosaic of case colors fairly twinkled on the small action, giving new meaning to the gun-trader term “100 percent.”

The gun’s wood seemed far better than most Field grades, but perhaps I just had never seen one so clean—so untarnished by weather, age and human hands. The checkering was crisp and deep on both the stock and the little splinter forend, which nestled snugly under the 28-inch 16-gauge tubes.

I had expected to see a nice shotgun, but I simply was shocked to behold this svelte little Elsie.

“Prairie chickens, you say . . .” I sort of stammered.

We were standing in the dining room of an old farmhouse that was almost devoid of furnishings; the white walls harbored shadows in the paint where generations’ worth of pictures had hung for decades. The natural revolution of time had brought the house to this point and stopped. Now, like so many old farmsteads throughout the Midwest, this house likely was destined to stand empty as the earth began its slow reclamation process.

  For the past few months I had been on the lookout for a classic American double. I had put out the word among my fellow upland aficionados, hoping that someone knew of a sleeper somewhere, and I had frequented—much to the chagrin of my loving wife—the local gun libraries and shops. My efforts had paid off rather anemically, as most of the guns I’d looked at were, for lack of a better term, old beaters. One stood out: a 16-gauge Parker VH, but its dramatic drop at heel was surpassed only by its dramatic price tag, which made me question whether its owner really wanted to sell.

Then one Saturday morning in the spring I received a call from a friend; his uncle had told him there had been an estate sale and that the executor—the deceased woman’s son—was a personal friend. The son had told my friend’s uncle that about all that was left was “an old double-barrel shotgun” that he just couldn’t let go at auction. The gun had belonged to his father, who had purchased it after coming home from World War II and then passed away several years later. The gun had sat in the house ever since. He still was thinking about selling it but doing so privately.

“Dad was a quail hunter really,” the man in the dining room said, “and he used an old Smith 20-gauge choked Skeet and Skeet. After he came back from the war, he got to hunting them chickens. I was only a nubbin at the time—9 years old—but I remember him cussin’ them because he didn’t have enough gun or enough choke. So he got this 16; ordered it at the general store. She’s Modified and Full, if I remember right.”

“Mind if we step out on the porch?” I wanted to see the gun in the daylight.

“You know,” the man continued, as we stepped through the doorway, “I don’t believe that gun has been out of the house in, hell, 50 years. I was going to try it a few years after Dad died, but I never shot it. Let’s see now, that was probably in about ’55 or so.”

I raised the 16 to my shoulder, and it came up like it was made for me. Its barrels glistened as I looked down the rib and out to the prairie and the winding river beyond.

“Is that the Little Blue or the Big Blue River?” I asked, trying to make polite conversation.

“Little Blue,” he said. “We’ve got a couple of sections over there. That big prairie mesa was one of Dad’s favorite chicken fields.”

I imagined the gun’s original owner—a fairly young man at the time—pulling up in his old Ford and letting out his dog. Maybe it was a cool day, unseasonably so, which foretold of a good evening afield. Across the knee-high carpet of grass he strode, the Smith lying comfortably in the crook of his arm. He passed a small thicket and was surprised to not flush a covey of bobwhites.

As the lemon pointer cast uphill, it winded a small flock of pinnated grouse, foregathering against the coming night. Tail cracking back and forth, the dog worked the scent and suddenly froze—his tail level in the style of many dogs of that era.

“Whoa, Jeb… whoa,” the lanky gunman cooed as he walked past his old campaigner.

From the lee side of a chokecherry tangle, 20 prairie chickens flushed as one, their buff wings pressing the evening air, their eyes fixed on a distant plateau and safety.

Caught slightly off balance, the man mounted his new Elsie and pulled past a bird vectoring low and left. The open barrel spoke and ended the chicken’s flight. Smoothly and quickly, he pivoted and pulled down on a bird flying straight away and gaining distance. Now the tighter barrel worked its magic and tumbled the second chicken.

Two purple Monark hulls were extracted from the barrels as the sweet smell of spent gunpowder drifted past the gunner’s nostrils. He slipped two more loads of No. 6s into the waiting bores and smiled, realizing his new chicken gun had proven its worth.

“Chicken supper tomorrow night, Jeb,” he said to the old dog as he placed the birds in his game bag and began walking through the tall grass toward a distant ridge.

I lowered the gun and admired it as my mind returned to the present.

“How about a cup of coffee?” my host asked.

I accepted, and soon were sitting at an old dining table on the last two chairs in the house.

“Why are you even looking for another gun?” my companion said. “You have several, don’t you?”

“Yes sir, I have several that I like, but they’re really just tools. What I want is a classic double—an example of fine American craftsmanship and history; a gun to admire as much as use.”

“You hunt a lot, do you?” he said.

“Every chance I get. I feel most alive when I’m walking the field with my setter. Plus I get to relive the experiences by writing a little for some outdoor magazines; you know, trying to bring the stories to life.”

“What about chickens?” he pressed. “Do you hunt chickens?”

“I haven’t missed a season for several years,” I said, a little proud of myself. “I take only a couple of birds per year. One day, I’m afraid, their habitat will shrink to the point where huntable populations may be a thing of the past.” Suddenly, I found myself feeling a little melancholy.

“If you want Dad’s old chicken gun, I’ll tell you what we’ll do . . . .” My host rose from his chair in mid-sentence and scrounged up two scraps of paper and a well-used pencil. “I’ll write down what I’ll take for her on my piece, and you write down what you’ll give for her on yours.”

  My mind raced. The shotgun possessed intrinsic value for sure, value that could be determined by the marketplace. But how does one place monetary value on the feelings imbued by holding such a fine upland gun? The gun’s condition was perfect, its history profound . . . .

My host slid his piece of paper to me, and I slid mine to him. We both turned them over, and when we did, a slight, gentle smile came to my companion’s lips as he raised his coffee and took a sip.

Seeing that I was about to speak, the man—25 years my elder—raised his hand to quiet me. Unable to contain myself, I told him that his figure wasn’t even in the ballpark. It barely approached a quarter of the gun’s value.

“And your figure is probably nearing twice its value,” he replied. “I spoke to a collector at the estate auction, and he tried to buy her. He told me her value and began to make ever-increasing offers. But I knew what his plans were. He would put the gun in a cold, lifeless safe and maybe once a year show her to his friends. I politely told him that I’d decided not to sell the gun and ended the conversation.”

He looked over at the Elsie and pointed at it. “Dad bought that gun to hunt chickens and died before he could fully enjoy it. Hell, I know he couldn’t have shot more than a half-dozen boxes of shells through it. I want that old gun to hunt chickens, and I aim for you to be the one to shoot it.”

“I’m flattered more than you’ll ever know,” I said, “but your price is still way too low, and I just couldn’t . . . .”

“I’m giving you my part of the gun and I’m shorting my sister a few hundred dollars. She doesn’t need the money—she’s rich—and besides, I’d bet she probably forgot this gun even exists; it means nothing to her.

“No, sir, I’ll take that figure and not one penny more!”

Feeling a little ashamed, I counted out the money, and my host slipped it in his shirt pocket. Then he slowly poured us another cup of coffee. We sat there in the empty house for about an hour until we’d drained the pot while talking about hunting, the weather, grain prices and the like. A few feet away, the Elsie leaned stately against a closet door.

With the coffee gone and our business finished, my host carried the old Smith out on the front porch, held it up and looked at it one more time. Then he handed it to me.

I thanked him generously.

“We’re keeping those two sections yonder on the Little Blue,” he said. “I want you to come out this fall and hunt those chickens. By God, there’s sure a bunch of ’em over there.” He looked down at the graying wooden floor and then back at me. “You know, I never realized how hard yet how satisfying this would be. I’ll see you in September . . . .” And then he turned and went back into his boyhood home, the screen door clattering faintly as it shut behind him.

Driving down the private gravel road, I was engulfed with emotions as it hit me just how much this shotgun really meant to the old gentleman—how he must have felt as he went back inside the lonely old house. Then my thoughts turned to September, prairie chickens and the old 16 . . . .

God willing, I would be back that fall, and once again a resonant echo of the mighty Elsie would be heard by the prairie chickens of the Smoky Hills—the same sonorous echo heard by their ancestors so long, long ago.

Jack Hancock is a US Army Warrant Officer who grew up on a Texas ranch and has hunted upland birds throughout the country. He currently lives in Kansas, where he hunts pheasants and quail with his English setter.