The average length of time a kid was allowed to remain in possession of his hatchet was forty-eight hours. By then the hatchet would have produced approximately sixty bushels of wood chips, eight hundred hack marks, and a bad case of hysteria for the kid’s mother. The youngster would be unceremoniously stripped of his hatchet, even as its blade fell hungrily on a clothesline post or utility pole, and be told that he could have it back when he was “older,” by which was meant age twenty-seven.

  Kids now probably wouldn’t understand the appeal hatchets held for youngsters of my generation. If a kid today received a hatchet for Christmas, he would ask, “Where do you put the batteries?” He would have no inkling of the romance of the hatchet and what it symbolized to boys of an earlier time, presumably all the way back to George Washington.

  In the time and place of my childhood, woodcraft still loomed large in the scheme of a man’s life. A man sawed and split firewood for the home, of course, but more important, he could take care of himself in the woods. He could build log cabins and lean-tos and footbridges, chop up a log to feed a campfire, fell poles to pitch a tent on or to hoist up a deer or to make a stretcher to haul out of the woods the person who wasn’t that good with his ax.

  One of the best things you could say about a man back then was that he was a good woodsman. Being a good woodsman seemed to erase a lot of other character flaws.

  “Shorty may have some faults,” one man might say, “but I’ll tell you this—he’s a good woodsman!”

  “Yep,” someone else would observe. “Shorty is a fine woodsman, all right. If he made it to the mountains, I reckon it’ll take the posse a month to root him out.”

  The ax was the primary tool of the woodsman. If he wished, a woodsman could go off into the woods with an ax and provide heat and shelter for himself and live a life of freedom and independence and dignity and not be at anyone’s beck and call or have to comb his hair or take baths. Not that I recall anyone ever fleeing to the woods, not even Shorty, who was nabbed sitting on a barstool at Beaky’s Tavern, still a long way from the mountains. But it was the idea! If you were good with an ax and a gun, of course, and a knife, you could always fall back to the mountains. What it was all about, underneath, was the potential for freedom, not the jived-up freedom of patriotic speeches but real freedom, one-to-one-ratio freedom, where man plucks his living directly from Nature. Of course, sometimes Nature plucks back, but that’s not part of this dream, this vision, as symbolized by the Christmas hatchet.

  I first realized I needed a hatchet when I was five years old and my mother read me stories about the pioneers chopping out little clearings in the great forests of the land. Ah, I thought, how satisfying it would be to chop out a clearing, to chop anything, for that matter. My campaign for a hatchet began immediately and achieved fruition on my eighth Christmas.

  Although I wasn’t allowed to touch any of the presents before Christmas Eve, I had spotted one package that bore the general shape of a hatchet. Still, I couldn’t be sure, because my mother was a clever and deceptive woman, once wrapping a new pair of long johns to look like an electric train. Was she pulling a fast one on me this time or had she truly lost her senses and bought me a hatchet?

  It turned out to be a hatchet, a little red job with a hefty handle and a cutting edge dull as a licorice stick. Even as I unwrapped it, I could feel all the thousands of little chops throbbing about inside, pleading to be turned loose on the world.

  “Now don’t chop anything,” my mother said.

  Within minutes, I had honed a razor edge onto the hatchet and was overcome with a terrible compulsion to chop. Forty-eight hours later, the hatchet was wrenched from my grasp and hidden away, presumably to be returned to me sometime after I had children of my own.

  A few days after Christmas I learned that my friend Crazy Eddie Muldoon, who lived on the farm next to ours, had also received a Christmas hatchet.

  “Where is it?” I asked. “Let’s go chop something.”

  “Uh, I got it put away,” Crazy Eddie said. “Let’s use yours.”

  “Uh, I loaned mine to my cousin for a while,” I replied. “He said, ‘You don’t have a hatchet I can borrow, do you?’ and I said, ‘Sure.’”

  “Sure,” said Crazy Eddie, who was only crazy part of the time.

  As good luck would have it, an epidemic of permissiveness swept the county the following summer and both Eddie and I regained possession of our respective hatchets. There were still plenty of chops left in the hatchets and the two of us wandered off down to our woodlot in search of a suitable recipient.

  A large tamarack soared up uselessly on the edge of the woodlot, and Crazy Eddie said maybe it would be a good idea if we built an empty space in the sky where it was standing. As it happened, I had long nourished a desire to yell “Timberrrrrr!” at the very moment I sent a mammoth of the forest crashing to the ground.

  “Your folks can use it for firewood,” Crazy Eddie said, in an attempt to explain his motive for felling the tamarack. But I knew he too yearned to hear the thunder of a great tree dashed to earth; he, as much as I, was into chopping for the pure aesthetics of the thing.

  We spent all day chopping away at the tamarack, with Eddie on one side, me on the other, our hatchets sounding like slow but determined woodpeckers. At noon I went home for lunch.

  “What are you boys up to?” my mother asked, with no great show of interest.

  “Chopping down a big tree.”

  “That’s nice,” Mom said. “Don’t fight.”

  After lunch, Crazy Eddie and I were back at the tree again, chipping out a huge U-shaped gouge all the way around its circumference. We were both exhausted, sweating, standing in chips up to our knees, but we could see now it was possible to accomplish the task we had set for ourselves. The tree began to moan and creak ominously as the hatchets bit into its heartwood. By late afternoon the huge tamarack stood precariously balanced on a gnawed core of wood slightly thicker than a hatchet handle.

  Neither Crazy Eddie nor I had the slightest clue as to the direction in which the tree might fall, which heightened our anticipation with the added element of suspense. We took turns charging up to the tree, whacking out a quick chip, and then dashing back to relative safety.

  Suddenly we heard it: the faint, soft sigh that signaled the tree’s unconditional surrender to our Christmas hatchets. A silence fell upon the land. High above us the boughs of the tamarack rustled. Crazy Eddie and I shivered happily. We had accomplished something momentous!

  Crrrrrraaa … went the tree, beginning a slow tilt. We were now able to determine the direction of its fall, which wasn’t particularly good. Eddie’s father, a short while before, had built a fence between our woodlot and theirs and now, even though I had not yet studied plane geometry, I was able to calculate with considerable accuracy that the tree would neatly intersect the fence at right angles.

  “You better yell ‘timber,’” Crazy Eddie said, his voice trembling.

  “Timmmm …,” I started to cry. Then we heard another cry. It was that of Eddie’s father, who had come down to the woodlot to call him to supper.

  “Eddieeeee!” his father called. “Crazy Eddieee! It’s time for supperrrrr!”

  Cr-r-r-r-a-a-a-a-A-A-A-A-ACK! went the tree.

  “Eddieee!” went Eddie’s father. “EddieeEEEEEE!”

  The monstrous tamarack smote the earth with a thunderous roar, rising above which was the twanging hum of barbwire. Fence posts shot into the air fifty yards away. Eddie’s father shot into the air fifty feet away.

  “Bleeping bleep of a bleep!” screamed Eddie’s father, introducing me to that quaint expression for the first time.

  There is an old saying that cutting firewood warms you twice: once when you chop it and once when you burn it. Well, chopping down that tamarack warmed Eddie and me three times, and one of those warmings was a good deal hotter than when the wood burned.

  I learned a good many things from felling that tamarack with my Christmas hatchet, perhaps the most interesting of which is that a barbwire fence is regarded by its builder as merely a barbwire fence until a tree falls on it. Afterward it is looked back upon as a priceless work of art, surpassed in beauty and grandeur only by the Taj Mahal.

  My Christmas hatchet disappeared immediately after the great tree-felling but surfaced again a few years later when I was old enough to conduct my own camping trips. Much to my surprise, I discovered the hatchet was almost useless for cutting wood. It was as if Excalibur had been reduced to a putty knife.

  The very next Christmas, I gave my little cousin Delbert the hatchet as a present.

  “Wow!” he said. “A real hatchet of my own! Thanks a lot!”

  “You’re welcome!” I shouted after him as he raced away, homing in on a stand of shrubs in his backyard. “But don’t chop anything!”

  The Night Grandma Shot Shorty

  When I was a boy, we kept a loaded pistol in the house with which to dispatch criminals who might come prowling around late at night. We never killed any criminals with the pistol, but there was one near-fatality. Unfortunately, the victim was not a criminal, at least so far as we knew.

  The caliber of the pistol was very large, at least .45—maybe .50—and magnum to boot. The pistol could put a hole in you the size of a grapefruit, if you were a criminal trying to force your way into our house late at night. At least that’s what I told the guys at school. What I didn’t tell them was that the gun was a figment of my mother’s imagination.

  My father had died when I was six, leaving me the lone male in a family of women—my mother and grandmother and a sister, who was six years older than I. If I have never become too excited over women’s liberation, it is because I grew up surrounded by liberated females, all tough, hard, and fearless. Any one of them could have taught a graduate course in assertiveness training. My sister held a black belt in aggravation.

  Our farm was situated about a mile from a railroad, and it was not unusual for tramps to stop by and ask if they could chop some wood in exchange for a meal. My mother, bless her heart, never once turned away a tramp unfed, but boy did those suckers chop wood! There were no free handouts at the McManus farm.

  Even with all the tramps drifting into our place (staggering away three hours later with a baloney sandwich clutched limply in hand), Mom never saw any need for a gun as a means of self-protection. After all, she viewed the tramps as harmless, easy-going fellows, who, if spoken to with a proper measure of firmness, were capable of chopping a good deal of wood.

  Then one day Mom went into town and hired three local criminals to build an extension onto the chicken house. When they were about half done with the project, she saw they had no skill as carpenters, paid them off, and sent them packing.

  “We’ll get you for this!” one of the criminals, a mean little man called Shorty, yelled back over his shoulder.

  “Ha!” Mom responded.

  The threat, however, caused some concern among the rest of the family. What would we do if Shorty came sneaking back in the middle of the night, intent on murdering us all?

  “Oh, all right!” Mom said. “Here’s what we’ll do.” She explained that if we heard any strange noises outside at night or someone banged on the door, my sister would sing out loud and clear, “Do you want the gun, Ma? Do you want the gun?” To which my mother would loudly reply, “Oh, you’d better give it to me! But be careful—it’s loaded!”

  This system worked rather well. Not only did the imaginary pistol frighten off any criminals making strange noises outside our house, but it gave several innocent late-night visitors a bad case of the shakes.

  In fact, the imaginary pistol turned out to be more deadly than any of us expected. One night my mother was sitting up alone playing a game of solitaire, when suddenly there was a banging on the door. Mom, who never thought the imaginary pistol was necessary in the first place, got up and answered the door without bothering to wait for my sister to sound the alarm.

  The visitor turned out to be a diminutive young fellow by the name of Little Ernie and he had a terrible tale of woe to tell. He had joined the Civilian Conservation Corps that summer and had been working with a CCC crew back in the mountains eradicating blister rust. Somehow, Little Ernie had managed to antagonize the rest of the crew, and they had taken him down and shaved off all his curly blond hair. He had left the camp in a huff, his cowboy hat wobbling loosely atop his ears.

  As he recited the story to Mom, his voice rose and fell, quavering with rage. He also refused to remove his hat to allow Mom to survey the damage. In that time and place, it was considered the ultimate rudeness for a man to wear his hat in the house. This was to be a contributing factor in the misunderstanding shortly to follow.

  After one last outburst of rage, Little Ernie pounded the table with his fist. Mom was getting tired of hearing about the atrocity and she told Ernie he could spend the night in a spare upstairs bedroom. She then went off to bed herself, neglecting in all the excitement to mention to Ernie that another upstairs bedroom was occupied by my Aunt Gladys, who was visiting, and Gram.

  When the banging on the front door had first sounded, Aunt Gladys and Gram had sat “bolt-upright” in bed. Soon they heard a loud male voice full of rage and incoherence.

  “It’s Shorty!” Gram hissed to Aunt Gladys, who had been told about the threat. Aunt Gladys went pale and her hair tightened in its curlers.

  “We’d better go help Mabel,” she whispered.

  They listened a bit longer to the mad ravings rising from the living room. Then they heard the dull sounds of blows being delivered.

  “My God, he’s killed her!” Gram gasped.

  After a period of silence broken only by the tinny rattle of hair curlers, they heard booted feet begin to ascend the stairs.

  “Oh!” Aunt Gladys whispered. “Now he’s coming for us!”

  Through the open door of their bedroom, Gram and Aunt Gladys had an unobstructed view of the stairwell. Thump … thump … thump … came the booted steps. Given their emotional state, it was perhaps understandable that Gram and Aunt Gladys would mistake the slow plodding on the steps to be a result of stealth rather than weariness and nervous exhaustion.

  Slowly, the crown of a cowboy hat rose above the edge of the stairwell, a sure sign the intruder was a killer. No one else would wear a hat in the house. Then the head and shoulders came into view. There was only one thing to do.

  Gram drew the imaginary pistol.

  Employing the tone of voice she reserved for breaking up dog fights and ordering the family hog out of her flower gardens, she let Little Ernie have it.

  “Hold it right there, Shorty,” she snarled, “or I’ll blow your head off!”

  Three days later, Little Ernie had recovered enough to be ready and willing to go back to the CCC camp. By then, if he held a cup in both hands, he could get it to his lips without sloshing coffee all over himself. Much of his color had returned too. Since the stubble of his hair had leaped up half an inch when he heard Gram’s command, he now looked as if he had a crew cut, although it was somewhat lighter in shade than his original blond curls. We never saw Little Ernie again, so I don’t know if he ever fully recovered. Perhaps he was still peeved at Gram, thinking that by calling him “Shorty” she had been referring to his modest stature.

  Mom got rid of the pistol soon afterward. She said it was too dangerous to have lying around the house, where a young boy or an old lady might get hold of it and accidentally kill somebody.

  The Kindest Cut of All

  Hal Figby, a newcomer to our little gatherings down at Kelly’s Bar & Grill, doesn’t care much for hunting or fishing. We don’t hold that against him, of course, and even go out of our way to treat him just as if he were normal. He is soft-spoken, polite, does everything in moderation, and in general seems to be a perfect gentleman. Otherwise, he is a pretty decent sort of guy. He’s even good for a laugh occasionally, such as the time we invited him down to Kelly’s to watch the Saturday night fights. He said later he had thought we meant the fights would be on television! Broke us up. That’s just the sort of person Figby is. Still, we couldn’t have been more surprised when he committed the breach of etiquette.

  Half a dozen of us had stopped by Kelly’s after a hard day of fishing and were getting tuned up to spend the rest of the evening testing out some new lies on each other and maybe stretching a truth or two. Then Figby showed up. Scarcely had he sat down than he began staring across the table at Retch Sweeney.

  “Something wrong, Figby?” Retch asked, in a tone that killed somebody’s promising lie in midsentence.

  “Uh,” Figby said, “it’s just that nasty scar on your face. I was wondering how you got it.”

  We were dumfounded. Of all the stupid things we might have expected Figby to say, this was absolutely the worst. Here we had just got a nice start on a pleasantly sociable evening, and Figby had to blurt out something like that. Even Figby should have known you never ask a man how he got a scar on his face. A couple of the guys got up in disgust and walked out right then. I later regretted I hadn’t gone with them, because I didn’t have much stomach for what happened next. And I must say, Retch was unmerciful. He talked steadily about that scar for upwards of two hours. It was dreadful.

  There is nothing a man, particularly an outdoorsman, enjoys talking about more than his scars. Every scar has a story behind it. I have heard some scar stories approximately the length of Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, but such brevity is rare. Once a question has been put to an outdoorsman about one of his scars, the man will go on a binge of scar stories. He cannot tell about one scar and let it go at that. As soon as he has exhausted all the scars on his face, he will move on to the scars on his hands and arms, and once he has recited the history of each of them, he descends to his lower extremities, finally rolling up his pant legs to search for old scars he might have forgotten about.

 

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