Part 4

In no very strict historical sense can the adjective “new” be fairly applied to trap-shooting, and yet there is a newness in the recent vogue of the sport. The live, tame pigeon, thrown into the air, frightened and confused, from a collapsible wooden cage, has long since been supplanted by a little clay disc, hurled with lightning speed from a steel spring trap. This was the starting point of the development of trap-shooting as we know it in America today, and this took place years ago. It is a harder, more sporty thing to smash a whizzing clay bird to smithereens than to knock down a frightened tame pigeon, and it is more humane. This change of targets put a keen zest into trap-shooting and took out a bitter reproach. But till recently, the growth of trap-shooting has been slow. In four short years, however, the number of active trap-shooters has increased fourfold; from about 100,000 to about 425,000. During the same period trap-shooting clubs have increased from 1,000 to 4,000, and it is estimated that about 500,000,000 clay pigeons are thrown into the air each year at the shooter’s sharp command, “Pull!” In one short Presidential term, trap-shooting has sprung forward from a low place among the so-called minor sports to occupy a position second only to baseball in the number of its devotees. We are not apt to appreciate what this really means without the help of the cold figures above.

There is a world of difference in being a “rooter” and in being a “player,” and the one simple little fact that each trap-shooter is a player himself, or herself, is just what gives the sport its strongest grip upon the interest of its followers. That tense moment of “two out and the bases filled”; the jerky, crashing advance of the battling human machine carrying a pigskin ball down the field toward the goal-posts; the rush of the ponies and the hollow click of mallet against polo ball--all these tighten the muscles and quicken the heart-beat of any live sportsman, but, as the psychologist says, these are all external stimuli.

Let the same man--or the same woman, for many women shoot at the traps nowadays--step up to the score, tuck his gun against his shoulder, brace himself and draw a deep breath, glance down the long length of blued barrels, and call “Pull!” Whizz goes the little black disc, hurtling away at a speed that makes the teal and the mallard seem lazy laggards. One moment of intensely concentrated effort and keen enjoyment till the flying saucer is found just above the forward sight; an almost involuntary squeeze of the trigger finger, the thrilling jump of the discharge, and puff!--the clay target is knocked into a thousand bits.

That tremendously concentrated effort of finding the speeding disc--you must find him quick--he will be quite out of range if you stop to say quickly--followed by the physical climax of the almost simultaneous kick of the gun and the shattering of the clay target; these are secrets of the witching spell that lures the shooter back and back again to the traps. I must confess to a thoroughly diabolical delight in knocking the clay birds to powder. I do not do it always--not even often, but when I do I enjoy the keenest pleasure. Other trap-shooters confess the same joy. Please, do not say anything about dangerous destructive tendencies that ought to be rigidly suppressed, or we shall get into an argument, and then I will have to say a lot of things about quickness of eye, correlation of senses and muscles, and a great deal more that has nothing whatever to do with the sport of shooting the clay birds.

Over and above the inherent fascination of knocking the flying clay targets into powder, the fact that there is no closed season on these clay birds and that even a little hand trap in any open field will furnish good game anywhere, goes far towards making “the sport alluring” the sport universal. Nor do the changing seasons at all handicap the trap shooter. The clay birds are always full grown and they have no nesting-time; they are just as plentiful and just as fair sport in November as in May. Indeed, when you mount the trap-shooting hobby-horse, you can make up your mind to settle yourself in the saddle for a long, long gallop over all sorts of country and in all sorts of weather.

There seems to be a delicate touch of sarcasm in the fact that the most important winter trap-shooting tournament should be held within a stone’s throw of grounds so well stocked with quail that they are chosen for the running of one of the largest field trials. The pick of the blooded setters and pointers are tried out for their bird sense and hunting ability almost within hearing of the guns at the Pinehurst traps. But the quail-hunter and the trap-shooter are brothers in arms. Often, like the Manufacturer, converted at the Pinehurst traps last winter, they are sporting Siamese twins. The traps furnish good practice to the field shooter and good sport when the closed season would otherwise keep the gun in its case.

There is a curious connection between these brother sports. How keenly, at the traps, does one miss the tramping over the open fields, scrambling up hillsides, fording the streams, hopping over the rail fences! All the tireless quest of the hunt, that strange, primitive, impelling force that defies physical fatigue and keeps your high boots swishing through the coarse, knotted crab grass with a long, eager stride from daylight to dark! Most of all, you miss the dogs. That to me is the great loss. But there is continual shooting to take the place of the joys of the open fields, and there is a cleaner, keener satisfaction in smashing a target than in knocking down a quail; but what takes the place of the dogs? Nothing. Every shooter loves to shoot--if he says he does not, put him down as a hypocrite. No man lugs six or eight or ten or even twelve pounds of shotgun all day long just for the fun of carrying firearms. He likes to shoot. He may--and probably does--thoroughly enjoy the tramp and the pleasure of watching the dogs work, but if he went hunting for these alone he would not burden himself with a gun. No, the shooter loves to shoot, and at the traps he can shoot till his gun barrels get red hot. Only a lame shoulder and the price of shells need keep him from shooting his head off, as the saying is. To the man who loves action--quick action and lots of it--this is a charm that the traps surely, and the live birds only uncertainly, offer.

But the very kernel of the sport of trap-shooting comes in smashing those flying discs. However keen the hunting instinct there is always just the tinge of regret in blotting out the pretty life of little brown birds. There are times when one feels just a bit ashamed of that fierce pleasure of a good, clean, quick shot. At the traps one can let that pleasure run wild. You can grit your teeth and say, “I’m going to paste you this time,” without qualm of conscience. You can give rein to the passion for destruction without becoming a brute. To do so in the field is to degenerate. We hate the “game hog,” not because he is selfish and cruel, but because he is not a man. We need the strong, elemental passions, and we are in danger of becoming super-refined jelly-fishes, incapable of doing wrong because we are incapable of doing good. It takes more courage to attack a lie than to storm a trench, more passion for destruction to root out a bad habit than to raze a city.

Through a Jungle to the Old South

The first man to whom we spoke about canoeing down the Lumbee was not encouraging. The water would be too high for fishing, and what with whirlpools and other dire, vaguely hinted-at dangers he did not reckon we would even get to Lumberton, to say nothing of going all the way through to the sea. But our weather-stained mail held forth no inducements to return North to be buffeted about by a blizzard, and our dismal friend’s croakings but seemed to us promises of an exciting trip and strengthened our determination to go--to go, we secretly hoped, despite all hazard. He proved to be a melancholy deceiver; we found excitement, but not the kind he foretold. The natives know precious little about the Lumbee.

Our first confirmation of this was when we discovered that the authority on the river is Dr. John Warren Achorn, who has a winter home at Pinebluff. This canoeing enthusiast told us much about the river--that till three years ago, barring the natives’ cypress dugouts, the Lumbee had never borne a canoe, and that, while he and others had been down a hundred and eighty miles, no one had ever gone clear through from the headwaters to the sea at Georgetown, S. C. Here was an additional fillip--we were going to blaze the way! Dr. Achorn also extended to us the courtesies of the Mid-Winter Canoe Club, and, thanks to him, we used one of the club canoes. He would have fitted us out with a complete kit had we needed it.

“It was a misty, moisty morning, and cloudy was the weather,” when we pushed off from Blue’s Bridge and started down the Lumbee. We, by the way, were two men and two dogs, Leonard Chester Freeman and I, his setter “Belle” and my Scottish terrier “Dixie”. Snugly stowed away in our sixteen foot canoe were a shelter tent, blankets and ponchos, duffle bags, two shotguns and a .22 rifle with ammunition, a camera, cooking kit and food supplies for a week; a two hundred pound outfit, but there are no carrys on the Lumbee.

Half a dozen strokes and we were round a bend. The little clubhouse under the great pines had vanished. Faintly, through the thickets, Dr. Achorn’s cheery voice reached us, calling the Indian’s “_Bon Voyage!_”--“Good hunting!” Then, save for the swish of the paddles and the buzzing of a couple of precocious dragon-flies all was silent. Apparently, we were miles from civilization. The strange wildness of the Lumbee country strikes you at once. It is all a tangled wilderness, wild and rampant. There are no stump pastures, such as one meets along the banks of the rivers of the North Woods; no clearings with a squatty cabin and a field of scraggly corn; no trace of the hand of man. Except for the friends who pursued us in a motor to give us a farewell banquet in our first night’s camp, we saw no human being for eighty miles.

Again unlike the northern rivers, the headwaters of the Lumbee do not “chatter over stony ways”; they zigzag, silent and swift, over a bed of white sand. If every river had its own private trade-mark, surely “XXX” would be granted to the Lumbee, for it twists and turns and loops about till beside it the proverbial corkscrew seems to be the shortest distance between two points. If you are mathematically inclined, you can calculate the curves from this data: we paddled twenty-eight miles from Blue’s Bridge to McLeod’s Bluff, where we made our first camp, and our friends’ speedometer showed they had covered just six miles over the road between these two points.

There are no rapids or falls in the upper Lumbee, but the water glides along at a merry rate, scooting round the bends--“cow faces” the natives call them--in a way that, till you get just the knack of cutting the corners, is quite disconcerting. Every once in a while, which may mean every three miles or every thirteen, we came to what the natives are pleased to call bluffs, rises of ground that stand, dry and sheltered, a couple of feet above the swirling high water. Between these bluffs the river is literally bankless. The flood flows round and through the trees, a floating forest not a swamp, for there is no marshy ground and few reeds or water grasses. On the entire trip we never slapped at a mosquito or a fly. During the hot summers, this tangled jungle must teem with them, but from September to May, though the weather is mild enough, they vanish completely.

As it slips quietly to the sea, the Lumbee passes through three distinct phases, each different, each with a charm all its own. During the first stage, the hundred and thirty miles from the headwaters to Lumberton, the river winds its way through the Sandhills. Here the bottom land is heavily timbered, but it is hard country to lumber, and the woods are almost virgin forest. During the cold weather the swirling high water, and in the summer the noxious malaria, have kept the lumberman and his swinging axe out of the Lumbee woods, and the country is a great natural game preserve. Giant long-leafed pines dominate the thickets. These great trees shoot straight up fifty or seventy-five feet, their heads crowned by their long needles and huge cones, as the palms are crowned. Beneath are great dark clumps of mountain laurel, glossy bluegums, and tall bushes of bright holly all dotted with scarlet berries. Here and there the strained and twisted branches of a black-jack, that curious dwarf oak that seems to have been racked by some terrible torture, stand stark and bold among the leaves of its fellows, for even in December, the Lumbee woods are bright and green.

What capital places for a snug camp the little bluffs are--dry and sandy, sheltered by the evergreens, and stocked with great stores of the best fire-wood in all the world. Those dry pine sticks, saturated with rosin and tar, crackle at a single match’s provocation into a bright flame. Some of these Lumbee camps of ours cling in my memory as the most glorious camps I have known. I can hear now the happy gurgle of the river and the swishing whispers of the wind in the pines. The pungent incense of our snapping fire, mixed with the fragrance of the pines and damp, cool, woodsy smell of the river bank even now fills my nostrils.

From the very first we paddled one at a time, one hour on and one hour off; and oh, how much more quickly passed the “sabbatical hour,” when you lolled in the bow, than the “paddlatical hour” in the stern. This trip ruthlessly destroyed all my faith in copybook maxims about toil making the hours pass quickly.

We had left Blue’s Bridge but a few moments when we came suddenly upon a great colony of blue herons, giants of the race, standing over five feet. Disturbed at our boorish intrusion upon their domestic affairs, the great, grey birds flapped laboriously up from their crude nests in the tree-tops. They rise as painfully as a gouty old man, but once fairly underway they sail gracefully in huge arcs. We grew to know them well before our trip was over, for they and the buzzards are both plentiful. For their beauty they are protected the year round, and the law, for the utilitarian reason that they act as public scavengers, is equally kind to the buzzards, who are tame to the point of familiarity. One battered old fellow, whose wings and tail lacked several feathers, took a keen, morbid interest in us. Soaring just behind us, watching with his wicked, hungry eyes, he followed us all one morning, but he finally convinced himself that we were going to get through all right, and disgusted, he gave up the chase.

In the Lumbee woods are many wild turkeys, and during the fall and early winter, before the water has risen so high, if one has a still paddle, he can often slip round a bend and surprise a stately old gobbler and his hens feeding on the bank. ’Coons and ’possums--African pork--are also plentiful. Often a slim brown mink slips silently off a log, and sometimes a lusty otter streaks across the stream, leaving a wake like a miniature power boat.

The middle of the third afternoon, while I dozed in the bow, Freeman shot us through a narrow strip where a fallen tree had all but dammed the stream. As we skinned skilfully between the bank and the branches, a most unmistakably hog-like grunt woke me thoroughly, and Freeman, with a couple of vigorous strokes, brought us about and headed up stream. Several times we had come up with wild hogs, great porkers who have taken the back-to-nature call too seriously. Years ago--no one knows when--they forsook the pen with its three square meals a day to roam the woods in search of uncertain livelihood. Nomadic life has made them lean and gaunt, and armed them with stubby tusks that stick wickedly through their lips. We had some pot shots at these tough customers, but they had always rushed away through the flooded woods where pursuit was impossible. We were therefore mightily surprised to find, when Freeman paddled us back, a great three-hundred pounder, black as the ace of spades and ugly as sin, who stood ground on a little ribbon of land between the river and the back waters. Cautiously we approached, I in the bow with gun ready waiting for the splashing rush to cover, Freeman paddling and trying to quiet the dogs who were most forcefully expressing their opinions on the subject of wild hogs. In vain did we wait for the snort and the splashing rush to cover, and, when almost on top of her, we discovered the reason for her determined stand. A volley of wild squeals greeted us. We had found a sow with twelve day-old piggies. I landed, and “Uff er--r--runt!” she bowled at me. I stuck my gun barrel in her face and she stopped, grunting and chopping her short, thick tusks. Freeman, having tied the dogs to the canoe braces, joined me and staved off her bold attacks while I snapped the brave lady’s picture. Then, after a deal of maneuvring, we kidnapped one of her offspring. I managed to get a youngster on a paddle and flipped him like a pancake over to Freeman, who deposited him unceremoniously in the canoe. Off we pushed, delighted with visions of roast pigling, and the old lady gave us a parting rush.

Our little piggie was, barring nothing, the most homely beastie ever seen. He was black and shiny, like a shaved and varnished puppy, with a big, shapeless wedge of a head, topped off with enormous, flappy ears. He squealed, and squawked, and snorted, and grunted in every key, and every waking minute he kept up his racket. But his comical antics and unfailing good nature won our hearts. We did not enjoy roast pig, and since he did not prove to be a good canoeist, we sold him, three days later, for the munificent sum of “two bits.” His new owner carried him off to join him to a family of tame pigs in his pens.

Just above Alma (Alma is a puffing saw mill surrounded by dirty, dilapidated negro shacks), we passed under Gilchrist’s Bridge, where Sherman’s army, marching north after taking Charleston, crossed the river. Just below Alma is the reservation of the Croatoan Indians, the mysterious blue-eyed race descended, so it is said, from Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony, which was planted on Roanoke Island in 1587 and disappeared as completely as if swallowed by the earth. We met several of these Indians--short, thick-set fellows with yellow skins and wide-set, blue eyes--and found them so engrossed in planting cotton that it was hard to believe they were for years a thorn in the side of the Government and the army.

Nearing Lumberton, a busy little town with an attractive Confederate Monument, all strangely like a New England village with its shaft “To our Soldiers and Sailors,” the country began to change. We were leaving the long-leafed pines of the Sandhills. Cypress became more and more common, and occasionally we spied a bunch of Spanish moss swaying in the branches overhead. Just above Lumberton the river twists itself all into knots and then straightens out, so the last couple of miles into the town are straight as a canal, between banks that rise steeply from each side of the swift, deep stream.

We created a sensation in Lumberton. Khaki clad, in flannel shirts, much in need of the barber’s services, traveling in a strange craft whose frailty aroused great admiration of our supposed courage, and accompanied by two dogs and a young wild pig--it is small wonder we disembarked amid a crowd that thought we were crazy, but was too polite to say so. The sole and only hotel, so we discovered, had been torn down to make room for a bank, but we found a genial savior in an energetic gentleman who combines the various duties of proprietor of the movies, political boss, reporter for the local paper, and last, but not least, husband of the landlady of “th’ best eatin’-house in town.” Here we could eat, and our factotum found us a place to sleep with one of his neighbors.

Below Lumberton, which we left next morning after stocking our larder and purchasing a nursing-bottle for piggie, we came fairly to the second stage of the river. The woods of the Sandhills had vanished; we were in a semi-tropical jungle. Bottle-neck cypress rose, like the columns of a cathedral, right out of the water. When they rise in mid-stream, the lumbermen recognize such a phenomenon of Nature by calling them “dram trees” and claiming a drink when the logs are safely by. There are parts of the river where, if this jovial custom is strictly followed, it must take a remarkably hard head to bring the lumber to the mill. The undergrowth is a tangle of giant ferns and cactus-like palms, all snarled up with twining creepers. Overhead every crotch in the trees is a jardiniere of ferns, and every branch is coated with lichens, and festooned with Spanish moss and vines. Here is fascinating canoeing. The current slips along merrily between the banks, and one can whirl along almost without dipping the paddle in the water. In other places, the water sprawls out through the cypress jungle and there is no more current than in a bath-tub. Chattering black birds in whole colonies scolded us roundly; red and yellow wood-peckers played tag up and down the tree trunks; scarlet tanagers and sapphire kingfishers darted down the stream before us, while humming-birds, like great bejewelled moths, hovered about our canoe. The trees had burst into leaf as if by magic, and the delicate greens of their new foliage made a delightful setting against which to show off the brilliant colors of the bright birds. We had canoed right into the heart of Fairyland at the first of a glorious spring. Who would believe that it was the first of March and that a blizzard was throttling the North?

Soon we left this Fairyland and came to the great Buzzard Flats, the stillest, weirdest waters one ever canoed. After threading our way between the decaying bastions of the Old State Line Bridge, once a famous thoroughfare, now but a mark to tell the lumbermen they have passed from North to South Carolina, we had slipped with the Lumbee into the waters of the Little Pee Dee. They slide together these two great rivers and except that the banks are now a hundred yards from side to side one would hardly know the change. But it is different when the Little Pee Dee joins the Great Pee Dee. Here the rush of the big river’s muddy floods backs up the slower waters of the smaller river. They sprawl over the flat country into a great labyrinth of lakes and lagoons, the famous Buzzard Flats of the Pee Dee. It was a cool, still, grey afternoon when we paddled through this strange place. The sky stretched steely grey above us, and on all sides the still water reached away like great sheets of ground glass. The great, grey cypress, all hung with grey Spanish moss, rose in straight colonnades. Save for the swish-swish of the paddles and the clunk-a-plunk of innumerable turtles which dropped dully into the water at our coming, all was still as the tomb. Even the birds added to the eerie spell; big blue heron swinging in lazy circles; grey cranes streaking across the sky; buzzards hanging all but motionless far overhead; and owls bolting away in their senseless flight.