The Remington & Other Graces

An essay for Burson & Co. Read the story here: https://bursonandco.com/blogs/news/the-remington-and-other-graces 

Photo of my grandmother, featured in the story. The Remington and Other Graces

The night before my first bird hunt, I decided to clean my shotgun. It was at least forty years old and presumably needed a tune up. I took it apart in the garage following a YouTube tutorial. That, it turned out, was the easy part. By ten o'clock I had a towel covered in springs and pins and small metal parts. I called my brother on FaceTime and panned over the scene.

"Help."

For two hours, headlamp strapped to my forehead, I held the phone in one hand and gun parts in the other while he walked me through the reassembly: that curly piece of metal, the round one, the one like a thimble. Just after midnight it clicked shut and I exhaled for what felt like the first time all evening. We agreed, half laughing, never again on the eve of opening day. 

It is a Remington 1100 semi-automatic 20 gauge. Surprisingly light, its walnut stock worn smooth except the forend’s diamond engraving, good for grip.

My grandmother's gun.

***

Grandmama was at home in a hospital bed, sipping what she cheerfully called her liquid medicine: a daily tipple of Belvedere vodka. We were talking about my recent move to Montana. I had always been her city companion growing up—museums and musicals—while my brother went fly fishing and bird hunting across Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. Now here I was, living in the mountains. She smiled at that, and drifted back to stories of Yellowstone, decades earlier. Darling, she said, waving toward the closet, there is a shotgun I want you to have. I used it for years and now it should be yours. Maybe one day you'll use it to bird hunt.

She spoke slowly, her voice strained and thin at the edges. Her eyes were bright.

She had grown up outdoors. Her grandfather W.C. Coleman invented the first portable gas-powered lantern and soldiers parachuted into Europe with his camp stoves on their backs. Her father Sheldon built it all into a household name. Her summers were spent fishing, hunting and testing gear around a campfire. Tough and elegant in equal measure, effortlessly gracious, a stunner in wool trousers, silk blouses and cashmere, and never precious about any of it. She was a devout Christian in a way that made her heart more spacious, not less. When she met someone she leaned in, asked questions, and really listened. Her laugh was a high-pitched, contagious giggle and she could hold a bridge table captive with a good story. We wrote each other letters, hers in kelly green cursive. After she died I found one page of her journal and it was entirely about gratitude for the abundance of love in her life. She was Cally to everyone else but Grandmama to me. When she died I found myself reaching for her in the life I was building, in the woman I was becoming, hoping she was woven through both.

***

The gun went into its case, and five years passed. Then came a breakup, a pandemic, the heaviness of both at once—I needed a dog. A friend had a lead on a four month old Wirehaired Pointing Griffon in Idaho who'd had a disheartening start to life. I called and said I'd be there in the morning.

I left before dawn into a storm that had swallowed the interstate whole. The roads were empty, snow coming down sideways, the temperature four below by the time I reached the stretch past West Yellowstone. No service, no other cars, just snow and dark and the road disappearing ahead. Then, out of nowhere, elk—a whole herd of them, blocking the glow of my headlights. The truck was sliding through a barrage of enormous bodies and I was somehow weaving between them, on ice, in the dark, breathless, in what felt like both slow motion and no time at all: flashes of reflective eyes, plumes of breath, antlers. The wheel in my hands felt like it belonged to someone else. I don't know if I was praying or just trying to breathe. And then it was over. I was stopped in the middle of the road, the elk gone, the storm still raging, sitting in the ringing silence of something that should not have been survivable.

In those moments I had felt something steady and vast, a presence I recognized without being able to name.

When I started moving again I said thank you, Grandmama. Out loud, into the dark.

***

I met the scraggly Griff at a gas station outside Idaho Falls. He bore the signs of neglect—underweight, coat dull, ribs showing. The sleet came down as we stared at each other. I took a leap, loaded him up, and spoke to him softly until the whimpers settled. I called him Quincy.

The road back to health was long: giardia, worms, months of careful feeding. But his personality had arrived fully intact—curious, comedic, entirely himself. He stared at his reflection in the oven glass for long stretches, carried his own leash on walks, stole my slipper every morning and took it to his dog bed, and howled for seconds at dinner. By spring he was freezing mid-stride on our morning walks, one leg lifted, trembling with purpose, nose trained on magpies in the neighbor's yard. He earned the nickname Party Boy for his wicked good looks and easy charm. He was, and remains, a remarkably relaxed road trip passenger.

That summer of lockdown involved hunter safety, shooting practice, books on bird dogs, upland bird podcasts and plenty of training videos with conflicting advice. I resigned myself to a certain level of just winging it come opening day. I took Grandmama's gun out of its case and practiced mounting it against my cheek, swinging it toward imaginary birds, learning the weight of it. Somewhere in the grain of that walnut stock, our cheeks had touched. 

***

On the morning of our first upland bird season, I woke two hours before sunrise, and made a strong coffee. I loaded up the 2003 Chevy Tahoe: clean gun, Gore-Tex boots, hunting cap, an orange vest packed with a med kit and 2 ¾-inch shells that had been surprisingly hard to find that fall. Quincy wore his blaze orange chest protector—I'd heard too many stories of barbed wire and branches—and trilled from the passenger seat the entire drive into the mountains.

I sat at the trailhead waiting for sunrise, anxious, trying to remember everything I'd read and practiced. Quincy stared at me, also quivering. I hoped at least one of us might know what we were doing out there.

The sun broke over the ridgeline, gilding the tree tops. I pulled the Remington from its case, shouldered my vest, and we stepped out into the cold together.

Grandmama, I said quietly, as I followed Quincy into the woods. I know you're here.

***

The forest was dense, haze lifting slowly off the ground between the pines. My footsteps were soft, muffled by the damp earth, and there was almost no sound beyond them. I wore ear protection and the world contracted to what I could see: the trees, the trail, Quincy's orange chest moving through the brush ahead of me.

He dropped into a ravine, quartering back and forth, nose down, tail blurring. Then stopped. Every part of him stopped. One leg lifted, tail rigid, the whole of him trembling with the effort of holding still.

I turned off the safety. Said whoa, as much to myself as to him.

I moved one step, then another, and the grouse erupted from the brush, thundering up the ravine toward me. Quincy broke his point, shriek-barking, and the world compressed into a single second. I shot. And shot again. The bird dropped.

Then abrupt silence.

I let out a wild whoop and Quincy was already there, nose buried in the feathers, tail helicoptering. He pranced with the bird in his mouth while I hooted and cheered, astonished that we had pulled it off. I leaned the Remington against a tree and gently took the bird from his mouth before he charged back down into the ravine, nose already to the ground.

I knelt in the pine needles and looked at it. A grouse—a ruffed grouse, as a friend with more seasons behind her would later confirm—smaller than I expected, its feathers smooth, barred in rust and brown and grey. I turned it over slowly in my hands.

And then, unexpectedly, I was weeping. From the overwhelming fullness of it—the dog, the stillness, the bite in the air, the fact that it had all come together in a way I couldn't have planned or predicted. I thought of her. The scent of her gardenia perfume. The soft weight of her arthritic hands in mine. Maybe one day, she had said, as though she could already see this hillside, this cold morning, this version of me.

***

Quincy and I have been out every year since, learning the mountains together, learning each other. He is my best partner and my best company, and between us we mostly figure it out. Grandmama also comes with me into every field, every cold morning, every first flush of the season. What surprised me most wasn't the hunting itself but what it gave me—the ritual, the particular silence of the woods, and a comfort in the wild older than myself. 

Thank you. I love you.

I don't always know if I'm talking to her or to Quincy or to something larger than all of us. Most days I think that's the whole point.