Gene Hill - Outdoor Yarns & Outright Lies

I had the honor to call Gene Hill a friend for two decades, collaborated on a couple of books with him, was his editor on a couple of different magazines, got drunk with him, and laughed and cried with him. Most of the really good stuff we did together I cant share, at least not in a book that may inadvertently fall into the hands of small children.

That aside, I had the pleasure of shooting with Hilly in a number of places for pheasants and ducks and quail. Hilly always had some observation, some way of looking at something having to do with gunning that was pure, distilled experience and wisdom. He was a first-class shot, but he considered me his equal in the field. I am here to confess that I am not and was not. I earned his respect the old-fashioned way: I swindled him. Maybe swindled is too harsh a word; it was more like deceived. Allow me to explain.

It started off innocently enough. We were shooting pheasants in Iowa, at a very high-class shooting preserve. The birds were plentiful, flew grandly, and offered great sport in the stout prairie wind. I found, twenty minutes out of the lodge, that it was one of those days when I couldnt hit the ground with my gun if I dropped itweve all had it happen to us. Hill was shooting well, as was his custom, fast and accurate and deadly. So as the morning progressed, I worked my way over until I was next to him, behind the busy short-hairs, working the cut milo fields.

I dropped a fired hull in the right barrel of my gun. When a bird went up, Hill would shoot it, I would snap the trigger, and when hed glance at me as the dog retrieved the bird, I would open the gun and the ejector would snap out the fired shell. Like two world-class shotgunners with lightning reflexes, we had doubled on the bird, two shots from two guns going off as one, neither man hearing the others shot because of his own.

I did that the rest of the day, claiming a half-kill on each of his birds. The faster he shot to beat me, the faster I shot. Now, to sell my scam, Id make self-deprecating little remarksones that were technically true but misleading, you know, like Clintons. That was your bird, Hilly. Im sure I didnt hit it. Of course, he thought I was being generous and sporting. He looked at me with newfound respect.

A couple of years later, in Mexico, Hilly and the late Dave Meisner, our partner on a number of such outings, were shooting quail. There were a lot of birds. We were shooting the autoloaders the outfitter provided (no taking a fine gun into Mexiconot unless you wished to donate it to the Federales Retirement Fund), and instead of loading three shells, Id load two. When Hill dropped a bird, Id just reload as he watched me. Id smile or shrug my shoulders and silently claim his bird (Id slip the shell out of the magazine later). When he shot a double, Id make a show of loading one shell and palming another. Hed just shake his head. If he ever suspected me, he was too much of a gentleman to accuse me, and I was having too much fun with it to stop.

I remember screwing him over in another way on a duck shoot, also in Mexico. Hill was a great waterfowl shot, and the outfitter set us up on a small pond the pintails were using. It was late January, and the birds from the north were down and using the ponds and fields. There were scads of them. On that trip, Genes wife, Cathy Lee, joined us, along with Meisner.

The evening before, under the influence of strong drink, Hilly commented that even though he was too modest to make a big thing of it, he wouldnt be too offended if we wanted to refer to him as the Pintail King, describing in great detail how he would execute difficult crossing shots, high passers, and those tricky dropping incomers. This violated one of Hills Shotgunning Precepts: Brag about your shooting after the hunt, not before. And, of course, he was going to have to pay for his mistake.

The next morning found us in two blindsMeisner and I in one, Hilly and Cathy Lee in the othermaybe fifty yards apart. As luck would have it, nearly all the birds passed by our blind, and Meisner and I lowered a number of them. Hills only shots were at screamers that were approaching from behind him, out of the morning sun. By the time he got on them, they were well out and moving away, difficult at best. That day, Hilly found them impossible.

Finally, he screamed over that we should, from our better vantage point, for once in our miserable lives, do the honorable thing and let him know when a duck was approaching so he could stand and take it before it got past him. We hooted at the Pintail King but agreed. Five minutes later, a duck came screaming at his blind. We waited a bit too long before alerting him, and he missed. Three times. He gave Dave and meby now convulsed with laughtera rousing verbal whipping for deliberately withholding information about when the just-missed bird was within shooting range.

Now, he was in rare form, and he swore to us, to Heaven, and on the grave of his sainted mother that the next bird was a dead bird, or his name wasnt Gene Atkins Hill, the Pintail King. We promised to give him more warning.

Hunkered back down in the blind, he did not see the next bird coming, of course, relying upon his friends to do the right and principled thing to save his day and what little remained of his reputation and tattered self-esteem.

As a bird approached, Meisner and I gestured frantically while hunkering down, each pointing at the bird with one hand and making stand-up motions with the other. Hill stood up in a twinkling; he pivoted, mounted his gun as smooth as butter, squinted into the sun and absolutely centered a curlew.

Meisner and I almost fell out of the blind laughing. Hill looked at the dead, hapless shorebird floating on the pond, looked at the gun, and looked back at us, as crestfallen as I had ever seen anyone. Around the plug of chewing tobacco in his cheek, he muttered an unprintable oath in our direction. Meisner and I had, by this time, run out of oxygen from laughter. We called him the Curlew King. We asked for his autograph. We asked for the empty shell, so that we could have it bronzed. Did he want the bird mounted? He finally looked at us, his basset hound face creased with a grin, and started to laugh. And laugh that hearty, Scottish-New Jersey laugh. A laugh Ill never forget.