Restoring an 1887 Scott Shotgun Stock

Having successfully browned the Damascus barrels of this 1887 Scott hammer gun (see my previous post), it's now time to restore its stock.  To say this, however, is immediately to raise the question of what "restore" means.  These days, it is often understood to mean "make like new again."  In the antique furniture trade in the 1920's and '30's, all traces of age were removed to make the piece look brand new.  This process was known in the antiques trade as "skinning," and its widespread practice eventually made pieces that still retained their original finish much scarcer and therefore more valuable.  To me, over-restoration is as wrong-headed as a lovely woman in her later years resorting to Botox to replicate her youthful appearance.  As John Donne declared almost three hundred years ago, "Neither Spring nor Summer Beauty hath such grace / As I have seen in one Autumnal face."  The aim of restoration should not be to make an old gun look new again, but to bring back the grace of its autumnal beauty.


This particular hammer gun has decent walnut and some engraving, but it left its Birmingham factory in 1887 as one of the "plain" guns offered by W. & C. Scott and Sun (the Scott 1872 catalog shows a similar model but with the earlier, higher hammers).  In contrast to today, engraving was relatively inexpensive in the 1880's.  It probably never was stored in a trunk case, which would have protected its finish, and it was used hard.  Compared to the interior wood of the fore end that's protected by the barrels, the color of the wood has faded, much as if it had been bleached by the sun.  Its original checkering survives only in a few place, having been replaced by much coarser lines outlined by deep grooves.  The border grooves remain, but the gun has been used so hard that even the second set of checkered lines is worn away.


In these circumstances, what sort of restoration is possible?   I am going to remove what remains of an earlier refinishing.   (How do I know it's not original?  No original finish would show brush marks!)  I'll do as little as possible to make it look well cared for:  gently remove the sloppy finish with stripper and steel wool (which, unlike sandpaper, doesn't destroy the patina), apply some coats of alkanet oil, then a sealer coat of spar varnish, and follow that with some coats of TruOil.  Finally, I'll dull the finish slightly and top coat with alkanet oil, slowly replicating a London (or, for this gun, a Birmingham) oil finish.


What to do about restoring the checkering is a problem.  Removing the second checkering's grooved borders would remove far too much wood in the wrist--and that is already perilously slim.  It is thus impractical to attempt to get back to its original look.  Is some checkering better than none, even if it is from a later, crude refurbishing?  Or is it better to leave the wood alone and have its "checkered history" (forgive me) evident?  Food for thought.

Ideally, I first would separate metal action and trigger guard and plate from the wooden stock before working on the wood, but someone earlier buggered up the action screw so badly that I can't budge it and don't want to take the risk of making things worse.  I'm just going to have to be very, very careful finishing the wood around the fences.


Here's a shot of the butt and the horn-tipped fore end after stripping off the old finish:

I managed to raise one dent and lessen the depth of another by applying a steam iron to a damp rag held against the wood.

It then was time to rub in alkanet oil.  Three coats later, with several days between each coat, the wood has regained some color and its figure is more pronounced:

Next came a coat of spar varnish, rubbed down with 0000 steel wool.  The satin spar varnish was followed by sanding in TruOil:  I applied two coats of TruOil and then a third sanded in with 400 grit paper moistened with more TruOil.  After the sanded-in coat dried, I rubbed that down with 0000 steel wool, burned off the steel wool particles over a gas range, and then applied two more coats of TruOil, sanding in the third.  I did this a total of three times.  I then applied a coat of TruOil and rubbed it down with auto rubbing compound.  Another coat of alkanet oil followed, again rubbed down with the auto rubbing compound.

The old saying about applying an oil finish goes, Rub in linseed oil once a day for a week, once a week for a month, once a month for year, and once a year forever.  The spar varnish and TruOil have accelerated this process, so I'll just rub in alkanet oil once a month for a year.  The stock now has partially but not completely filled pores.  The wood no longer looks ravaged, but relatively well cared for.

  

This Scott shotgun has had a hard life, but with its barrels browned (and then rubbed back) and with its wood refinished, it looks now as if it has aged with some degree of grace:

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Browning Damascus Barrels

Let me say at the outset that I'm writing as a novice about browning Damascus shotgun barrels.  I've previously browned exactly one barrel, a Getz octagonal barrel for my .50 Pennsylvania long rifle, and of course that was a new barrel, not an antique one, and it was steel, not the twisted combination of iron and steel that defines Damascus.  So why, you may be thinking, should I write about doing this for the first time? Simply because I'm going to record both what I do wrong as well as what I do right--that way, I may save some others from replicating my mistakes.

There is a lot of information on the web about Damascus barrels, everything from how they were made to identifying types of Damascus construction to how to refinish them.  I had managed to compile a sizable folder of this information, but then a virus struck my computer and I lost it all. But I had already decided not to make my own browning formula, so I simply ordered Laurel Mountain Forge's Barrel Brown and Degreaser.  Their instructions on the web are critical, especially their caution against rubbing the surface with multiple coats:  that can cause a metallic copper colored film to form, which impedes the browning process.  This particular Barrel Brown offers the advantage that the surface to be browned does not have to be entirely free of oil, as the formula cuts through that.  Several sources on the web noted, however, that for Damascus barrels at least the initial application of this solution should be diluted 50% with distilled water.

Another useful source for browning is Oscar Gaddy's A Rust Blue Primer (the steps one follows for a rust blue are the same as for browning--up until boiling the barrels, which turns the red Ferric Oxide to the blue-black Ferric Ferrous Oxide, better known as a rust blue).

Like many aspects of gunsmithing, the process is relatively simple.  Doing it well is another matter. That's where experience counts, and experience may be considered as the ability to have learned from your mistakes--and no small part of that is knowing how to correct the mistakes you've made.

Here are my Scott's barrels in a "Before" shot:  the browning has pretty much disappeared.

The first step was to remove what little remained of the old finish and get a relatively smooth surface.  I started with 220 grit on a sanding block and followed Gaddy's suggestion to stop polishing with 320 grit.

Next came degreasing.  Even though Laurel Mountain Forge claims that this step is not necessary, I decided to do it anyway.  I had bought at a hardware store some rubber stoppers to plug the barrels, but they fell out all too easily.  I returned to the store and bought some corks.  These were not a great fit, either, but I sanded them down until they stayed in place.  After putting on vinyl gloves (check to make sure they don't have powder on the outside), I first flooded the barrels with Formula 409 and then rinsed it off with hot water.  When that had dried, I rubbed the barrels down with a cotton pad moistened with rubbing alcohol.

Two things I learned from degreasing are that you have to figure out 1) how to support the barrels while you apply the solution, and 2) how to support them during the time they rust.  I suspended the barrels from a parachute cord slip-knotted to the underlug and looped on a nail in the garage (there's more humidity outside).

I cut Laurel Mountain Forge's Brown 50-50 with distilled water.  Wearing vinyl gloves, I applied the solution with the 1" foam brushes Gaddy recommends.  Using a foam brush didn't work for me:  I couldn't control the amount of solution I was applying.  I quickly learned that to avoid runs I had to apply the solution horizontally, not vertically.  Try to cover evenly, overlapping as little as possible.

The length of time it takes to rust obviously varies with the temperature and the humidity.  In Ithaca, NY, during a rainy week near the end of May, I began by checking on the rusting after three hours or so.  Laurel Mountain Forge suggests not letting the rusting process go past 24 hours, or pitting may develop.

Card off (that is, rub lightly) the barrels under running water with degreased steel wool (I prefer Lee Valley's extra-fine steel wool, as it comes already degreased).  My first attempt turned out gray, not rust brown, and rather streaky.  You can't have made a mistake, I thought to myself, so I took a deep breadth and kept on trying.  I dried the barrels:  using hot water makes this faster.  I discarded the foam brush and substituted a cotton sterile dressing, folding it into a pad.  Again, I took long horizontal strokes the length of the barrel.  Being careful not to touch the wet barrels, I suspended them to rust for five hours.  More applications, rusting, and carding followed, and a light brown color began to emerge.  Re-applications made the brown deeper in color and more even.

Here's how the barrels looked after seven applications:

Following Laurel Mountain Forge's suggested procedures, I carded the barrels and then neutralized the surfaces with baking soda dissolved in hot water.  I rinsed that off with more hot water and allowed the barrels to air dry.

Next came oiling.  I heated the barrels over a gas stove until they were uncomfortably hot to hold and rubbed in a coat of motor oil (10W-40 is what I happened to have on hand). After 12 hours, I wiped off the motor oil with a clean cloth and applied a sparing coat of CLP BreakFree inside and out.  Here's how they came out:

I really liked the richness of this brown, but it rather obscures the Damascus pattern.  You have to look hard to see it.  Etching the barrels would bring out the contrast between the iron and the steel, but I couldn't decide whether I wanted to do that.

The next day, after re-assembling the gun, I decided that the barrels looked too good, too new.  They needed to lose some of that rich luster.  I first tried rubbing them with extra-fine steel wool--it didn't make that much of a difference.  I then thought of auto polishing compound, which is less abrasive than auto rubbing compound.  I applied the polishing compound on the underside where it wouldn't show if it turned out to be a terrible idea.  I liked its effect, so I polished away.

Here's a view of the polished barrels.  Only one barrel and the rib are in focus, but you can see that the contrast between the iron and the steel has been markedly improved by the auto polishing compound:

My last step consisted of warming the barrels with a heat gun and then applying two thin coats of Renaissance Wax, buffing each coat.  The barrels now have a low luster.

In my view, the barrels now look right for the effect I want:  not a shotgun that looks as if it  had just left the Scott factory yesterday, but one made in 1887 that's been used pretty hard but been cared for.  Here's a shot of the barrels and part of the action.  Rather than one element standing out, they all seem to go together:

Useful Sources

Print: 

David Baker, "The Blueing or Blacking of Gun Barrels," in Desmond Mills and Mike Barnes, Amateur Gunsmithing (Boydell Press, 1986).

John Bivins, "Metal Finishes for the Custom Gunsmith," in Gunsmithing Tips & Projects (Wolfe Publishing, 1989).

William R. Brockway, Recreating the Double Barrel Muzzle-Loading Shotgun (George Shumway, 1984).

Web: 

http://www.damascus-barrels.com/Finish_Restore.html

http://www.laurelmountainforge.com/barrel_brown_inst.htm

Remodeling a BRNO Mauser, Part 8: Putting It All Together

In my previous posts, I have concentrated on the various elements of remodeling this 7x57 Mauser: reworking the stock, say, or bedding the action.  Now, everything is about to come together, and I am hopng, as I always do at the end of one of these projects, that the whole magically will become more than the sum of its parts. For me, at least, this final assembly typically involves some pesky last minute adjustments before the magic can happen.  In this case, I had to remove some stray AcraGlas to make the bottom metal fit properly again.  

I'm planning to shoot the BRNO first with iron sights, partly because I like the look of a rifle uncluttered with a scope, partly because the rifle will weigh at least three quarters of a pound less than it would with a scope, and partly to see whether my aging eyesight can manage one minute of whitetail deer.  What this means in practical terms is whether I can still keep all my shots at 50 yards on an eight-inch paper plate--offhand.  

Although the BRNO lacked a front sight when I bought it, it did come drilled and tapped for a Lyman 48.  Fortunately, the RS model Lyman 48 I already owned fit this Mauser 98 perfectly, so that's what I'll try.  If I no longer see well enough for iron sights, I can always take off the peep sight and mount a scope, making use of the BRNO's tapped holes for Weaver bases.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, despite my amputating the Monte Carlo comb, the comb is still high enough that I can use a low-mounted scope.

Here's a shot of the altered pistol grip, the receiver with the Lyman 48, the checkering, and the shortened fore end with a barrel band.  The magazine release is just visible, and as I said in an earlier post I've swapped the two-stage military trigger for a Timney I already had on hand.



The finishing touch, so to speak, wasn't a matter of seeing so much as a matter of feeling.  After assembling the rifle and holding it muzzle down in my right hand, I noticed that the edges of this Lyman peep were digging uncomfortably into my hand.  Looking more closely, I saw that the edges had been chamfered, but only minimally.  Following a suggestion by E. C. Crossman in The Book of the Springfield (1931), I picked up a needle file and in a few minutes had softened the edges of the sides and the adjustment knobs.  Some cold blue made it look new again.  It's surprising how much difference a little detail like this can make.


Looking back to the beginning of this project, here's the BRNO as I bought it, complete with a Monte Carlo comb, a bulky, closed pistol grip, and an extended, angular fore end (the odd bump on the bridge is a Weaver scope base):

And here's where we've ended up: a new front sight, set back a tad in the English style, and a Lyman 48; a barrel band for a sling; a slightly truncated fore end to balance the 21 1/2" length of the barrel; and a more open pistol grip together with a much altered butt stock, a recut cheek piece, and a new recoil pad.  And now the much slimmer stock is checkered:

Assembled with iron sights, the rifle weighs 7 1/4 pounds. 

This BRNO 7x57 now fits me.  It balances just the way I like, very slightly muzzle heavy.  Unloaded, its balance point is five inches in front of the trigger.  It feels lively in my hands.  Almost as important, it is very close to my Platonic ideal of a bolt action sporter, an elegant and altogether personal rifle.  Its styling is conservative:  I like to think that Bell or Corbett would have approved of this 7x57.  I'm looking forward to practicing with it and then taking it afield.  In the meantime, I am deriving pleasure from just holding it in my hands and dreaming big dreams!


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Remodeling a BRNO Mauser, Part 7: Checkering

This post has been longer in getting up than I anticipated.  Put the delay down to the holidays and a tough winter combined with taking on a new Lab puppy.  But now I can return to the BRNO 7x57 sporter and  suggest some ways to make checkering its stock easier and less error-prone.  This post could be entitled "An Ode to Blue Tape," using the BRNO as an example.

Remember the old quip:  "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?"  The answer of course is, "Practice, practice, practice!"  How do you avoid the most common error in checkering: over-runs, those pesky little cuts that extend just beyond the border that's supposed to contain them?  Practice checkering!  After you've checkered a dozen or so stocks, you almost certainly will have gained much more control of the checkering tool.  While you're gaining control in the interim, however, and perhaps even afterwards, the solution to avoiding over-runs is Scotch Blue Painter's Tape.  I use the 0.94 inch x 60 yard size.

Available at any hardware store, this painter's tape has many uses for checkering.  I use a template cut out of aluminum foil to scribe in the borders on the pistol grip for a checkering panel. How do I hold down the template as I scribe?  Scotch blue painter's tape.

A strip of Scotch blue painter's tape laid carefully along the stock will give you a straight line to follow with a scribe or cutter (if you have difficulty following its thin edge, add another strip on top of it).  A strip can extend a line along a compound curve like a pistol grip.  By tearing off small sections and layering them tangent to a line, you can even tape a compound curve, as on this pistol grip.



So, when checkering, how do we avoid over-running a border?  All together, now:  Scotch blue painter's tape.

How do I make one side of checkering begin and end at the same point of the stock as the other side?  Run a piece of tape from one side to the other, checking it to make sure the curvature of, say, the grip doesn't throw it off. 

How do I know my points will end up aligned?  I simply put a strip of tape where I want the points to go:  I checker to the edge of the tape, and no farther.  This photo shows the grip after I've completed the first set of cuts.  The curled piece of tape visible on the right is from lining up the points on the other side:

  

As some of us have learned the hard way, tape on a gunstock can lift the finish off when it is removed.  3M says this tape is safe for finishes "up to" fourteen days, but I don't like pushing my luck.  I've kept it in place for a week, with no problems on removal.  If I haven't finished checkering the stock in a week, I re-tape.

As the proverb has it, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  If you resent the time taken to tape a curved panel (or re-tape it after a week), take a  moment to consider how much time it takes to fix a mistake:  scraping out the cut, sanding it with several grades of sandpaper, re-staining, refinishing--a number of days, in short, by the time it can pass inspection.  Wouldn't taping the panel in the first place have been preferable to spending all this time and effort?

Here's a shot of the checkered grip "in the white":

If you look closely at the middle point, you can see where I overran the border and had to scrape out and sand the cut.  This will disappear after dyeing when I apply a coat of TruOil thinned by 50% with mineral spirits.

The checkering on the fore end wraps around.  Given the relatively short fore end (14 1/4" from the trigger to the tip) to have the 21 1/2" barrel look in proportion, I decided to terminate the front end not with points but with an English-styled square border that affords more checkering for my forward hand's fingers.

I then dyed the checkering with the dye mix I'd saved for this purpose (see Part 6), applied a coat of alkanet oil to the checkering and then a thinned coat of TruOil, brushing it in with a toothbrush, and carefully wiped up any overflow.  The stock is now finished, literally speaking.  The remodeled stock without pad weighs 25 ounces, or one pound nine ounces.  Even with its minimal length of fore end and no fore end tip, this is unusually light for walnut. 

After letting the TruOil dry overnight, I screwed on the sling stud and recoil pad, which brings its weight to just under two pounds.

As a parting note, I've checkered something on the order of two dozen stocks.  As I admitted above, I still make mistakes.  To checker, you need to exercise patience.  You need to take your time.  And the way to minimize mistakes is straightforward:  Use 3M's Scotch blue painter's tape!

Stippling a Gun Stock

Faithful readers may remember my series of posts in July, 2013, about putting together a Scout or a Woods rifle, as I preferred to call it.  Following the suggestions of Jeff Cooper in To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth (Gunsite Press, 1988) and of Finn Aagaard in Selected Works (Wolfe Publishing, 2007), I took a DWM 1908 Mauser action with a commercial stainless barrel in 7x57mm, asked Fred Cornell (Custom Shooting Accessories, 570 888-9236) to turn down the barrel and shorten it to 20", and then fitted it to a Boyds laminated stock.   I trimmed Boyds' generous stock dimensions down and used aniline dyes to darken it.  I then epoxied on a XS Systems sleeve and mounted a Leupold Scout 2.5x28 scope just ahead of the magazine. 

The result was a handy rifle indeed.  Including the scope and a new recoil pad, it weighs seven and one half pounds.  If some malign fate confined me to only one rifle, the legendary reliability of the Mauser action, the versatile range of bullet weights available in 7mm, and the quick handling qualities of this Scout rifle would almost certainly make me choose this one.

One problem remained:  while hunting with it, the oil-finished stock felt a bit slippery in my hands.  I'd read that the glue in laminated stocks quickly dulls checkering cutters (carbide cutters might have worked, but I didn't have any:  they're expensive), so checkering was not an option.  What to do to get a non-slip surface?

Following a tip I'd picked up from a chat room on the web, I first tried truckbed paint.  This black paint is formulated to be non-skid, and that sounded like just what I needed.  Fortunately, I decided to test it on a junked stock.  It turns out that truckbed paint is indeed less slippery than regular paint, but it drips, runs, and sags when sprayed on the smoothly curving surfaces of a gun stock (see below):



So truckbed paint was out.  I then read about using an electric woodburning tool to create a non-slip surface on pistol grips.  Off I went to a hobby store and purchased a Weller Woodburning and Hobby Kit.  Once again, I decided on a test run.  It did work, after a fashion (see below):

 

 

It's not that easy to get your dots in a row for a border--and you also need a lot of them to fill a given space.  Checkering involves a lot of repetition, but this technique is really boring.  To my eye, it doesn't look that great, either.

 

I then thought of commercial Mauser sporting rifles I had seen:  many of them had the metal of the receiver ring stippled, presumably to cut down glare.  I wondered, are there stippling tools for wood as well as for metal?  There are indeed, and Brownell's carries them.  I ordered the Medium size (16 per inch) and the Fine (20 per inch) stippling punches.  I preferred the Medium size, so I tried to get the hang of stippling on another discarded stock.  Guess what?  Brownell's instructions are much to the point: practicing first does lead to a better result.

 

What I discovered, however, is that the stippling looks much better when set off by incised lines, just like a checkering pattern.  Given that the punches themselves are about 1/4" in diameter, the borders can't end in the V's traditional to checkering.  I decided simply to round off the panels, the one exception being the bottom of the grip panels, where I followed the typical line parallel to the grip cap.  Several sizes of washers gave me the arcs I wanted to end the panels close to the receiver and on the fore end.

 

After cutting those border lines, stippling was straightforward.  Just as I do when checkering, I taped all around the borders to prevent an overrun.  If you want to try stippling, I suggest you use light blows with the hammer.  Keep turning the punch so the dots form a random pattern.  If it looks a bit sparse, just do it some more until it looks filled up.  In other words, your eye will tell you when it's right. 

 

The stippling punches created just enough texture to keep my hands from slipping.  Here's the end result after re-staining and finishing the stippling:

 



 

 

 

 

 

 



Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk

Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk (Grove Press, 2014) is an extraordinary book, one that seamlessly fuses a number of themes.  It is a memoir about grieving for her father, dead from a heart attack while working as a photojournalist.  It is a book about raising and relating to another member of the animal kingdom, a hawk.  And it also compares and contrasts her experiences to those of T. H. White, who in addition to The Once and Future King and The Sword in the Stone wrote The Goshawk, a searing account of how not to train a hawk.

Holding these disparate themes together is a framework derived from the quest in medieval romance.  H is for Hawk concerns Helen Macdonald's quest for her rightful place in the world, a version of self-knowledge.  Because she is overwhelmed by her grief from her father's unexpected death, she decides to rear and train a goshawk.  Quests typically involve journeys into another world, one fraught with perils and ordeals.  The hero confronts death and then returns, much changed, to the journey's point of origin.

What Macdonald does, however, is go off in the wrong direction, thereby inverting and reshaping the romance tradition.  Rather than setting out on a quest for something, be it the Golden Fleece or self-knowledge, Macdonald escapes from something:  To distract herself from grieving for her father, Macdonald retreats from the ordinary world of people and disciplines herself to enter the world of her goshawk, sardonically named Mabel (from amabilis) because she is anything but amiable.  But the world of hawking is not only a matter of predator and prey in the here and now.  No small part of its appeal is that it offers a mode of relating to a past that extends back through the Middle Ages and beyond, back into the realm of mythology and the ancient Egyptians' worship of Horus (a deity Macdonald actually prayed to as a child).

Macdonald succeeds in entering Mabel's world by becoming a non-entity, invisible, and thus ignored by her hawk.  (T. H. White correctly saw this process as an ordeal, and he failed at it.)  Macdonald becomes exquisitely sensitive to every nuance of Mabel's expressions, seemingly proving that she could become like Mabel, "solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life."  What she didn't realize at the time was that "turning into a hawk" also involved loss, the loss of her own humanity and therefore her relationships to the human community.

Undistracted by quotidian life--she has no job, no friends, no children, no home--Macdonald is free to focus on Mabel.  One outcome I found delightful:  she has to discard the contemporary view that goshawks are sulky and murderous when Mabel and she engage in a game of catch with scrunched-up balls of paper.  When Macdonald tosses the paper ball to Mabel, Mabel catches it with her beak and tosses it back with a flick of her head.

Hunting with Mabel, however, takes Macdonald to the very edge of being human and then past that place.  That way madness lies, and indeed she comes perilously close.  She could always tell a hawk from a handsaw, she comments, but sometimes she was struck by how similar they were.  She is scared of people. Suffering from anxiety and depression, she drifts into states where she isn't certain who she was or what she was.  Far from her worth being proved by the ordeal of her quest, she is falling apart.

It might be argued that Macdonald loses control over her material as she struggles to convey her path back to becoming human.  Granted, no dramatic revelation starts her in another direction.  But I would suggest that this lack of drama, this rather messy, tentative turn indicates instead that Macdonald is reshaping romance conventions.  Far from a neat resolution of her ordeal, her conversion imitates life as we live it:  uncertain, non-linear, proceeding by fits and starts.

Mabel also helps, albeit unknowingly, by teaching her about death.  Every time Mabel kills an animal, that act pulls Macdonald back from her hawk-like mode into being human.  As a human, she begins to feel accountable for these deaths.  Mortality becomes real to Macdonald in ratio to her accepting responsibility for hawking with Mabel.

Another element in her conversion is attending her father's memorial service.  She is intensely moved by how many people had come and how much they cared for him.  She feels a sense of community at the memorial service, and that in turn leads her to a major realization:  she had taken the wrong path.  The wild would not, could not heal her hurt.  She couldn't become a hawk; she couldn't fly though a rent in the sky, as she'd dreamed, and bring her father back.  She needed instead to be in touch with people: "Human hands are for holding other hands.  Human arms are for holding other people close."

The passing of time transmutes her grief for her father into love.  She reestablishes human relationships.  At the same time, she continues hunting with Mabel, but with a difference.  Now, she begins to depart from accepted practice by letting Mabel fly free.  The loss of control scares her, but both of them begin learning the landscape, creating maps of magical places where they had earlier found game, places "glowing with memory and meaning."  And, wonderfully, their two maps coincide.

Grieving for the death of a beloved father; what it's like not to be a human; the relations between our species and another; the ordeal of becoming who you really are; and the emerging of love that passeth all understanding--all of these themes cohere in Helen Macdonald's brilliant reshaping of the medieval quest, H is for Hawk .


 

First-Rate Writing: Hutto's Illumination in the Flatwoods

Joe Hutto's Illumination in the Flatwoods:  A Season Living Among the Wild Turkey was published in 1995 and in a second paper edition by Lyons Press in 2006. Almost on a whim, Hutto saved some wild turkey eggs from being destroyed by mowing operations in Florida.  He got ahold of an incubator, marked them and turned them, and when the chicks hatched, he imprinted them on himself.  The chicks thought he was a turkey, and he in turn did everything he could to enter their world (which, among other demands, involved being sleep deprived for two years).  Hutto writes not only with insight but with love and wonder, and the result is a moving appreciation of a species entirely different from us, the wild turkey.

Hutto is more than an observer of their lives, he is a participant.  Among many other things, these turkeys teach Hutto how to live in the present by teaching him about "wild turkey speed and wild turkey time."

     Wild turkey speed is that speed beyond which an organism becomes stupid on a scale proportional to the relative increase.  In other words, stupidity is directly proportional to the square of one's velocity.  For this reason it is very difficult for me to travel at wild turkey speed.  Every day is a new lesson in this discipline.  Wild turkey speed allows one to utilize consciousness and sensory awareness to minimize one's expenditure of energy.  A wild turkey always proceeds as if he were in the perfect place at the perfect time.  All his needs may be satisfied here in this moment.  These opportunities are merely waiting to be recognized--a constant condition of sustenance through inquiry and discovery.  I find that it is difficult for me to avoid being goal oriented in our outings, betraying the moment for some abstraction up ahead.  An absurd and ironic result of this is that the rattlesnake, which serves as a perfect metaphor, is peacefully waiting to be understood and instead winds up underfoot.  There is no profit in this, and these wild turkeys constantly remind me to do better.  Their experience, which I believe to be vastly richer than my own, affords them an awareness and evolutionary maturity that is far superior.  I have made this natural world my devoted life's work, but they remind me that I am a clumsy pilgrim in a realm that can never truly be my own.

     Wild turkey time is more difficult to explain.  It seems to have something to do with a resolution of the time it takes for a grasshopper to fly and land, and the time it takes to get from the Cretaceous to the Holocene.  Wild turkeys exist on a vast continuum like continents and mountain ranges but only in this moment like the wind on your face.  And, as any turkey hunter knows, they exist only as a probability, a tendency to occur in a certain place at a certain time.  They behave at once like a particle and like a wave, and even a physicist would call them unpredictable.  A wild turkey suddenly is there like a gnat in your eye or he is an apparition that gives you occasion to doubt your senses.  In either case, he can be very hard to get to know.