When I was a kid, my job each summer at my Grandpa and Grandma Spilloway’s farm, near Gackle, North Dakota, was to clear the gophers out of the pasture.
Grandpa was more than happy to supply me with the traps, free of charge. I still remember buying them at the big brick hardware store on the corner. We bought .22 hollow point shells, too. At the time, they cost a dollar for a box of 50.
I made a good living at five cents a gopher tail. If I took the rifle with me, I had to shoot straight, because I had to reimburse Grandpa two cents for each spent shell. Even if you were perfect, you took a 40-percent pay cut. You sure as heck wanted to make sure the gopher didn’t tumble back into the hole, because no tail, no nickel.
Like any good entrepreneur, I devised a third option. With my traps set, I learned to snare gophers with baling twine. I learned patience and how to make the sexiest gopher whistle you ever heard. Patience, economics and marksmanship — that’s what I learned.
I appreciated the solitude and beauty of the prairie. The crocuses in the early summer, the sounds of the red wing blackbird or the yellow headed blackbird, which sounded like a rusty gate closing. I sat on rock piles and contemplated life, sometimes just listening to myself breathing.
By each summer’s end, I had worked through a couple of pastures. I took it personally if I spotted a gopher in a pasture that had been “cleared.” Some of them were pretty cagey.
If I was a good gopher hunter, my mother was the master. I still remember going for an epic gopher hunt with her and my Grandpa Bender on his farm, near Ashley, one Sunday afternoon.
Up until then, Grandpa Bender was so impressed with me as a shooter, he would drag me out of the house to plunk pennies off the wooden cover of the cistern to impress the neighbors. When my mother let slip that she, not I, was the greatest marksman in the family, he pooh-poohed the notion.
She missed the first shot from the window of his maroon 1968 Chevy pickup.
“This shoots a little high,” she said, cooly.
“Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that,” Grandpa replied.
The next gopher was a goner. And the next. And the next. And with each successive shot, Grandpa would slap his knee and exclaim, “Golly!” Only the golly was spread out over four or five syllables. Sort of a Gomer Pyle golly.
Twenty-two shots fired. Twenty-one fresh arrivals in gopher heaven.
Impressive, right? Yes, but, let me tell you about a Philadelphia kid named Joe LaVelle, who I dragged home from college for Easter vacation, promising him a good, old-fashioned gopher hunt.
Joe was maybe 5-6, a curly-headed muscular member of the swim team. He kind of strutted when he walked. I remember his mom worked at the building made famous by Sylvester Stallone when he ran up its steps in “Rocky.”
During Joe’s stay, we got permission to hunt gophers from Orville Crawford, near Frederick, South Dakota. Orville was one of those guys who would hurt you when you shook his hand. The term meathooks was created with him in mind. If you didn’t scream or buckle, you passed Orville’s test.
We survived the handshake and went hunting. It was still cool, a little too blustery for a good gopher hunt. I don’t remember seeing any, but from atop a hill, Joe spotted a jackrabbit loping along down below, a good hundred yards out. Now, an experienced shooter hitting a moving jackrabbit with a high-powered rifle and a scope would be quite a trick. A greenhorn with a .22 rifle, open sights in that wind at that distance? Crazy… and I told Joe that.
He fired, anyway. And we waited. And waited some more. But, wouldn’t you know, that rabbit fell over in mid-stride. We never could find the bullet hole. I remain convinced the old boy picked that exact moment to keel over of a heart attack.
I’ve looked, but I can’t find the picture we took that day of Joe and the rabbit. It is indelible in my memory. There he is, grinning away, holding the stretched out rabbit that was nearly as long as he was tall, somehow still strutting as he stood there.
Joe wanted to eat the damn thing, but cooler heads prevailed.
I lost track of him over the years, but I’ll bet Joe LaVelle never fired another shot in his life.
What for? How you gonna top that?
© Tony Bender, 2017
