Boys and Guns

I came across a definition for a term that I heard from my father the other day. he used "mexican standoff" to describe a showdown where no one could be a winner. The definition I found was similar and was " a situation where nothing can be expected" which puts a more derogatory slant on it. I like the first one best. I guess it was on my mind because of the NHL labour dispute which seems to fit nicely with the term.

When I was about 17 years old and living on a farm in Saskatchewan having a gun was a part of life. Everyone had at least one and most 3 or 4. I had a little single shot .22 and a bolt action with target shooting sights on it. A Cooey single shot shotgun that actually had a hammer on it that you had to pull back to cock. It was quite a gun and was quite possibly the first one that ever came off its assembly line. I got it from my grandfather and used to say it was as ancient as he was.

Now this gun had a particular quirk to it. It had been fired so many times the parts had worn out. When you broke it to put a shell in and closed it back up, the brass of the shell was visible where the barrel and hammer assembly met. Every time you fired, it came apart and ended up in three pieces. The butt which you kept in your hand, a piece of wood that served for a cradle the barrel rested in which stayed in your left had and the barrel which broke off and fell to the ground. Quite an operation, it was like loading up a musket to get the second shot off. But it seemed normal to me at the time.

I spent a lot of time hunting, just wandering around the countryside putting miles on shoes, all by myself and enjoying being outside. One fall afternoon I decided I would take a walk over to Carletons slough, about 3/4 of a mile away to see what was around, ducks, geese, muskrats, everything was in peril on these forays.

The slough covered about 75 acres and wasn't more than about 3 feet deep anywhere. It was weed infested and had about 3 feet of duckshit accumulated from millions of mallards over 10,000 years. I had learned early that if you stepped off the bank you would sink right up to your waste in this soup. So when you were shooting you had to make sure that the duck was over land because if it landed even ten feet into the water you couldn't get it.

I was having not to bad a day and after an hour or so of walking I had shot a few ducks. As I came out of a cluster of willow bushes on the far side of the slough I suddenly came face to face with another hunter. And not just any hunter, but my arch enemy of the world, I find it hard to believe that I am not certain of his name but I think his last name was "Rorke" . There was a real history between us and had been involved in several knock down drag out fist fights including one about two weeks previously on the school bus where I had emerged victorius after driving his face into the floorboards and bloodying his nose pretty good.

He was one of those kids who was just a "bad cat", he lived in town and had a reputation as being in trouble a lot. He had an uncle who had a shack about 1/2 mile from the slough and his parents would sometimes send him out for a few days to stay with him. The last time I heard about him he was in Montreal and had been arrested for some type of criminal activity which didn't surprise me.

So here we were, both of us surprised as hell and face to face, me with my trusty single shot Cooey and him with a .22. Somehow we got past our recent squabble and decided to continue the hunt together. The prime candidate for slaughter was duck and the weapon of choice on a duck hunt, the shotgun. As we moved along I added some more ducks to my tally and he was being skunked, its damn hard to hit a duck on the wing with a .22 so at some point he made the suggestion we trade guns, so he could get a few.

"Well OK" I must have said because the switch was made and I gave him 5 off my precious Canuck Brand bright red # 6 shot shells and he gave me the .22 and some ammo. Now how did I know it was 5 shells, because I didn't have much money and one of the ways I counted how wealthy I was came down to how many shotgun shells did I have. Over the next hour as we continued on our hunt he fired 2 shots and got one duck. We finally ended up in Stan Careltons yard whose homestead bordered the slough and was the closest point to where I lived. It was time to split up and each go our separate ways, we exchanged guns and ammo, but something was wrong, he only gave me two shotgun shells back. "Where's my other shell" I said, "You only gave me four" he replied. "Let me search you" I said, he came back with, "Don't you fucking touch me". Our relationship was quickly returning to what we were used to.

So there we were. I can't remember who moved first, but it wasn't long before somebody pointed a gun to emphasize his position. A challenge that was quickily met, and soon the situation evolved to a state where the barrel of his .22 was resting on the bone that runs between my nose and my left eye and he was facing my Cooey with the hammer back, jammed in the soft flesh of his neck resting on the Y of his wishbone.

No one was saying anything and we were eye ball to eyeball, each of us trying not to blink. And at least one of us was thinking "how in the fuck am I going to get out of this".

I wouldn't have a clue how long we stood like that, but it seemed like a long, long time until we heard the sound of a spring door shutting. Across the yard came Helen Carleton who had started yelling at us as soon as she came out the door. She must have sized up the situation from her window and I could tell from her voice that she was feeling a lot of stress.

Helen was a large woman, not fat but about 5' 10" and maybe 20 pounds overweight. She was quite attractive in an old fashioned calico dress sort of way, and today she was about the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. I used to wonder how she ever ended up with Stan who was as homely as a hedge fence and had a perpetual smell of old chewing tobacco about him.

She kept getting closer, yelling all the time for us to stop, and put those things down. When she got about 10 feet await she tried reasoning with us, her voice sometimes breaking up under the strain. I wondered if was thinking she would have to tell my mother I was dead if we ended up gunning each other down. Its strange what goes through your head when you are in a situation like that. I clearly remember what had been going thorugh mine after I got past the "what the hell am I going to do". I evaluated my options.

What if he fired first, would I have time get my shot off. Thats a poor train of thought when you are holding a weapon with a hair trigger and it didn't take much of a jiggle to set off the old Cooey. What if I fired first and jerked my head to the right, would I have cleared myself before he could squeeze. I even thought about various forms of a 1-2-3 countdown where we moved our guns to the side simultaneously, but concluded I couldn't trust him, he would probably shoot me as soon as I moved my gun off him.

Pray to God you never find yourself in this kind of a situation because it will haunt you from time to time throughout your life.

I don't even know what ended it, maybe it was when Helen started to cry, but somehow the guns were dropped and we each headed home, my parting shot " I still want my shell back you fucking prick". Everything between Jim and Rorke was back to normal.