My grandfather was a man of few words.
Towards the end of his life, when he was physically unable to farm, he would sit outside the barn in an old chair, "watching the birds," he once said.
To me, it always seemed like he was remembering.
Grandpa had been a tank gunner in Patton's 13th Armored "Black Cat" Division during World War II. I heard secondhand stories about his landing in France, the month of intense combat that followed, liberating a concentration camp in southern Germany, and setting up a command post in Hitler's childhood home in Austria.
I always imagined the horrors behind those events, but he rarely spoke of them.
Instead, he occasionally talked about what life was like after the war while he was stationed in France — fishing for trout with hooks fashioned from tank antenna wires and daily baseball games with his unit.
When he returned from the war, he stepped off the train in Sutherland, Nebraska and walked 26 miles back to the family farm. There was no welcoming party. Just what I imagine was a sudden and striking return to civilian life.
Then he did something uncharacteristic. He bought himself a nice shotgun — a Remington Model 11 "Sportsman Model." Not only was it the first autoloading shotgun made in the U.S., the "Sportsman Model" featured an engraving of a pheasant on one side and a mallard on the other.
It was the gun he did the majority of his hunting with the rest of his life.
While he was alive, I only shot it once. When I was still in high school, I stopped at the farmhouse one day and he said he needed help with a ground squirrel that was tearing up grandma's garden. He got the Model 11 out of the barn, slipped a single shell inside, looked me in the eyes, and said "don't miss."
He poured a bucket of water down the hole until the squirrel emerged, soaking wet and muddy. It turned and ran across the yard.
I aimed down the long barrel and pulled the trigger.
Grandpa picked up the spent shell and walked the gun back to the barn.
That was the last time I saw it for 20 years.
When grandpa died, we had a small gathering at the National Cemetery in Omaha. At the time, it was new, and as a placeholder for future graves, the groundkeepers had planted native grasses and wildflowers. Since then, I've heard quail whistling from the grass while visiting his grave.
My dad and I almost forgot about the gun, figuring it was lost among the jumble of old machinery and other menagerie that has accumulated in the barn over the years. Then dad found it — wrapped in a wool blanket, shoved into a recess between the drill press and the chop saw. Rusted over. The bolt stuck shut.
Dad put it in his gun cabinet as a memento, but without him knowing it, I took the Model 11 to a gunsmith.
"This'll cost more than the thing is worth," the gunsmith had told me when he first looked at it.
"Not to me," I said.
He cleaned the rust away, found some new parts, and brought it back to life.
Last year, after two cold days of hunting in South Dakota, I pulled the Model 11 from its case and handed it to my dad. Compared to his usual shotgun, it was heavy.
We followed our dogs through freshly fallen snow along a brushy fenceline. A few minutes in, a rooster surged skyward, and dad dropped it with a jerk of the trigger. He joked about how hard the old gun kicked and handed it to me.
"Your turn," he said.
A hundred yards farther down the fence, my pointer whirled as a sharp-tail launched from the snow.
A moment later, three generations had gripped the same gun and watched the arc of bird and barrel meet.
As I lifted the bird from the snow, I thought of grandpa sitting in the farmyard. I wondered what memories passed through him — war and peace, farm and family, life and death, a rooster pheasant bursting from a fencerow?