The fence is set back about ten yards from the two-lane road several miles east of Culpepper, Virginia. I get out, swing open the gate, drive through, get out again and shut it behind me. There, up ahead of me, behind the maples and cedars and boxwoods, stands Rose Hill. I drive up on the left of the house by the tractor barns and park beside my cousin’s car around back.
Down in one of the back fields a shotgun blasts twice. Otherwise it’s quiet. I get out and walk around to the front yard. This is a sort of pilgrimage. I stop in front of an old wooden seat that hangs beneath a cedar tree from rusty steel cable—a swing my daddy remembers from his childhood visits here. Up on the porch is an older souvenir: a bullet hole left from the days when the federal government temporarily borrowed this “big frame house near Brandy Station,” as Bruce Catton describes it in A Stillness at Appomattox. When Uncle Broaddus had the house done over several years ago, he insisted that the painters keep that hole uncovered.
It was in the penultimate winter leading up to that “stillness” that this house served as the winter headquarters of Brigadier General Judson Kilpatrick, leader of the Third Cavalry Division of the Army of the Potomac, then under the command of General Meade. And it was from here that in late February 1864, the 28-year-old Kilpatrick launched his wild-eyed scheme to raid Richmond, distribute proclamations of amnesty, and release thousands of Union prisoners. The controversial papers found on the dead body of Kilpatrick’s advance guard leader, the dashing 21-year-old Colonel Ulric Dahlgren, described two additional goals: burn Richmond and assassinate the Confederate cabinet.
Bad weather, miscalculations, and unexpected resistance turned the raid into a rout; in the end, it failed to do anything but stir up war-time hatred. Strange how that animosity lingers. It somehow satisfied me, for instance, to learn that T.R. Covington, my cousin’s great-grandfather and the proprietor of Rose Hill, rode with the Ninth Virginia Cavalry, whose Company H it was that ambushed Dahlgren on his flight from Richmond.
Today’s enemy is, alas, more gentle than Northern aggressors. Back at the car I load up Uncle Bob’s old Remington “Sportsman 58” 12-gauge shotgun, fill up my vest pockets with shells, and head for the newly cut cornfield where my cousin and his buddy have already taken shots at today’s target: the pale gray, swift-winged mourning dove.
I walk down between the small pond and an old barn, then down a bush-whacked path beside a row of cedars. It opens on a cut sorghum field. This is where I stood three weeks ago, a few hours after dove season opened: the cedars behind me and a stand of wildflowers in front. It was hot and summery; I saw many more butterflies and bees in those flowers than birds in the air.
Today is different, clear and cool, and we’ve started later in the afternoon. Corn stubble crunches under foot as I head toward the trees lining the back field. I stop, listen, and walk on. Then, that plaintive purr! I drop to one knee, release the safety, and listen again. And here they come! Stand, point, follow, and pull. Pull again! Damn their speed! Muttering more curses, I catch a whiff of burnt powder, which triggers the usual memory, and for a moment I forget about doves.
Gunpowder’s acrid scent dissipates quickly outdoors. At the indoor firing range in the southern college town where I grew up, it hung like incense. This is where I learned how to shoot a 22-caliber rifle. I well remember my lesson in marksmanship: focus on the bull’s eye and line up the bead so it’s level with the rear sight, inhale, then slowly exhale and squeeze the trigger gently, lest you anticipate the moment of firing and tense up. This meditation on a paper target would abruptly end with my next breath, as I took in a pungent mouthful of exploded sulfur, saltpeter, and charcoal.
The gunpowder may smell the same for an instant, but shooting a shotgun at an airborne object differs from shooting a rifle at a stationary one. None of the marksman’s contemplative sigh; here timing is critical. First, you don’t aim the gun, you point it. Then the trigger is pulled, not squeezed. Like a conversational topic, the target moves in this game; wait too long and your shot becomes an awkward remark that misses its moment. One more thing: you must keep the gun moving after you pull the trigger. It’s only a split second that the shot remains in the barrel, but if you don’t follow through, you risk falling behind, which I think is why those two doves just slipped right by. They aren’t the only ones today who will.
I walk along the field’s ledge to some corn the harvester missed and stand there, waiting, with this old “Sportsman 58” in my hands. It’s a fairly long shotgun, a 30-inch barrel with a full choke, meaning a more compact shot pattern and a longer range. A good bird gun. Indeed, there’s a waterfowl scene etched on one side of the semi-automatic action; on the other are upland birds, quail, and dogs on point.
Whether Uncle Bob used this more for duck or quail, I don’t know. I also don’t know whether this was the gun Aunt Margaret kept under her bed after he died. Like many southern women, she could defend her turf, as any rodent foolish enough to get into her garden might discover. Midnight intruders would presumably get the rabbit-in-the-garden treatment, as well. But she had a gentle side, too. She adored her house dog, and was moreover one of the most neighborly women I’ve ever known. I remember thinking that after her memorial service several years ago, only to turn around just then to see the woman who lived next to her, red-faced and bleary-eyed like a child, suffering sharper pain than any of us relatives.
She was at once tender and hard-edged. The President was her “boyfriend”; the Speaker of the House was not. And she sided with the traditionalists in her Episcopalian Church, which meant early service, not late. That all suited me fine, as the politics I adopted were her own, and I quite liked the Book of Common Prayer, a priest who celebrated the Eucharist facing the altar, and altar rail communion. I’m sure it was in part my affinity with her outlook that prepared me for the bolder, even more compelling distinctions I later found elsewhere; for instance, in Chesterton’s Orthodoxy (“the red and white upon the shield of St. George”). In time, I followed him into the Church—the Roman Church, as my aunt would emphasize, and as most American Catholics, I dare say, would rather not.
Hunting does not always provoke theological musings. But it invariably reinforces one fundamental truth: the difference between man and animal. While the “Iceman” they lately found in the Austrian Alps no doubt grasped this point (and him coming 2,000 years before Aristotle!), it escapes all too many of our enlightened contemporaries. God bless the priest who clarified the matter for one member of the local social justice brigade. “The first thing to remember about animals rights,” he said with breathtaking sanity, “is that they have none.” What followed was a discussion of the proper relationship between rights and responsibilities, which merely underlined the initial point.
All this is best sorted out before aiming your loaded shotgun at a passing dove. It’s too late then. Let’s review the steps: release the safety, stand (if you’re not already), point your barrel, follow and then lead the bird, pulling the trigger as you pass ahead of its flight path. And don’t forget to follow through. Now, fit all of that into about two seconds. There’s just no time to imagine what your bird “feels” or what the U.N. General Assembly may have declared about the dove as an international symbol of peace. It is true that the hunter spends very little of his day actually shooting, but most of that other time is anticipatory—expecting, listening, looking, awaiting. These are very quick birds. The dove that appeared at our Lord’s baptism is usually depicted as hovering overhead, but I’ll bet there was a lot more movement to it than that, and that most onlookers, anticipating nothing, missed it altogether.
I finally meet up with my cousin and his friend down at the edge of the cornfield, close by the rock quarry where the birds drop in to pick up gravel for their craw. We stay down here the rest of the afternoon, quitting as the sun sets. The last shot is a hit, though not direct; the bird flies another fifty yards. We spend the next twenty minutes looking for it among the cut corn rows. My cousin’s three-month-old German short-haired retriever is too young to be much help. We find it and walk back toward the house. As we do, I begin wondering what this broad field looked like back when General Kilpatrick swaggered out on our front porch, trying to decide just how many barrels of (highly combustible) turpentine to carry with him to Richmond. This must have been a sea of camp tents and wagons and horse stalls.
The day has remained clear, and back up at the house we can see the sharp line of the Blue Ridge on the western horizon. In the foreground Mount Pony, a Union signal post during the War, is already dark. Our skin glows under this orange sunset. It is a lovely sight and makes one appreciate why Thomas Jefferson considered this locale a possible site for his university. On the driveway I line up our 15 doves (about half the legal limit for the three of us) and divide them with my cousin. Tomorrow night my roommates and I will be dining on bacon-wrapped dove breasts and smoked oysters.
We say goodbye and drive out separately on the right side of the house, by the family gravesite. There, in 1912, they buried that Virginian cavalier, T.R. Covington. His epitaph: “I know that my Redeemer liveth.” I circle around to the main drive and head down to the front gate, leaving Rose Hill’s dark shadow behind.