The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [11]
When I was ten (the year after I had left school), he taught me how to remove the bolt, clean the barrel, load and unload it, all without firing a shot. And then, a month after we had brought the sheep into the mountains, set them grazing, and waited for the lambs to start coming, he said, “It’s time you learned to shoot.”
I went mechanically, yet with a practiced ease, through my test of assembling the Krag, and we hiked up a promontory, where we wouldn’t spook the flock, and I felt as though I had already gone through a rite of passage and that on the other side there waited for me my first portion of the kind of strength my father possessed, as though it were a gift he had carved and prepared for me, and I felt a consoling peace in that, and pride.
But I did poorly on that test, clinging loosely to the stock with my face down, in spite of my father’s instruction to “pull it in close and snug,” and he yelled “Stop!” before I could lose an eye or dislocate my shoulder, took the rifle away from me, and said, “It’s to be feared, but not fired in fear,” and I wanted to assure him that I wasn’t afraid, but instead I remained silent, and so we returned to our books and shepherding for the rest of the summer.
In the fall, I got a second chance, sighted down a buck in a high-mountain meadow, and, in my excitement, snatched at the trigger. The recoil on the Krag was so powerful that the shot went high and wide and the buck turned to look at us, sniffed in the wind, and bounded off into the trees.
“I think you scared him,” my father said, and what I had initially felt as pride emerged then as my first bitter taste of weakness and failure, and I wondered if he thought less of me, thought that I was undeserving of his gift, or believed that I could not do the work he had for so long trained me to do, and quietly I waited for him to suggest that I stay home in the village, or even to send me back to school, when it was time to lead the sheep again to their summer pastures.
But the following spring we set off as we had done the year before, and halfway up the mountain he told me that I wasn’t to go any farther with him. I trembled and expected the worst. He sat his old horse there on the trail like Grant astride his beloved Cincinnati, removed the Krag from its skin, unloaded it, and handed it to me where I stood on the ground.
“You go ahead, but don’t let on to where you are. I don’t want to see or even hear you. I’ll meet you at the cabin for supper.”
I stood frozen and staring up at the man.
“Go on,” he said. “I’m going to be a while with these beasts, but Sawatch and I will get by.”
“What am I going to do with this?” I asked, and held out the Krag, cradled in my arms like a baby I was unaccustomed to holding.
“Nothing, I hope. And if you knock that sight out of line, you can be sure you’ll never carry it again. Now get.”
I reached the cabin in a few easy hours, placed the rifle on its pegs, swept the winter dust and droppings, and waited.
There was silence all about, none of the sheeps’ constant bleating, and no hint yet of their mephitis, which saturated the air and our surroundings once the summer months settled in, but to which one simply grew accustomed, and I enjoyed the strange sameness and yet difference about the place.
After a few more hours alone and with no sign of my father, though, I became nervous and decided to go back and see how far he had yet to come. And when I reached a small cliff and could just see the trail where it emerged from the forest, I noticed him standing there eating an apple and watching me, the horse grazing, the dog running a