This story, “Never Say Uncle,” appeared in the July 1953 issue of Outdoor Life.
It was no easier to grow up in the 1860’s than in the 1950’s, possibly harder. There were certain hazards. Horse thieves murdered my father before I was born. Mother had gone east so I could be born in the bed in Charleston, S. C., where my father and grandfather had been born. Word could have been sent to her by pony express but my uncle — her brother — saw fit to withhold it. So she did not know she was a widow till she got back to southern Cali fornia eight months later.
My uncle — the Old Man — ran the ranch alone after my father’s death. I was afraid of him. The horse thieves had given him the same buckshot-in-the-back treatment they had given dad, but he survived to become even more ornery than before.
He used to take me out shooting when I was still very small. “Get that squirrel!” he’d command. Maybe I hadn’t seen the squirrel. I’d have to dismount and find it. Maybe it ducked into its hole before I could shoot. “Why didn’t you shoot him before he ducked?”
And if I hit in the belly instead of the head I got criticized for that, too. I was never good enough. I said I might do better if I had one of the new Winchester repeaters, but the Old Man snorted and kept me using the muzzle-loader from George Washington’s time.
After mother died things became worse. It was like being left alone with a bear. The Old Man was short and gruff and had chin whiskers. A six-shooter hung from his bedstead every night because the horse thieves still paid us visits. He was a deadly shot.
“Keep both your eyes open!” he’d bellow at me. seeing me aim with one eye. Later I learned to keep them both open, pistol or rifle, hip or shoulder, either hand, and to knock a meadowlark out of the air. But still he wasn’t satisfied.
For the first time I could remember I stood up to him.
The year that mother died, 1869, was the one when the transcontinental railroad linked us to the rest of the world. In the autumn the Indians came as usual to the ranch to gather piñon nuts and sweet oak on Cuyamaca Peak. And as usual one of the chiefs came to the house to ask permission of the Old Man. It was only a formality because the Old Man rented their reservation for pasturage for a rental of a steer a year, and things were understood.
But this morning the chief had something to add. As he came up the walk between the rose bushes he pulled a brindle puppy from the pocket of his blue bib overalls and handed her to me. As soon as I took her she began to wiggle and lick at me.
“Ugh — lap dog, eh?” the Old Man commented.
We kept dogs galore around the place, mainly Southern foxhounds to which the Old Man was partial, but no pets; he didn’t believe in pets. So I’d never had a dog of my own. Now the chief by giving me one as much as said he had heard of mother’s death and was sorry. I thanked him and set the dog down. She ran away among the rosebushes and tried to make friends with a hen and chicks, got soundly pecked, and came running back, tail between her legs.
“Likely won’t have enough gumption to bite her own fleas,” the Old Man said.
For the first time I could remember I stood up to him.
“She’s a good dog,” I retorted. “She’s got bull in her! Look at that short head and strong jaw.”
“Bull in her? Sixty kinds of mongrel blood is what she’s got. But no bull!”
“I’ll call her Jip,” I said defiantly, “and she’ll make us a catch dog — won’t you, Jip?”
“I know what she’ll catch and you too, youngster, if you’re both not careful. A boy’s bad enough. A boy with a dog I can imagine! But I’m not going to, see? We’ll give her a try. If she makes good she stays. If not, she goes.”
He seldom failed to make himself clear. He was accurate with words as with everything. He had been educated as a surgeon at Heidelberg University in Germany, and he owned 2,000 books that he read far into the night, sitting by the fire, a pitcher of red mission wine at his elbow, bending that elbow more and more freely as the night wore on. He grew mellow as he smoked his huge meerschaum pipe and gave me puffs of it while I was still a baby, saying it was better than milk to grow up on; he also gave me a pistol to cut my teeth on, a pistol always being handy. He didn’t practice surgery regularly but answered the calls of neighbors in distress, and once went all the way to Kan as City to perform a single operation. I stood in awe of him. He had owned nine leagues of land in Starr County, Texas. That in itself was enough to make a man awful: to have owned nine leagues of land. But when you added the buckshot in his back that had failed to kill him and just stirred around in there and riled him up, why, you had something truly terrible.
He relented enough to let Jip sleep on the porch. “But don’t go to her if she cries,” he warned. “There’s no quicker way to spoil a pup.”
Of course she cried. She was away from home and mother for the first time, . She cried and cried. The Old Man back like a wild bull from his bed in the next room to mine. But I knew something of what it was to be alone and without a mother. After he’d grown quiet I slipped out of bed. I had to go through his room to get to her. I could see his chin whiskers protruding over the counterpane and the six-shooter hanging from the bedpost. If I startled him he’d shoot me sure.
I trembled as I slipped across the floor, careful to step on the lion and deer skins wherever possible, and at last reached the safety of the porch. As soon as I took Jip in my arms she quieted. Her little wet nose and warm tongue went all over me. in the dark. In no time we were back to bed.
Next morning when the Old Man called I pretended to delay until he was dressed and gone. Then I whisked Jip from under the covers and outdoors.
Night after night the stratagem was repeated successfully. It made me feel mighty proud of myself. Not till long afterward did I discover that the Old Man was awake and watching me all the time.
Jip was my only playmate except for Indian children, so we became close friends. We had fun Sundays with the other kids catching wood rats. The rats were highly desirable for stews, being as clean and succulent as squirrels. The Indian bucks would climb upon the rats’ huge nests — piles of sticks and rubbish as much as 10 feet high — and jab with long poles till the rats ran out. Then the wives and kids and dogs, including Jip and me, went into action with sticks and clubs and bows and arrows. Our bows were willow, the bowstrings babiche trimmed to an even thickness. I grew pretty accurate with the reed arrows that had sagebrush tips hardened in the fire. They had quills of twisted hawk or chicken feathers, the twist giving them a revolving motion in flight.
I could kill rats and rabbits and blue jays at 20 yards but I worried lest Jip fail to find out what her teeth were for. I don’t know how many times she was bitten around the nose and mouth be fore she finally learned. She thought the rats were there to play with. And the Old Man seemed to know at a distance, and to disapprove by the expression of the back of his head. A cold qualm of doubt would go through me.
Jip quickly learned the difference be tween a horse and a cow. She would heel the cows. The time came later when I could tell her to go into the brush after a wild steer and she’d go in and heel him out into the open, then grab him by the nose and hang there till hell froze or somebody came.
She grew fast. By the time she was a year old she looked grown.
My 11th birthday arrived and the Old Man announced it was time for me to grow up. He found me a horse that had never been ridden, and told me to ride it. Juan Merón and Joe Lopez, our top vaqueros, stood at either side as I climbed aboard. By some miracle I stayed there. I nearly pulled the bucking strap out by the roots but I stayed. Thereafter there was hope for me. I wasn’t yet a man but I wasn’t a boy any more. I was in that limbo called youth; and the Old Man said, one evening drinking wine, “You’ll get you a lion one of these days, sir.”
“I hope so,” I replied.
“Hope he’s a big one?”
“Yes sir,” I said.
I’d never faced up to anything more dangerous than a rattlesnake and that didn’t count.
Fall came and brought the damp nights that hold scent well. There was that ring around the moon and the sycamores and maples turned yellow in the canyons. The wild pigeons came with a beat of wings that filled the air, and ate the acorns under the oaks. Then the Old Man took Jip to hunt with the grown dogs on the Peak. I could have gone; I was too nervous to. I lay all of that still, warm October morning in the barrel-stave hammock in the oak grove listening to Jip’s trial: the cry of the hounds now strong, now faint. I wondered if they were singing her praises or disgrace. Toward noon she crept home alone. I knew the worst. I saw her avoid me and go to the kitchen door with the cats.
The Old Man came in raising Cain.
“Cottontail rabbit thumped the ground a time or two and she was gone. I mean she wasn’t there. I’d like to put a bullet through her.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” I said, astonished at the boldness of my words. “She’s my dog. You can’t shoot her!”
“Oh, so-ho … !” I saw his startled expression.
“Give her another chance,” I begged, and I’d never begged him for anything, not even to let up on the whippings. “She’s the only playmate I’ve got.”
It was a low trick: to recall my orphan state. But I did it for Jip’s sake. The Old Man had adored my mother, his sister, and the way she was like a vinegar bottle bubbling over, galloping everywhere on the back of a stallion sidesaddle, as ladies did in those days, and the stallion kneeling for her to get on, as stallions did.
He choked up, turned gruff, and said he’d see about giving Jip another chance. He did, though, and this time it was in a chase after the wild pigs that had run upon the mountain since Spanish times.
The hounds quickly brought a sow to bay and got good, sensible holds on her ears. But Jip, being the pup, walked up to the sow’s face. She landed on the dog with all four feet and everything else. A sow’s tushes aren’t as long as a boar’s but they rip like knives. For a while things looked bad for my Jip. Then she got the idea that the sow wasn’t doing right by her. The bulldog in her began to show. Bristle by bristle it came out, growl by growl. Long after the pig was dead she was still chewing its ear.
“Mighty hard on ’em after they’re dead,” the Old Man commented.
I could have killed him. I thought I had the bravest dog in the world.
“Any old dog can handle a pig,” he said, “but wait till she meets a cat.”
A week later she did meet a cat, a big, tufted-ear lynx that weighed 40 pounds, her weight. We ran him up a tree in the Rancho Viejo and shot the feet out from under him so he wouldn’t rip the dogs too badly. But he still had plenty of teeth. That is how you make a dog. Jip joined in the rush. He fastened to her underlip. Oh, but she cried. She tried to back out and run home, to quit, to die, anything to get away, but he wouldn’t let her. She had to stay and face it. After a while she got tired of facing it. She got mad. She squirmed around and, despite the way he had her, sunk her teeth into him. Then, tooth to tooth, eye to eye, they chewed it out.
Long after he was dead she was still chewing. The bulldog in her came out that day and never went back. She be came a hot-trail dog. Her nose was never any good so she left the cold trails to the hounds, but as soon as their voices went up a notch she knew and was gone. Cats became her pet hate. Every time she smelled one she remembered what that lynx had done to her.
I was coming along. I could shoot almost on a par with the Old Man either hand, pistol or rifle, hip or shoulder. I never did learn to snuff a candle placed inside a half-broken beer bottle by shooting through the nozzle end, but I learned to hit coins tossed in the air. Later I learned to hit them once and knock them on up and hit them again. The Old Man explained that my life might depend on my shooting, an ex lanation that was quite unnecessary seeing what had happened to my father and him.
So matters stood when one day he ordered, “Go up onto the mesa and get us a mess of quail for supper.”
The mesa was three miles away and 1,500 feet up. When he said mess he didn’t mean 15 or 20 quail; he meant half a sack. So I got the 12 gauge double-barreled hammer gun and some of the brass shot shells we loaded at home. I called Jip and Hee, a Southern foxhound, got my horse and sack, and started up the trail. The month was February, clear and warm, the grass green from the rains. The wild lilac brush was in bloom, so thickly in places that the fragrance almost made me sick.
I could visualize it so well that I hesitated to go forward. But I did. I crept up through the brush along the edge of the cut, to the place whence the noise was coming. And there, very carefully, I peeked over.
We found quail feeding in the openings and Jip pointed them for me in her remarkable way, which consisted not in looking at the quail but at me. She’d freeze still and watch me till she saw that I saw the quail. We collected near ly half a sack while Hee was off scout ing around. All of a sudden we heard his deep boe-woe. Immediately it went up a notch. Jip left.
“Golly,” I said to myself, “Hee’s hit a hot trail already!”
I threw the sack over the back of the saddle and galloped after them. The brush meant slow going but finally I located them in a water cut. I knew perfectly well what the situation was. I could hear it.
It sounded pretty snarly. I could visualize it so well that I hesitated for a moment to go forward. But I did; I got off and crept up through the brush along the edge of the cut, to the place whence the noise was coming. And there, very carefully, I peeked over. Fifteen feet below me, hemmed against the bank on my side by the dogs, was a male mountain lion.
He was crouching and facing them, pivoting back and forth, one paw cocked like a prizefighter’s right hand, ready to let go.
Meanwhile he told the world what he thought. Jip came too close. He let her have it.
She sailed through the air and lit 10 yards away. I thought she must be dead but back she came, game as ever. That encouraged me. Instead of departing for home and help, as I had been tempted to do (my lifelong desire to kill a lion having suddenly weakened), I emptied both barrels of the shotgun into the lion’s backside.
Of course, I never stopped to realize I was using only quail shot. The effect was much the same as if I’d shot him in the rear with hot pepper. He went straight into the air, clawing and squalling like a cat with firecrackers tied to its tail. When he came down he bowled over the dogs and departed down the cut in the direction of Mexico, with Jip and Hee hot behind.
I halfway hoped he’d never come back, and that they’d lose him completely. He had looked awful big, particularly when he went up in the air that way. Seemed he came nearly level with my face, a whole self-propelled mountain lion.
“Guess I’ll have to get me a gun that will kill something!” I said aloud, gruffly, in the way one does when one is 12 to buck oneself up.
I jumped on the horse and piled off the mesa like an avalanche.
I found that the farther I got away from the lion, the braver I got. I charged up to the cookhouse door and pitched the sack of quail at Cap’n Hulburd, the cook, who had been a Yankee banker and Union officer before he came to cook for us Rebels, and I don’t think in all his broad experience he had ever seen a boy in such a rush. I felt now that I would like to kill my lion alone, as any man should.
I didn’t explain. I grabbed my Winchester .44 saddle rifle, a repeater that was a recent present from the Old Man and as fine a thing as any boy in the land possessed. Then I charged back up the mountain as fast as I could.
I found that the nearer I got to the top, the more I was hoping the dogs had lost him. But no such luck. When I got on top I heard them far away. They’d stayed with him; I would have to do the same.
I started to get off my horse, and then I reflected that I was only 12, a long way from home, and alone, and there was a wounded lion up in that tree.
I tore through the brush at full speed. Sometimes just plain velocity helps in a case like that. The thick chaparral was horny and dusty, and it scratched and choked me, and again the lilac was so sweet it nearly stifled me; but on I went, feeling like I didn’t know just what. And, sure enough, in one of the biggest, thorniest patches of brush and lilac, centered around a great, black, bushy live oak, I found them.
I couldn’t see the lion but I could hear him. He was up in that bushy oak. And he left no doubt how he was feeling. Jip was mad. I could tell my quail shot was burning his rear end. The dogs were making a continuous row around the foot of the tree. Altogether there was a good deal of noise and excitement. I thought how fine it would be if I could shoot him from the saddle where I sat safe, but there was no chance of that. If I wanted him I’d have to go get him.
I started to get off, and then I reflected that I was only 12, a long way from home, and alone, and there was a wounded lion up in that tree. And then I started to get off again, and I reflected again. Finally I got off.
I slipped forward nervously through the lilacs. They were regular trees 10 and 12 feet high. I kept peering up, trying to locate him, not wanting to walk right underneath a wounded lion. But that was where I had walked to when I spotted him.
I saw immediately what my quail shot had done — it had inflated him! He looked positively enormous — twice as big as before. Of course I was now looking up at him, not down, and when you see a thing as big as that up in a tree, well, you can’t believe it. I found that my rifle wasn’t holding steady. The sights kept jumping every time I saw lion through them.
I intended to break his neck. I squeezed as I’d squeezed a thousand times. I heard my bullet hit. Next a body came hurtling down, but it wasn’t a dead body!
Whether by accident or design, he jumped almost on top of me, crashing through the oak leaves and lilac branches like the whole sky falling, and I was trying to get out of there and being caught in the brush, trying to get another shell into the chamber but failing to, as he landed six feet away.
I saw the blood from the wound in his neck. Things happened very rapidly now but I couldn’t move. He was bewildered just for an instant before coming to kill me, bewildered by the bullet, the fall, me.
In that instant I saw Jip take hold of his skinny tail. I saw him become aware of her and debate which to go for, her or me. Finally he chose her. He swung, and there was just room enough among the lilacs for him to swing and hit her with all his might. Dempsey in his prime never delivered a harder blow. Jip flew through the air. She’d be going yet, I think, but a lilac trunk stopped her with a thud.
It knocked a yow out of her. Hee was on the lion before he could get back to me.
Then Jip flew at him again, streaming blood, minding it not at all.
About that time I got my gun working and put a bullet through the lion’s head.
When all was over I saw stars, and the world went spinning in an aroma of sweet lilacs. . . . The faintness lasted only a minute. When I came to, Jip was nuzzling my face.
I rode proudly down the mountain, hoping to find the Old Man now and say offhand, like nothing at all, “Killed a lion on the mesa. Got time to come help me skin him ?”
I met him riding up the trail at a trot. “What’s all this rifle shooting?” He had an ear for rifle shooting.
“Just killed a lion—“ I began, but before I finished it was flat. He was looking at me too hard.
“Couldn’t you skin him out by yourself?”
Burning with shame, I followed him to where the lion lay. Then I saw with satisfaction that a serious look crossed his face. The carcass seemed about the size of a horse, stretched out there. The Old Man made the official examination. My quail shot had lodged between the outer hide and the thin inner skin. No wonder the lion had been mad. My bullet had penetrated the neck between the jugular and the bone, missing the spine by a fraction.
“What happened?” he asked.
I told him the story, briefly, dispiritedly.
“What’s the matter, couldn’t break his neck?”
I said nothing. The whole day long since gone sour.
“Some shot! Next time make that first shot count.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Make it your last one.”
“Yes, sir.”
“If it hadn’t been for Jip you probably wouldn’t be here.”
“I know, sir.”
He gave the dog a chuck for congratulation and a pat for her wounds, and then all at once he began to laugh. Softly and incredibly he laughed.
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“Can’t get over your warming him with that quail shot!”
I laughed too. He had spoken as one man does to another, not as a man to a boy, not as the Old Man to me. I felt different. But I didn’t know I had grown up.
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