No Hunting – Douglass Crockwell

No Hunting
Douglass Crockwell
October 28, 1939

I’ve always gotten a chuckle from this 1939 cover by artist Douglass Crockwell. No only did this hunter ignore the warning, he’s mad enough to add his own commentary – under the big “NO HUNTING” letters he’s scribbling, “You’re telling me.” Notice that the artist simply signed his covers “Douglass”. This was to avoid confusion with another artist – some guy with a similar last name.

No Hunting – Leslie Thrasher

No Hunting
Leslie Thrasher
September 5, 1914

When this old guy says “No Hunting,” he means it! One might say there have been flagrant violators, since the sign is riddled with bullet holes. We’ve had some cover artists who were wonderful at painting old codgers, and Leslie Thrasher was one of them. This great cover is from 1914.

Springer Spaniels – J.F. Kernan

Springer Spaniels
J.F. Kernan
November 1, 1930

I’d know that white mustache anywhere; this old guy has been in many beautiful J.F. Kernan covers. This time he’s dressed for the hunt in 1930 and picking up the spaniels for the job. When the little guys grow up, they’ll be great hunters, too.

Duck Hunters – Robert Robinson

Duck Hunters
Robert Robinson
December 12, 1911

Now we all know that hunters and fishermen are the most honest and upright of sportsmen. But there’s not only this 1911 cover of an unsuccessful hunter buying someone else’s catch, there’s a cover a few years later depicting a fisherman doing the same thing. Who wants to go home after hours of hunting or fishing with nothing to show for it?

Patient Dog – John Atherton

Patient Dog
John Atherton
December 12, 1942

This is a sweet one. World War II has taken the man of the house away and this beautiful dog is waiting patiently for his master to return and take him hunting. Not all of those waiting at home are two-legged.

Hunting Couple on Walk – J. Hennesy

Hunter Couple on Walk
J. Hennesy
November 1, 1936

It’s a crisp autumn day, and together time for this couple means hunting – or at least walking in the woods. Country Gentleman magazine was a sister publication to the Post for many years and often shared the same artists.

Classic Covers: Fall Hunting Season The Saturday Evening Post

But Americans were also living and working in quiet towns and peaceable cities, never hearing an air-raid siren, spotting an enemy bomber in the sky, or even seeing an enemy soldier. And, unless they had the bad luck to be born to Japanese parents on the west coast, they never saw a military operation.

Yet their lives were hardly tranquil. They lived in gnawing uncertainty about the war’s progress, the fate of a loved one in combat, and even the possibility that America could still lose the war. They also lived with food shortages, gas rationing, and the impossibility of buying automobile tires or even a new pair of shoes. For many, the 1940s looked a lot like the grim 1930s.

The future, though, was another matter. It easily accommodated any wish for a better life. The thought of peace and prosperity must have been dizzying, particularly for the young men, who would only have vague memories of life before the Depression and war.

Now, with all the new technology generated by the war effort, life was going to be better than ever. Anything was possible.

This spirit of post-war predicting is captured in a Post article from August of that year: “The Coming Boom in Vacations.” According to its authors, America wouldn’t just beat its swords into plowshares, but into fishing rods and camping trailers.

If having fun ever needed any justification, it has that justification overwhelmingly now… Our great responsibility for the future is to create peacetime work in a volume at least comparable with what we have been doing for war.

An important item helping to keep our economy in blooming good health can be the activities engendered in keeping ourselves individually healthy, mentally and physically, by getting a larger share of the out-of-doors.

A considerable part of what we mean when we say “the American standard of living” involves our power to rove and play.

And a considerable part of the new recreation industry the author anticipated would involve camping and hunting. He quoted the head of nation’s Fish and Wildlife Service:

“Right after World War I, there was a thirty-per-cent increase in the number of hunting and fishing licenses in the United States. Much of that increase was due to the fact that a lot of city boys had newly learned to live out-of-doors during their military service and had likewise learned to use firearms skillfully.  This time almost every able-bodied young man has been drawn into military service. When these men are restored to civil life, their wives and children will certainly share to a considerable extent in their newly won proprietorship of the American woods and fields and streams.”

Ironically, American industry would enable its citizens to get back to nature. The end of gas rationing, the resumption of auto manufacturing, and the growth of passenger air service would give families new access to America’s 13 million acres of National Parks.

The automobile did much to further both the use and the preservation of the parks. Among the guardians of the Yellowstone, 1922 stands as a kind of frontier year. One per cent of the visitors arrived in automobiles then. But thereafter the change was sensational. In the five years between 1922 and 1927, thanks to automobiles, more visitors came to the park than had come in the previous half century.

By saving travel time en route, vacationers are going to gain time to play. Whether you work in Hollywood or Brooklyn, if your vacation begins on a Friday night, on Saturday you can begin spending your vacation period at your goal, whether it be the slopes of Mt. McKinley, the Great Smoky Mountains, Lake Placid… etc.

The author also expected that military equipment would soon appear on the shelves of sporting-goods stores.

Will this G.I. hammock, watertight and insectproof, become standard vacation gear?

A major part of war production has been concerned with the making of new things to enable Americans to live out of doors in health and reasonable comfort.

Probably the most popular single appliance, if the soldiers were asked to vote on it, would be a companionable little stove intended to be a kind of supplement to any motor vehicle, jeep, truck, reconnaissance car, tank or your car. Its fuel is the same gasoline. When taken out of its neatly fitting cylindrical container, that container becomes a stew pan. When the folded top of the stove is opened, it looks and functions just like the burner on your gas stove. Since one of these stoves, complete, weighs only a pound, you could easily and habitually carry in your car one stove for each passenger.

There will be a companion piece to that stove. It is a six-pound item… in which a soldier can have a night’s rest in a jungle, no matter though the ground beneath him be ankle-deep mud. No tent is necessary; this is a tent. The tent part is simply a cloth roof, which is a part of a hammock with a zippered envelope of mosquito netting. As used by the military in the jungles, this little fabric home is simply tied between any two trees conveniently spaced. The soldier inside sleeps as dry as if in a cocoon.

The rubber boat, because it is not merely a portable but a packaged boat, represents, potentially, a geometrical expansion of fishing and hunting opportunities. This package, in combination with airplane, automobile or jeep, means that any trip can become, at will, an expedition.

Some of these products, with modification, became staples for modern campers. Others, like the following, never got farther than being a war-time fantasy:

Recently the sales manager of a New York sporting-goods store received a letter which confirmed exciting conjectures about out-of-doors life after the war. This letter was probably the first civilian order for an amphibious tank. It is wanted by a Maryland duck hunter, and he is ready to pay $2000 for it.

The order was accompanied by a cutting from a newspaper, a picture of the amphibious vehicle being used by the United States marines wherever they are making landings on hostile beaches.

And the amphibious tank is, of course, but one more item in a catalogue of relatively new and wonderful inventions being produced in America because of the war, all of which lead the entrepreneurs of outdoor sports to believe a boom in their business waits only for peace and demobilization.

Next: Raising a Family on a War-Time Budget

Life in the Shadow of a Distant War The Saturday Evening Post

South of Raymond on Highway 101 the forested hills opened out to give a view of salt marsh. The smell of the sea laced the pungency of fir needles. Habitation thinned out. My old pickup camper’s wipers made a monotonous beat. The radio got only static. Clouds marched in off the Japanese Current low enough to snag on the coast range. Wind gusts swayed my camper. Repeated bridges offered glimpses of the Pacific. I was counting bridges now.

All my life I have sought these marginal places where land and water and sky meet. Life boils down to simple things: Will the ducks be there, will the wind be right, and will the ducks decoy? No telephones, no deadlines, no tight white collars. Usually I sought these remote places alone, but I hadn’t been alone the day I was stupid. I hadn’t hunted ducks since that day. The road curved through one final stand of second-growth fir and onto the bridge I was looking for. Downstream, the tide was full, marshes covered by the wide bay. I shuddered, remembering.

At the south end of the bridge, the causeway to Bay Point led off at right angles to the highway. The road sign said two miles. Bay Point itself consisted of maybe a hundred weathered houses and corroded mobile homes around a small mooring basin. Low sheds lined the basin. The tied-up fishing fleet bobbed and clanked nervously on wind waves coming around the breakwater. A handful of men in foul-weather gear worked among the boats. I felt them watch me out of the corners of their eyes, the way residents of remote places do strangers. My shoulders got tighter. I was looking for a particular boat. A bright pea-green bowpicker. I had seen it only one time in my life, the day I was stupid out on the bay, but I knew I would recognize it anywhere.

It wasn’t in the boat basin.

You don’t just get out and brace the locals with your questions in a place like Bay Point. At least I don’t. The gulf between your worlds is too enormous. I have hunted near such isolated communities nearly half a century. In all that time I exchanged fewer words with their inhabitants than one typical day in an office. But the pressure of my purpose was on me. I drove to the one tavern in town.

It occupied a small, gloomy former 1930’s gas station. There was one lighted beer sign in the window. A few Formica tables, a jukebox, a short, wooden bar along one wall. Maybe half a dozen people watched me come in, and they all had stopped talking by the time I picked a barstool. I was wearing my old, olive-drab Filson mackinaw and khaki pants, but they knew I was an outsider. The bartender was a woman with a broad, closed face and guarded eyes. She gave me a Budweiser and change and went away. I felt somebody sit at the other end of the short bar.

“You ain’t from around here, are you?” Nasal challenge, like a B-Grade Western from my childhood.

I looked up then. He was a slope-shouldered, older guy with a fat, guileless face. Of course I had to draw the local snoop right off.

“No,” I said. Any talking feels like too much talking in a place like that.

Illustrated by Sterling Hundley

An invasive question, slightly hostile. Outsiders seemed 
to spell trouble here.

“I’m looking for a guy who owns a boat,” I said.

His wattles shook when he cackled. “Lots of guys own boats here, Mister. Them and the bank! You repossessing a boat?”

“No, I want to buy the guy who owns this particular boat 
a beer. He helped me out of a jam out in the bay. On those islands up there.”

“Yeah? What was you doin’ up there?”

“Hunting ducks.”

He relaxed a little. “You do any good?” The eternal question of the hunter.

“We damn near drowned. Would have, if it hadn’t been for this guy.”

He sidled closer across the stools, interested now. “Sounds like a story to me.”

Everybody in the place seemed to be listening, too. It was an opening that might lead to the man I had come to find. So I told him my story. …

“There were five of us that day, out in the gray, wintry dawn on what seemed like the edge of the world. We could hear the boom of the surf from the Pacific. At low tide the serpentine coils of the river that flowed out of the densely forested hills were invisible below undulating humps of bay mud and marsh grass. There was no traffic on the 101 bridge. At the foot of the boat launch beneath the bridge the dark water had begun to lap higher as the tide turned when I backed my big old camouflage-painted duck boat down the ruts. The rain drifted like smoke, blurring distances. My old 20-horse Mercury turned over easily. Its only purpose in life was to take me duck hunting, and back again safely. I pampered it with regular service, it slept in the garage between seasons, and always did as asked. I had no way of knowing its dependability would be of no help on this day.

“I had hunted this river in the more prudent upstream marshes, and done very well. Dan usually hunted the pair of low islands out in the open bay below the bridge. He said the shooting out there warranted the extra exposure to the elements. So that day, I ferried him and my son out to the islands. Topped with marsh grass, the islands were separated by a mud bank maybe 30 yards wide. Dan and Beau built a blind on the seaward island while I went back for Bob and Bob Junior. It was to be Bob Junior’s first duck hunt, my son’s third. Beau hadn’t killed a duck yet. With the quick impatience of youth he was beginning to wonder if he ever would.

“The four of them set four dozen lightweight decoys on their anchors on the mud while I worked out of the boat alone, setting trawls of my heavy, handmade cork decoys farther out. There were vast rafts of loafing widgeon not a half a mile out to sea. Even in the washed-out light, the white wing patches of the drakes bloomed brightly when they flapped. The tide was making steadily now. The ducks would follow it in to feed. The tide would cover the exposed mud around us just at shooting time. It seemed a perfect setup.

“Birds began to move right on time, but the first ones flared off our 70-decoy set. Dan said my boat, beached on the mud below our blind, was the cause. I had killed the wariest waterfowl—Canada geese, late-season sprig, and adult snow geese—out of that boat. And I grew up on the salt, where my personal rule is that you should always be within reach of your boat. But Dan was the host that day, so I deferred to his judgment and moved the boat to the far end of the second island. Bob Senior grinned at me as I waded back across the ankle-deep slough separating the islands. We worked together and had been through some tense bureaucratic times. He knew my temper and tendency to stand my ground. Now, he seemed to be silently congratulating me for not interrupting the harmony of the hunt.

“We let the boys shoot first. Bob Junior and Beau managed to take a pair of widgeon drakes out of a decoying flock. My Labrador, a winter dog named Summer, bounced out and collected. But the birds continued skittish. I clipped down a mallard drake at long yards with my left-hand barrel. Summer chased it clear out of sight across the widening water toward the Bay Point causeway. Came back with it, triumphant. She was a hunting fool. By then the boys were chilled. Beau and I started back to the boat to get the vacuum bottle of hot chocolate.

“The slough between the islands had deepened. Toward the center, the water was inches from my hip-boot tops. I could go ahead and soak myself or wait another hour until the turn of the tide. My second rule of cold-weather duck hunting is to avoid a soaking if at all possible. So I elected to wait.

“That was my second mistake that day. The tide didn’t turn at the appointed hour. It just kept coming.

“We told the boys to watch the logs floating upriver. When they paused, the tide would be full. When they began to drift back downstream, it soon would be time for hot chocolate. After what seemed like an awful long time, Bobby mentioned that the logs still were racing upstream awfully fast, and he was right. By then, the water was up to the highest point on our island, lapping at the skirts of our camouflage netting. Before too long we were shin deep. Within another half-hour, there were no visible islands anymore. We stood in the center of a wide, uninterrupted expanse of water from the forested slopes to the causeway, dimpled by the driving rain. We ignored the ducks after that.

“Dan had chest waders. He made a try for the boat. Long before the slough could suck him down he was to the top of his waders. It seemed any direction he moved would take him deeper. We all stood perfectly still, the adults looking at each other without comment. There seemed nothing left to say. There was no point using fancy words like hypothermia to try to hide the gravity of our situation from the boys. Both were proud graduates of state hunter-safety courses. They knew we were in serious trouble, but talked to each other in matter-of-fact tones. They began to shiver when they told us the water was over the tops of their hip boots …”

The bartender slammed her cash register drawer, hard. It jerked me back to the present.

“I won’t hear any more of this. I can’t. Anybody want anything, get it yourself.”

She went into the back room through ratty bead curtains. A door slammed back there, harder than the cash register.

“S’okay, Mister.” My listener leaned forward, still caught up in the story. “Molly gets like that. She’s entitled.” I hadn’t lost any of the rest of my audience either. “Them islands are dangerous as hell. Everybody around here knows it. What happened next?”

“The water kept inching up our bodies.

“My thinking seemed to slow down. ‘Just wait it out,’ I kept telling myself. The tide has to turn. We were 90 minutes past the tide-table high. Bob and I held our sons close, bracing them. I remembered that awful old joke about the devil coming through in a motorboat. I hoped the devil had other business today. My real fear was that waves from the sea would start rolling more deeply into the bay, or that the wind would rise.

“My old duckboat floated silently higher than our heads now, not a hundred yards away.

“One of the boys suggested we fire signal shots. Our measured shots brought no response. But still we cradled our guns, in case someone came along. That’s what I told myself. But I just couldn’t bear to surrender the LeFever to the salt. I held Beau’s little H&R Topper, too. Surrendering the guns would somehow be surrendering hope.

“Beau wanted to swim for the boat, supremely confident of his ability to make it. I was afraid he was too cold to clamber over its high sides, or crawl up over the motor. Not strong enough to crank the motor if he did make it. But mostly I couldn’t bear the thought of watching him go under, beyond my ability to reach. I belatedly realized Summer had vanished. She had been swimming a steady orbit around us, evidently unconcerned, for a long time. But none of us had seen her go.

“At first I didn’t hear the voice, calling across the water.

“ ‘There’s somebody there,’ Bob said. ‘On 
the causeway.’

“I looked through the steady rain. A man stood on the edge of the road.

“ ‘Do you need help?’ I heard him then.

“ ‘We can’t reach our boat,’ I yelled. ‘We have children out here.’

“ ‘Hold on,’ came back the words. ‘Just 
hold on.’ Then he was gone behind another veil of rain.

“ ‘You think he has a boat?’ Beau asked. ‘Where was his car?’

“ ‘He’s going for help.’ Bob sounded more confident than I felt.

“I could see lights still on in Bay Point, though it was past noon. A dark and dreary noon. What if the man had misunderstood? What if he had a bayman’s fine contempt for greenhorns and didn’t really understand how desperate we were? I couldn’t seem to form a cogent thought, and couldn’t seem to find any reason to hope. All I could do was stand still and hold onto my son. The water was 
up to my waist now, which meant it was halfway up Beau’s chest. Dan was in almost to his shoulders.

“The driftwood still moved inland. I thought it had slowed but didn’t trust my eyes.

“My gaze drifted back toward Bay Point, attracted by a flash of white. It looked like a bow wave. A black dot moved across the water. I didn’t say anything. What if it was just a crabber, headed out to check his pots? I didn’t want to stir false hope.

“Dan had no such qualms. ‘I see a boat,’ he said. ‘It’s coming this way, I think.’

“ ‘Is it him?’ Bobby asked.

“ ‘It’s green,’ Beau said. ‘A big green boat.’

“Moments later his eagle vision was confirmed as the big, green, high-sided bowpicker bore down on us. It’s engines throttled back, and it coasted to a stop some distance out, to avoid swamping us. Then it nudged toward us carefully. The pilot wore a weathered khaki chore coat and an old Jones hat pulled down snug against the rain. His lower face was a ruddy blur as he concentrated on his maneuvering. When he spoke, his voice had cigarettes and hard whiskey in it.

“ ‘You’re deepest. I’ll take you first,’ he told Dan. ‘The rest of you just hold on.’

“He went down on his knees against the hull and hauled Dan aboard in one powerful motion. I have no idea how much Dan weighed just then, with his chest waders 
full of water. But he went aboard like a sack of dog food.

“ ‘Now the boys,’ our rescuer said. The boat sidled over like an obedient saddle horse.

“Dan took all the guns. Our rescuer plucked Bobby and Beau aboard.

“ ‘I’ll go last,’ Bob said. ‘My boots are full. It will take both of you to lift me.’

“I got a foot up on his bent knee and drove up and over, assisted by the bayman. Bob weighed over 260 pounds in his sock feet. The bayman and I yarded him aboard like a prime Alaska halibut.

“Just like that we were all safe.

“The bayman put me over into my boat and said he would take everybody else back to the launch. I was so busy picking up the decoy rig, and then searching the far shore for Summer, that I never saw his boat go back toward Bay Point. I didn’t find Summer. When the chill soaked through my waterlogged Filson, I motored back to the launch. When I came under the highway bridge, my camper was almost hub-deep in the river. I had parked far above the normal high-tide mark. My boat glided almost to the camper door before it grounded. Natural laws seemed to have gone crazy that day. …”

“The tide will do that.” My companion was behind the bar, helping himself to another longneck. He offered me another.

“I know that now.” I took a long swig. It was cleansing in a way to reveal my blunders to these people. They knew what stupidity could cost out here.

“Them winds way offshore back 
the water up in these shallow bays … something fierce,” he said. “Even with no wind at all in here on the bay. Tide tables don’t mean a damn thing in winter when that’s happening. You got lucky. Them boys were okay? Molly will want to know that.”

“Inside my camper, the boys were wrapped in sleeping bags and slurping hot soup.

“ ‘I never thought I’d be this glad 
to see a can of Campbell’s soup,’ Bobby grinned.

“Bob was spraying down the guns with WD-40. I changed out of my wet clothes and squeezed in behind the dinette table with soup of my own. Somebody tapped on the camper door. Dan spoke to someone, leaned back in. ‘Back in a minute.’ When he came back he had Summer with him, romping, completely dry and very proud of her.

“ ‘Two men from that fishing village,’ Dan said. ‘They saw her up on the causeway. Knew she wasn’t local, so they came down here looking for her owner.’

“ ‘Did they know this other guy?’ I said. ‘I never even got to thank him.’

“ ‘Well they must know him, if 
they know every dog in town. But I didn’t ask.’

“The tide did turn, of course. It was dropping fast by the time we loaded up all our gear and pulled out in early dusk for home. For the rest of the season, my waterfowling fervor was missing. I could not get my mind around the fact that stupidity had put my son at risk. I was certain that our rescuer had identified me as the one who should have known better, who should have protected the group. I sensed his brooding disapproval. I could never justify my stupidity to him. But I could thank him for giving our lives back to us. 
So I returned to Bay Point alone, to settle that debt.”

My companion at the bar heaved a sigh. “But you don’t know his name? Anything about him?”

I tried to describe our rescuer’s appearance, but he snorted a laugh.

“Might be half the men in town, give or take a little face hair. You sure 
you’d spot his boat?”

“Unless he repainted it. It was 
the brightest pea-green you ever saw. 
A bowpicker—”

Chairs scraping. All at once everybody in the place seemed to be standing up. Two or three of the men were bigger than I was, and a lot tougher-looking.

My companion at the bar looked 
as if I had punched him. Hard.

“That’s the sickest damn kind 
of a joke I think I’ve ever seen 
pulled,” he said tightly. “What’s your game, Mister?”

“You better get out of here,” the biggest one of the others said.Windburned and weathered, he 
looked like a bayman, too. “Just get 
up and go.”

My own temper was heating up. 
“I just want to thank this guy. He 
saved my son’s ass out there in the 
bay. And mine, too, and my friends. 
I’m not the law. I’m not a collection agency. What the hell’s wrong? 
Doesn’t he live here anymore? This 
was just December it happened. Just two months ago!”

The big guy weighed me. I met his gaze stubbornly.

“You better come with me, then,” 
he said finally.

I followed him out into the wind. 
I admit I had my hand in my Filson pocket, closed around my old Buck folding hunter. I had violated some local taboo, that was clear. But I 
was not going to take a beating 
without knowing why. I was nervous, expecting others to follow us. But 
none did.

“Just down the street,” the big man said. It was getting dark fast. “You’ll 
be wondering about Molly,” he added. “Her kids hunted them islands. A long time ago now. They was 13 and 16 years old when their dad left ’em out there and went off around the point. Fishing was good back then, and he didn’t want to miss a beat. He had a long way to go, but he always thought he was tougher than the ocean. Always pushed it. But that day he didn’t make it back to them islands in time.”

“My God! The boys—”

Illustrated by Sterling Hundley

My stomach knotted, remembering how close it had been for the five of us.

“How on earth could you live with something like that?”

He gave a smile like a grimace. “Mostly, you drink a lot.” He shrugged.

“Here’s where we’re going.”

He paused in front of a rusty old hurricane fence threaded with ratty vinyl privacy slats. When he leaned 
his shoulder into it, the gate creaked open. The pea-green boat was there, 
on a rusting trailer all tangled in blackberry vines. I recognized it instantly. It sagged on the trailer as 
if its keel were broken.

“That the boat?” he asked.

“That’s the boat. What happened to it? It was just fine in December.”

He shook his head. “Blackberry vines don’t grow that fast, Mister, even out here. This here boat belonged to Molly’s old man. It was busted up the night he was lost at sea, a year to the day after 
his kids died. We found it on the river bar at low tide.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“We don’t paint boats green anymore around here. It ain’t lucky. And this one has been right here in this yard for over 30 years.”

What did you think about this story? Write to us at Letters, The Saturday 
Evening Post, 1100 Waterway Blvd., 
Indianapolis, IN 46202 or send an e-mail to letters@saturdayeveningpost.com.

Pea Green Boat The Saturday Evening Post