The Partner 
The Man You Go With and Depend Upon in 
Fair Weather and Foul 
By PERCY M. CUSHING 
H E may be a plumber’s assistant or an ice 
king, or a farmer boy or a mine owner 
when he is in his office or his drawing 
room, but when he goes with you into the fields 
and marshes in quest of game, he is none of 
them. He is your shooting partner, and upon 
him depends in great measure the success and 
enjoyment of your hunt. 
He may sit up in his pivot chair and boss one 
thousand men, or he may be bossed by one thou¬ 
sand men when he is a part of the everyday 
grind of life, but when the shackles are thrown 
off and the sweep of stubble or of marsh opens 
up before you, he is nobody’s boss and nobody s 
servant. He stands on equal ground with you 
and you with him, and his soul lies bare before 
you to study, to read, to discover the qualities 
that should have made him a great or a little 
man. He. is just your shooting partner. 
Now, there are but two kinds of shooting com¬ 
panions—good and bad. There is no half-way 
when it comes to sharing the sport and the toil 
of a day on upland or on lowland. Either the 
man that goes with you does his part, or you 
have to do it for him. 
Many of the days that I count the most suc¬ 
cessful I have ever spent in the field were due 
to the man who went along to divide the toil and 
the fun with me. I can count others that were 
marred by companions who were failures. And 
it is more than half a truth that your companion 
has more to do with the success of a day with 
the gun than has the bag of game. 
You know the kind of man I mean, Jim—the 
ideal partner, the partner who does not shirk 
his share of the work, who asks his share of 
the sport and not your share, who wants'to get 
in the field before the day begins and stay there 
until it is done. Perhaps you have been with 
him in the shooting cabin down on the salt 
beaches, with the winter gale screaming across 
the bay and piling the shore with the mystery 
of the sea. You have seen him moving rest¬ 
lessly about in the glow from the stove, watched 
him swabbing away at his gun, arranging shells 
in his cartridge belt, fussing uneasily with the 
decoys. Then you have felt the cold gust of salt 
air creep down the collar of your flannel shirt 
as he opened the door and peered out into the 
driving sleet toward the lonely reaches of black 
marshland, and you have felt the word of com¬ 
plaint die in your throat when he turned with 
that suppressed excitement in his voice and said: 
“Why, man, every bird for miles along the coast 
will be bunched down there on the flats at day¬ 
light, and we’ll beat the dawn by an hour. It’s 
the best weather I’ve seen in years.” 
No, Jim, you do not need any continuous alarm 
clock with a partner like that. You know he will 
be up a full half hour before you lose your own 
fondness for the bunk. Many are the mornings 
you have looked out from between the army 
blankets and seen his serious face etched in the 
fire glow as he stirred up the fire in the old 
sheet iron stove and fiddled with the coffee pot. 
And Jim, does that take you back to the fire 
glows of other years? Does it poke up that old 
rheumatic memory of yours, open the door of 
the golden storehouse and let the treasure flow 
down the vista of time, a long procession of fire 
glows, and winter sunsets and cold dawns and 
vast twilight evenings, with the black mystery 
crowding close from the east? 
And does it freshen up those faces in the fire 
glows of countless fires that really never fade, 
but are just laid aside for further reference? 
Does it bring home the picture of the grizzled 
face of gnarled old Pierre carved against the 
red gleam from your camp-fire in the Canadian 
forests? Does it conjure to your vision the 
ruddy, chiseled features of George, the bavman, 
flopping flapjacks on the stove of the pitching 
gunning sloop while the day makes eastward 
over the gray crests? Does it take you back to 
the flickering shadows from the open grate in. 
the old farmhouse as you waited for the dawn to 
light you to the long-billed master of the alder 
thickets ? 
Yes, Jim, it does—and do you know the rea¬ 
son ? But of course you do. It is because Pierre 
and George, and all of those immortal faces were 
men whom it was worth anyone’s while to ac¬ 
company afield. They were true blue. 
And when you think of those old times, think 
of the everlasting place they occupy in your 
heart and know that the reason they have sur¬ 
vived is because of the men who shared them 
with you, you will realize what it means to take 
the right kind of a partner with you to-day. 
Now of course this is all mere words, but it 
is true. You know it is true yourself, Jim. You 
will have to admit that you would not have fra¬ 
ternized with that old sandpaper-face Pierre in 
the city; would not have hobnobbed with George 
about literature and correct dress for evening 
wear. But you know, too, that you would not 
have traded them for a dozen learned gentle¬ 
men ahd immaculate dressers when it came to a 
two-mile portage over a rough trail, or a long 
pull to windward in the teeth of a northeaster. 
So the moral is, that you cannot choose your 
hunting partner from his occupation, or his per¬ 
sonal appearance. He must have the right stuff 
in him; that is all, and there is only one sure 
way to find out if he has got it—try him, or let 
one of your friends in the real fraternity try 
him, and then pass you his decision. 
On the other hand, you can tell something 
about a man you are considering for a partner 
by his conversation, though this test is not in¬ 
fallible, for some tenderfeet can make a pretty 
good bluff. In order to feel a new man out, it 
is best to go about it carefully. Give him a 
chance to commit himself, and if he tells about 
having shot forty canvasbacks on Long Island 
Sound or black-tailed deer in Connecticut, drop 
him. 
If he seems to know just a little about things, 
but you are still uncertain of him, you may even 
go so far as to make a break yourself. Remark 
casually of the “three mallards you shot” from 
the topmost branch of the big sycamore tree be¬ 
hind your old home in the mountains, and see 
what he says. If he grunts contemptuously, he 
is worth investigation. Perhaps he will shiver 
and hunch his shoulders at the sound of blind 
shooting in December, or groan at the mention 
of an all-day tramp over the rolling country in 
search of prairie chickens. And if he comes back 
with, “Oh, that’s too hard work,” or “Br-r-r-r, 
battery shooting, why I’d think you’d freeze,” 
you can be reasonably sure that he will not do. 
I know of but onq man who shivered at the 
mention of winter duck shooting, and at the 
same time panned out. He was a fence-rail¬ 
appearing individual, with the jaw of an ex¬ 
aggerated lantern, and a general aversion to 
everything, particularly cold. Strangely enough, 
however, duck shooting was the only sport he 
really enjoyed. When I met him and heard his 
bones rattle whenever I spoke of blinds and bat¬ 
teries, I marked him for a failure of the first 
order. Circumstances made it impossible for me 
to avoid taking him out with me once, and after 
that I came to know him. He froze me out of 
the blind that first day and later I learned that 
there was not a man at the coast club at which 
we were shooting that he had not treated simi¬ 
larly. I have seen him sticking desperately to 
a blind with his clothing a sheet of ice, his gun 
barrel encased in it, and his angular frame shak¬ 
ing so that I thought he would fly apart at any 
moment. Later he lost his life in one of the 
great lakes. He had gone out from shore in a 
