I was thrilled recently when I received a letter from a Western writer I've long admired, A.B. Guthrie Jr., of Choteau, Mont. He wrote to tip me off that an old hunting story I've been tracing had just appeared in, of all places, The New Yorker magazine.
Guthrie's novel "The Way West" won a Pulitzer Prize in 1950. By coincidence, the film based on it was shown on television the same week his letter arrived.A former journalist from Kentucky, Guthrie immediately recognized the story as a popular legend told among hunters in that part of the country. He found it in the Jan. 15 issue of The New Yorker, part of a profile of former Texas Gov. Coke Stevenson written by Robert A. Caro.
According to Caro, Stevenson's sober demeaner masked his delight in pranks. This story, among others, became part of the folklore surrounding him in Austin, Texas:
"During a hunting trip with several fellow-legislators and a lobbyist, a rancher called Stevenson aside and told him that in one of the back pastures where the men were to hunt was an aged horse - an old family pet - so infirm that it should be destroyed.
"The rancher asked Stevenson to do it for him. Stevenson agreed.
"As the hunters' car was passing the horse, he asked the driver to stop, and got out.
"`I think I'll just kill that ol' horse,' he said, and taking aim, shot it in the head.
"His companions, unaware of the rancher's request, stared in amazement. `Why did you shoot that horse?' the lobbyist finally asked.
"`I just always wondered what it would feel like to shoot a horse,' Stevenson drawled. Pausing, he stared hard at the lobbyist. `Now I'm wondering what it would feel like to shoot a man."'
The events related in this anecdote seem out of character for the serious-minded Coke Stevenson. Whether or not he really pulled the prank, it's actually a variation of the widely-told story I call "Shooting the Bull."
The story usually ends with the prankster claiming that he shot the farmer's livestock to get back at him for forbidding the hunting party access to his land.
Another hunter, in the same spirit of revenge, then shoots another of the farmer's animals, which turns out to be a prize bull.
I've heard versions of this story from England as well as the United States. The most famous version was told by late Yankees manager Billy Martin, who claimed that the prank was played on him by Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford when the three baseball greats were deer hunting in Texas.
The earliest example I'd found prior to the Stevenson version was in a 1945 book by newspaper columnist Morton Thompson. But since Coke Stevenson first arrived in Austin in 1929, the gag may have been attached to him even earlier.
Another version of "Shooting a Man" implies that the story has a life of its own, rather than being an actual prank once pulled by Stevenson.
Just a few days before I heard from A.B. Guthrie Jr., Lorraine Mon of San Francisco sent me the same story as she remembered hearing it in West Virginia during the late 1970s.
Mon said the hunter's prnak concluded like this:
"He decided to play a joke on his friend by acting really crazy before he shot the cow. When they reached the pasture, the hunter started rolling his eyes, frothing at the mouth and generally acting insane.
"Then he yelled, `I'm going to kill that cow!' and shot the cow. He turned to his friend and said, `And, now I'm going to kill YOU!'
"The friend immediately raised his rifle and shot him dead, not knowing it was all a joke."
If coke Stevenson had pulled the gag that way, his political career might have been stopped dead in its tracks.