Courage - The Story Of Modern Cockfighting

CHAPTER I

Test

SAM DOUGLAS couldn’t tell me. He stopped stock-still at the gate which opened down to the chinquapin tree and gave me a slow, foolish smile. Like the little boy in school who didn’t know the answers, he just grinned. The rich red Mug in his left arm reared a snakelike head and shrilled a blast at some imagined cock, and Cut-cut-cut toned down, mollified under Sam’s expert, soothing right hand.

Sam had bred gamecocks since 1895. He had fought mains from Quebec to Mobile and from Texas to Long Island. He had made enough money out of it to buy a yacht and had lost the same amount almost to the cent. He had fought furtively by night deep in the woods, guarded by sentinels. He had fought cocks under the mellow sun of Orlando, with officers of the law standing by to keep order. He had given the precious, peak enthusiasms of a robust life to an outlawed sport, and as a mistress it had lured him into his fifties with nothing to show for it but greying hair and a couple of hundred cocks on tenant farm walks over three counties.

I had asked him why.

It seemed to me there was an answer. Deep down in it somewhere was an answer. A man would not give an able life to studying roosters, talking to roosters, betting his bottom dollar on roosters, thrilling at roosters flying man-shoulder-high bent on murder, however radiant, without a sound reason.

I was ignorant and had the answers. Brutalizing was one word. Degrading. Demoralizing. Corrupting. And Mr. Roget had still others which could be used. But I was not sure. Sam was not degraded or brutal or corrupt. There was something else, not obvious. So I asked Sam why.

And he said: Well — He stroked the rich red Mug the more and looked at me with square blue contemplation, quizzically. Sam was not one to start an argument, nor yet one to dodge an issue. Some things he hadn’t bothered to figure out. Maybe — well, maybe — it’s because I like it, you reckon?

I reckoned, and he opened the gate down toward the chinquapin tree. Charlie Gale was there. We could see him sitting behind the bushes, waiting, holding a Nigger Blue cock in his arm, stroking him. Stroking him. A cocker always is stroking a rooster, firm, easy strokes from the hackles to the rump, stroking and feeling, sizing up the quiver of him, knowing his hard, corky spring, with the cock sitting steady in his arms, loving it, looking out with wild brown and yellow gleams of arrogance, demanding trouble.

Sam walked on, not wishing to bother with me. The Mug hadn’t been born yet. He had been laid and hatched and raised and walked and fed and conditioned and had the fierce blood of a thousand dead-game ancestors burning in his inbred, incestuous veins. His eyes showed it. His medium-stationed uprightness showed it. His steel-spring tread showed it. It was there. But a thin keen doubt was leveled at that blazing red Mug, as thin and as keen and as deadly as the twenty-dollar steel gaffs which reposed in a case in Sam Douglas’ pocket.

Somewhere back in the forty-year maze of in- and out-breeding which produced Sam’s red Mug there could have been a mediocre ancestor; nothing so low as a dunghill, of course, but a gamecock with a quitting heart. One that would fight until he had a broken wing, and would fight yet until he had a punctured lung and a bloody rattle in his throat, and would fight on still yet with a burst eye oozing down his cheek, and still fight with one leg broken and useless, and fight on, even yet, flat on his back, unable to get up, sinking his remaining steel jagger deep in feathers and meat, fighting until he stared at death — and then give up.

Such a shameful ancestor Sam’s red Mug may have had. It may have been generations ago, but with such rotten blood coursing through the veins of good chickens in a thin, weak stream, it could at any time break to the surface and be dominant. Sam had to know. There was but one way to find out.

The steel test had been practised since steel gaffs were invented, and before that bare-heel tests were given as far back as it is recorded that men have fought cocks. Cocks are dead-game, or they are not. There is no compromise. So Sam carried his young red Mug with the dauntless eye, one of a brood of fifty brothers, down to the smooth ground back of the bushes under the chinquapin tree.

There was no question about the Nigger Blue which Charlie Gale stroked with his hand. This blue was a seven-times winner. He had won in Kentucky in the North-and-South main. He had won in Orlando at the National Tournament. He had knocked out a Warhorse five-times winner in a hack fight with $500 at stake on the single match. He had taken victory by storm and triumph rode upon his fine feathers. There was no question about the Nigger Blue. But the red Mug hadn’t been born yet, nor his forty-nine brothers.

My own feeling was one of — well — say regret. The red Mug was a picture of flame and passion. His eyes were brown fire and royal disdain. He walked in his run with kingly arrogance, commanding my admiration and enslaving me to his beauty. That was sufficient for me.

But to Sam he was a wrapped package, contents unknown. He was a hope. Sam had a place for him in his affections, but it was reserved and the door closed. It was a place of such greater capacity for love and admiration that my mild fascination for the rooster’s beauty was but a small thing and I hesitated to express it. I couldn’t fathom the deep well of Sam’s emotion for cocks. I could sense it, and Sam couldn’t tell me. Maybe it’s because I like it, you reckon? No introspectionist, Sam.

I put the iron hoop back on the gate to keep it closed, and followed Sam down the path. Charlie arose from the box he sat upon and placed the Nigger Blue in a bag.

Charlie, like Sam, was a small man. A lot of cockers are small men — small and sure and unafraid. Remember that, because we will come back to it some thousands of words hence should I find what I think I’m looking for. I had the same feeling about Charlie that I had about Sam — something I couldn’t fathom.

For why, tell me, should a man in this humane land, where laws abound and kindness is made paramount, where the under-dog is the beneficiary of every strong right arm, why should a man go hell-bent through a life’s career in an outlawed sport where might is right and the weaker is slaughtered and unsung? There is something there. It would do us good to know, perhaps.

For Sam and Charlie were not vicious men. They were very kindly and honest. They bristled with it. Nor were they sadistic and unsocial. They took no pleasure in pain in either man or beast. But they had something that took them on through mayhem and death calmly to find their pleasure beyond. It was something they learned from cocks. They loved roosters, not merely to have but to be with and talk to and croon upon and merge into in a manner that had me baffled. Somehow, rather humbly, I wanted to know that feeling, myself.

Just here we learned something.

Charlie said: Sparred enough?

Sam said: Yeah — sparred enough. Third time he went four feet high.

Charlie was anxious about it. There was no personal contest between him and Sam. As a matter of fact, both cocks belonged to Sam.

But if they had been in a main, and Charlie had owned the Blue cock there still would have been the fine distinction I am attempting to draw. Sam and Charlie in no sense would have been in personal conflict. They might have said, probably would: You gaffed me in the thigh, — and perhaps that illustrates it. The man, in a cockfight, subordinates himself. He is a part of it, and a very intimate part, but the fight, the spirit of the fight, that deep-lying spark, the thing that is worshiped, is in the cocks. Men are incidental. Their only part is to see that the cocks are in good condition and that the fight is fair.

Charlie wanted to know if the Mug had been sparred — if, as he emerged from stagdom to cockhood, his sawed-off spurs had been covered with leather muffs and he had been pitted against a similarly muffed cock for a few rounds. That would be his training, his only training in fighting. In the first sparring match he was somewhat confused. Never before in his life had he met a cock. He had walked, he and his hens, in solitary grandeur upon a farm, no cock being permitted to approach him, growing up in the imperious belief that he was supreme.

In the second sparring match it came to him that he must top the opposing cock, brain him, dispose of him by those means and after the fashion of a thousand ancestors who had planted their cunning in his instinct. By the third sparring he took on form, and he was as good as he would ever be. So Sam said: Yeah — sparred enough.

Charlie reached for the Mug and sat on the box with it in his arms while Sam took out his case of gaffs. It was a careful process, almost a rite. First Sam took two narrow strips of fine soft leather an inch long, moistening one on his tongue, laying it across the half-inch nub of sawed-off spur which Charlie held out to him. Then the other moistened strip at right angles across that, binding them down with his fingers to the cock’s shank. Then he slipped upon the leather protected spur the socket of the inch-and-a-quarter steel gaff. Then carefully, very carefully, Sam and Charlie sighted along the cock’s flat shank to see that it was set right. It had to be precisely at a certain angle. Remember, they had sawed off the cock’s natural weapon. They had substituted another. They owed it to the cock to make sure that it was just as good, and better. They would not forgive themselves or hold the respect of other cockers if they were careless about this.

While they set one gaff I held the other. It was a drop gaff. That is, the spur of fine, round steel curved down a half inch from the socket before curving back up to its deadly keen point. That meant something. It gave the cock a half-inch-longer reach. Nature gave him a normal reach for his naked spurs, but steel gaffs were thinner and keener. With the same leg strength he could take greater distance. Other cocks and other cockers would not require the drop gaff, but Sam elected to use one for the Mug test — and the short inch-and-a-quarter spur instead of the longer, perhaps two-inch spur which he would have used in a regular fight. His purpose was to test, not to kill at a stroke.

What’s he weigh? Charlie asked.

Sam intently drew strong waxed string around the Mug’s shank, binding it around the heavy leather guard of the gaff, and said nothing. He drew and knotted the fastening and clipped the string with scissors.

Five-two, he said after a time.

That was important. Five pounds, two ounces. The Nigger weighed five-one. No cocks except shakebags are matched beyond a fight range of two ounces. Shake-bags are the heavyweights — six-six, six-eight and up — and fight without regard to size. But the Mug and the Nigger Blue were in the regular fight range and match weights were a factor even in a test.

And so they heeled the Mug and gave him to me to hold, instructing me to be damn’ careful about those two steels that bristled back of his shanks. One heave of his wings and a kick-back with his legs in an effort to get away, and I’d have an inch of gaff under my skin. They told me of a Mexican who was holding a cock heeled with a slasher — a long, knife-edged steel — who suddenly fell back dead with a cock hung in his heart. So, therefore, more tightly than necessary, I held that cock with his legs sticking straight out, his head resting against my left biceps, stroking him with my hand. The cock was restless. I hadn’t the touch.

They heeled the Nigger Blue. The June sun washed light down through the leaves of the chinquapin and the streamer plume of the Mug’s tail caught the rays and glistened. Out in the sunlight a half-dozen lambs gamboled on awkward legs in the grass and beyond them a fluffy, anxious hen and a brood of chicks chased grasshoppers. It was placid, balmy, pastoral, immersed in peace. One had the desire to lie in the grass lazily and give himself in freedom to the rhythmic chirp and cheep, to the sweet music of bucolic harmony that knew no violence — unless, of course, the grasshoppers could have a word.

Charlie rose from the box with the Blue in his arms. He was not languid now, Charlie wasn’t. His neck, somehow, was bowed up. He stepped lightly, with tense tread. He looked at Sam with something approaching defiance in his eyes. He drew a straight line in the bare ground with his heel and stood upon it.

Sam took the Mug from me and he, too, drew a score line. It was parallel to and about six feet from Charlie’s line. He, now, was stepping quickly, his chin out. A sudden, fierce responsibility had come upon both of them, and friends the moment before, now they were enemies. Each was the custodian of some precious thing. For the moment they were hard, pugnacious, suspicious. Each was the bodyguard of a king, and his king went forth singlehanded to battle to the death. That was the feeling that Sam and Charlie gave me as, old cronies, they faced each other, stroking their roosters, glaring defiance.

Clean steel gaffs substituted for natural spurs

Close-up view of heeling

There was their pit. Two lines in the soil. Not the boarded, rounded pit with the steep, plank grandstand surrounding it that we were to see. It was enough. Had it been known that Sam was to test his Mug stag there would have been forty men standing under the chinquapin tree. Other breeders. Handlers. A referee or two. A banker from town, a lawyer. Three or four professional gamblers. Sam’s stags were significant. And Sam was shut-mouth about his cocks. He’d talk cocks all day long. He’d tell about the scores of mains he’d fought, including the many he lost. He’d tell about the time in Memphis, with $12,000 on the odd in a fifteen-cock main, they went down the road to payday — win one, lose one, win one, lose one, until they stood seven-seven — and with $300 on each of the fights — and that, too, stood even Stephen — when that there li’l ol’ Mug, sir — that was all Sam’s famous rooster was called — li’l ol’ Mug — went in there and stayed forty-seven pittings before he finally sunk a steel into the throat of that Kansas Roundhead and bled him to death. But Sam was shut-mouth about his breeding and his tests. That was his business. If I’d had any sense, if I’d known the difference between a waxed tie string and a plow line, I couldn’t have been there.

So Sam stood with his right foot on his score line, the blazing Mug across his left arm, right hand sharply around the cock’s shanks, sort of swaying, defying Charlie, who was in the same position facing him.

Then each swung with a stout step of his left foot inside the score marks, his right still on the line, to bill their cocks. The Nigger Blue’s hackles went up, a great fluffy collar around his neck. And the Mug’s. Their necks went out like snakes striking, bills open, eyes gleaming. There was a click when their bills met. Then the pitters swung back to their lines, searching their cocks’ dubbed combs and eyes for injuries. Then they swung in again to bill them the second time, and swung back to their lines.

Sam said in official tones: Get ready-y-y-y! and then: Pit!

Back of their lines the men dropped to their knees, the cocks resting on the score marks. The Mug was ready for his first-day test.

The Nigger Blue was a beautiful thing standing there for that silent second, his head erect, twisting, poised, sure, despising danger, the sun bringing out the blue sheen on his elegant coat.

The Mug, too, was a beautiful thing. It was nothing to him that his adversary was a champion in his own right, the slayer of seven good cocks, strong and virile and cunning in the ring. The Blue was a veteran, but he had no more than was born in the Mug. And the Mug knew, knew with an arrogant, invincible pride, with an unshakable limitless determination, knew without regard to death or pain or disaster, that no cock on earth should menace him and live. Dead-game or no, he knew that then, though later it fail.

So did the Blue. They fixed their eyes on each other and stepped forward slowly. Then they rushed. Before they met they sprang straight up, their wings flapping small thunder. They rose almost to the overhanging branches of the chinquapin, a mid-air fury of rumbling red and blue. Five feet up they poised, steels and beaks gleaming like lightning flashes