the Woodsman pistol

The Woodsman pistol is a .22 caliber automatic handgun that the Bowden family keeps for target practice and which becomes, over the course of Max Cady's campaign of terror, the household's primary means of self-defense. It is a modest, unassuming firearm — a .22, the sort of weapon one uses for plinking at cans — yet it is the instrument around which the family's survival strategy pivots, and it is the weapon that ultimately brings Cady down. Its journey from recreational object to instrument of lethal necessity traces the Bowdens' own descent from ordinary domesticity into a state of siege.

From Recreation to Readiness

The Woodsman first appears in the context of family leisure. After Sam Bowden decides that the family must take precautions against Cady, he instructs Carol to get some target practice with the Woodsman, planning to use the MG himself the following week while Carol drives the children in the wagon. The family's target range sits part way up the gentle hill behind the house, with a clay bank as the backstop. Jamie hangs half a dozen empty cans from a red maple limb in front of the clay bank, and the family works through a box and a half of longs in the .22 automatic. Sam and Nancy prove the best shots, while Jamie, as usual, becomes infuriated with himself when Nancy outshoots him. Carol does better than she has in the past, and notably she does not try to give up her turn; she listens with care to the hints Sam gives her and does not flinch as badly as before. Sam, standing behind her and off to one side, sees the set of her jaw and her frown of concentration. The children are much quieter than usual — this has been a game they have played often, but today it is more than a game, with a new flavor sensed by all of them. On Bucky's final turn he hits three of the riddled cans at sixty feet with an eight-shot clip and flushes red with pride at the congratulations.

The Weapon in the Night

The Woodsman's true test comes during Cady's night attack on Carol. Carol, alone and terrified, hears a sort of scratching near the door. She finds the buzzer and pushes it for a long time, and she has the gun — the Woodsman — in her hand. When Cady runs right in through the door, through it like it is paper, she fires and screams and tries to fight, and he hits her. The sequence of events is chaotic and brutal: Sam, rushing to help, slips on the uneven ground and falls an eight-foot drop, landing with his entire weight on his right ankle, a white flare of pain exploding inside it. He crawls to the wall and pulls himself up, sobbing with fright and frustration and pain, just as he hears the second scream quaver across the night air, a piece of silver wire stretched out to an endurable point, then snapping into a silence worse than the scream. Carol, when Sam reaches her, is broken and barely coherent. She tells him that Cady smelled like some kind of animal, that she did not hear anything, just the scratching near the door. She fired the gun, she screamed, she tried to fight, and he hit her. When Sam asks if Cady did anything to her, she frowns as though trying to concentrate and says, "Oh, I know what you mean. No. He was going to. But then... Andy came." The Woodsman's shots, fired in her desperate defense, are what draw Andy Kersek to the scene and interrupt Cady's assault.

The Fatal Shots

The Woodsman's final, decisive role comes on Shadow Hill, in the confrontation that ends Cady's life. Sam fires at Cady as he flees up the hill, and the aftermath reveals the true consequence of those shots. Ricardo, examining the scene, tells Sam that they only had to bring Cady down, and that they started finding blood halfway up the hill — a lot of it. One of Sam's shots, one of the last two he fired, tore Cady's right arm on the inside just below the armpit, tearing an artery open. Cady climbed another three hundred feet before he ran out of blood. The Woodsman, the modest .22 automatic that began as a family target-practice gun, is thus the instrument of Cady's death, its small-caliber bullet finding the one spot that could bleed him out as he fled.

Aftermath and Reflection

In the immediate aftermath, Sam stands over the body as it is rolled onto a stretcher, a blade of grass pasted to Cady's lips. He thanks the men tonelessly and walks back to the house, a sudden weakness turning him toward a chair where he sits listlessly. He can hear Jerry Jacks talking over the phone, saying, "... that's right. Dead. And it was Bowden did it." The phrase echoes in Sam's mind: It was Bowden did it. Sam Bowden, who had wanted to throw his head back and yell at the sky, who had wanted to dance around the body and chant of the defeat of the enemy. The killing is presented as justified — Ricardo's account makes clear that Cady was fleeing and that the fatal shot was one of the last two fired, a matter of chance as much as aim — yet Sam's reaction is not triumph but a kind of hollow exhaustion. Later, at the lake, Sam sits on a blanket in his swimming trunks with a can of beer and a cigarette, while Carol lies on her back beside him, her arm across her eyes. She asks him to baste her, and he pours lotion into his palm and strokes it into the long, clean brown lines of her back, thinking of her as one of the rarest of women, a woman of grace and spirit, pride and delicacy. He thinks of the nightmare thing that had so nearly happened to her, and of how a duller spirit might have survived the crime without too much emotional damage, but Carol never — it would have broken her utterly and forever. When he thinks of the narrowness of the escape, it makes his eyes sting and blurs the shape and pattern of her. The Woodsman, which had been in Carol's hand when she fired at Cady in the dark, is the thread that connects her desperate resistance to the final, fatal shot on the hill — a small weapon that, in the end, proved decisive.