Читать книгу A Hunter's Confession - David Carpenter O. - Страница 7
Оглавление1 THAT GOOD OLD TIME
The keeper did a-hunting go, And under his cloak he carried a bow All for to shoot a merry little doe Among the leaves so green, O. ENGLISH FOLK SONG
BACK IN the late 1950s, when I was in high school, I went hunting one afternoon with two friends. I had my father’s shotgun, and perhaps my friends brought along their fathers’ shotguns as well. The three of us had grown up playing in ravines and coulees that fed into the North Saskatchewan River valley. These ravines had always harbored a number of pheasants, but this particular ravine was a few miles safely outside of the city.
I was very keen on this day, perhaps because we three would be hunting unsupervised for the first time in our lives. It must have been a cold October, because fresh snow had fallen and remained unmelted on the ground. Suddenly the days had become shorter, and I felt ambushed, as I always did, by the failing light in the afternoons. We drove just outside the city in my dad’s Chevy and got out and hiked to the edge of the ravine. We walked at the upper edge of the ravine in single file.
If my memory serves me correctly, we were all wearing rubber boots. I was wearing a hand-me-down hunting coat made of brown canvas and a bright red liner made of wool, but soft like flannel. The coat had many tears in it, some of them mended with thick black thread, lots of pocket space for shells and duck calls, and a big pouch for carrying birds. The pouch always had feathers in it, and the pockets always contained stubble and grit.
The ravine was to our left. It was lined with spruce trees up top, where we were walking, and it was stuffed with tangles of rosebush, aspen, dogwood, and willows down below. If a grouse or a pheasant flew down into those thickets, we would never find it. I am guessing that this was the first time we had ever hunted together. Bill Watson was ahead of me and Davis Elliot behind. Not long into the walk, I noticed a set of tracks in the snow, a three-toed bird with big feet, meandering past the spruce trees. My heart must have lurched at this discovery.
Frantic whispering and waving of arms and pointing. We began to peer down into the ravine as we went along. We probably realized that these tracks in the new snow had to be fresh. I was ready in that way that hunters must be when the signs are good. If you’ve ever watched a hunting dog approach a point, you have a pretty good idea of what I looked like.
It must have felt strange to us to hunt for pheasants in a ravine that we had explored as young boys. Back then, we had sported cowboy hats made of brightly colored straw, hankies tied around our necks, cap pistols unholstered to deal death. We had seen pheasants plenty of times, and the odd grouse, but we had more important business in the ravines. We had each other to shoot at. The pheasants of our boyhood were beautiful, startling, and irrelevant. And now they were our quarry.
My eagerness to hunt and kill these birds seems callous to me today—a little like shooting a family pet. The pheasants in this ravine were not pets, of course. They weren’t our friends, but they had been our familiars, and they had lent to our explorations in this ravine a savor of the exotic. In the absence of tigers, polar bears, or mastodons, at least we had pheasants. Why do away with them?
If ever I had had this thought in the late 1950s, I would have swept it away without a moment’s doubt.
“Hey, Carp, wait up!”
Davis Elliot was always saying this to me. He never seemed to be in a hurry, and I must have wondered if Davis wasn’t a bit too prudent to be a kid. He was the much beloved elder son in a family of five kids. Like Bill and me, he was no good at contact sports. Davis was destined to become a golfer. His father was a doctor, and he and his younger brother both became doctors, and his three sisters were all bursting with brains and good looks and high spirits. The Elliots were the first family I ever got to know outside my own house. Mrs. Elliot was a great beauty and one of Mum’s best friends.
“Wait up, you guys. Slow down! Jeez!”
“Jeez” was a word we were not encouraged to use at home. “Jeepers” would have been all right, but it was a girl’s word. “Jeez” was almost like cursing, and almost cursing was almost like being a man.
Bill Watson would have slowed down before I did. He was more considerate than I or any of my friends were, a true nonconformist well before the word was known to us. I suspect that he was the only idealist of any age in our entire neighborhood. If one of us was out of line, he would say so and reason fiercely with us as to the rightness or wrongness of our actions. He preferred reasoning to fighting, which made him stand out as a moral paragon. At times he seemed to be channeling the enlightened nonviolence of Gandhi, and where that came from I will never know.
When we were teenagers, most of our radio stations, most of the movies we watched, most of the magazines in our drugstore racks seemed to conspire to turn us all into ersatz Americans. But Watson seemed magically immune to these influences. He introduced me to The Goon Show and Beyond the Fringe and a host of witty English movies. From Bill, I learned to appreciate the music of The Weavers, an American folksinging group, but they were okay because they had been blacklisted all over America for their leftist views. Bill’s affable mother, Jessie, taught me the virtues of dry toast served cold with butter and marmalade in the mornings.
Now, in our teens, almost at the end of our time together in the same town, we were hunting for pheasants on the edge of a ravine we had navigated on scouting trips and family picnics. “Blasting away” is what we called it, without any apparent regret. After all, this was what our fathers did.
Bill Watson was okay about shooting a pheasant or two, but more than once he had to lecture me on the virtues of nonviolence when it came to sparrows or crows or anything nonedible. Once, in order to sight in my shotgun, I shot a sparrow, and he gave me hell for it. Since that day, I’ve never shot a nonedible bird. He pricked my youthful conscience as no one else could.
On the afternoon of our hunt, Watson went down into the ravine to see if there were more tracks in among the thickets, and Elliot fell behind me once again to toss a stick or two into the thickest brush to get something to fly up. I continued along the fringe of the steep ravine. Soon enough, I spied more tracks from our mystery bird. My God but those tracks were big—dinosaur tracks in miniature.
Hunters know that on some days you are the nimrod who acts as the dog and the other guys get to do the shooting and feel like alpha males. Some days, you can do nothing right. You just cannot get on track. You can’t relax enough to shoot straight. You go one way, but the quarry goes another way, and you end up thwarted. But on that day, half a century ago, through no apparent virtue of my own, I was given the chance to go for glory. Elliot was well behind me, still tossing debris into the bushes below. Watson had just reemerged from the ravine, but he was looking back in the direction of Elliot, and I was now ahead of him.
The sound of wings exploded right beside me. I wheeled to the left, and there it was, a brilliant big peacock of a bird, three feet long, hurtling downhill and hauling its great undulant tail. The rooster was beelining it for the ravine not fifteen feet away, wing beats whirring with a mighty, rattling noise. I swung my shotgun up to my shoulder until all I could see along the barrel was bird, and I fired twice. Brown feathers, black feathers, gray and rufous feathers flew in all directions, and the big bird was down. I leapt after it, sliding into the ravine on my rump, oblivious to ice, pain, or danger. A minute later I had emerged from the ravine holding the great bird by the neck and grinning at my friends. In a generous twist of fate, it was their turn to envy me.
The rooster was a big one with a long barred tail that moved in flight like a flying snake. Its body feathers had an iridescent bronze sheen mottled with black and gray. Its head was bluebottle green, a glossy green that transformed into purple in the sun. It had a white ring around its upper neck and bright, fleshy red patches over the eyes and ears.
I had managed to do what hunters were supposed to do. I had swung my gun enough to follow the trajectory of the bird, and I had placed my quarry on the bead at the end of the barrel. I squeezed the trigger and felled the pheasant before it could get to the thickets below. But most of all, I had been ready and looking. Looking at the underbrush, looking at all the places I didn’t want my bird to fly to, looking at the tracks in the snow, looking to see where my friends were walking.
It was my dad who showed me how to do all these things. He showed me how to carry a loaded gun safely, how to swing it in concert with the bird’s flight, where to look for birds. It was his old castoff hunting coat I always wore, his gun I trained on, his initiative that took me out to Egg Lake to shoot at clay pigeons from my thirteenth year on. And it was his friends who showed me how entirely sociable a hunting trip could be.
GORDIE W YNN, HAROLD Williams, Gerry Wilmot, Bruce Massie, Richie Goosen, Fred Jenner, Ollie Rostrup, Rusty McClean. My dad was at his best when he hunted with these men. Gordie Wynn was the acknowledged leader and the best shot. Williams was the most persistent, the last man to put away his gun, and the official bartender. With his majestic moustache, and his rump planted on a shooting stick, he reminded me of an English gentleman. Wilmot was a practical joker who warmed up any room he entered. He could rattle windows with his laughter.
Dad, Gordie Wynn, and any two of the others would take an hour’s easy drive out from Edmonton, go east of Camrose or southeast of Mundare, spot a big flight of mallards, get permission from the appropriate farmer, and dig their pits with garden spades. The idea was to find the biggest concentration of birdlime out on the stubble and locate right there. The last act was to lay down the decoys at night and then head for the nearest hotel for drinks, supper, and a few hours of sleep. Regardless of how much revelry they had indulged in the night before, they would rise early and try to be in their pits by about 6 am. Four men was the ideal number. Gordie Wynn would assign one man to each direction, and they would wait for the first wave of birds to circle their decoys.
They always came home with ducks in the trunk, perhaps a couple of grouse or partridge, and sometimes even some Canada geese. In our subservient youth, my older brother, Peter, and I would be inveigled into plucking these birds, and the more we plucked, the more we yearned to do what the men had done. We were probably quite whiny on the subject.
When I was about nine years old, my dad bought my brother and me a bb gun, a classic Daisy air rifle. You poured a plastic vial full of copper pellets down the loading tube until your gun felt heavy, and then you sealed it off and levered a bb into the chamber. When you fired the gun, it made a noise that was halfway between a puff and a bark, and it gave a satisfying little kick.
Dad took us out into the country for target practice and showed us all about gun safety. Never take a loaded gun into the car. Never point the gun at a person. (“Yes, Peter, that includes your brother.”) Always assume that the gun is loaded. No horseplay. Never peek into the barrel of a gun.
One morning at the lake I spotted a squirrel darting among the shrubs in front of our cottage. Could I drop that critter with our bb gun? Surely not. But . . . it was worth a try. I aimed for the head, squeezed the trigger, and the squirrel went down. Horrified, I dropped the gun and rushed to see what I had done. It lay at my feet, its body convulsing. I ran inside and sought out my mother and blubbered a confession. I expected a stern rebuke—I probably wanted a stern rebuke—but she was surprisingly easy on me. She had grown up in a hunting household, and perhaps these little atrocities were common enough to her, a thing that boys and men did because they were stupid.
She told me to promise never to shoot another squirrel and to go and bury the poor creature. I fetched the spade, but when I returned to the scene of my crime the squirrel was gone. Had a hawk swooped down and carried it away? Had it recovered from its convulsions and crawled off to die? Crawled off to live again?
In another narrative, our young hero might find the injured squirrel and nurse it back to health. Or like a tiny version of the Ancient Mariner, he would preach to the neighborhood children on the evils of shooting innocent creatures. But that was not the story of my life.
In the 1950s, in my neighborhood, fathers took their sons hunting. Bought them guns. Got their kids to do all the plucking and eviscerating of the unlucky wildfowl. Told them hunting stories. If a son was ever to bond with his father, this was probably the best way. It was through this hunters’ fellowship that I got to know my dad, and that is how he got to know his dad. Blasting away at unsuspecting wildlife was almost the only ritual a father and son performed together. And we loved it.
If you find the term blasting away offensive, join the crowd.
When at last my brother and I were old enough, my dad relented and took us out hunting. This would happen once every fall, usually in early October, around the time of Canadian Thanksgiving. American Thanksgiving is inseparable in my memory from nfl and college football. Canadian Thanksgiving is scattered with memories of the World Series and hunting with our dad on the side roads west of Edmonton.
He must have made some sort of bargain with himself and my mother that these trips were not about bringing home the birds. They were all about a father’s duty to his boys—to instruct them, to tolerate their lapses without losing his temper, to spend time with them. Once we were on the road, he seemed to relax and ease up on both of us.
His shotgun was a twelve-gauge pump that he had acquired in Melville, Saskatchewan, in the late 1930s— something to do with a poker debt. As the decades rolled by, the blueing on Dad’s gun faded until, by the time he was hunting with us, his gun had taken on a dull silver finish. It was a big, heavy weapon with a recoil pad, because it kicked like hell, and you had to pump mightily with your forward arm to get the next shell into the breech.
Our strategy on these hunts was to drive the side roads searching for flights of ducks and checking out the ditches and fields for grouse and partridge. The weather was often cold and sodden, or even snowy, so Dad’s Chevy was not only our transportation but our refuge from the elements. My brother probably bagged a few birds during these years, but I doubt that I ever shot anything.
Our car had a radio. It was World Series time. We would be driving very slowly down a gravel road, squinting into the clover and the windbreaks on either side of the road; Dad would be lighting up or warning us against the excesses of tobacco or both; the score would be tied at two runs in the second. Dad might spot a partridge trotting into the stooks. He would slam on the brakes, and we would ease out of the car, ram some shells into our guns, creep into the ditch, blast away at least enough to send up a covey of partridge, return to the warmth of the car, and Duke Snider would have doubled. Dodgers up four to two.
There came to be a new presence in our car, our good friend Mel Allen, the announcer for the New York Yankees. He had a resonant, gregarious voice that was buoyed by enthusiasm and baseball wisdom. He was such good company that even his commercials were engaging. Every inning or so, he cued the ads for Gillette Blue Blades. The soldierly advice in these ads was entirely admirable, even for those of us who did not yet shave: “Look sharp, feel sharp, be sharp.” This plan for success was somehow inseparable from climbing the corporate ladder, sparking the gals, and looking like Mickey Mantle. And the razor had evolved through the years from a straight blade and a strop to a safety razor with its own marching band. By the time I was ready to shoot my first grouse, Gillette’s male chorus was proclaiming to all the world, “It’s adjustable and, man, it’s new. BRAND NEW!”
I hope I’m not the only one who remembers those jingles.
In 1951, Canadian culture didn’t stand a chance. In the years that followed, I cheered for the Dodgers, the Milwaukee Braves, the Giants—anyone who might have a hope of beating the Yankees. When we were listening to the ball games, we were also warming up from our last foray into the blasting winds. And then Dad or Pete would spot a pond with a few mallards feeding, asses raised to the sky, mooning us and our puny guns and our presumptuous dreams of conquest, and we’d be out there sending our pellets into the void. I don’t think we ever got entirely warmed up or ever heard an entire game.
Though hard to come by, the grouse and the ducks were great sport. The lunches Mum packed were great. The ball games were great. Inside or outside the car, it didn’t matter: life was one continuous adventure.
IN THE FALL of 1954, Dad and his hunting buddies chipped in fifty bucks apiece, bought a small hunting cabin, and plopped it onto the shores of Egg Lake, about twenty miles north of Edmonton. They had rented the land from a farmer. Their cabin was a one-room shack with a wood stove and four double bunks. The only light at night came from gas lamps, and we had to bring our water from town. There was a biffy out back. It was a great pleasure on Sunday mornings to see Gerry Wilmot sitting on the can with the biffy door open, reading his newspaper. He was my father’s perfect opposite— outgoing when my father turned shy, loud when my father was restrained, irreverent when my father was in his straitlaced mode. Mr. Wilmot had brilliant silver hair, a great abundance of laughter, and a smoker’s cough that functioned as our alarm clock each morning.
One of Mr. Wilmot’s contributions to the lodge’s decor was a big poster of a young woman stepping naked from her shower. She was innocent looking, blonde, dripping wet, with a residue of soap bubbles on her neck and shoulders, and for reasons mysterious to me, she wore a clueless, happy smile. Why would someone all alone and naked in the bathroom be smiling? I can’t remember what the ad was for. Cigarettes? Tractor parts? But she was a beacon for adolescent yearning. It was difficult, beholding the gaze (okay, the breasts) of this smiling girl, to believe that sex could be evil. I mean, there was no question in my mind that sex really was evil, but my beliefs, in the presence of this fine example of contemporary realism, were severely tested.
When I ogled her on the far wall of the shack, I was dimly aware that we were in male terrain, that this glorious vision had no place in our house. But out here, where men carried guns, pissed in the bushes, and sought the predator within, where Mr. Wilmot was a defining presence, an outlaw world beckoned. The hunting at Egg Lake was so-so, but the experience of being there with my friends and our dogs and our dads was entirely to my liking.
I was a virgin in any way the metaphor could be deployed. I had never even shot a duck. I had potted clay pigeons Mr. Williams launched with his hand launcher, and I dreamed of the day when I would join the older boys who had already been, as it were, blooded.
My initiation into the fellowship of hunters came around the age of fourteen on a father-son hunting trip. My older brother would have been our designated young hunter, but for some reason I was chosen to come along instead. It was the first time I had ever been turned loose on anything that had feathers with anything more lethal than a bb gun. I was given my older brother’s gun, a single-shot Cooey sixteen-gauge, and a pocketful of shells. I wore Dad’s old hunting jacket, the brown canvas coat with the red wool lining, and a worn hat of the same canvas material.
Early in the morning a brigade of fathers and sons drove in two vehicles to a slough somewhere northeast of Edmonton. The land was owned by a farmer who was one of my dad’s customers, so we had his permission to shoot over his slough. Once we boys had been stationed along the shore, hidden in the cattails, our dads drove the cars away from the area and walked back to join us.
By the luck of the draw, I must have been placed in a flyway. Most of the ducks would have to take off into the wind and wheel over by me to reach the best feed or pass my way to return to the water. No sooner had my dad returned from parking the car than I bagged my very first duck. I think it was a gadwall, a small brownish duck that looked like an undersized mallard hen. Mr. Williams’s dog, a sturdy old springer named Mort, recovered my bird, and my father was jubilant.
There was a fair bit of bird traffic between our slough and some others nearby, and the men dropped a few more. And then came a moment of glory that eclipses the killing of my first duck. Some blue-winged teal came whistling right down the slough in front of me, flying fast with the wind, and I swung my gun ahead of them and fired. Two teal dropped. Old Mort hit the water running. The men went wild. I could imagine them wondering who this new prodigy was, this Deadeye Dick.
My friends would have none of it, of course, and they razzed me without mercy. For a while I was known as Two-Teal Carpy.
But when old Mort brought in those two birds and dropped them at his master’s boots, I was thrilled to the roots of my being. I had found something I could do as well as the other guys, and on a slough northeast of Edmonton, my life seemed to change. I was still the dreamer who toddled along in the shadow of his smarter, more athletic older brother, but by the end of that day, I had dispatched five ducks.
Slough ducks, my dad called them. We sliced out their breasts, and Mum marinated them in the fridge for a day or two and roasted them in the oven. I was in such a frenzy of accomplishment that it was some time before I realized that Dad and his hunting pals looked upon teal and gadwall with some disdain.
For my seventeenth birthday, my dad gave me a sixteen-gauge shotgun, a cut above the Cooey single-shot. This was a Remington Wingmaster, a pump gun that was light enough for shooting partridge without blowing them to bits and heavy enough for shooting Canada geese at reasonably close range. When a flock went over, you fired and pumped, fired and pumped, fired and pumped out the last expended shell. For a few seconds the air smelled of burnt gunpowder. The mucky rotten aroma of marshes, the sharp moldy scent of stubble fields, the cordite smell of burnt gunpowder. Hunting with Dad was always an olfactory delight.
My Wingmaster was the greatest gun I ever owned. My friends had heavier guns, twelve-gauges and occasionally ten-gauge shotguns. Some of them owned more prestigious weapons—Browning semiautomatics, for example. Some of them hunted with European double-barreled shotguns with engraved steel and beautifully carved stocks and butts. Often they bagged more birds than I did, but I clung with gormless pride to my Wingmaster. I brought it out almost every fall for thirty-six years.
THE DAY CAME when Dad and Mum decided they could finally afford to buy a cottage. The shack at Egg Lake passed into other hands, and in 1958, my parents bought a small lot at Ascot Beach on Lake Wabamun. The following year, Dad purchased the old dental clinic from a defunct air base at Edmonton’s Municipal Airport. It was just an empty wood-frame building about the size of a large garage. It cost Dad five hundred dollars for the building and a thousand dollars to have it moved out to Ascot Beach, forty miles west of Edmonton.
By this time I had finished high school. Our hunting trips took off from Ascot Beach to somewhere in the parkland north of the Yellowhead Highway. We always teamed up with Dad’s friend Mr. Massey and his son, Bruce Jr., who, like me, was starting out at university. The families would gather at the cottage on Thanksgiving weekends. My mother and Mrs. Massey would spend the day gabbing and cooking the big meal, and the males of both households would head north of the Yellowhead for a day’s hunt. Sometimes we came upon ruffed grouse in the ditches filling their crops with clover, or sharptails in the fields pecking at the swaths of wheat and barley. Sometimes we encountered a covey of partridge; they were such fast fliers that they were nearly impossible to hit. One of Dad’s clients had a pheasant farm somewhere northwest of the lake, and the farm went under. All the remaining stock was released into the countryside, and we had a go at those as well. For the most part, the hunting was pretty good.
One fall, however, we drove the side roads and walked the hedgerows and couldn’t find a bird worth shooting. This is often the fate of the weekend hunter. If he doesn’t live where he hunts, he is frequently unaware of the cycles of growth and depletion that determine what is available for hunting. He walks for miles in his favorite beats, and if he sees any game birds at all, they are flushing out of range.
“Well,” said Mr. Massey on that day, “it’s just nice to get outdoors and do some walking and breathe that good air.” We all nodded in agreement without the slightest conviction.
“How’d it go, hunters?” my mother said when we returned.
Long faces, shrugs, grunts.
“Well, nobody asked me how my day went,” said she.
There was a familiar smell coming from the kitchen—I mean, in addition to the aroma of roasting turkey. A wild fragrance that we should have recognized. She had our attention.
“Well, I’m glad you asked. Muriel and I were having a cup of tea, sitting right at this table, when we heard a big thump on the front window.”
She shot a thumb in the direction of the thump.
“What was it?”
She went over to a small black roaster on the stove, lifted the lid.
“I don’t believe it,” said my dad.
“My lord,” said Mr. Massey.
They were staring at a nicely done ruffed grouse.
“Seriously now,” said my mother, with her flair for cheekiness, “how did the hunting go?”
THE IDYLL of father-son hunting was not to last. A father wants to hunt with his sons forever, but how long can a son remain fixed in that supporting role? We wanted to drive the car and call the shots and prove to ourselves and to our father that we were much more than just his boys.
For me the split came in the fall of 1961, when we three Carpenters and a couple of friends were hunting sharptails and mallards out by the Glory Hills. After a great deal of walking, we all returned to the car for a drink and a snack. I was the last to return. By then there were six or seven boys and men hunkered down by the vehicles. I leaned my shotgun against our car’s bumper. My safety was on, but I still had two live shells in the chamber. I was gulping down some water when my father came up to check on my gun.
“Is that thing still loaded?” he said.
I caught an edge to his voice.
“Yes.”
“You’ve got a loaded gun leaning against the car?”
“The safety’s on,” I said.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he said. My father would never use the word “hell” in his boys’ range of hearing unless the situation was pretty serious.
“What if a bird flew over our heads?” I said. “Like this morning.” Surely my logic was unassailable.
Apparently not. With my brother and the other hunters looking on, my father lit into me with all the fury and sarcasm at his command.
“Of all the lame-brained, stupid stunts to pull,” he began, and his tirade continued until his lungs could hold out no longer. I can’t remember the words, but I can still hear the iambic rhythm of his many tirades. Of all the lame-brained stupid . . .
Clearly he had no second thoughts about humiliating his son in front of his friends and mine, and he expected me to take it, as I always did. He must have known, at least dimly, that we were all afraid of his temper. The thing that galled me most, however, was that he was probably right. I had done a careless thing with the very gun he had bought me for my birthday. I had let him down.
His ferocity, his sarcasm, my ignominy were all too much. For maybe the first time in my life, I yelled back at him, and he flinched. I don’t remember what I said. It would be tempting for me to cast this confrontation as my bad-tempered father against his sensitive young son.
The most disquieting fact to me, however, is the way in which my counter-tirade must have replicated his own. It is never particularly comforting to discover that some of the flaws that bothered me about my parents have resurfaced in me.
THE LAST TIME I hunted with Dad was about a decade later, in October of 1971. There might have been a trace of atonement in it, at least for me. By then he’d had a bad heart attack and carried his nitro wherever he went. His angina was especially touchy in the cold weather, and he puffed and wheezed when he walked any distance.
Hunting around Edmonton had changed for Dad and his friends. They could no longer pop over to Camrose or down to Mundare for a quick shoot. They had to head almost all the way to the Saskatchewan border. This was around the time that Alberta premier Peter Lougheed was sending out press releases and giving speeches alluding to the province’s embarrassment of riches. Oil rigs dotted the countryside, and Alberta was in one of its periodic booms. Edmonton and its satellites had expanded into the countryside with merciless speed. The great flights of mallards that I had seen as a boy were a rarity, at least where I lived and hunted. But one Sunday evening when Ian Pitfield, Terry Myles, and I were coming back from a hunting trip up north, we noticed a huge flock of mallards pitching into a large weedy slough, which was surrounded by barley swath. There was no evidence of hunters around, so we asked the farmer whether we could return to hunt on his land. He was only too happy to see someone drive off the birds, so I took down his number and promised to get back to him.
It turned out that my hunting pals were busy, but this location looked ready-made for my dad and me. There was good cover down by the slough, and that meant no pits to dig. But where would we bunk the night before the shoot? There wasn’t a hotel within twenty-five miles.
“Are you sure about the location?” my dad said.
“I’m positive,” I said.
“And you’ve got permission.”
“Of course,” I piped up. “I’ve just talked with the farmer on the phone, and he says the slough is ours. The birds are still there.”
“You’re sure.”
“Positive.”
My dad had an idea. He would ask Richie Goosen to come along and to bring his truck with the big RV in tow. Goosen’s trailer had plenty of room for the three of us, and there was a bathroom with a flush toilet. We could make breakfast over a propane stove, and best of all, we could walk from the trailer to the edge of the slough in five or ten minutes.
It turned out to be a pretty good plan. When we arrived in the evening there were thousands of ducks, mostly northern mallards, fattened up on farmers’ grain. Goosen parked his big RV on a rise above the slough among a grove of aspens and a thick belt of berry bushes. We were close enough to the birds to observe them without scaring them off. The weather was warm for October. It would be nippy in the morning, with a tinge of frost, but the sun would warm things up for us as the morning progressed. We decided to walk the three hundred yards or so to the edge of the big slough, fan out, and hide in the willows, cattails, and bulrushes that grew in great clumps well out from the water’s edge.
Richie was a great rotund bald man with a booming voice and an unflappable regard for his own opinions. He was a millionaire several times over, a handyman and a civil engineer, and he owned both a construction company and a small drilling outfit. But he was a blowhard, and my mother loathed the sight of him. Dad had always defended Richie, and my mother did her best to go along with it. Dad had been his broker, which meant that there had been a healthy bit of symbiosis going on between them. Goosen, I imagine, was the sort of business dynamo that made the Alberta economy tick during those years. I think Dad admired him for his entrepreneurial energy and his great optimism. Whenever he landed a big contract or struck oil up in the Swan Hills or somewhere west of Red Deer, he passed cigars around. But by the 1970s, when Dad had at last retired, Richie had acquired a tendency to bully my father. This was painful to watch, because my father was in shaky physical condition and looked a lot older than I’d ever seen him before.
The sun had not yet risen when we stumbled out of Goosen’s trailer. We headed toward the slough together for a minute or two, then spread out with Dad in the center so that he would have the shortest distance to walk, Goosen on the left flank, and me on the right. I walked fast because I wanted to be sure I was lying in good cover before the mallards began to move. I didn’t want to be the one to scare off the first flight of birds.
The light that heralds the sun a few minutes before it rises through the mist is the color of clear tea. If you look through the bulrushes and focus your attention just above the mist and listen hard for the whistle of wings, you might just see the first flight of mallards rising out of the marsh.
A small flight appeared in front of me, skimming the calm surface of the water and heading my way. I waited till they were almost upon me, and then I rose up, swung my shotgun just ahead of the lead bird, and fired. It spun into the water a few yards to my right. Then a whole great raft of mallards quacked into the air and flew in front of us, over us, to the left and right and behind us till the air was whistling with the sound of their wings, and we fired again, all of us, one after the other, whump, whump, whump-whump, into the mayhem. It was quite a moment. It is always quite a moment.
I waded in and collected my first mallard and looked back to see where a second one had fallen. That’s when I saw my father, standing halfway between Goosen’s trailer and the marsh.
“Come on down,” I cried to him. “It’s better down here.”
“It’s okay,” he called back. “I’m fine up here.”
I retrieved my other duck and saw Richie retrieve one as well.
“Won’t the ducks see you up there?” I cried to Dad.
“I’m just fine here,” he said again.
It occurred to me that he didn’t want to come any closer to the marsh because he would have too far to walk back up the hill to the trailer. His angina would not allow this small liberty. While Goosen and I were thinking about ducks, my father was thinking about mortality.
As the morning progressed, the ducks flew higher and higher, and by the time they passed over my father’s head, they were out of range. He got off a few shots, but he didn’t do any damage. I had a sinking feeling that my dad might never shoot another duck.
AT SUPPER THAT night in Goosen’s trailer we had a rousing discussion about the hunters’ quarry. The best I can do is attempt to reconstruct the last part of our conversation. I am working with the rawest of materials. My father’s thin voice, his frequent need to clear his throat. Goosen’s resonant bellow, his glowing pink pate. My presence in this discussion as the self-appointed naturalist and bleeding heart.
We had shot a dozen or so mallards. My father claimed that this flock was the biggest he’d seen in quite a few years.
“Not as many birds around,” he said.
“Oh,” said Goosen, “there’s lots a birds around. You just have to drive farther to get them.”
“Not so many pintails,” my father said. “Canvasbacks.”
“The pintails are in decline,” I said, and I told them about a wildfowl census report I had read. The decline had something to do with new cultivating techniques. The pintail nests in the fields were getting plowed under each spring.
“There’s lots of pintails,” said Goosen. “I seen some last week over by Drayton.”
“Not like it used to be,” said my dad. “Ten, fifteen years ago, we’d always come back with a few pintails. There was a mating pair last spring at the cottage. Prettiest birds in flight you ever saw.”
“Not bad eating, either,” said Goosen.
“And look at the driving we did yesterday to find these mallards,” said my father. “We never had to drive this far before.”
“So we drive a little farther. Gas is cheap.”
“I’d hate to think what this place will be like when we’ve destroyed the best marshes and wiped out all the ducks,” said my father. “The fall won’t be the fall anymore.”
“Way you shot today, Paul,” said Goosen, “there’s no worry about lack a birds.”
My dad tried to laugh it off, but it seemed to me that this was a low blow. After the first hour of shooting, my dad had simply given up.
“Here’s to many more of these shoots,” said Goosen, and now the whiskey was beginning to proclaim itself and he was yelling. “Because dammit, Paul, we’ll always have ducks to shoot. Pintails, mallards, or whatever. Because no way in the world could we wipe out these critters. Too many of em. You don’t believe those gov-mint reports, do you, David? I’m surprised you’d get taken in by that.”
“When there were scads of prairie chicken,” I said, “that’s what they used to say.”
“There’s lots a chicken,” said Goosen.
“There’s sharptails,” I replied, pedant to the last. “But what about the pinnated grouse?”
“The what?” said Dad and Goosen simultaneously.
“The pinnated grouse is the true prairie chicken. Used to be lots of them down on the prairie till we destroyed their habitat. Now they’re extinct in Canada.”
“That’s just what I mean,” shouted Goosen. “Gov-mint propaganda. They want us to think that so’s they can shut us down anytime they feel like it.”
But I would not be shouted down. Even though I was getting tight on Goosen’s excellent Scotch and sleeping in his sumptuous trailer, I would not be cajoled into agreeing with him. I was drunk on my own pedantic wisdom.
“When the herds of buffalo darkened the prairie,” I said, “when the great flocks of whooping cranes blackened the skies, that’s just what they used to say.”
“Useta say what?” snapped Goosen.
I quoted him word for word. “No way in the world could we wipe out these critters.” I paused to see if my parody of Goosen’s words had struck the target. My father winked merrily at me. “But where are the buffalo now? Where are the whooping cranes?”
“Gone with the dodo birds,” said my father.
“What in the hell is a dodo bird?” said Goosen, who by this time must have realized that he was outnumbered by Carpenters.
AFTER THAT DAY my dad quit hunting, and he began to seek out the birds with his binoculars and to build birdhouses out at the lake. His journals all through the 1970s and 1980s are filled with observations of weather and birds. He became a yearly contributor to Ducks Unlimited. So have I.
Ducks Unlimited. Sounds like Richie Goosen’s version of reality, doesn’t it? We would not need this excellent organization if duck populations across the Great Plains were once again healthy and unthreatened. But the pintail is now disappearing from the prairies. You have to drive to southern Alberta, North Dakota, or southwestern British Columbia to see flocks in any numbers. With its chocolate-brown head, long slender neck, and long tapering tail feathers, the male pintail is the most elegant duck I’ve ever seen.
The mallards are with us yet. The drakes are decked out brighter than Little Richard. Yellow beak, orange feet, dark blue feathers on light brown wings, opalescent green head with a white collar and a chestnut-colored breast. They can make their nests in beaver dams, river valleys, city parks, even sewage lagoons, but their numbers are well down from that good old time in the 1950s.
The huge flocks of whooping cranes that were said to darken the prairie skies are just a rural myth. The great white cranes had a stable population in the presettlement days, but they were never that abundant. However, evidence suggests that they might be coming back from near-extinction. It depends which year they are counted.
The dodo of Mauritius was wiped out by hunters. Not even a single reliable specimen of the dodo remains. We have only a few preserved fragments of its skeleton throughout the world and a few drawings done by rank amateurs.
The image that brings me back to Richie Goosen’s trailer more than thirty-five years ago is that wink my father gave me. I cherish it to this day.
I have been cherishing a lot of my past lately, rolling around in nostalgia for a good old time when blasting away at birds with a shotgun was considered an innocent pastime. But hunting has come under fire these days for the best and worst of reasons, and grappling with some of those reasons is one of my motives for writing this book.
Sport hunting is in decline in North America. So is subsistence hunting. Sport fishing is in decline. Outdoor activity in general is in decline. The more we talk about the environment, the less we see of it. Says Nicholas Throckmorton, a spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, “What we’re seeing among young people is, in a phrase, nature deficit disorder.” There are some exceptions to this general trend—my own province of Saskatchewan, for example, where the numbers of hunters have increased in recent years—but I cannot quite decide whether this increase in hunting activity is a good thing.
I never asked such questions when I was a young hunter. The problem with innocence, of course, is its blindness to the moral implications of our acts. The problem with that good old time is that it is gone, and I am left to wonder just how good it was. We live on an imperiled planet in which humanity swarms all over the earth, compromising the land as it goes, the water, the air, the very climate at the distant poles like a metastasizing cancer. Whatever escapes getting tamed by us gets consumed by us.
Nevertheless, when I examine deer tracks or grouse tracks in the snow, these things still awaken in me: the slight increase in heartbeat; the riveted attention; the awareness of sounds and smells; the patient, highly focused scanning of the bush around me. I am driven to ponder where this response comes from, and that is what the next chapter is about. But before we plunge into the ancient origins of hunting, I have to say this: cherishing the act of hunting for wild animals has become more and more difficult for me. My memories of the thrill of the hunt are tempered more and more with regret. If Bill Watson were around to hear my confessions, that is what I would tell him.
