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
