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
