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,
