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.
