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.
2 SKULKING THROUGH THE BUSHES
Meat eating helped make us what we are in a physical as well as a social sense. Under the pressure of the hunt, anthropologists tell us, the human brain grew in size and complexity, and around the hearth where the spoils of the hunt were cooked and then apportioned, human culture first flourished. MICHAEL POLLAN, The Omnivore’s Dilemma
I have often wondered where my sense of urgency for the hunt came from. I suppose it came from my father, because he nurtured it in me. Or, genetically speaking, it came from his father, who loved to drive a buggy to the outskirts of Regina and shoot sharptails during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Or, more to the point, because we are talking about urgency, it came from my mother’s dad, Artie Parkin, founder of the Saskatoon Straight Shooters, circa 1920 to 1940, a club for men to teach youngsters how to handle guns and hunt wild game. My dad and his Edmonton friends were keeners, but Artie Parkin was said to be obsessed.
Not only do I wonder what woodsy legacy brought my father and me from Edmonton to Richie Goosen’s trailer to hunt mallards in October of 1971; I wonder what historical phenomena made it likely that fathers in Alberta would buy firearms for their sons and take them hunting. I can see this paternal legacy being passed on from generation to generation in settlements up north among the Cree and Dene hunters, but we were middle-class white folks, and Mr. Noaks, our friend the butcher, provided us with all the meat we needed to get through the winter.
My quest for answers to these questions has sent me a long way from Edmonton, Alberta. It began in Scotland, in May of 1970, with a conversation I had with a woman who was a hunter herself and a member of the English gentry. We weren’t hunting, but we were both guests at a gentleman’s hunting lodge in northern Scotland. She was talking to me about the grouse, deer, and pheasants that people over there hunted each fall. The conversation featured the usual differences in nomenclature. We hunted bucks, for example, which they called stags. And we hunted pheasants without using gillies or beaters.
“And we don’t hunt pheasants—we shoot them,” said she.
“What’s the difference?”
“Well,” she said, “one doesn’t visualize oneself skulking through the bushes to shoot a pheasant.” Clutching an imaginary shotgun, she went into what I thought was a provocative
