have to hunt without a dog, Farley,” he said gloomily to me one evening.
Mother, for whom this remark was actually intended, rose to the bait.
“Nonsense,” she replied. “You’ve got Mutt—all you have to do is train him.”
Father snorted derisively. “Mutt, indeed! We need a bird dog, not a bird brain.”
I was stung by this reflection on Mutt’s intelligence. “I think he must have bird dog in him somewhere,” I said. “Look at all his ‘feathers’—like a real English setter.”
Father fixed me with a stern glance and beckoned me to follow him out to the garage. When we were safely in that sanctuary he shut the door.
“You’ve been listening to your mother again,” he accused me in a tone that emphasized the gravity of this breach of masculine loyalty.
“Not really listening,” I apologized. “She only said we ought to try him out, and maybe he might be some good.”
Father gave me a pitying look. “You’ve missed the point,” he explained. “Surely you’re old enough by now to realize that it never pays to let a woman prove she’s right. It doesn’t even pay to give her a chance to prove it. Mutt stays home.”
My father’s logic seemed confusing, but I did not argue. And so that first season we went out to the fields and sloughs without a dog. In the event, it was probably just as well. Both my father and I had a great deal to learn about hunting, and the process would have been impossibly complicated had we been attempting to train a dog at the same time.
On opening day Father and I were up long before dawn (we never really went to bed that night) and, having loaded the gun cases and all our paraphernalia into Eardlie’s rumble seat, we drove through the grave desolation of the sleeping city into the open plains beyond. We drove in the making of the dawn along the straight-ruled country roads, and the dust boiled and heaved in Eardlie’s wake, glowing bloody in the diffused reflection of the taillight. Occasional jack rabbits made gargantuan leaps in the cones of the headlights, or raced beside us in the ditches as ghostly outriders to the speeding little car.
The fields on either side had long since been reaped, and the grain threshed. Now the stubble was pallid and unliving, as gray as an old man’s beard, in the breaking dawn. The tenuous, almost invisible lines of barbed-wire fences drew to a horizon that was unbroken except for the blunt outlines of grain elevators in unseen villages at the world’s edge. Occasionally we passed a poplar bluff, already naked save for a few doomed clusters of yellowed leaves. Rarely, there was a farmhouse, slab-sided, gray, and worn by driven dust and winter gales.
I suppose it was a bleak landscape and yet it evoked in me a feeling of infinite freedom and of release that must be incomprehensible to those who dwell in the well-tamed confines of the east. We saw no ugliness, and felt no weight of desolation. In a mood of exaltation we watched the sun leap to the horizon while the haze of fading dust clouds flared in a splendid and untrammeled flow of flame.
Many times since that morning I have seen the dawn sun on the prairie, but the hunger to see it yet again remains unsatisfied.
We turned eastward at last and drove with the sun in our eyes, and little Eardlie scattered the dust under his prancing wheels, and it was morning. My impatience could no longer be contained.
“Where do we find the birds?” I asked.
Father met my question with studied nonchalance. For almost a year he had been imbibing the lore of upland hunting. He had read many books on the subject and he had talked to a score of old-time hunters and he believed that he had already achieved expert status.
“It depends what birds you’re after,” he explained. “Since the chicken season isn’t open yet, we’re looking for Huns”—he used these colloquial names for prairie chicken and Hungarian partridge with an easy familiarity—“and Huns like to come out to the roads at dawn to gravel-up. We’ll see them any time.”
I mulled this over. “There isn’t any gravel on these roads—only dust,” I said, with what seemed to me like cogent logic.
“Of course there isn’t any gravel,” Father replied shortly. “Gravel-up is just an expression. In this case it obviously means taking a dust bath. Now keep your eyes skinned, and don’t talk so much.”
There was no time to pursue the matter, for a moment later Father trod hard on the brakes and Eardlie squealed a little and jolted to a halt.
“There they are!” my father whispered fiercely. “You stay near the car. I’ll sneak up the ditch and flush them down the road toward you.”
The light was brilliant now, but though I strained my eyes, I caught no more than a glimpse of a few grayish forms scurrying into the roadside ditch some forty yards ahead of us. Nevertheless, I loaded my gun, leaped out of the car in a fury of excitement, and crouched down by the front fender. Father had already started up the ditch, shotgun cradled in one arm, and his face almost buried in the dry vegetation. He was soon out of my sight, and for some time nothing moved upon the scene except a solitary gopher that lifted its head near a fence post and whistled derisively.
I thought that it seemed to be taking Father an interminable time, but then I did not know that he was having his first experience with Russian thistles. These are frightful weeds whose dried and thorny carcasses roll for miles across the plains each autumn, to pile up in impenetrable thickets behind the fences or in the deep roadside ditches. There had been a bumper crop of Russian thistles that year and the ditch through which Father’s path lay was choked with them.
He suffered agonies, yet he persevered. Suddenly he burst out of the ditch, leveled his gun at a whirring cluster of rocketing birds, and accidentally fired both barrels at once. He disappeared again immediately, for the double recoil of a twelve-gauge shotgun is quite as formidable as a hard right to the jaw.
As Father had predicted they would, the Huns flew straight down the road toward me. I was too excited to remember to release the safety catch, but it did not matter. As the birds passed overhead I recognized them for as pretty a bevy of meadow larks as I have ever seen.
Father came back to the car after a while, and we drove on. He steered with one hand and picked thistles out of his face with the other. I did not speak, for I had a certain intuition that silence would be safer.
Nevertheless, our first day afield was not without some success. Toward evening we encountered a covey of birds and Father killed two of them with a magnificent crossing shot at thirty yards’ range. We were a proud pair of hunters as we drove homeward. As we were unloading the car in front of the house, Father observed the approach of one of our neighbors and with pride held up the brace of birds to be admired.
The neighbor, a hunter of many years’ experience, was impressed. He almost ran to the car and, snatching the birds out of my father’s hand, he muttered:
“For God’s sake, Mowat, hide those damn things quick! Don’t you know the prairie-chicken season doesn’t open for a week?”
Father and I learned a good deal that first autumn. We learned that the Hungarian partridge is the wiliest of birds—bullet-swift when on the wing, and approaching a gazelle in speed when running through dense cover on the ground. We became inured to the violent explosions of prairie chickens bursting out of the tall slough grass. We learned that there is only one duck that reputable western
