1 THAT GOOD OLD TIME

      The keeper did a-hunting go, And under his cloak he carried a bow All for to shoot a merry little doe Among the leaves so green, O. ENGLISH FOLK SONG

      BACK IN the late 1950s, when I was in high school, I went hunting one afternoon with two friends. I had my father’s shotgun, and perhaps my friends brought along their fathers’ shotguns as well. The three of us had grown up playing in ravines and coulees that fed into the North Saskatchewan River valley. These ravines had always harbored a number of pheasants, but this particular ravine was a few miles safely outside of the city.

      I was very keen on this day, perhaps because we three would be hunting unsupervised for the first time in our lives. It must have been a cold October, because fresh snow had fallen and remained unmelted on the ground. Suddenly the days had become shorter, and I felt ambushed, as I always did, by the failing light in the afternoons. We drove just outside the city in my dad’s Chevy and got out and hiked to the edge of the ravine. We walked at the upper edge of the ravine in single file.

      If my memory serves me correctly, we were all wearing rubber boots. I was wearing a hand-me-down hunting coat made of brown canvas and a bright red liner made of wool, but soft like flannel. The coat had many tears in it, some of them mended with thick black thread, lots of pocket space for shells and duck calls, and a big pouch for carrying birds. The pouch always had feathers in it, and the pockets always contained stubble and grit.

      The ravine was to our left. It was lined with spruce trees up top, where we were walking, and it was stuffed with tangles of rosebush, aspen, dogwood, and willows down below. If a grouse or a pheasant flew down into those thickets, we would never find it. I am guessing that this was the first time we had ever hunted together. Bill Watson was ahead of me and Davis Elliot behind. Not long into the walk, I noticed a set of tracks in the snow, a three-toed bird with big feet, meandering past the spruce trees. My heart must have lurched at this discovery.

      Frantic whispering and waving of arms and pointing. We began to peer down into the ravine as we went along. We probably realized that these tracks in the new snow had to be fresh. I was ready in that way that hunters must be when the signs are good. If you’ve ever watched a hunting dog approach a point, you have a pretty good idea of what I looked like.

      It must have felt strange to us to hunt for pheasants in a ravine that we had explored as young boys. Back then, we had sported cowboy hats made of brightly colored straw, hankies tied around our necks, cap pistols unholstered to deal death. We had seen pheasants plenty of times, and the odd grouse, but we had more important business in the ravines. We had each other to shoot at. The pheasants of our boyhood were beautiful, startling, and irrelevant. And now they were our quarry.

      My eagerness to hunt and kill these birds seems callous to me today—a little like shooting a family pet. The pheasants in this ravine were not pets, of course. They weren’t our friends, but they had been our familiars, and they had lent to our explorations in this ravine a savor of the exotic. In the absence of tigers, polar bears, or mastodons, at least we had pheasants. Why do away with them?

      If ever I had had this thought in the late 1950s, I would have swept it away without a moment’s doubt.

      “Hey, Carp, wait up!”

      Davis Elliot was always saying this to me. He never seemed to be in a hurry, and I must have wondered if Davis wasn’t a bit too prudent to be a kid. He was the much beloved elder son in a family of five kids. Like Bill and me, he was no good at contact sports. Davis was destined to become a golfer. His father was a doctor, and he and his younger brother both became doctors, and his three sisters were all bursting with brains and good looks and high spirits. The Elliots were the first family I ever got to know outside my own house. Mrs. Elliot was a great beauty and one of Mum’s best friends.

      “Wait up, you guys. Slow down! Jeez!”

      “Jeez” was a word we were not encouraged to use at home. “Jeepers” would have been all right, but it was a girl’s word. “Jeez” was almost like cursing, and almost cursing was almost like being a man.

      Bill Watson would have slowed down before I did. He was more considerate than I or any of my friends were, a true nonconformist well before the word was known to us. I suspect that he was the only idealist of any age in our entire neighborhood. If one of us was out of line, he would say so and reason fiercely with us as to the rightness or wrongness of our actions. He preferred reasoning to fighting, which made him stand out as a moral paragon. At times he seemed to be channeling the enlightened nonviolence of Gandhi, and where that came from I will never know.

      When we were teenagers, most of our radio stations, most of the movies we watched, most of the magazines in our drugstore racks seemed to conspire to turn us all into ersatz Americans. But Watson seemed magically immune to these influences. He introduced me to The Goon Show and Beyond the Fringe and a host of witty English movies. From Bill, I learned to appreciate the music of The Weavers, an American folksinging group, but they were okay because they had been blacklisted all over America for their leftist views. Bill’s affable mother, Jessie, taught me the virtues of dry toast served cold with butter and marmalade in the mornings.

      Now, in our teens, almost at the end of our time together in the same town, we were hunting for pheasants on the edge of a ravine we had navigated on scouting trips and family picnics. “Blasting away” is what we called it, without any apparent regret. After all, this was what our fathers did.

      Bill Watson was okay about shooting a pheasant or two, but more than once he had to lecture me on the virtues of nonviolence when it came to sparrows or crows or anything nonedible. Once, in order to sight in my shotgun, I shot a sparrow, and he gave me hell for it. Since that day, I’ve never shot a nonedible bird. He pricked my youthful conscience as no one else could.

      On the afternoon of our hunt, Watson went down into the ravine to see if there were more tracks in among the thickets, and Elliot fell behind me once again to toss a stick or two into the thickest brush to get something to fly up. I continued along the fringe of the steep ravine. Soon enough, I spied more tracks from our mystery bird. My God but those tracks were big—dinosaur tracks in miniature.

      Hunters know that on some days you are the nimrod who acts as the dog and the other guys get to do the shooting and feel like alpha males. Some days, you can do nothing right. You just cannot get on track. You can’t relax enough to shoot straight. You go one way, but the quarry goes another way, and you end up thwarted. But on that day, half a century ago, through no apparent virtue of my own, I was given the chance to go for glory. Elliot was well behind me, still tossing debris into the