A Hunter's Confession. David Carpenter O.
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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, and that meant no pits to dig. But where would we bunk the night before the shoot? There wasn’t a hotel within twenty-five miles.
“Are you sure about 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