A Hunter's Confession. David Carpenter O.
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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.
“There’s sharptails,” I replied, pedant to the 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