Born Naked (14 page)

I was appalled. The thought of dressing up like a girl was enough to chill the blood of any boy of my age. On the other hand, Christmas was approaching and I had some faint hope it might bring me a real camera so I could stop wasting time and film trying to photograph wildlife with my mother's Brownie. In the end, I allowed myself to be persuaded by my parents' argument that my imposture was intended to be a practical joke, and therefore would be fun.

It didn't feel like fun but I nevertheless did my duty so well that nobody recognized me. I also did it in such a way as to ensure that I would never again be forced into such ignominy.

What I did was to be so assiduous with the cocktail shakers that I got all the heavy drinkers squiffed out of their minds, and did almost as much damage to the light and moderate imbibers. The guests, in turn, did some minor damage to Professor Morton's house and rather more serious damage to my parents' status in the neighbourhood which, though by no means staid, drew the line at parties attended by Saskatoon's finest, in uniform, with sirens blaring.

This was not really my fault. My father had recently bought a double-barrelled, twelve-gauge shotgun made by the prestigious English firm of Fox. This had been an extremely expensive purchase (“Darn him, he's spent a month's salary on it,” my mother noted sadly in her diary) and he was inordinately proud of it. As the party gained momentum, nothing would do but that he and some of his sportsmen friends step out onto the front lawn and test his Fox. The targets were some presumably obsolete plates which the Mortons had left in a dusty carton in the cellar.
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Several of these were sent spinning into the air over the river bank while Angus and one or two others took turns blazing away at them.

Soon thereafter the police arrived. However, Angus had already established himself in Saskatoon as a character of some stature so, after enjoining him to keep the peace, the policemen departed. I think they went with some reluctance for the party was continuing with unabated zeal. Although I went to bed not long after, my duty done, I was sleepily aware of “noises off” until dawn next day.

No. I did not get a camera, but then Angus had not the wherewithal to buy me one, his purchase of the shotgun having temporarily depleted his finances. On the other hand, I never again had to imitate a maid, and a month or two later Helen relented and engaged a real one.

 

 

 

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ANGUS HAD BEEN A POT
hunter since his early youth, shooting ducks primarily for food, as Bay of Quinte men had been doing since European settlement began. He was not a killer by inclination and never relished taking the life of any living thing until we moved to Saskatoon. There he became infected by the pathological dysfunction which is called “sport” hunting. Those afflicted by this disease derive pleasure from slaughtering “game” animals ranging from moose to squirrels, from doves to geese, together with all kinds of “vermin” from wolves to crows.
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Many of Saskatoon's so-called sportsmen seemed still to be in the grip of the killing frenzy which, within human memory, had led to the extermination of the buffalo and the prairie wolf, together with the virtual extinction or massive decimation of dozens of other species of prairie animals.

That Angus, a man capable of deep compassion, could ever have brought himself to join in this butchery of the innocents for pleasure's sake remains a puzzle to me, despite something he told me in later years:

“It was the
hunt,
you understand. Getting up shivering in the dark for bacon and eggs and a mug of tea, and then the sounds and smells of an autumn dawn. Sheer ecstasy! Though there was this terrible paradox about it because when you pressed the trigger and death leapt forth, the mood of almost unbearable ecstasy was shattered. Smashed. Turned into bloody slush, just like the birds we killed. The hunting was right. The killing was an abomination because it wasn't done out of need.”

Those words were spoken a long time afterwards.

Not only did he become an avid sport killer in Saskatoon, he made it his business to turn me into one too. This wasn't too difficult. Nothing could have been more attractive than the opportunity to be buddy-buddy with my father in a shared enterprise. Besides which, Angus was right: the desire to hunt, if not to kill, comes naturally to most young males.

Our first sally was on a crisp November day only a few weeks after our arrival in Saskatoon. We were in search of upland birds, and we were both tyros in a new land. Angus was equipped with a borrowed shotgun and I with a .22 rifle.

 

WE WERE UP
long before first light (I never really went to sleep that night) and having piled all our paraphernalia into Eardlie's rumble seat, we drove through the grave silence of the sleeping city into the open plains beyond. In the making of the day as we drove along the straight-ruled country roads, the dust boiled and heaved in Eardlie's wake, glowing rosily in the diffused reflection of the tail-light. Occasional jack rabbits startled us by making gargantuan leaps into the cones of the headlights, or raced along beside us like ghostly outriders.

The fields on either side had long since been reaped and the grain threshed. First frosts had turned the stubble pallid as an old man's beard. Tenuous, almost invisible lines of barbed-wire fences drew to a horizon unbroken except for the shadowy 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 yellow leaves. Rarely, there was a farmhouse, slab-sided and worn by dust and winter gales.

I suppose it was a bleak landscape, yet it evoked in me a feeling of untrammelled freedom that may be incomprehensible to those who live out their lives in the well-tamed confines of the east. In a state of exaltation, we watched the sun leap from the horizon while a haze of high-flying clouds flared overhead in a splendid flow of flame—the very signature of a prairie dawn.

We drove on with the sun in our eyes, and little Eardlie scattered the dust under his prancing wheels. It was morning and my impatience could no longer be contained.

“When do we find the birds?” I asked.

“Depends on what birds you're after,” Angus explained authoritatively. “Today we're looking for Huns”—he used the colloquial name for Hungarian partridge with assured familiarity—“and Huns like to come out on the roads at dawn to gravel-up.”

I mulled this over. “But there isn't any gravel on these roads—only dust,” I said dubiously.

“Well, so there isn't any gravel,” my father replied shortly. “Gravel-up is just an expression sportsmen use. In this case, it must mean taking a dust bath. Now keep your eyes skinned and don't talk so much.”

There was no time to pursue the matter. He trod hard on the brakes and Eardlie squealed to a halt.

“There they are!”
Angus whispered fiercely. “Stay in the car! I'll sneak along the ditch and flush them up.”

Although the light was brilliant now, I had seen no more than a blurry glimpse of some greyish forms scurrying across the road forty or fifty yards ahead of us. Angus disappeared into the ditch and for a while nothing moved except a solitary gopher, who stood on his hind legs and stared beadily at me while whistling derisively.

Angus was having difficulties. There had been a bumper crop of Russian thistles that year and the ditch was choked with their thorny, wind-blown skeletons. It was my father's first experience with these demonic plants. “Rather like crawling through the Jerry barbed wire in front of Ypres,” he told me afterwards.

But he persevered and suddenly was on his feet levelling his gun at a whirring cluster of rocketing birds. In his excitement, he fired both barrels at once—and immediately disappeared into the ditch again, the double recoil of a twelve-gauge shotgun being quite as formidable as a right to the jaw.

Unscathed, the flock of Huns flew straight down the road towards me. As they passed overhead, I recognized them for as pretty a bevy of meadowlarks as ever I saw.

Angus came back to the car after a while and we drove on. He steered with one hand while picking thistles out of his face with the other. Not much was said between us.

Nevertheless, our first day afield was not without some success. Towards evening we saw a covey of Huns in a stubble field and Angus managed to kill two of them.

We were a proud pair when we drove home. As we were unloading the car in front of our house, Angus observed the approach of one of our neighbours and held up our brace of birds to be admired. The neighbour, a sportkiller of experience, seemed impressed. At any rate he came running towards us—but only to snatch the birds out of my father's hand and splutter, “For God's sake, hide them damn things! The prairie chicken season don't open for another week!”

 

DESPITE THIS INAUSPICIOUS
beginning, Angus rapidly learned the ropes. He bought a second-hand shotgun and went hunting almost every Saturday with newly acquired sportkiller friends. He learned the trick of stubble hunting—shooting ducks as they fed on grain left behind by the threshers, and where to find upland birds, as well as how to tell the difference between prairie chicken, Hungarian partridge, and meadowlarks.

When the bird season ended for the year, he remained hotly engaged with his new passion. That winter he spent an inordinate amount of time in his cellar workshop building a set of two dozen mallard decoys. These were works of art, made of laminated pine planks with their centres hollowed out for better flotation, meticulously shaped and painted to imitate the famous Greenhead mallard and his mate. Yet not even this could quiet his compulsive ardour for the hunt and so he took his shotgun apart and carved a new and elegant stock and forend out of walnut imported from Ontario. Thereafter, at home or at the office, he could often be found lovingly polishing the gleaming wood with a mixture of linseed oil and vinegar. Not yet content, he had the library buy several books dealing with the ancient Arabic skill of “blueing” steel and, after much arcane experimenting, re-blued the barrels of his gun. This esoteric exercise earned him considerable kudos from others of the hunting fraternity.

Helen observed all this dedication to Nimrod with tolerance but some petulance.

“It's a fixation,” she said. “He could have built the dining-room table and chairs we need in half the time it took to make his silly ducks.”

I continued to accompany him on some of his hunting forays but my enthusiasm was waning. I had begun to take as much or more pleasure in watching the ducks and upland birds in life as in shooting at them. A poem I wrote at this time indicates that the killing was making me uncomfortable.

 

SPORT

 

A flash of flame that flickers there,

A rain of lead that hisses by,

A deafening crash that rends the air,

A wreath of smoke floats in the sky.

 

A bark from the dog as it gallops past,

A laugh from the man who holds the gun,

The flutter of birds that seek to fly,

The words: “Good work!” when the deed is done.

 

A ring of feathers scattered round

A quivering pulp of flesh and bone.

A pool of blood on the autumn ground.

A life has passed to the great unknown.

 

Although I did not show Angus this poem, I think he had begun to realize that the admiring son of the huntsman father was becoming disillusioned with the game. In an attempt to rekindle my enthusiasm, he bought me a twenty-gauge shotgun of my own. I was grateful but would have been more so had he instead chosen to buy me a decent pair of binoculars.

Near the end of November, Angus made a major effort to bring me back into the fold.

The travelling library he had organized had made him acquainted with a number of people scattered about the province. One of these was a Ukrainian immigrant named Paul Sawchuk. Paul owned three-quarters of a section
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on the shores of an immense slough known as Middle Lake, well to the east of Saskatoon. One Thursday toward the end of the duck and goose season, Paul phoned my father to advise him that huge flocks of Canada geese were massing on the lake at night and feeding in his stubble fields at dawn.

Angus and I had never hunted Canada geese, which are the ultimate target and supreme trophy of the water-fowler. I am sure he concluded that if we went goose hunting together we could recapture the mutual excitement and camaraderie of our first hunting trips. So he arranged for me to take Friday off from school and we set out to try our luck.

It was a cold journey. Snow already lay upon the ground and the north wind was bitter. We arrived at Middle Lake in the early evening and found a frozen wasteland. Not a tree pierced a bleak void heavy with the threat of approaching snow. The roads had become frozen gumbo tracks that seemed to meander without hope across a lunar landscape. The search for Paul's farm proved long and frigid.

His house, when we found it, was a clay-plastered, whitewashed, log shanty perched like a wart on the face of a frozen plain. It had only three rooms, each with one tiny window, yet it held Paul, his wife, his wife's parents, Paul's seven children, and two cousins who had been recruited to help him with the pigs, which were his main stock in trade.

Paul greeted us as if we were lords of the realm and took us into the bosom of his family. Mutt, who by this time had become a bird dog of some considerable pretensions, refused to be taken. Having sniffed the piggy air about the cabin with ill-concealed disgust, he refused even to leave the car. He sat on the seat, his nose dripping, saying “Faugh!” at intervals. It was not until utter darkness had brought with it the brittle breath of winter and the wailing of coyotes close at hand that he came scratching at the cabin door.

We slept on the floor, as did most of Paul's ménage since there appeared to be only one proper bed. The floor offered some advantages because the air at the lower levels contained more oxygen. At that there was none too much and, since the windows could not be opened, the trickle of fresh air which found its way under the door was soon lost in a swirl of other nameless gases. The wood stove remained volcanic throughout the night, and our lungs worked overtime and we sweated profusely.

At 4:00 a.m. Mrs. Sawchuk cooked our breakfast, which seemed to consist of barley gruel with unnameable bits of pig floating fatly in it. Shortly thereafter, storm lantern in hand, Paul guided us down to the soggy shores of the unseen lake and out onto a low mud spit.

He had earlier dug two foxholes for us at the tip of the spit but now there was ice-encrusted water in the holes. There was also a savage wind out of the north-east and, although it was still too dark to see, we could feel the sharp flick of snow driving into our faces. Paul departed and we three settled down in our holes to await the dawn.

I cannot recall ever having felt so cold. We had found a sack for Mutt to lie on but it did him little good. He began to shiver extravagantly and finally his teeth began to chatter. Angus and I were surprised by this. Neither of us had previously heard a dog's teeth chatter but before long all three of us were chattering in unison.

The dawn, when it came at last, was grey and sombre. The sky lightened so imperceptibly that we could hardly detect the coming of the morning. We strained our eyes into swirling snow squalls. Then, abruptly, we heard the sound of wings—of great wings beating. Cold was forgotten. We crouched lower and flexed numb fingers in our shooting gloves.

My father saw them first. He nudged me sharply and I half-turned my head to behold a spectacle of incomparable grandeur. Out of the storm scud, like ghostly ships, a hundred whistling swans bore down upon us on stately wings. They passed directly overhead not half a gunshot from us. I was transported beyond time and space by this vision of unparalleled majesty and mystery. For one fleeting instant I felt that somehow they and I were one. Then they were gone and snow eddies obscured my straining vision.

After that it would not have mattered to me if we had seen no other living thing that day, but the swans were only the forerunners of multitudes. The windy silence was soon pierced by the sonorous cries of seemingly endless flocks of geese that drifted, wraith-like, overhead. They were flying low and we could see them clearly. Snow geese, startlingly white of breast but with jet-black wing tips, beat past while flocks of piebald wavies seemed to keep station on their flanks. An immense V of Canadas came close behind.