Tag: Hunting Page 1 of 2

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, October 2, 1937.

“At last, cried Jimmie Frise, “I have everything set to take you duck hunting.”

“Not me,” I assured him.

“Listen,” said Jim earnestly, “I’ve built the swellest duck blind you ever saw. I spent the whole week-end building it. It’s on the one point in the whole, bog where, you might say, every duck from Hudson Bay has to pass on its way south.”

“Count me out,” I said.

“Now listen,” said Jim, “it’s the swellest blind I ever saw. It’s built with poles, overlaid with cedar all woven together and cat-tails entirely covering it. It’s so clever a blind even an old grandma duck that has been up and down America eight or ten times wouldn’t suspect it.”

“I’m booked up,” I said, “every week-end from now to Christmas.”

“Aw,” said Jim, “don’t be so pig-headed. You don’t know what you are missing. You call yourself a sportsman? Duck shooting is the basic sport. Until you have shot ducks you’re nobody in the world of outdoor sport.”

“Give me,” I stated, “deer, moose, bear, pheasants, partridge or porcupines. Anything dry. But deliver me from all dampness, chill, sleet, mud and east winds.”

“This duck blind,” stated Jim, “is practically weather proof. I built a regular little bench in it for us to sit on. I built a kind of a shelter underneath so that if we do get cold we can snuggle down under and get warm. It is made of thick cedar boughs woven in around a framework of poles, the whole overlaid with cat-tails. It is without doubt the best duck blind I ever saw anywhere, and I built it to introduce you, at last, to the sport of duck shooting.”

“Some other time,” I concluded.

“I’m afraid,” said Jim, “you are a fair-weather sport. You miss the true essence and spirit of sport. Sport involves all the manlier human attributes, such as taking risks and overcoming danger. The true sportsman fares forth in the face of the elements and by his own devices outwits the elements. That is why duck shooting is the premier sport of all. It calls upon a sportsman’s resources to keep dry and warm. You can’t hunt ducks on a fine warm day. You’ve got to be in the blinds before dawn, and the worse the weather the better will the ducks fly.”

“It sounds as horrible as ever,” I informed him.

“To me,” cried Jim, “it’s the greatest thrill in the world. We get up at 4 a.m. It is still pitch dark and the wind is sighing over the farmhouse. We dress by lamp-light, gradually coming back to consciousness. Minute by minute, our sense of appreciation of life seems to grow sharper. We put on our heavy clothes, our canvas coats and our wind and rainproof covers.”

“I love bed,” I gloated. “Deep, tumbly bed.”

Those Rushing Targets

“We go out into the air.” went on Jim, “and it is dark and strange and tingling and sharp. The blood leaps. Stars shine coldly. We have our guns across our bent arms, and what a queer lovely feeling that is. Our pockets bulge with boxes of shells.”

“I’m still in bed,” I said. “Yah, I stretch my legs down under the quilts.”

“We walk down across the dark fields,” said Jim, “to where the punt is tied on the edge of the bog, and there it is, looming, with its pile of decoys all ready in the middle. Silently, our heavy boots crunching in the frosty rim of the water’s edge, we get in and push off. We pole and paddle amidst pale ghostly aisles of bog, listening every now and then to the sleepy quack of ducks or to the faint whistle of wings of ducks already stirring. We hurry. We reach the point of bog, putting into the dark, windy water, where we quickly toss out our decoys, draw the punt deep into the rushes to hide it, and fumble our way into the waiting blind.”

“I fumble the quilts up higher about my head,” I put in.

“We unload our pockets,” continued Jim. “We lay the shell boxes handy, emptying a few into our pockets, and load our guns. We button up our collars and pull our caps low. We are ready.”

“And I,” I said, “mutter drowsily in my sleep. Something about the chief end of man.¹“

“All about us,” sang Jimmie, “something seems stirring. There is a faint paleness. The wind freshens. Afar off we hear the muffled thud, thud of a gun. Something unseen whistles and fades overhead, a flight of ducks. Dimly the outlines of bog and shoreline begin to be visible, and we sit, crouching, gun at the ready, peering into the air. It is the dawn. It is like a symphony. It is a great, primeval thing, in vast simple tones of gray and of darkness, of sound and silence, of stirring and of motionlessness. We can now see, like little bobbing phantoms, our decoys on the water fifteen yards ahead of us. A mile to our left there is a sudden blaze of guns, two, three guns, blasting in quick succession. We tense. We crouch and take a fresh grip of our guns.”

“Go on,” I said.

“There we crouch,” said Jimmie. “And then faintly, faintly to our ears comes hissing, indescribable sound, increasing like the rush of arrows through the air. Through the peep-holes we have left in the cat-tails of our blind we suddenly see, like shadows, far beyond our decoys, a close packed flock of ducks curving through the air. They have seen our decoys. They lift and turn. Our pulses are beating like hammers. Our breath nearly stops. With a rush of sound they come, like arrows slackening in their flight, straight into our decoys. Ten feet above the decoys they bend their wings to brake their speed, and in a kind of innocent jumble prepare to drop down among the wooden deceivers.”

“Go on,” I said.

“We rise,” said Jim. “All in one smooth motion, we rise to our feet and aim our guns. Bang, bang, bang, we pick our birds and drop them. The others, suddenly towering, try to make off, with loud quacks of fright. We swing and follow with our gun barrels, in that eerie light, the flashes showing us we aimed too far ahead or not enough, and a couple more of those rushing targets fall to the water.”

“How many did we get?” I asked.

“Six,” said Jim. “Three each.”

“Oh, boy,” I said, because a roast wild duck, served with wild rice, creamed celery and apple sauce, is just about as nice a thing as ever a man got out of bed for.

“We hurriedly push the punt out of the rushes,” said Jim, “and pick up our kill. Then we hide the punt as quickly again and crouch down in the blind.”

So that was how I was betrayed by Jimmie into going duck shooting. To my outfit for normal sport I added canvas coats and hip rubber boots, which are good for nothing but washing a car. Firemen wear them, but firemen don’t have to walk in them. They ride.

We arrived at the farmhouse about 9 p.m., but the good woman insisted on feeding us, and there was potted meat and pies made out of greenings, so it was eleven o’clock before we finally got into the spare bed, which was hard and cold. And I don’t believe I got my eyes really shut before I found Jim with the lamp lit shaking me roughly and telling me to get up.

It was not only dark and cold, but a wind that I identified as an east wind was sighing and moaning around the side of the farmhouse. Canvas was never intended to be worn. It is for tents and horse covers. We pulled on our clammy underwear and our canvas and our high rubber boots. We gathered up guns and shell boxes with clumsy hands. I ached all over for sleep. That bed fairly held out its arms to me. But shivering and hoarsely whispering, we stood forth and Jim blew out the lamp.

“Rain,” I said, as we opened the door and stepped out.

“A swell morning,” said Jim with hoarse enthusiasm. “A perfect morning. And not a smell of rain.”

“East wind,” I shuddered, “always brings rain. Just a minute.”

I had seen an umbrella hanging on a nail the night before. I slipped back in and fumbled for it. I took it down and rolled it, with my gun, in the rubber sheet I was taking along to sit on in the blind.

Down the yard and out across the pasture we walked, in the complete darkness, no stars glittering however coldly, and heavy clods sticking up to further impede the loose and hollowly clumping rubber boots. We found the punt, and as Jim had foretold there loomed the pile of decoys in the middle of it.

I clamped down in the bow while Jim, with a long oar, poled and paddled us across the windy little bays of the bog. It took us fifteen minutes to get out to the point where Jimmie had made his blind the week before. As we neared it a voice, muffled and low in the dark, called out:

“Hey, on your way. This is occupied.”

Jim stopped poling and let the punt drift nearer.

“Beat it,” came the voice. “Make it snappy.”

“Look here,” said Jim, “I built this blind.”

“Go on,” said the voice – it sounded like a large, rough sort of person, “beat it. We build our blind on this point every year.”

“You’re in my blind,” stated Jim sharply.

“So what?” said the voice, and faintly I could now make out two massive figures looming head and shoulders out of what seemed a mass of wet and cold swamp.

With an angry shove, Jim pushed away and started paddling past. I could see decoys on the dark water.

“The dirty crooks,” said Jim bitterly.

“Let’s go back,” I said, “the farmhouse.”

“There’s lots more good spots,” said Jim. “In fact, one of the best spots of all is only a quarter mile out here.”

I slunk down lower. The east wind was rising. There was a horrible ghastly paleness seeming to grow all about. Jim paddled furiously with the oar, standing up, and the wet little punt wobbled and teetered across the leaden water, the small busy waves making a most unpleasant sound along the sides.

“Take it easy, Jim.” I suggested.

We drew on towards a point of bog jutting out darkly. As we approached a sharp whistle rang across the murk.

“Hey,” a voice called. “Full up here.”

Jim swung the punt and headed furiously in a new direction. It was paling. Far off, I heard a faint double thud of a gun being fired. Jim made the punt wobble dangerously as he drove the oar into the water.

“If we dumped here–” I began.

But Jim just made an extra wild wobble that cut me short. We hove off another point of bog. A dog barked at us. A voice called angrily words that we could not hear.

From the point where Jim had built his blind came the sharp bang of two pump-guns firing furiously.

“It’s begun,” said Jim, swinging the punt out and resting his oar.

Every Man To His Taste

And it had begun. The paleness had increased until now, dimly, we could see the shoreline. The wind had freshened. On the edge of our limit of vision we saw a flock of ducks, flying low and fast, streak along, and a moment later a fusillade of shots broke from another point. Far off and near at hand, the firing swelled.

“We’ll just push in here anywhere,” said Jim excitedly.

He headed for the cat-tail bog and, on nearing it, commanded me sharply to set out the decoys while he held the punt steady. The decoys were cold and icy. They each had a string with a lead weight for an anchor. The strings were tangled and I had to double down and peer and jerk and untangles I laid them in the water and got my hands numb with the cold trying to make them ride right side up. There were twenty of them.

We got them set out somehow and Jim, feeling with his oar, found a soft spot in the bog where he shoved the punt in amidst the tall rushes. I having to get half out of the punt to help shove with my foot. It was cold and terribly wet and smelled of swamp.

We got set. We managed to turn the punt sideways to allow both of us a shot if any ducks did come in to our decoys.

But no duck did come. We sat there, listening to the far-off cannonade and the sudden fury of the guns nearby. Far off, as the day dawned, we beheld harried flights of ducks crossing ever farther out and ever higher.

It became broad gray daylight, the east wind was now a mild gale and there came the first sprinkle of small, drifting rain.

“Well,” I inquired bitterly, “now what do we do?”

The firing had died down. Desultory shots sounded on the wind in the rushes.

“I guess we can go back now,” said Jim dully.

So while Jim held the punt steady in the lashing wind, I picked the decoys up.

“Wind the strings around each one,” said Jim, “so they won’t get all tangled.”

The water was icy. It ran down my wrists. My hands were no longer gifted with any feeling. They were red and raw looking.

As we started to push away from the bog to cross the homeward bay the rain began to thicken. I reached down and unwrapped the umbrella from the rubber sheet. I shook it out and sprung it open.

“What on earth have you got there?” demanded Jimmie, as if he couldn’t see.

“It’s an umbrella,” I explained. “A device invented some hundreds of years ago by the Chinese to add to the comfort of human kind.”

I heard a whisking sound.

“Hye!” roared Jim, and the punt gave a sickening wobble.

A big fat mallard had jumped from the bog behind us and nearly collided with my umbrella.

“We couldn’t have got off a shot in time anyway,” I stated.

“I guess,” said Jim thinly. “I guess it’s best not to try to interest people in duck shooting. Either you’ve got it in you or you haven’t got it in you. You’re born to shoot ducks, I guess.”

“Every man to his taste,” I agreed.

So I kept the umbrella up all the way across to the farm and all the way up to the house, where we had a great breakfast of eggs, ham, apple sauce, potted meat, apple pie made of greenings, thick toast made over a wood fire and boiled tea.

---

Editor’s Note: This story was repeated on October 7, 1944 as “Just a ‘Blind’ Date”.

1. The Westminster Shorter Catechism is a catechism written in 1646 and 1647 by the Westminster Assembly, a synod of English and Scottish theologians and laymen intended to bring the Church of England into greater conformity with the Church of Scotland. The catechism is composed of 107 questions and answers. The most famous of the questions is the first:
   
   Q. What is the chief end of man?
   A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, September 23, 1939.

Tackling the sport of their grandfathers to find out why it isn’t popular today, Greg and Jim discovered it has “gone away, awaaaay”

“It’s a pity,” said Jimmie Frise, “there isn’t more for a man to do at this season of the year.”

“There’s duck hunting,” I informed him, “and in a few weeks there will be pheasant shooting. And then deer hunting.”

“If our ancestors,” said Jim, “hadn’t slaughtered this country, September and October would be two of the merriest months of the whole year.”

“How do you mean?” I demanded.

“To think,” cried Jim, “that here in Canada. less than a century old, with vast areas still wild and unpopulated, we should have to import pheasants from China in order to supply something for us to shoot.”

“Our forefathers had to civilize the country,” I protested.

Civilizing a country, I suppose,” snorted Jim, “means killing everything in sight.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow you,” I submitted. “You wanted your ancestors to shoot less, so that you could shoot more. Is that it?”

“They might have left more than they did,” said Jim. “But it strikes me as funny that we in Ontario, after one brief century, should have to import game birds from China, which has been settled for thousands of years.”

“I guess we did go at settling Ontario a little furiously,” I agreed.

“September and October,” declared Jim, are livelier months in Pennsylvania and Tennessee than they are in Ontario. And I mean sport.”

“And they’ve been settled three hundred years,” I agreed.

“There must be something funny about Ontario,” mused Jim. “Why should we have to work so hard for our game here?”

“Largely because,” I informed him, “a very large part of Ontario, all the unsettled part, the north country and the lake country, is all rock. It is not fertile.”

“I’ve been reading lately,” said Jim, “a good deal about the sport they have in states like Pennsylvania and Kentucky. They go in for sociable sports. Things that a dozen men can enjoy together. Like fox hunting at night, where they put their hounds out to chase a fox and the hunters, instead of chasing after the hounds on horses, or on foot, with guns to shoot the fox, just sit in company around a big bonfire and listen to their hounds chasing the fox.”

Trained Coon Hounds

“That’s southern for you,” I commented. “Lazy and indolent. I like the chase.”

“Then they have coon hunting,” went on Jimmie. “That’s got action. They have specially trained coon hounds.”

“I love the music of hounds, day or night,” I admitted.

“On a bright moonlight night,” said Jim, “it must be glorious. Away go the hounds, baying. And all the hunters follow after, armed with lanterns and potato bags.”

“Potato bags?” I exclaimed.

“They don’t kill the coon,” said Jim. “After a wonderful chase, over fields, through woods, from one woodlot to another, over fences, across creeks, the coon leads the hounds until finally they overtake him and he goes up a tree.”

“This sounds good,” I agreed.

“The hunters following,” explained Jim, “are by now straggled out, some trying to keep up with the hounds, others using their wits to take short cuts, employing their knowledge of the country, and of coons, to dope out where the coon is heading. When the coon trees, the hounds make a different sound, they ‘bark treed,’ as the saying is. Then all the hunters converge on that woodlot, and gather around the tree, build a big fire, their lanterns all gleaming, and they see the green shine of the coon’s eyes as it stares down.”

“How long does a chase last?” I asked.

“Sometimes half an hour, sometimes two or three hours, with a good big old coon,” said Jim. “Then when all are gathered and the best men are there first, one man shinnies up the tree and shakes the coon down. The dogs pounce on it and before it is killed, the coon is put in the bag. They can either kill it for fur, keep it for a pet or let it go for another hunt after they have proved, back in town, their prowess.”

“And the prowess of the hounds,” I reminded.

“That’s true,” said Jim. “As the hunters follow the chase, they always pause, every few minutes, to hear whose hound is leading. When there is a check, they all stop dead still and listen to hear whose hound first finds the scent again.”

“That ought to be grand fun,” I confessed. “It’s a wonder we don’t follow that sport here.”

“I can’t understand it,” said Jim. “There are plenty of coons, even in Old Ontario.”

“Let’s get Joe Shirk some night,” I submitted, “and try it. He’s got five hounds.”

“There may be some perfectly good reason,” said Jim, “why we don’t hunt coons in Ontario.”

Exploring Recreation Field

“Well, we can find it out,” I said firmly. “If there is some recreation we are overlooking in this province, Jim, it is our duty to discover it and report the facts to the public.”

“Agreed,” said Jim heartily. “I can think of no means of making a livelihood better than exploring the field of recreation for the benefit of the public.”

“What this world needs,” I assured him, “is more ways of amusing itself, not more ways of worrying.”

So we telephoned Joe Shirk and when we outlined the proposition to him, he leaped at it. Joe is one of those men, now unhappily growing fewer in number, whose function in the scheme of nature is to breed hounds. Not setters or spaniels or lap dogs or any of the other of man’s best friends; but plain hounds that sit about bored to death until turned loose after rabbit, fox, deer of other game. One thousand years ago, the Joe Shirks and their hounds were part of the essential economy of the human race. They were to the world what the big meat packers are to our present day economy. Without Joe Shirks and hounds, society did not eat.

“I’ll bring the whole pack,” said Joe. “And tonight ought to be the night, because the moon is just coming full.”

Then Jim telephoned long distance to three of his country uncles and the third announced that he had at least two families of coons in his main bush lot.

“And,” said Jim, hanging up the phone, “it’s less than 50 miles from the city.”

We tried to get together a party. We called up all our fishing friends, all our duck hunting acquaintances and all our deer shooters, but they were all engaged. It was too short notice. Some had dates for the movies with their wives. Others wanted to stay in because it was Thursday night and a big night on the radio. But when we picked Ed up in the car, it was just the three of us in the party, and after a brisk after-supper drive of one hour flat, we arrived at Jim’s uncle’s.

And even he couldn’t come with us, because “Four Feathers” was showing at the village theatre.

“One of the reasons why there isn’t much sport in Ontario,” declared Jimmie, “is that Ontario people aren’t much interested in sport. That is, unless they can sit down to it. In grandstands.”

“You won’t get much sitting down tonight,” said Joe Shirk. “These here hounds are raring.”

As indeed they were. All the way out in the car, I had been in the back of the car with the five of them, and they had climbed and crawled and rubbed all over me, whining and shivering with uncontrolled excitement, until I smelt like a hound myself.

From Jim’s uncle’s, we drove around a concession so as to come on the back of the great bushlot that ran the full way across the concession, a nice swamp buried in its midst. The uncle had one small field of corn stooked, but on the back concession, a farmer had fifteen acres of it, and would most certainly welcome any coon hunters because the coons were playing havoc with the corn.

It was frosty and still and the wide moon just rising by the time we sided the car and let the hounds loose. In the dim first light of moon, the hounds scattered along the road, sniffing and very busy.

Over the meadow and up to the edge of the woods we walked, with lanterns unlighted, stumbling in the moonlight until we came to the edge of the great corn patch. The stooks rose spooky in the soft dark, and the hounds ran and investigated them eagerly.

“Do they know coons?” I asked Joe Shirk as we puffed along.

“They’ve never hunted coon,” said Joe, “but they’ll investigate any trail. And if we show interest, they’ll soon get wise and follow it.”

Which proved the case. For suddenly, one hound halted and arched his back and began sniffing furiously at the ground. Another and then another hound instantly joined him, and with backs arched and tails waving, they followed the trail into the corn patch.

“Hie,” called Joe Shirk in a low, excited voice after them, “hie in there, Mike. Hie in there, Sally. Hie, hie, hie!”

And from the midst of the stooked field there suddenly rang out the sound that echoes out of the ages in the hearts of all men in health. The deep, baleful bay of a hound. A sound like a trumpet, like a French horn, like an oboe, like certain of the nobler notes of a grand organ.

“We’re away,” shouted Joe Shirk vanishing into the cornfield. “Gone away. Awaaaay.” And all five hounds filled the moonlit night with a symphony of their doomlike wails and quavers.

“Light lanterns.” commanded Jim breathlessly.

With shaking hands, we lit the lanterns – plain coal oil lanterns. Jim said, were essential implements of the chase when coon hunting. The hounds curved away and then, from the far end of the cornfield, swept back to wards the woodlot.

“It may be an hour,” cried Jim, leading off, “so save your wind.”

Into the bushlot the cry went, and the whole township seemed to rock and shiver with the music of the hounds. We could see Joe Shirk’s lantern bobbing away off in the bush, disappearing and reappearing.

“They’re headed for the swamp,” shouted Jim over his shoulder. “It’s a big old he-coon.”

He used a sort of Kentucky accent.

Into the bushlot we thrust, our lanterns waving. And if you want to get into a real tangle, try pushing through unfamiliar woods at night with an oil lantern.

Over logs, into thickets, around boulders, under rusty old lost wire fences, we plunged and labored. When Jim came to a sharp halt and cried – “Listen!”

The music of the hounds had changed from the rhythmic baying and was now a series of sharp barks followed by a high long drawn howl.

“Treed,” cried Jim, “already!”

In 10 minutes of staggering, blundering, plunging and falling, we reached the spot where Joe Shirk had a fire lighted and was sitting back, filled with broad joy watching his beloved hounds bounding and baying up the trunk of a tall tree.

Ceremoniously, we set our lanterns down and stood around peering into the tree. The eyes of the coon were shining. But they were red, not green.

“Who climbs?” asked Joe Shirk.

But I had already wrapped one leg around the tree. For if there is anything I don’t like, it is a mix-up with dogs snarling and snapping around on the ground. I don’t want to be mistaken for any coon. It is more comfortable to watch such a scene from above.

Mistaken Identity

Up the tree I went, heavily.

“Stop,” came a sharp voice.

It was a strange voice.

“What are you men doing here?” demanded a stranger advancing into the firelight.

“We’ve got a coon treed here,” said Jim, heartily. “You’re welcome to join us. mister.”

“I’m the game warden,” said the stranger sternly. “Don’t you gents know it is illegal to hunt coons?”

“Illegal?” I asked, from away up in the tree.

“Coons are fur bearing animals,” said the stranger. “You have to have a license to hunt them. They have to be hunted in season. And it is illegal to hunt at night.”

Just ahead of me, on the branch, a dark shape loomed.

In spite more than anger, in spite to think of all the reasons we can’t have fun in this world, I gave the branch a nasty twitch.

The dark shape scrambled for a hold but lost it, and fell with a thud to the ground.

The hounds, instead of staging the coon fight I expected, leaped back.

It was a porcupine.

So we all sat around the fire, game warden and all, and talked about the sport our grandfathers used to have in these parts.

---

Editor’s Note: This story appeared in Greg Clark & Jimmie Frise Outdoors (1979).

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, February 17, 1934.

“Twenty thousand starlings,” said Jimmie Frise, “were bumped off last week by the farmers down along Lake Erie.”

“Little,” I said, “did those first sixty starlings that were released in Central Park, New York, thirty years ago, dream of the fate their children’s children would meet.¹“

“It was a ghastly mistake,” said Jim, “importing those European starlings to America. Why, you have no idea how they have multiplied. The sky down in Essex and Kent is black with them, Millions of them. They have spread all over America. They have established themselves permanently in the warm southern states, and yet they are reported up at Fort Churchill, on the edge of the Arctic.”

“What is the good of shooting 20,000 of them?” I asked.

“Well, when men decide a thing is bad, they like to do something about it,” explained Jimmie. “It makes them feel better to have killed 20,000.”

“But in the meantime, what are we going to do about it?” I asked.

“Nobody knows,” admitted Jim. “Whole cities, like Washington, are being conquered by the starlings. Park trees fifty years old are being sacrificed to try and drive the starlings away. Stately towers and belfries are being grotesquely boarded up in the hope that this inhospitable hint will be taken by the starlings and they will get out. But they don’t. It begins to look as if the starlings will alter the architecture of America.”

“It makes me feel very helpless,” I admitted.

“If I weren’t a hard-headed and clear-thinking twentieth century man,” said Jim, “I would almost imagine that this plague of starlings was nature’s revenge on us for destroying the passenger pigeon. It was just about the time the last passenger pigeon was slaughtered that the starlings were set loose in Central Park. Ironic, isn’t it?”

“Jimmie,” I declared. “I am a mystic. I believe in things like that. While we go blindly along imagining we can conquer the world by good business practices, while we march stupidly from one human disaster to another, each year getting more thoughtful, each year becoming more sure of our great human powers, nature keeps laughingly tossing us hints like these starlings. We strain our brains over economics. And nature plays her jokes.”

“Nature has no mind,” said Jim.

“No,” I countered. “But nature has a heart. In all our splendor and glory, we men conquer the earth and incidentally exterminate the passenger pigeon. Having conquered the earth, here comes the starling, just to see how much we have conquered.”

“Don’t forget,” said Jim, “that for all the sob stories you hear about the passenger pigeon, it, too, was an enemy of man. Why, a flock of pigeons, big enough to cloud the sun, would drop down in a pioneer’s little clearing, into a field of peas. And in a few minutes, before the pioneer could wake up to the disaster, there wasn’t a pea left.”

“Well,” I said, “we got rid of the pigeon. We’ve got the peas. What good are they? We can’t sell them.”

“H’m,” admitted Jim.

“And now the starling has come,” I said, “in ever-thriving millions, to destroy us!”

“Then,” cried Jimmie, “what are we going to do? Submit to our destruction? A fine patriot you are. Why, to arms, to arms, and join the patriots of the Lake Erie shore!”

“It is a war,” I agreed.

“You bet it is a war,” cried Jimmie. “It will make commonplace human wars like the last one, or the next one, seem like sport. Why, the starlings could starve us in one year. They could become so numerous, they would eat all our grain, our grass, starve our cattle. All the ships on the sea couldn’t bring enough food, fast enough, to keep us from starving. The starlings would consume the food of our live stock and poultry. Exterminate our grain. Gobble up our vegetables and fruits. And what an awful spectacle it would be. All of a sudden, us lovely civilized people murdering one another for a scrap of food. Bank presidents eating their old shoes. Movie actresses gnawing old bones. It’s a terrible thought. We ought to get busy and arm against the foe.”

“And all the while,” I gasped, “the sky about us black with the rustling wings of millions of birds, like demons sent to humble and destroy us. What a revenge!”

“What a revenge nature can take on us, any time,” said Jim, “for our sins against her!”

“Jim,” I said, “do you think we could rouse the people to their danger? If we could get everybody in the world to take a gun and shoot starlings…”

“If we could send our militia, armed with shotguns, out into the forests and the deserts,” added Jimmie.

“And Arctic expeditions all across the vast spaces of the north,” I said, “to pursue the deadly starling to its last lair!”

“Yet,” said Jim sadly, “if we missed only two of them, if we overlooked just one pair, then in thirty years we would have the same old menace again!”

“That’s the trouble with nature,” I said. “It is so healthy.”

“We ought,” put in Jim, “to do something about it, however. It is our function as investigators of public matters, to go and shoot a few of them.”

“I am certainly with you,” I agreed.

Defending the Human Race

So instead of going rabbit shooting, the rabbit being another, menace that Jim and I have been keeping down for years past, we spent last week-end, armed with scatter-guns and small shot, out in the defence of the human race from extermination through starvation.

We drove west, the starling menace being greater the farther west you go. We drove out the Dundas highway and then went north, zig-zagging west and north, all the while scanning the sky for the black legions of the foe.

“If we see any on the ground, or sitting on a fence.” I asked, “should we shoot them? Or only take them on the wing?”

“Only on the wing,” cried Jim, emphatically. “Remember, we are sportsmen, even though we are on the verge of extermination!”

We passed Milton, and its cleft mountains. We got up into a very pretty country of farms and swamps. Two or three times. we stopped the car violently to leap out and take aim. But the little birds we had spotted in the evergreens were only goldfinches and siskins and other tiny songbirds.

We saw one crow below Guelph, but it was too smart. The moment we started to slow the car, it bounced into the air and went away with one sarcastic croak.

Turning south, we passed wide of the cities of Kitchener so as to get southward toward that infested sea of Erie. We saw several small drab birds flitting over the snow from the fences and weedy ditches where they had been creeping, like beggars sniping butts along the roadsides of the city.

“When we come on them,” said Jimmie, while the long snowy miles ticked by us, “by all accounts there will be immense flocks of them. You will have to be ready, and load and reload like lightning, firing into the mass of them as they fly over.”

“I’m ready,” I said, setting the shotgun shells in between the fingers of my left hand, where they were held as in a holder for instant action.

“Hssst!” warned Jim. “A bird!”

He slowed the car. Ahead, on a rail fence, sat a dark bird, nearly as big as a robin. It had a long pale beak and a short tail.

“A starling,” I hissed.

“We’ll slow down,” whispered Jimmie, “and both get out together. Then when it flies, we will both shoot, both barrels. A broadside!”

We slowed. The bird was a good forty yards away, sitting serenely on the fence, all unaware of our approach, it seemed, and unafraid.

We got out.

“Quietly,” whispered Jim, “let’s walk closer. We mustn’t miss! When I raise my gun, it will be the signal to fire.”

Down the rutted country sideroad, with nary a farm or a house or a barn to be seen. but only the heaving hills and the little copses in the fence corners, and the gray winter sky overhead, we crept pace by pace, toward this mortal enemy of human kind.

Our hearts were beating high. This was the mystical moment. The first shot. It would ring around the earth. This was another Sarajevo². What prince of the enemy was this, sitting on the rail fence!

We paced, cautiously, nearer and nearer, the guns poised. Double barrel guns. Loaded with number seven shot. To scatter and wipe out the black demon.

Then we heard a soft sound.

The stupid enemy was singing!

Squatted there, on the fence rail, its head lifted a little like the head of a mother crooning to her baby in a rocking chair, half asleep in the gray winter light, the starling was softly and aimlessly warbling.

We stopped. We lowered our muzzles.

Squeak, warble, hiss, flute, flute, flute, went the starling. Jim took another step forward and I followed. Pace by pace, we advanced. We were within twenty yards, eighteen, sixteen.

Squeak, flute, flute, warble, hiss, tinkle, squeak, softly sang the starling.

Fourteen, twelve yards.

And now we could see that the starling was not a black bird. He was in masquerade costume. A harlequin, decked out in a suit of golden chain mail, overlaid on soft brown-black velvet!

An unreal, a strange, a beautiful creature, with a pale large bill tremulous as he sang in a guttural low voice a sort of Wagnerian song. The only song in all the white, gray, bitter world!

The song of an exile. A sad, small song.

In the winter stillness, we stood listening, with reverently lowered gun muzzles, until the starling got tired of his song and fluttered his feathers out and stood up, as a dreamer wakes. He turned his head and saw us. And without haste, he took wing and flew away across the frozen fields.

“Well, well,” said Jim.

“I hadn’t the heart,” I admitted. “It seemed so lone.”

“The only way you can work up any passion about starlings,” said Jim, “is when you get them in masses, in hundreds, thousands.”

“Yet each one of them is a little harlequin in gold and black, like that one,” I pointed out.

“In war,” said Jim, “you can’t stop to consider your enemy as individuals. You musn’t picture them as nice young men.”

We got in the car and drove down at couple of lots. In an orchard, as we drew near, we saw twenty birds in the apple trees.

“Hsst!” I hissed. “An outpost! Twenty of the enemy in those apple trees.”

Two Opinions About Everything

He stopped the car. We got out with guns alert and crept down the road. We deployed. Jim took the right and I the left.

“Bang,” went Jim’s gun into the orchard.

“Bang, bang,” went my gun, scoring two misses.

“Hoy!” roared a voice.

The trouble with farmers in winter is they look so much like a plowed field.

This farmer was carrying an armful of wood across the field just back of the orchard. He dropped the wood and came, on bent legs, bounding through the orchard.

“What the Sam Hill!” he shouted, feeling his face with a large hand.

It was useless to run. He would have got our license number anyway.

He halted inside the orchard fence and glared at us.

“We were shooting starlings, sir,” I said.

“You were shooting me, you mean!” yelled the farmer, though he was only twelve feet away.

“Pardon, sir,” said Jim. “We are two public-spirited citizens out helping the great crusade against the starling. You ought to thank us for coming to help you keep down the menace that threatens not only your crops, your stock but your own very life!”

The farmer studied us for a minute.

“City fellows, I suppose,” he said, quietly. “Full of linseed and beans as usual. Listen, you two. I don’t want you to touch my starlings!”

“Why, they are destroyers of –” began Jim.

“I been watching them all fall and winter,” said the farmer. “They have been eating cocoons and grubs out of the bark of my apple trees. They have been eating pounds and pounds of weed seeds. What else would they be staying around here for all winter? There’s no other food but weeds, bugs and waste.”

“They ruin cherries,” said Jim.

“I have no cherries,” retorted the farmer.

“They will destroy a field of peas.”

“I have no peas,” said the farmer.

“The farmers of Essex and Kent slaughtered 20,000 of them,” said Jim.

“All right, this isn’t Essex and Kent,” said the farmer. “Look, I tell you what I’ll do. I’ll take your names and addresses. And if ever the starlings get so bad they are digging up my potatoes, or attacking my heifers, I’ll send for you to save me.”

“Good-day, sir,” we said, retreating back up the road to our car.

“You see,” said Jim. “There are two opinions about everything, even about extermination.”

We turned the car and went back the road we had come. And it so happened that when we came to the place where we had tried to shoot the starling on the rail fence, there it was again, huddled down in the fading afternoon.

So we got out of the car and crept up close and listened to it sing until it got up and flew away to its bed, probably some maple tree it calls its old Canadian home.

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. All the European Starlings in North America descended from 100 birds set loose in New York’s Central Park in the early 1890s. The birds were intentionally released by a group who wanted America to have all the birds that Shakespeare ever mentioned. ↩︎
2. Reference to the start of World War 1 and the Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, October 31, 1942.

“What gripes me,” announced Jimmie Frise sadly, “is what war does to friendships.”

“There is no brotherhood,” I informed him, “like the brotherhood of arms. I have sometimes thought that there is no human relationship deeper, dearer, more passionate than the comradeship of men who have passed through battle together.”

“Yet,” sighed Jimmie, “where are our blood brothers of the last old war? I remember swearing eternal friendship with comrades of mine. Yet inside six months or a year at most after the war, we had forgotten about each other. We were embarrassed when we met. Inside of three years, we were avoiding each other…”

“I remember,” I confessed miserably. “I went through the same experience. Don’t remind me.”

“After six months of front line experience,” went on Jim, “you know the difference between men and mice. You gravitate together, according to your quality. The brave guys gang together. The tough guys chum up. The medium brave guys segregate themselves into little groups. The lazy and the crafty, the lead-swingers and the bums, cast off by all the other groups, are forced into each other’s company.”

“That’s it exactly,” I recollected.

“Ordinary peacetime life,” continued Jimmie, “does not offer the same chance to weigh and measure your friendships. But in war, you see a man for what he is, morning, noon and night. He can’t pretend to be better than he is for long. The truth comes out. I think there is no greater time in a man’s life to choose his friends than in war.”

“Then why,” I demanded, “have we all drifted away from our war-made friends?”

“I remember in Hersin-Coupigny,” related Jimmie, “five of us who had served together a long time formed a sort of little lodge or secret society of our own. We lived in at billet in Hersin-Coupigny. We had it all worked out. We made complete plans for our lives when the war was over. The main feature of the plan was that we were going to stick together after the war, come hell or high water.”

“I suppose half of them were casualties?” I submitted.

“No, I was the only casualty,” said Jim, “and all I lost was a finger. We five never got together again. We’ve met, one by one, across the past 25 years. But we don’t ever refer to the plan of Hersin-Coupigny. Yet I never in my life made a more earnest and sincere vow than we made in that old chalk barn in France, a quarter of a century ago.”

“Of course, those were hard years, right after the war, Jim,” I reminded him. “We had to scramble like hogs to get jobs and get back into the swim of peacetime life.”

“If we had stuck together,” declared Jim, “we soldiers, maybe it wouldn’t have been so hard for us. But we threw off our uniforms, turned our backs on one another, and started burrowing, each his little burrow.”

“And of course,” I recollected, “the political parties of those days had no intention of letting us old soldiers form a soldier party. They both saw to that. Every time a veterans’ organization got going successfully, the politicians would finance a rival veterans’ organization with smart politicians guiding them. And so we were bust up into fragments, easily handled. Divide and rule is the ancient prescription. It worked on us old soldiers.”

“Still, that doesn’t explain,” insisted Jim, “how all our old war friendships were abandoned.”

We sat thinking about it for a while, with guilty hearts. And at length I offered this suggestion:

“Maybe friendship, the real, deep friendship such as the comradeship of war inspires, requires hardship, struggle and danger to keep it aflame. War is so stark and simple and honest. Peace is so filled with pretense and compromise, bluff and fakery. To live honestly as a civilian is ten times harder than to live as a good soldier. Maybe when we got back to the creeping, crawling ways of civil life, we were ashamed to look our wartime friends in the eye.”

“Maybe that’s it,” muttered Jim.

“How did we get on this melancholy subject?” I demanded.

“Oh, I was just thinking,” said Jimmie, “how war busts up friendships. For the past 20 years, we have been patiently sorting over our acquaintances, gathering together a little gang of those we are entitled to describe as our friends. It isn’t easy to gather together six or eight men who are all equally willing to go places and do things together; such as deer hunting.”

“Ah, deer hunting,” I said. “No thanks. Not for me. Not after last year.”

“Well, that’s what I mean,” declared Jimmie. “Up until 1939, we had, for 10 long years, the best, most congenial hunting party in Canada. No eight guys anywhere in the country were as harmoniously blended into a unit as we were. Then what happens? Jake and Lou are whisked off to war jobs in Ottawa.”

“Joe and Andy went into the army,” I added.

“Pete had to go back to the United States,” completed Jim, “and Sam wouldn’t go deer hunting because his son was in the air force and he thought it would be unpatriotic of him.”

“And there we were,” I rounded up, “you and me.”

Arguing About Shooting

“So we went. November, 1939,” said Jimmie, “and what happened? We found out that two men can’t hunt deer.”

“They certainly can’t,” I agreed. “Not you and me, anyway. We never even saw a deer, did we?”

“Not one,” said Jim. “Then, in 1940, after you got home from Dunkirk, we rigged up a dandy party. Jake and Lou both promised to take a week off their war duties at Ottawa. Pete promised to come up from Chicago. And at the last minute, they all reneged.”

“So we didn’t go at all,” I recounted. “That was 1940.”

“Last year,” began Jimmie.

“Ugh!” I said and shuddered.

We sat, with cold smiles, remembering last year’s deer hunting party.

“I never,” declared Jim, “in my life, saw three such heartless, selfish, cold-blooded guys all in one group.”

“They played us for suckers, all right,” I admitted.

“How did we ever get tangled up with them?” demanded Jim. “How did it start?”

“It started, you remember,” I said, “at lunch that day. The three of them were sitting at the next table to us. I’d often seen them around the downtown district, and at lunch and in elevators. In fact, I was on nodding terms with Jackson long before that day.”

“And I knew Buddy and Jones,” admitted Jim, “by sight anyway.”

“Well, you remember,” I exclaimed. “They were talking about whether a .30-30 was accurate at 500 yards. Jackson was blowing away about having shot lots of deer at 500 yards…”

“Ah, yes,” recollected Jim. “And you leaned over to their table and said that at only 300 yards, a .30-30 had a midway trajectory of 12 feet. And that at 500 yards, it probably had a mid-range rise of nearly 30 feet.”

“And what did our pompous friend Jackson say?” I inquired.

“He said,” laughed Jimmie uproariously, “that he always allowed for that.”

“Then,” I recalled, “we got into an argument. I asked him if in these 500-yard shots of his, the deer was standing still or running. And he said running.”

“Then you said,” remembered Jim, “with the mid-range trajectory of about 30 feet, how many yards ahead of the running deer did he shoot? And besides, how did he know which way the deer was going to jump?”

“Oh, boy,” I said, wiping the tears from my eyes. “That was some argument.”

“It was the first of hundreds!” said Jimmie. “I don’t know which was the hardest part of last year’s hunt; washing the dishes when it was Jackson’s or Jones’ or Buddy’s turn; or listening to you and Jackson arguing.”

“Well, there was nothing else to do,” I protested. “Was I to sit there silent and listen to that big blowhard?”

“It would have been better,” sighed Jim.

“It shows you how easily you can get into trouble,” I mused. “There we were having lunch. We had no intention of going deer hunting last year. It was only eight or 10 days to the opening. Then, overhearing that big fat slob’s ridiculous chatter, I lean over and make a casual remark. And inside of 15 minutes, we are invited to join their hunting party.”

“And,” said Jimmie bitterly, “what’s worse, we went.”

“It was awful from the start,” I recalled. “Do you remember the night up at Jackson’s house, planning the grub list?”

“That was bad,” agreed Jim, “but how about the trip on the train?”

“The hike into the cabin was worse,” I submitted. “I can see Jones still, carrying that one little carton. I tried a dozen times to pick it up, whenever we rested along the trail, just to see if it was heavy. I never did get my hands on it until we reached the cabin. And then we found it was nothing but a carton of soda biscuits.”

“Buddy,” said Jim, “with his sprained ankle!”

“Ah, yes, sprained at the station,” I remembered. “And he could barely hobble when we started down the trail. So he didn’t have to carry anything. And next morning, he insisted on going away over to the Cedar Narrows, two miles away, the best runway of all. And he walked like an athlete!”

“They sure made pack mules of us, that trip,” confessed Jim.

“Pack mules!” I said. “Did either of us get a shot, did we get one shot, at a deer between us, in the whole week? Who cooked the meals? How many meals did Jackson cook? How many times did Buddy wash or dry the dishes? And did Jones do a single chore the whole week?”

“Every time it was his turn,” recalled Jim, “he had palpitation of the heart. And Jackson was in with him on it, because it was always Jackson who rushed him off to bed and fed him pills. They just took us for a ride, that’s all.”

“It’s hard to say which I disliked the most of the three,” I pondered. “Jackson, with his pompous airs of captain of the hunt. Buddy with his tricks for getting out of chores, like dishwashing. Do you remember, the minute the meals were over, how he’d go out and stand by the wood pile with his shotgun, watching for ducks flying over?”

“Jones was the worst,” insisted Jimmie. “Him and his palpitations! That doe he shot, I bet he chased it two miles over hill and dale, through muskeg and tag alders. And when we caught up to him, he was as fresh as a daisy. Yet, when somebody had to bring in an armful of wood, he had heart murmurs and palpitations.”

“I can hear Jackson’s voice, yet.” I grated. “First thing in the morning, he lying, there in his sleeping bag roaring at us to get up. And the last thing at night, as you or I sometimes fixed the stove and turned out the lamps, Jackson sleepily droning from his snug bed the instructions for the morrow.”

“You would think one of them,” declared Jim, “would have been a little thoughtful of the visitors.”

“The first thing Jackson said,” I reminded him, “when we arrived in the cabin was- ‘now this is a hunting party, boys, and we all have to pull our weight’.”

“Whereupon,” said Jim, “they put the harness on us.”

“Why didn’t we rebel?” I demanded. “We knew what kind of birds they were, before the first day was over.”

“Well,” explained Jim, “for the first two or three days, we were sort of strangers in camp. The next couple of days, we were so mad about it, it was funny; and we just kept on to see how much they would let us do. Then, the last couple of days, we had more or less given up hope, and we just carried on…”

“We were guides, that’s what we were,” I asserted. “Two guides, without pay. Will you ever forget carrying out Jackson’s big buck?”

“I won’t ever forget it,” said Jim, “but I still don’t understand it. Not one of them laid a hand on it.”

“I gutted it,” I reminded him. “You went and cut the pole to carry it. We both tied it on to the pole.”

“Then,” said Jim, “we hoisted it up and carried it. Carried it the whole three-quarters of a mile to the river.”

“With the three of them following very jolly on behind, carrying our rifles,” I gritted bitterly.

“Well, on a hunting party,” sighed Jimmie, “some of us aren’t happy unless we are suffering.”

“Maybe that’s it.” I said. “But it certainly goes down in our history as the worst hunting trip we have ever been on, and the queerest trio of cold-blooded, lazy loafers we have ever encountered.”

“How sweet, though,” smiled Jim, “they make the memory of dear old Jake and Lou, and Pete and Joe and Andy…”

“Ah, what a gang!” I agreed. “The hunting trips we’ve had. I wonder if they’re thinking about us now, too, with the opening of the season only a couple of days off?”

“I’ll bet they are,” said Jim. “Especially Joe and Andy, over there in England somewhere…”

The phone rang and Jimmie reached for it.

“Who?” he said, eyebrows up. “Oh, hello, there, how are you? Glad to hear your wheezy old voice.”

Jim winked at me violently.

“You don’t say? When? Saturday, eh? Who else is going?”

Jimmie hunched up his shoulders and rolled his eyes at me in glee.

“Just Buddy and Jones and you, eh?” said Jim into the phone, “Are you going to the same camp?”

He reached out with his foot and kicked me, winking furiously at the telephone mouth piece.

“Well, well, well, we were just talking about you, Jackson. Sure, he’s right here.”

“No, no,” I growled. “I don’t want to speak to the…”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Jimmie. “We had no plans made for this year. Our party is still all scattered to the four winds. I think we’ll wait till the war ends, and then we’ll have a grand reunion…”

Jimmie sat listening to a long harangue from Jackson. I could hear the mutter of his voice. My hair bristled at the mere sound.

“That’s a fact,” said Jim. “Mmm-hmmm. That’s a fact. Well, I hardly think we could I make it on this short notice. If you had called us a week ago…”

“Jim,” I hissed. “Hang up on him!”

“That’s a fact,” said Jim in the phone. “That’s so. Mmm-hmmm. A cook, eh? How many? Three guides, eh? Well, that would be a lot handier than last year, doing all our own work.”

I listened intently.

“Yes, you’re right,” said Jim. “It was sort of catch-as-catch can. Yes, that’s a good idea. Draw for runways each morning. Sure, that would give everybody an even break. Sure, sure; I realize that. You wanted us to get the hang of the country before putting us on the best runways.”

I waved my hands in front of Jim’s face, but he shut his eyes and went right on listening.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” he said. “I’ll talk over with him and if he feels the way I do, I’ll call you back at supper time tonight. That will give plenty of time to get the extra provisions…”

Jimmie hung up and looked at me with glittering eyes.

“Listen,” he said. “In this world, you have to take such friends as you can find.”

Anyway, excuse us now. We have to and try and locate some ammunition in the shops. And this year it is awfully hard to find.

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, November 27, 1937.

“I’m through,” said Jimmie Frise, “with killing.”

“Why, you haven’t killed much,” I assured him, “especially this past year.”

“That’s what I mean,” explained Jim. “I’m through with it. I can’t see wasting time and money chasing after fish and game just for the fresh air of it.”

“That’s the best part of outdoor sport,” I protested. “The outdoors of it.”

“Listen,” said Jim, “it costs me five cents every time I shoot my shotgun. It costs me twelve cents every time I shoot my rifle. That’s the cost of the shells alone. The cost of the guns, the cost of all my expensive fishing tackle that I have waved in vain over the waters of Ontario this past year, is the capital expenditure.”

“But your profits,” I said, “are good health, a happy frame of mind and so forth. Intangible assets, if you like, but mighty real.”

“Happy frame of mind?” cried Jim. “Do you call it a happy frame of mind if you sit here looking back over a year with no trout, no muskies, no duck and no deer?”

“But the fun?” I reminded him.

“The best fun,” stated Jim, “is coming home, after a happy trip in the woods, with a basket of fish, a bag of ducks, or a deer lashed on your car fender.”

“This was just a bad year,” I comforted him. “You’ve had your share, in former years.”

“Have I?” questioned Jim. “I was just thinking. Thinking of all the shells I’ve fired, all the guns I’ve owned, all the fishing rods and big cases of tackle that have come and gone in my life. And all the miles I’ve walked, and rowed, and driven, and all the hours spent in hard, rough work. And yet the kill is mighty slim, as my memory holds it. A good muskie, once or twice. Three or four good bags of ducks. Maybe one deer, really killed without help from others.”

“It seems to me,” I said, “that is the experience of the average sportsman. People imagine, when they see hundreds and hundreds of us going forth with guns, that there is to be a dreadful slaughter of wild life. But the fact of the matter is, nine out of ten who pretend to be killers are anything but killers. If their kill was to be measured against their tackle, their outfit, their energy and the time they spend at it, even they would have to laugh.”

“Still,” said Jimmie, “what right have a few of us, a little percentage of the population, to assume we have the right to kill game?”

“Hmmmm,” I mused, “you have been converted, haven’t you?”

“I mean it,” declared Jim. “Why should a little handful of gunners be allowed to go forth into the public domain to kill birds and animals that belong to all? There are plenty of people who love as much to see a deer as we love to kill one. Maybe more. Maybe twice or three times as many.”

“Sssshhh,” I said, “Jim, this is heresy.”

Reformed Hunters

“I Don’t care,” insisted Jim. “Now that I find I can’t kill anything anyway, I am beginning to doubt the right to kill of those who can kill.”

“That’s perfectly human of you,” I agreed. “That’s the proper way to feel about it.”

“What I mean,” said Jim, “why haven’t you and I taken up camera hunting years ago? Imagine some of the swell shots we could have had with cameras, and be able to have, instead of a few horns hung up on the wall, beautiful enlargements of pictures of wild game, deer, moose and even bears, to adorn our homes and stand as a lasting record of our skill as hunters?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess cameras don’t go bang.”

“When I think of it,” said Jim, moodily. “That time I was standing at the beaver dam and that glorious buck came by me within twelve feet.”

“You missed it with your gun,” I reminded him. “Probably you would have missed it with your camera.”

“I could have made three or four pictures of him,” declared Jim. “Imagine. I heard a twig crack in the thicket. Then a full five minutes elapsed. Nothing stirred. As it was, I was standing there, with my rifle ready, slowly starting to shake and tremble with buck fever. Then, with a bound, he came out, his head laid back, his great antlers glittering in the sun, to pass so close to me I was actually frozen, with astonishment. In that five minutes, I could have got my camera set, my time set, my focus fixed. And the way he leaped out and halted and stood glaring at me not twenty feet off, with one of these new fast cameras, I could have had a picture that would have been one of my proudest possessions.”

“Or imagine, “I contributed, “hunting birds with a camera. That would be my line.”

“Listen,” said Jim, “how about selling our guns and buying cameras, these new candid cameras?”

“We could have fun,” I admitted. “Until about next summer, when we’d begin to hanker for our guns again. It’s a hobby that seems to last only for about three or four rolls of film.”

“Ah, but with us,” argued Jim, “reformed hunters. It would be like reformed drunks eating apples. Without our guns, we’d have to do something.”

So, at lunch hour, we strolled around to a camera store and sized the situation up. There were certainly a lot of new kinds of cameras since we had last pulled a bellows. There were handy little outfits, with interchangeable lenses running into three figures. There were cameras not much bigger than a package of cigarettes, with a film about the size of a thimble, with which, as the salesman explained to us, you could take a picture even of a detective and he would never know it. Palmed photography, as it were. There were about 40 different kinds of film for about 90 different kinds of cameras.

“When I was last in a camera store,” I told the clerk, “there were about seven different kinds of cameras and only one kind of film for each. The cameras were all standing open inside glass showcases, and it reminded me of an undertaker’s. The nearest thing to an undertaker’s was the camera store. Now look at you.”

To Set an Objective

And it certainly was a scene of glitter and color, cameras in green and pink and yellow, and everything very jazzy and chromium-plated.

So he showed us one of the newest candid cameras. He talked about “shiners” and light meters, and it seemed more like University mathematics than just up and banging a camera, the way I recalled it. The prices staggered us.

We asked him if he took anything in exchange, like guns or anything, and he said no.

So we went a little farther up the street to a gun shop and made some casual inquiries as to the turn-in value of sundry guns, rifles, micrometer sights, gun cases and what not.

“Well,” said the gun clerk, there isn’t much call for that old-fashioned equipment, but we could allow you perhaps $15 or $20 for it if you are buying a new outfit.”

Back at the office, we decided to use what cameras we had and perhaps borrow one, if we knew anybody that had got tired of theirs. But it seems the best way to remind anybody that they have an expensive camera which they ought to use oftener is to ask to borrow it.

“What have you in mind?” I asked Jim.

“It’s a poor time of year to start,” said he, “but at least we can go out into the country and look around for what we can see. We ought to set an objective, the same as hunting with guns. For instance, we might go out this week end to hunt jack rabbits.”

“There’s an idea,” I agreed. “But how could we get near enough a jack rabbit to take his picture? It would just be a speck.”

“Use this new modern film that guy was telling us about,” said Jim, “and enlarged, that speck will prove to be a jack rabbit, clear as crystal, in full flight.”

“But they get up so quick,” I pointed out.

“Don’t you see,” cried Jim, “what a sport this can be? You know how it is hunting jack rabbits with a gun. Walking across stubble fields, along snake fences, and not a sign of anything. You are going along very careless. You would say that no living creature, not even a mouse, could hide in that bare stubble. And then, all of a sudden, with a soundless bound, a great big jack rabbit, as big as a calf, leaps up not twenty feet from you and starts away with fifteen foot hops.”

“How would we ever have time to focus?” I demanded.

“We would have our cameras set,” explained Jim, “the same as we have our guns loaded and cocked. We would just have to up and bang, the same as with our guns.”

“Well, we can try,” I submitted.

“And once we get good,” said Jim, “we can plan trips for deer, moose, bears, ducks. I can just see me in a blind, shooting pictures of flocks of ducks storming into my decoys.”

“Yeah,” I said, “and wishing you had a gun, and throwing your camera into the drink in rage.”

“Not if I get some swell pictures that I can keep for years and show for my trouble.”

“Your walls,” I stated, “will hold just so many enlargements. Photograph albums grow fat and shabby. But you can eat ducks forever and ever.”

Across the Stubble

However, we went out Saturday. Jim had got from some camera fiend a little book that had tables and scales in it, showing exactly how much time to allow for certain lights. And he had got for a dollar a tiny gadget that you looked through. I had numbers in it, which you could faintly see. Depending on the light, the faintest number you could see was the one to work to, in the printed tables. It was a little complicated. It was like reading railway time tables, only the signs were different. We spent about an hour or so, after we had parked our car down a promising looking side-road, trying to figure out the light tables. So we gave it up and decided to take everything the old way. 25th of a second, distance inf. and the little hole open as wide as it would go.

“That has taken millions of good pictures,” said Jim. “It will do for us.”

So, with cameras held open and ready, we started across the wintry stubble fields, heading for a distant clump of dark cedars that suggested a brook.

“Where there are brooks,” said Jim, “there is game.”

Walking slowly and alert, we quartered the first two fields very thoroughly. It was a cold day, and it got pretty cold, even with gloves on, holding a hard chilly camera in a position of readiness. So we rigged up straps and handkerchiefs to hang the cameras around our necks.

Some little gray birds got up and cheeped and flew away, and by the time I had decided whether or not to try a shot at them, they were so far off that they do not show on the negative at all, just a thin edge of land and a lot of sky.

“Don’t shoot at everything,” protested Jim.

“It was just a practice shot,” I explained.

We found another field, full of dead weeds, burrs, stickers, prongs and sheep-snatchers, which we waded through very stealthily without raising so much as a small bird. So at the end of it, I snapped a candid camera shot of Jimmie bent down picking burrs off himself, and he shot one of me climbing a fence.

“Those will be the kind of thing,” said Jim, “informal, unposed stuff, our descendants will be interested in.”

“Except that I got you from the back,” I corrected, “and it might be anybody.”

The next field led down to the cedar clump and there was a little frozen brook running in it, ice and tiny falls making some pretty closeups, which I took and then Jim reminded me that I was set at infinity. So I finished up the roll, pacing the distances.

“Nice little shots,” agreed Jim, “of icicles and stuff. Very interesting. A good big fat album of that kind of thing certainly ought to amuse your guests whenever they call around.”

“All right,” I declared. “What have you got?”

“The thing about camera hunting,” said Jim. “Is the same as shooting. Wait till something turns up. Don’t bang your gun just for the fun of hearing it go off.”

As we climbed out of the valley of cedars, we saw a farm in the near distance.

“Good,” said Jum, “at least we can get some shots at cattle and pigs and barnyard stuff. There is a lot of humor and human interest in really characteristic shots of everyday beasts. We can stir ’em up and get them to show a little action.”

“You tickle a pig,” I said, “and I’ll get a picture of it.”

We walked across the fields to the farm, and as we drew near, we saw a little cluster of cows gathered in a fence corner, numbly feeding on a pile of hay. The farmer had let them out for a little fresh air which does not come often to cows in winter.

They looked up at us as we drew quietly near.

“Just that look of dumb curiosity,” said Jim, “would make a nice picture if we could get a close-up.”

“Cows won’t hurt you,” I assured him.

Taking our cameras in our hands and setting them, we began to stalk the cows, watching down in our finders to get the distance right.

I was looking down in the finder, preparing to say moo or otherwise attract their attention, when I heard a kind of a loud snort, and Jim’s feet pounding heavily on the frozen earth.

I looked up just in time to see that one of the cows was a bull, a large bull with that lithe humped look some bulls have, and, as he slowly curled around and advanced, I caught a glimpse of Jim’s vanishing back.

Instead of taking the fence which was quite handy, I too turned, and saw that Jim had reached a small tree and was already winging himself up into the branches. By the time I got to the tree, I discovered the lowest branch was too high for my reach, and the bull, without any excitement at all, was right behind me.

“Keep running around the tree,” shouted Jimmie from aloft.

Which I did, and the bull kept coming around after me, while above Jim kept screaming:

“Farther out, farther out, I can’t get you in focus!”

But I didn’t get farther out. And Jim, leaning down aiming his camera kept screaming orders at me and clicking his camera, until the farmer arrived and, with a fork, prodded the bull away.

“I never saw,” declared Jim, coming angrily down out of the tree, “less co-operation in my life. The most wonderful candid camera shot in the world, it would have been the sensation of camera shows all over the earth, and you wouldn’t even get in focus.”

I am happy to say that none of Jim’s shots turned out, as he had his finger over the lens hole in all of them.

---

Editor’s Note: Remember that all camera settings at the time were manual, and that they would not know how the pictures turned out until they were developed.

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, October 27, 1934.

“These bear rugs,” said Jimmie Frise, “make this open job of yours a very nice little car.”

“Yes,” I admitted. “Considering it is four years old. But an open car is the only car for a sportsman.”

We were headed out for the country on a rabbit hunt. Our friend Eddie, who owns hounds, was to meet us at one of those big swamps beyond Fergus.

“A sportsman,” opined Jimmie, “has a pretty comfortable life, take it all around.”

“Yet it has its dangers,” I pointed out. “To the casual spectator, seeing us bowling along comfortably smothered in fur rugs, and in our snappy mackinaw clothes, it might look like a life of ease. But consider the hard work we do, the tramping for miles across fields, the struggling through dangerous swamps, and then the guns. Don’t forget the guns. The dangers of carrying firearms and shooting them off, that’s the peril.”

“Sport is not sport,” said Jim, “if it has no element of danger or risk in it.”

“Is golf sport?” I asked.

“Well, you might get hit by a golf ball.”

“Sport,” I said, “in its truest sense, is doomed. You can’t shoot live pigeons any more. As a little boy, I recall attending live bird shoots and seeing my uncle bang down a hundred pigeons without a miss as they were released from a trap. We can’t enjoy that any more. Little by little, all the sturdier forms of sport are being slowly strangled. When I first went deer hunting, we could kill two deer each, and we had a month open season. Now we have twelve days to kill one, and we aren’t allowed to use hounds to chase them to us.”

“The world is getting more humane,” said Jim.

“But all the time it is becoming more humane toward wild animals,” I protested, “the more cruel the world is becoming toward men. More human beings have been shot, murdered, mangled, tortured and gassed in the past twenty-five years of the reform of sport than in the previous thousand years of stag hunting, bull baiting and cock fighting. It looks to me as if man, being denied the outlet of killing animals and birds, has turned his attention to his own species.”

“You’re a swell theorist,” admitted Jimmie.

“A man is entitled to a little danger, a little violence,” I continued. “You can’t suppress it. You can’t cut it out of him with a surgical instrument. Sooner or later, we are going to have to go back over the past five hundred years of reform and do it all over again by taking into account the true character of human nature.”

“Well,” said Jimmie, “we still have a little rabbit hunting left.”

“Sure, but now you can only get a gun license from September 1 to April 30,” I corrected. “And every year the farmers are putting more restrictions on us. You wait. Inside of a few years, we won’t be even allowed to hunt rabbits.”

Just a Few Sports Left

“We will still be able to play golf, tennis, bowls,” said Jim.

“We will still be able to play these games that meet with the approval of the reformers who rule us. People,” I said, driving more rapidly, “who have no hunger, no urge, no fire, no blood in themselves, and who go about enviously depriving their healthier and more natural fellows of a little action, a little excitement.”

“Rabbit hunting,” said Jim, “sometimes has a lot of excitement in it. I love the music of the hounds, the sight of them, all brightly colored, coming streaming through the woods or across the fields. The shooting of the rabbit is only an incident in the whole adventure. It’s the chase that counts.”

“I feel ashamed, every time I go rabbit hunting,” said l. “When I think of my ancestors hunting stags and wild boars, bears and wolves.”

“Did you get these bears?” asked Jimmie, fondling the glossy furs we were cuddled in.

“No,” I admitted. “One was sent to me by a friend in the bush. The bear got its head stuck in an empty jam pail out on the garbage dump, so my friend had to put it out of its misery. The other one I bought from a gentleman who peddled it around the office.”

“Very romantic, both of them,” agreed Jim.

“They make a snug article to go rabbit hunting in,” said I.

“They give you a sense of adventure anyway,” agreed Jim, settling back and inhaling the chill October air as we skimmed northwestward toward our tryst with Eddie and his pack of rabbit hounds.

We took turns in driving, and Jim had the last lap that bore us through Fergus and out some lonely autumn roads to a region of far-flung black swamps, where the bright swamp hare was numerous in his coat now changing from brown to snow white.

We met Eddie at the prearranged crossroads. He had a small truck, the back of which is for holding the hounds. He led us down some narrow swampy roads, turning right, and then left, as he penetrated deeper and deeper into the gloomy depths of cedar and spruce. The swamp was very wet, the road treacherous, but at the end of twenty minutes we came out on a stoney pasture, lonely and bleak in the gray weather, and all we could see on all sides were vast areas of silent brooding swamp.

The hounds were crazy to be let loose. Six of them, they raced about, excited and whining, watching us set up our guns and donning our hunting coats. Then they began sniffing about the edges of the pasture, and before we had got the cars half parked in the pasture, one of them, Dainty, let loose a deep belling song and all of the six fled into the swamp with a music that has been thrilling the heart of men for thousands and thousands of years.

“Let’s get going,” spluttered Eddie. “You take the right side of the swamp, Jim, and you head straight in there. You’ll come to a ridge, about two hundred yards in. Stay there. That’s where most of the rabbits cross.”

Jim went one way. Eddie the other, vanishing into the dark impenetrable cedars, so I set a true course and followed Eddie’s directions. I found the ridge, a stoney mound, and there I took my stand, while far off the hounds made music.

It is lovely being alone in a swamp. The mystic silence, broken only by the tiny chirp of little autumn birds or the startled scurry of a squirrel. The sweet aromatic smell of the cedars and balsams. I picked a good spot from which I could watch in all directions, and then, gun ready across my arm, I waited for the hounds to bring the hare across my path.

But the hounds went farther and farther, until I could barely hear them, even in the silence. Now and again I would hear them coming nearer and I would get set and half raise my gun and aim it at imaginary rabbits, just to get my eye lined up. But then the music would grow faint again.

Bang! Far away, a shot. For fifteen minutes I listened intently before I heard the hounds again. This time they started less than a farm’s width away, and around in a great circle they went in the other direction. I heard them grow faint and near, near and faint, and then – Bang, bang! – two more shots, followed by silence.

I yelled.

“Jimmmiiieeeee!”

But only silence answered my cry. It was chilly, so I walked up and down the ridge. I sat down and waited. A wind had risen. No hounds, no shots disturbed the great stillness of the wind through the cedar tops.

“Hang it,” I said, “is this hunting?”

So I decided to go for a little walk through the swamp and see if I could kick out a rabbit for myself, without the aid of hounds.

It is easy to go wrong in a swamp. The farther I went, the worse the swamp got. I came to a dense thicket of alders and small willows, and when I tried to go back out of it the worse it got. I came to a little stream flowing through the swamp, and I followed it for ten minutes looking for a suitable log to cross it. By the time I found the log I could see the stoney meadow through the cedars, the meadow where our cars were parked.

Some people can pop across a log as easy as walking along a pavement. I nearly always slip off. This time I slipped off and fell into the small creek. The creek was not deep, but one loses one’s balance and falls. I fell lengthwise in the chill little brook and before I could regain my feet I was thoroughly soaked from head to foot.

It was not three minutes out to the meadow and the car, but I was chattering with cold when I reached it. I removed my clothes in a twinkling and threw the bear robes about me. Then I reached for my car keys.

Jimmie had them. When he got out of the car he had just popped them in his pocket.

You can’t dry yourself on a bearskin lap robe. There was nothing else in either car. And I couldn’t start the car, to drive out to the last farmhouse we had passed to ask them to dry my garments at the stove.

“Boy,” I said, “you’ll catch pneumonia!”

I huddled under the bearskins, but they are stiff things that don’t lend themselves to tucking in. Gaps are always left for wind to blow up.

I tooted the car horn, long and loud.

No answer. No hounds. No shots.

I fired two shots rapid, a signal of distress if ever there was one.

A Grand Target

A blue jay laughed from a hidden tree. Far away in the direction Jimmie had taken I heard the sound of an axe chopping.

“Jimmm-eeeee, hoy!” I yelled.

But the distant axe went on chopping, so I figured there was a farm at the other side of the swamp and likely Jimmie would be there conversing with the farmer or even drinking cider in the farmhouse around the kitchen stove with the folks.

I spread my garments over the hood of the car and wrapped the largest rug around me. I pulled on my soggy hunting boots and started in through the belt of swamp in the direction of the axe. It would at least keep me from dying of goose-flesh.

As I pushed through the swamp I decided to keep up a regular call:

“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” I repeated at every step.

The swamp was deeper and wetter the way Jimmie had taken. I crossed two creeks and each time I saw a clearer place ahead, I found on arriving at it, it was only a patch of impenetrable alders.

“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” I repeated loudly, as I came from under each cedar tree.

Every fifty yards I paused to halloo for Jim. But the silence was profound, the day was grayer and the air more chill.

“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” I called, with monotonous regularity.

Suddenly behind me I heard a terrible sound.

It was the sharp, startled bellow and bay of a hound.

Before I could turn to look I heard other hounds join in the chorus, and in an instant I knew I was the prey of the whole pack of Eddie’s hounds. There is something panic-striking about a pack of hounds on your trail. I should have simply dropped the bear rug and stood forth, in my human mastery, before the surprised hounds. But I did what rabbits do, and foxes, what Liza did with Little Eva in her clasp as she crossed the ice – I turned and ran like a rabbit.

It was all a matter of a few seconds. I could hear the hounds coming, the full terrible chorus of them, high ones and low ones, belling and baleful, a swift, inescapable choir of wild savage voices, frantic with excitement, and I did some leaps that would have credited an Olympic athlete.

Then came the shot.

Just a terrific bang amidst the cedars, and at its call I fell down. In another instant the hounds were on top of me, tearing at the rug I clutched about my shoulders.

“Help, help!” I yelled in muffled tones.

“Hold still,” came Jimmie’s breathless voice, “until I get him in the head!”

“It’s me,” I screeched. “And the rug! Don’t shoot!”

So Jim ran up and kicked the hounds off and raised me to my feet.

“Thank goodness,” I gasped, “you are a punk shot!”

We wrapped the rug around me and led the way out while the hounds and I slunk in confusion behind him. We drove out to the farmhouse and sat around the kitchen while my clothes were dried.

“You see,” said Jim, “there’s excitement even in rabbit hunting. I should say we have all the thrill in rabbit hunting any man would want.”

“Quite,” said I.

---

Editor’s Notes: Mackinaw coats were standard for hunting back then.

Bull-baiting was a blood “sport” where a dog would fight with a bull. Dogs were bred specifically for this, and that is where bulldogs come from. Bull-baiting was made illegal in the 19th century. Cock fighting (between roosters) was also illegal, but continued for some time anyway.

Liza was a character in Uncle Tom’s Cabin who escaped slavery with her son by running across the not quite frozen Ohio River. It was based on a true story. I’m not sure why Greg says Eva is Liza’s daughter, Eva was a different character in the book. Many of the plays and stage productions bastardized the original book, so his memory could be based on anything.

This story appeared in Greg Clark & Jimmie Frise Go Fishing (1980).

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, October 24, 1936.

“Speaking of moose,” said Jimmie Frise, which we weren’t, “I would like to bag a couple of those noble beasts before my hunting days are over.”

“They tell me,” I said, “that no form of sport has as little justification as moose hunting. You find the huge brutes far from any road or railway. They weigh from 700 to 1,200 pounds, like a horse. It is impossible for the hunter to carry the animal with him. So he cuts off the horns and one or maybe two of the hams, and leaves the rest of it to rot in the swamp.”

“Well,” said Jim, “the whole animal finally rots in the swamp anyway. So what’s the difference?”

“A lot of difference,” I declared. “In the meantime, it lived. Isn’t that a difference?”

“I’m not so sure,” said Jim. “I often look at an animal and sometimes at humans and wonder if it makes any difference, even to them, whether they live or not. What I mean, is life itself interesting to them? Now you take a moose. It is born to trouble. All summer long, from the time it is born, the flies plague it. It nearly goes crazy with flies. It spends a frantic summer, hiding in the swamp and wading in the lakes and then comes winter, and the poor thing, with its long ungainly legs, is forced to plunge and stumble about in the deep snow, with the temperature at forty below. Can you say, offhand, whether life is interesting to it under those conditions? Is lite even worth while?”

“We’re not moose,” I defended. “We have no right to say. Maybe a moose finds it all very agreeable.”

“You are assuming,” said Jim, “that a moose wishes to be born. But it may be nature just forced that poor moose to exist. As if nature were some sort of a willful bully, who said, here you, exist. And then turned loose, to suffer and plunge and stagger about, a creature as ungainly and ugly and awkward as a moose.”

“I still think,” I declared, “that because moose exist, they must find pleasure in existing.”

“Yours is a cock-eyed philosophy,” said Jimmie. “A pollyanna philosophy. All’s right with the world. Personally, I don’t think it matters one way or another to a moose whether it gets shot by a hunter or pulled down in its infancy by a wolf or bear, or whether it lives on year after year, eating birch twigs and wandering about a lot of fly-infested swamps and bitter wintry glens, until, aged and infirm, helpless and starving, it finally lies down and dies, haying accomplished nothing.”

“A lot of human beings,” I agreed, “live the same story.”

“Don’t you think,” demanded Jim, “that a moose’s highest destiny is to be hunted by a man, trailed and pursued and finally outwitted, to fall quickly and mercifully to a hunter’s bullet, and then be consecrated by having its head mounted, with its horns, of which it was so proud, ornamenting, for years, the hall of some fine house, to be admired and respected by scores, by hundreds of men?”

“We don’t know our own destiny,” I said. “How can we figure out a moose’s?”

Just Like a Crooner

“That’s a far nobler destiny,” stated Jim, “than in old age falling down in a swamp and being unable to get up, and taking a week to pass away. And then porcupines come and gnaw its antlers.”

“On the Vimy Pilgrimage,” I said, “I met a New Brunswick guide who taught me how to call moose.”

“Really,” cried Jimmie.

“We had no birch bark,” I explained; “however, the guide – his name was McWhirlpool, or some such Scottish name – got some cardboard off a carton and made a moose caller out of it. It’s a little megaphone. We sat out on the boat deck, calling. The ship’s officers just thought it was somebody being specially seasick.”

“How does it go?” asked Jim.

So I made a megaphone out of some of Jim’s drawing paper and proceeded to demonstrate the art which had been transmitted to me in the middle of the Atlantic ocean.

“You call moose,” I explained to Jim, “by imitating the seductive and plaintive sounds of a cow moose. In the very early morning or late evening, you hide yourself in the bushes near some spot where you have seen the footprints of a bull, and commence calling. In case there is a bull quite near, you begin by making soft calls, kneeling down like this and placing the mouth of the horn close to the ground.”

I knelt down and began. The New Brunswick guide had practically given me a diploma for moose calling, because we rehearsed every morning on deck for eight days from Montreal to Le Havre.

Beginning on a high whining note, and muffling it by putting the mouth of the megaphone close to the floor, I let it go, like this “Ooooo-wauuugh”. The ooooo very high and whiney, the waugh falling abruptly to a guttural cough.

“That ought to call something,” said Jim, very impressed.

“You don’t call too often,” I explained. “In case there is a bull handy, you wait fifteen minutes or more after the first call. And listen. The call of a bull is very brief and gruff. It is a sort of choff. A sound, almost, like a distant axe chopping, once. But if you get no reply to your first call, you try again, still leaving the horn pointing down and fairly close to the ground, so as to muffle the sound. You make a little longer, this time. Like this: Oooo-waaaauugh-augh-augh. Oooo-eeeeee.”

“That was a beauty,” admitted Jim, getting up and closing the office windows, in case.

“It is a sound, McWhirlpool told me,” I said, “something like a bugle, something like a fire siren and something like the heaves.”

“You’ve got it to perfection,” agreed Jim. “Then what happens?”

“You listen again for a good fifteen minutes,” I explained. “In the foggy dawn or the increasing dark, it is a chilly and eerie business. You listen for the distant choff of bull. Or the crackling of the bushes as the monster comes to the call. If still nothing answers, you make another call. This time you start with the megaphone pointed to the earth and then slowly as you make the call, you go through contortions, twisting your body around until, at the conclusion of the call, the megaphone is pointing straight to the sky.”

“Just like a crooner,” said Jim, “in a snappy modern orchestra singing a blues number.”

“Exactly,” I agreed. “And McWhirlpool always made the most agonized faces as he called. Again you listen. If you hear the bull answer, or if you hear any sounds in the bushes, you wait. If the bull is suspicious, you can do two things. You can emit a couple of low moans through the horn, muffled, of course. Or even better, you can thrash around in the bushes yourself. Snapping twigs, to pretend there is another bull answering the call. That brings him. He can’t bear the idea of somebody beating him. So with a loud choff and a terrific cracking of bushes, the bull charges into the open. And bang, you’ve got him.”

“Or else you haven’t got him,” said Jim, “and then what?”

“McWhirlpool always said, you’ve got him,” I replied.

“It certainly sounds exciting,” cried Jim. “Compared with ordinary hunting, where you just see a deer and up and crack him down, this moose-calling has everything – mystery, drama, suspense, action.”

“Unfortunately,” I pointed out, “moose are vanishing from everywhere but where the rich and free can go. North of the transcontinental. Over the height of land. In Alaska. There used to be moose right around Peterboro.”

“I’ll tell you something in confidence,” said Jim. “There are still a few moose in Algonquin Park, and occasionally they stray out. This summer, there were moose in around some lakes I fished in Muskoka.”

“No,” said I.

“Yes,” said Jim. “The settlers were all excited. Two of the children on the way to school saw a cow and calf on the road. One evening, the settler where I stayed saw a huge bull wading among the lily pads across a little lake.”

“Ah,” I said, “they’ll all be gone by now. Those settlers.”

“I’ll find out,” said Jim. “The hardware man in Huntsville can drive out in half an hour. I’ll telephone him to-night. If the moose are still there, we’ll go up over a week-end and call them.”

“We can’t shoot them yet,” I reminded Jim.

“We will just call them, for experience,” said Jim, “and the thrill of it and to prove they are there. And if we take a rifle along, it will only be for the protection of life and property.”

Thus, when Jimmie telephoned me at midnight to say the moose were still hanging around the little lost trout lakes a few miles north and east of Huntsville, and it was only a five-hour drive at the most, plans were completed forthwith for the week-end. Jim would take his thirty-thirty and a camera. I would take my 7-millimetre carbine, my binoculars and a knife to cut myself a proper moose call of birch bark.

“There’ll be a story in it,” cried Jim. “A front page story.”

All the Wild World Watching

And Saturday found us steaming at daybreak up Yonge St., and by midmorning amidst all the autumn splendors of Muskoka; and before noon, passing out a rocky and rutted settler’s road to a lonely and miserable cabin on a lake where a tall and amiable settler, his wife and five children, all assured us the moose were still very much in evidence.

“You really did see a bull moose across a lake, this summer, didn’t you?” I checked up.

“Well, it certainly looked like it,” said the settler.

“And the children, I hear, saw a moose cow and call on the road?” I double checked.

“The very day after I saw the bull,” said the settler, “Reenie here and little Wilbert came rushing home from school with the news.”

Jim said he preferred to go out with me alone because of a bad attack of bronchitis the settler had that caused him to bark a great deal. The settler rented us his canoe and gave us directions for going up the lake to a creek and following the creek through three other lakes until we reached a country of spruce swamps and rocky ridges, which was the likeliest country to find moose. I cut a bark horn 15 inches long and four inches at the exit. And two hours before dark, Jimmie and I, moving with all the caution that McWhirlpool had advised, hid our canoe in the brush and took up our stand on the edge of a little lake margined with beaver meadow and surrounded with dark and forbidding spruce.

Just the act of moving stealthily induces a curious excitement. Jim and I were shaky and our voices, though whispered, were unsteady as we set the stage for action. I took post back of a log and Jim stood back of me, with his rifle ready, in case. Because everybody knows a bull moose, especially when excited, is liable to be an ugly customer. My own rifle I rested handy.

The sky was fading to a lovely color. The mysterious still little lake reflected the menacing darkness of the spruce. A sense of all the wild world watching made us shiver.

“Begin,” whispered Jim.

Setting the horn’s mouth close to the rock, I let go the first anguished cry.

“Eeeee-oooooo-waaaauuugh!”

Though I uttered it easily, that weird call echoed and rang and vanished across the quiet evening, and even the spruces seemed to stand stock still with astonishment.

Jim and I stared fixedly at the surrounding wilderness. Not a sound. Not even a dry leaf rattled. Not even a chickadee called.

Ten minutes passed, by the watch.

“Let her go again,” whispered Jim, turning to stand back to back with me, so as to guard all fronts.

“Oooooo – waaaaugh – augh – augh – mmmmmmmm!” I wailed through the trumpet, ending in a long drawn moan.

Again we sat immobile, our skins prickling, while the unearthly call rang across the lonely silence and vanished away in the distance.

“Psst,” said Jim, backing up against me.

Unquestionably, something on the far side of the little lake was moving in the brush. Without a shadow of doubt, something was now crashing amidst the spruce. Jim wheeled to face the same way as me, and I heard the snick of his rifle hammer as he cocked it to fire.

Silence. Silence vast and mysterious and throbbing.

“Gi-ive,” whispered Jim, “the little moans.”

“Mmmmmmm,” I lowed in the horn. “Arnnhh, unngh, mmmmmmm.”

Instantly, the distant crashing across the lake was renewed. We could hear the monster coming around the left side. Through spruce and alder and underbrush, something was coming, at an anxious, eager pace. We could hear its antlers crashing on the trees, hear the plunging of its great body.

“Don’t shoot,” I hissed, “unless it charges.”

“Take my camera,” whispered Jim hoarsely. “Get it ready.”

“Light too poor,” I answered, resting my rifle handy.

The thrashing suddenly ceased, forty yards away amidst the dense spruce. Ceased, and left us with hearts thudding in our ears and our eyes bulging with strain. I looked at Jim. He nodded.

In a confidential and almost whispered tone, I let go a low, enticing moan.

But the great bull did not come charging into the open. Instead, as we stood there rooted to the rock, we heard the unmistakable tiny sounds of something walking with stealth, with cunning, with caution known only to the wild, and coming, through the colored dusk, towards us.

A deep exhaled breath suddenly blew right at our backs. Jim wheeled, rifle up. I, after waiting a dignified instant to feel the hoist of giant antlers on my back, wheeled too.

A cow, a plain common barnyard cow, with eager and delighted expression on her countenance, was thrusting her head through the brush.

Jim laughed first. I joined later. Because the music of human laughter was a sweet and pleasing sound amidst that dark land. The cow followed us and saw us off in our canoe, mooing to us in the gathering dark as we headed south.

And the settler said it probably was his heifer that had wandered away last August in the hot spell, and he thanked us very cordially for locating it for him, which he would go and get at the earliest opportunity, maybe next week some time, if he got the chance, because he had so much wood to get in before the snow.

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Editor’s Notes: The Vimy Pilgrimage was the trip made by thousands of Canadians to France in 1936 for the dedication of the Vimy Memorial. This happened for Greg and Jim that same year in the spring.

A thirty-thirty is a .30-30 Winchester rifle.