Chapter Five:
Fenton Ferry
When I was just a small kid, maybe 4 years old, Dad took me ice fishing and I was his “right hand man” for many of his projects and adventures. He took on a lot of different building projects, pouring concrete for Grandpa George’s driveway, and shingling that roof. We actually shingelled a few roofs for different friends and family. Usually dad would lead a project and work on all stages of the construction, while other people would lend a hand with the labour involved. Dad also kept Leaf Cutter Bees and Honey Bees, selling the honey at the Prince Albert farmer’s market. He even bought a quarter section of farmland, North of the town of Canwood, which he farmed for about one year and then sold. He bought an old Massey 44 tractor for his farm and I learned how to use a clutch and shift gears on that old red tractor. Dad also, by that time, had begun teaching me about guns, gun safety, and how to shoot.
Dad had a few guns,.... He had a couple of Cooey brand .22 Caliber rifles (among others), and those were the ones that I first learned to shoot. Those rifles were handsome and they worked nicely. They were bolt action with a tubular magazine that could hold about 11 “Long Rifle” cartridges or nearly twenty “short” cartridges. You see, the “.22 Long rifle” cartridge was available in different sizes, and .22 “short” shells were really quite small, with the casing and bullet that made up the cartridge measuring around 15mm (1.5 cm) in length and a Long-Rifle cartridge being somewhere around 1 inch or 25mm. Indeed, the .22 was a popular rifle because it was powerful enough to kill any small game (or pests,) it wasn’t that loud when fired, there was no recoil (kickback) when fired, and cartridges were easily obtained and inexpensive.
Dad let me shoot the .22 and I tried to learn as much about firearms as I could. By that time I loved to read and I read incessantly. At different times of my life I read a great deal about various topics. Around 1984-85 I read (a lot) about hunting, fishing, and trapping. There was a fiction novel by Jim Kjielgaard called “Big Red” about a boy and his father in Rural America and their outdoor adventures running a trapline, hunting partridge and deer, and raising Irish Setter dogs for hunting. I absolutely adored that story, reading it several times, and I also loved to read magazine articles about firearms and ammunition, fishing, and also fur-trapping.
When Dad was a kid (he told me) he received a single shot .22 rifle for Christmas one year when he was about 10 (years old). Dad told me a great array of stories, all about his adventures growing up,.... He had so many exciting stories of hunting and trapping at his Grandparents’ farm. He hunted and shot red squirrels which he would skin and the pelts of which he would sell for actually remarkably high values! Dad also trapped other fur bearing animals like mink, beaver, and muskrat, always skinning them and stretching and drying the pelts and removing the excess fat off of the skins and then selling them. Once I started to learn about Dad’s hunting and trapping adventures, I would always ask him about his experiences and he would tell me new stories, of which he had a great many…. Indeed, Dad was a skilled storyteller, and I hung on every word of his every story,.... When you factored in his experiences working on the railroad and working for the Department of Natural Resources, plus his time spent on weekends at the farm, Dad had a lot of stories. He had stories of moose and bears, muskrats and mink,.. Ducks and geese. He also had stories of people,..., of exceptional men of tremendous strength or terrible dispositions, or of hunting trips he had been on himself or stories he had been told,.... In retrospect, I now see that it was in these times, riding with my father in a truck on our way to our destination, me listening to father carefully telling his stories, those times were the moments within which I gained and learned of culture and knowledge and wisdom that made me feel incredibly loved and bursting with curiosity and confidence! I wanted to be just like my dad had been when he was a kid, and then, I also wanted to be just as he was in those moments and be the father and master storyteller for my own children and loved ones!
When I was about four, Dad went to Foam Lake, Saskatchewan, to hunt ducks and geese in late October with his university friend Brian Ford. I still remember waiting in great anticipation for him to come home, as I had been told many stories of Foam Lake and Brian Ford, and I was so excited to see the geese and ducks, extremely eager to hear all of the stories,...! He did return home with some ducks and geese, I still recall it, and I went out to the garage, full of excitement, on 6th street East, with dad, and I began to learn about plucking and preparing the wild fowl for cooking. Dad was a believer in maximizing the use of the birds’ meat and skin, and so he would pluck the entire bird, and then singe (burn) the guard hairs off, and then eviscerate the birds just like a farm chicken. I found the entire process to be absolutely fascinating!
In about grade three, autumn, I began to carry a .22 rifle, walking behind dad, who also carried a .22 rifle when he went out hunting for partridge at the farm and I was very eager to shoot my first partridge.
We went out in the bush at the farm one sunny morning, through thick willows and gnarly thorn bushes and it felt like we walked and walked and walked but never fired our rifles. We walked through one gnarly bush and then through another and another! We searched and searched for partridge but found nothing. I quickly began to realize that it wasn’t as I was hoping it was going to be. I wanted fast and furious shooting and piles of partridges! I cared deeply and grew increasingly dismayed, but I carefully and resolutely tried to not display my disappointment that we hadn’t got anything (or even seen anything!). Bear in mind that this was my first time carrying a rifle. Up to that point I had gone with dad many times, walking behind him with no rifle, or later I would carry a toy gun,..., but I was really very excited to shoot many partridges and I noticed that it was not nearly as easy as I had hoped and dreamed…. It surely was a lot more effort than I had ever anticipated.
The first day of hunting went by with nothing. We only hunted in the mid morning, and then we tried another day, you couldn’t legally hunt on Sundays back then so we had only Saturdays. We tried it for a couple of afternoons. Dad was set on walking while we hunted, rather than drive. I think he wanted to have me learn about hunting as an activity done on foot, a kind of sacred practice— not conducted from the inside of a vehicle. In reality, partridges make themselves visible in morning and evening along the edges of roads and trails with great predictability and regularity, and they are easily spotted from a moving vehicle at those times, however, dad didn’t want to introduce me to hunting in that fashion. He chose walking, off the roads, in the bush, and if it meant killing less partridge, he was ok with that. It made a powerful and lifelong impression on me and those first several hours of partridge hunting are forever etched into my heart and mind,....
Beside his .303 British rifle and Cooey .22 rifles, Dad had a Winchester 12 gauge pump-action shotgun, a “model 12.” He used it for hunting ducks and geese. Sometimes when I was still quite little he would let me accompany him along the Shell River in search of ducks. I would walk behind him, stepping only when he stepped, stopping only when he stopped. One sunny day in late October, we were out at the farm and it was late in the afternoon, right around 4 pm, and he had finished up his tasks for the day, and he walked over to me in the farm driveway with an air of quiet confidence and excitement and a kind of secrecy that was “just between us” and he said:
“I know where there are quite a few ducks over to the North in a slough…. Should we go and see if we can pull a sneak job on ‘em?!”
I was so excited I could hardly stand it! We got ready quickly and drove out North of the farm just a few miles, to a gravel pit that was located in the middle of the open farmland a couple of miles from the highway. There were swaths out in the field by the pit and dad got out of the car and motioned to me to be quiet and he opened the trunk of the old plymouth sedan that we had at the time. He lifted up the off-white gun case that was hand sewn by mom and pulled out his pump-gun, placing the case quietly back into the trunk. He had an old canvas bag that had a shoulder strap on it and he reached into it and pulled out a handful of shotgun shells. The shells were green and red and navy blue colored with shiny brass tops,.... He held the shotgun in a way that exposed the magazine port and he firmly and calmly pushed two shells into the magazine, the brass on the shells “clicked” against the steel inside the magazine and the shells were locked into place. He then pulled the pump back on the forend of the gun and the whole forend slid back with a “shuck” sound. A bright red shell appeared as the breech opened on the side of the receiver of the gun and as he slid the forend ahead the breech bolt closed and the red shell disappeared, locked into the chamber of the gun. He then inserted a final, third shell, a shiny green one, into the magazine port, checked the safety switch on the gun and then he said to me in a whisper, “ Okay?... let’s go!”
Dad started off down a gradual slope in the field, very gradual, and I followed behind him very carefully, watching and timing my movements with his, about 8 feet behind. We walked about 200 meters through the stubble and over swaths, toward a slough,.... A couple minutes later dad stopped and looked around, then, he said with quiet urgency:
“Quick!! let's get down and hide…!”
I didn't really know why we were hiding, but he dropped down to one knee, and carefully setting his gun down he lifted up the swath with his hands,... “Get under here” he said, and I began to crawl underneath, it was kind of fun,...“Yeah!” He said, as I wriggled under the swath. “That’s it!” he whispered encouragingly, and, then he, too, quickly crawled underneath, and he pulled the straw from the swath back over top of us, to conceal us from sight- and then, just then, I heard a “WOOOOOOSH” from above and the sound of the whistling of wings overhead, filled the air as the dark form of ducks whistling by, appeared directly above us, maybe 20 feet up,..., they whistled over, barely flapping their wings as they made ready to land in the slough that lay maybe 60 meters away.
It was late October, near my birthday, and the day was growing overcast and cool. We lay under the swath, motionless, watching and listening, until all the ducks had passed by and had landed on the slough. As they flew over us, the air was filled with the sound of wings and bodies rushing against the air,... a whistling sound like a high pitched “si, si, si,si, si” but hundreds all at once very rapid and quiet and light, like so many whisperers of a great foretelling, and the “fwooooooooooooooouushhhh, fwoooooooooouushhhhhhhh” sound of the ducks cutting through the air and then the bright yet soft chirps of “uack” “uack” like a frog’s croak almost, but it was the ducks’ communicating with each other….
As we lay under the swath and witnessed the ducks and the sky and the sounds through the veil of barley straw, an impression was made on me of the Divine, by the Divine because that's what we were witnessing- we witnessed the Divine power manifested as field and sky and duck and sound and father and son….. I saw it all and heard it all and it felt tremendous, sending chills up and down my spine and filling me with indescribable energy and bliss.
Once the ducks were gone and landed, dad whispered urgently, “Ok, let’s go!” and we crawled back out from under the swaths and once again began to stalk, very carefully, toward the slough that was just a few meters away, surrounded by tall grasses and bullrushes. As we neared the edge of the slough grass, dad crouched over more and more to stay out of the ducks’ sight. If one single duck saw anything at all or heard anything at all out of the ordinary, they would take off and we would never get a shot!
It’s important that you realize that the effective range for a shotgun with birdshot is far less than you might think. The range to kill a duck (or goose) is up to about 60 Yards (55 meters), but that’s pushing it. It is optimal to shoot up to about 40 yards (37 meters) distance at the most, and that is really not far at all. To further complicate things, the law is written in Saskatchewan that when hunting ducks, in designated seasons, during certain designated legal shooting times, that a person only use one shotgun (per person) whose magazine has been plugged in such a manner that no more than two shells can fit. So, you can only (legally) have three shots in your gun- one in the chamber, and two in the magazine. Most shotguns have a magazine that is capable of holding 4-7 shots but there is a piece of wood (or plastic) inserted inside the magazine tube- so that only two shells will fit in the magazine when loaded.
We got up to the edge of the grass by the slough, and dad slowly raised his head, up just enough to see how many, and where, on the slough the ducks were situated. I looked too, from behind, and my racing heart sped up even more! The ducks were there, straight out in front and we were going to get a chance at them! I saw dad get ready to shoot and I plugged my ears with my index fingers– he smoothly went upright on his knees and aimed and then -BOOm! shuck- shuck-BOOM! shuck- shuck- BOOM!
Now, the ducks had chaotically lifted up and off the water and were fleeing away into the evening sky! I looked over onto the slough where a couple of ducks lay floating on the water! One of them lay floating on its back and I saw its bright orange foot kick upward into the air! Yes! I was ecstatic!
It was getting darker now, and dad told me to wait by the slough while he went back to get his hip waders from the car. While he was gone, I sat there, alone, studying the black water, and the cold soft wind, reviewing mentally, everything thus far and I felt the temperature plummeting. I imagined a lynx prowling in the thicket nearby and it smelling the freshly killed mallard ducks. Wouldn’t it come for them and swim out in the cold black water and steal those ducks before dad could go out and retrieve them? Mightn’t it also try to attack me? I was more than a little worried…. I told myself God was near, and that he would protect me and our precious ducks. Soon enough, Dad showed up, donning the waders and he ventured out into the cold, black water. Daylight faded with each passing minute and I watched excitedly, anxiously, as anything, I worried, could happen! I desperately wanted for the birds to be ours, and to be back in the safe, warm car, and then, to go back home to show mother, the glossy green-headed fat ducks, and then to eat the delicious dinner that mom would have waiting for us and then to pluck (and gut) our prize quarry! Then, one winter’s night, we could have Grandma Lilly and Grandpa George over for dinner, on a Saturday or Sunday night and we could tell the story of how we fooled all those ducks by hiding under a swath! And everyday we could remember the day and the hunt and look forward to the next one,....
The next great adventure came very soon, when later still, that month, perhaps the following Saturday, we had yet another fantastic adventure! Father went to a local gun shop, “Chads” and purchased a new Firearm. It was a Savage-brand “Combination gun” with two barrels, one on top of the other, or “Over/Under.” Savage combination guns featured a rifle barrel on top and a shotgun barrel below. The Savage that dad bought at that time was a “.22 Long Rifle” barrel on top, with a .20 gauge shotgun barrel below. It was a short-barreled gun with a break-open action to load and unload it, and it had a hammer that you had to cock before you could fire it, and then there was a switch on the hammer that you could flick to select the top or bottom barrel for firing. Dad said he wanted to get this particular gun because it would be good for partridge (because you could shoot them while they were on the ground with the .22 or when they took flight in the air with the .20 gauge shotgun) and it was also a good gun for a “young guy” starting on ducks and geese because it was a single shot so it was a little simpler than a repeating gun, and a little safer, and a .20 gauge is actually smaller than a .12 gauge. You see, the larger the number is, the smaller the bore of the shotgun, and furthermore, a shotgun fires a shell that propels a plastic wad, that is filled with pellets, down and out of the barrel. Those pellets spread uniformly into a “pattern” that continues spreading as it goes further out after exiting the muzzle. You can get shells of different pellet sizes which are manufactured for different uses. The smaller the number of shot-size, the larger the pellet. There are # 9 (smallest shot size) then 8, 7.5, 6, 5, 4, 2 and BB. BB is the size of shot that is the biggest before Buckshot, which had four different denominations, No. 4 (27 pellets), 0 buck (less pellets), 00 buck (less) and 000 buck(9 pellets). Usually for ducks we used #4 and #2. Then for geese, #2 and BB. The odd time we would use #4 or Buckshot for geese, but that was more rare.
The day dad bought the Savage gun, we drove out South of Prince Albert to a slough near a small railway siding called “Fenton.” Fenton is a little hamlet along the North side of the South Saskatchewan River, it is located about 13 kilometers West of Birch Hills. Nearby to where we were there was a ferry service, run by the Government of Saskatchewan for motorists who desired to go across the South Saskatchewan river at that particular point. The government ran a heavy ferry cable across the river and there was a huge diesel-powered barge boat that was attached to run alongside the cable and “ferry” people and vehicles across the river. It was an intriguing set up, especially to a curious young lad such as I….
That day we parked the orange colored chevy truck not far from the Fenton Ferry and dad and I got out. Our plan, dad explained, was to place a couple of duck decoys out in some standing water that was really shallow and that stretched out wide and far along a field. The shallow slough was pretty much frozen over, but dad didn’t seem to care. “Let’s set up our decoys out there,” he pointed, “and use the duck call,” he said, with enthusiasm.
We had a “Scotch” duck call that was made of a black rubber-cylindrical accordion- like cylinder-part which fit up into a blow-call made of dark grained glossy wood and a plastic reed (somewhere inside). You could take the wood part out of the rubber accordion-like part and blow on the call, or, you could work the call with either one or two hands making various quacking sounds, kind of like a small accordion.
First, though, Dad took a piece of plywood out of the back of the truck and set it up against the fence line. He wanted to pace off 30 yards and then see how the gun “patterned” with 3 inch magnum #2 shot, that way he could determine how to visualize and form his sight picture when he lined up to shoot on a moving target. We got the plywood propped up and he took a shot. He examined the plywood and explained it all to me. Then, we grabbed our stuff and walked out on the frozen slough to a point where dad decided we should set up. We broke the ice with our feet in a couple of spots and placed our decoys. Then, dad took out the duck call and began to work it.
“RIIIIIIiiiiiiiii
Riiiiiiiiii
Riiiiiiiiii
Riiiiiiiiiiiiii ng”
The call croaked and rang out distinctly in the silent prairie evening.
“RRRRRiiiiiiiiiiii, rriiiiiiiii, rrrrriiiiii riiiii riiii riiii riiiiii,...”
The call was loud and pronounced and it sounded very good. “Here,” dad said, and he motioned for me to take the call,.... “Like this for the hail call…” and, “like this for the feeding call,...” and he gave me another demonstration, to which I nodded my understanding. I started calling….
Now, I called and called and nothing came but there was a peaceful calm over the land where we were situated. No ducks were moving around at all, but there were little things happening all around— the distant sound of an automobile, a tiny flying insect coming past me, a kind of miracle of life considering the temperatures and the coming cold of late October evening— I realized, just then, that just being there, just watching and listening and noticing was extremely special-.... It dawned on me that consciousness itself was a kind of sacred state and the prospect of killing a duck was, I realized, strangely unimportant— but still I didn’t quit my calling! I called, and then waited, then I gave a series of long hail calls, and then switched to the feeder call, and in that manner I continued the cycle: I would wait and be still and just notice, then I would do a few hail calls, and then feeder calls. Hail calls, feeder calls, then wait and watch and be still,.... Time went by quickly, and hours were lost into that meditative kind-of state. The October air was turning cold, as it was about the night of Halloween, and we were just getting ready to begin the process of gathering our decoys when suddenly the miraculous happened! Dad whispered suddenly, and with urgency:
“Oh!--”
“Here come some ducks!”
I looked up to the Northern sky and two dark silhouettes came whistling, quickly inbound, against the orange horizon, at low altitude, to the one side of us. As they were passing broadside, and on Dad’s side, he smoothly raised, swung, and fired the .20 gauge, all in one smooth and spontaneous motion. I watched him as he did it and a bright orange and blue flame leapt out of the gun’s muzzle contrasted to the South-West horizon’s deep orange colors and the daylight was slipping into a new and ever-changing display of colors and shadows and at the report of the gunshot, the pair of ducks both crumpled, in unison, thudding into the reeds with a firm bump and the scratch and crackle of the frigid reeds and ice against the ducks’ bodies. We quickly moved over to find them and within a couple of minutes we had two warm and fat Mallard hens in our possession! I thought we would never find them, and I was so happy when dad called out happily, “Oh,-- Here they are!” and we gathered up the decoys with great jollity and made our way back to the truck with a new-found warmth and exuberance! The ducks had appeared out of nowhere, and they had presented us with one chance as the new .20 gauge was a single shot,... and dad had shot perfectly, hitting both birds in the pattern of pellets from the one shot! I didn’t think of it at the time, but I look back on it now, and I think that it was all The Divine Source (God), moving through us and the ducks and that whole entire time, in all events, people, places, and matter and that The Divine Source had guided those ducks, my calling, and Father’s aim as well.
We drove back home that evening and mom took a picture of dad coming in the back door of the house on 6th street East, happily holding those ducks, two beautiful mallard hens. Dad wore a grey-colored bunny-hug and he had a nicely grown-out brown mustache. He had a string tying the ducks together at the neck, that he held up happily for the photograph…. Those were such amazing times…. They gave me the foundation I would need later on in life to face the dark and dismal times that befell me during my18th year and lasted for over twenty years. Times that would test me in degrees and ways that I never ever dreamt possible. Times that were so hard and demoralizing I am compelled to tell you about them, to assuage their bitter memory and to come to better grips with the past. To understand the unpleasant stream of events that happened and to tell you that in the final analysis, although the times were excruciating, they did abate, but it would be a long, and excruciatingly lonely journey.