It was on the last Friday in September 2006 that I rolled into the camp for the first time. I had heard the legends and was flush with anticipation. Anticipation of a party that night, and anticipation of the opening of duck and goose season the next morning.
I had heard about how rowdy it could get, and I was a dumb kid of 26 just looking for some fun. For weeks in advance of that night I had been getting emails confirming my presence, asking if I was going to need a bunk, and generally hyping up my expectations for the craziness that was near-guaranteed to ensue.
I was not to be disappointed. Upon arrival I was tossed a commemorative hat.
I thought “Hmmmm. They have hats. Can never have too many hats I guess.”
Then I was thrown a beer.
I thought “Hmmmm. They have beer. Can never have too many beers I guess.”
Then we proceeded to get silly in a way that a bunch of guys in their mid-20’s when left alone with each other typically do. We told dirty jokes and traded verbal jabs at each other. We feasted on chips and wild-game pepperoni sticks. We laughed with a hysteria and abandon I hadn’t felt before. We drank beer, then some whiskey, then some more beer. We blew our best goose and duck calling contest routines at volumes that probably could have been heard a concession over. Someone took a deer mount off the wall and tried to poke someone else with it. We told grossly overblown lies that passed for hunting stories. We became instant friends. We stayed up way too late, and we slept way too little before the alarm clocks blared out their warning that we were going to have to get up and set up the decoys.
So, laden-down with gear and decoys, we marched through corn stubble and proceeded to hunt geese and ducks. Some heads were heavy, some stomachs were wobbly, there was as much sleeping in the ditch as there was shooting, and the pictures about summed up our success.
Was it sensible? No.
Was it safe? To be frank, that thought wasn’t really front of mind because we were too young to be anything other than impervious to criticism and invincible in the face of poor decision-making. I’m not an apologist for how we acted; it was just something that happened and everyone turned out okay.
Was it fun? You’re goddamn right it was.
Every year for a decade, the same core of men (and once or twice, a woman) has invariably joined together for this ritual. I missed a year after one of my sons was born, other guys have missed a year here and there for family or work commitments, and there have been a couple of new recruits over the years, but the nucleus of hunters has remained the same. We’ve hunted in rain and wind, we’ve hunted on bluebird days when nothing flew. We’ve hunted on days so hot our faces got sunburnt and we nearly melted packing gear in and out. We’ve sat ditches, hidden inside rows of standing corn, crouched in ill-concealed marsh boats, gone over our boots and waders on occasion, snuck through mazes of hay bales to jump birds, and flopped down layout blinds in windrows of straw. I’ve been sprayed by the shaking of a wet dog, and I’ve seen long shots and even longer retrieves executed with consistent success. I tried my hand at flocking the heads on my own decoys, and one of our more entrepreneurial friends built his own ‘motion decoy’ from an old shell decoy, some spray-painted ovals of corrugated plastic, and a chain saw crank operated from a distance by a pull cord of baler twine.
It was a deadly decoy that day, by the way.
We’ve eaten like kings on bacon and goose roll-ups, slow-cooker pulled goose sandwiches, heaps of coleslaw, jalapeno & cream cheese stuffed goose nuggets wrapped in bacon, pan seared duck breasts, and all sorts of sketchy, dirty snack food. Post-hunt breakfasts are well-known in the little town we frequent and as a group we’ve filled entire local restaurants, recapping stories from hunts that happened short hours previously, guzzling coffee, and tipping the wait staff generously.
On top of all that, we somehow find time to get the birds to put feet and flaps down and shoot a mess of geese and a slew of ducks.
Writing this just now, I’ve noticed that I’m grinning uncontrollably, and I hope that any friends I have reading this are doing the same. If we aren’t friends yet, and you’re reading this, I hope this echoes what you and all the other waterfowlers out there are about to embark upon as the early season descends on us, and I hope you’re smiling too.
This is a time of year that means a lot to me. Summer is over. Mornings will get cooler and I’ll be able to see my breath again. We’ll wave our flags and run the calls and the birds will turn wide into the wind before they glide down into the hole in our decoys. Someone will yell “Take ‘em!” and we’ll peel a few down. Later we’ll make a pile and take our photos and it will all seem to have gone by too quickly. The end of that opening weekend hunt is bittersweet, but we’re not there yet, not by a long shot.
Enjoy it friends, because the most wonderful time of the year is upon us.
I was sitting in my car the other day, doing that daily ritual that is my morning commute when all I could really think about was goose hunting. The birds are finished moulting and there is a soothing regularity to seeing them fly through the countryside of south-Central Ontario. Every morning I am treated to the spectacle of big flocks dropping into the recently-harvested grain fields that line the county roads and highways that lead me to my ‘real job’.
And every morning, I just sit there in the car trying to remain focused on the road. But, like any hunter that can relate to my sickness, I’m mentally transported to the goose blind, where I’m crouched motionless, thumb on the safety of my 870, waiting for the birds to put their feet and flaps down.
My 870. The first and, to date, only shotgun I’ve ever owned.
My relationship with it is longer than my relationship with my wife, my children, and several dozen of people that I call ‘friends’. It is older than this forum where I pour out my drivel by more than fifteen years. It has been with me for almost all of the most treasured moments in my hunting career. My first duck, my first goose, my first Eastern turkey, and the only Merriam’s I’ve hunted. On chilly December afternoons, grouse and rabbits have found their way into the stew pot via the muzzle of that old gun. I’ve thrown a slug barrel on it and punched paper, but have not had call to fire it at a whitetail…yet.
It came to me at Christmas in 1993, almost a full year before I could legally hunt with it, and I remember the long box with a bow sitting next to my stocking that December morning, and I can feel to this day the trembling excitement that my hands had when I unboxed it. It was “my first gun” and in truth my first real hunting possession of any kind. But it is not just familiarity and tradition that make me pull that scattergun out of the cabinet every year, although those are part of the appeal. It is also just a reliable, bomb-proof, smooth-cycling gun that does everything that I’ve ever asked it to do.
It has been dropped…hard. It has been disassembled and reassembled in the front seat of a truck. It has been soaked so thoroughly that water ran in a stream out of the barrel. I once forgot about it in a damp gun sock for three days; it wiped down clean and it shot flawlessly the very next day. Target loads, small-game shells, duck loads and big goose pellets have all flown down the barrel and it has thrown empty hulls every time. I have jammed various choke tubes down the muzzle, both in a sanitary setting and in the field, with no incident. I have been soft to it and I’ve been rough with it and it never once complained.
In 2013, on the last hunt of the goose season, I ejected my final unspent shells of the fall from it and the action would not close. The ejector pin had snapped after countless thousands of shells had been cycled through it, and part of me felt the twinge of panic that a parent feels when their child gets sick. I took the old girl the local gun shop and for a pittance they had it back in my hands promptly. A few short months later, it barked early one spring morning in the mountains near Cranbrook, British Columbia and flopped the bird that completed my Canadian Wild Turkey Slam.
Reliability aside, there is also a visceral, Zen-like pleasure in the fluid back-and-forth of the pump action. A calming, balanced rhythm that has become the metronome to my waterfowling and skeet shooting.
Now I have fired other guns. I own and/or have fired the gamut of other weapons that autoload, or bolt. I have long coveted my father’s break-action Ruger Red Label Over-Under 20 gauge, and to shoulder and fire that shiny toy is an act of pure euphoria. The ‘throw’ of a lever action on my cousin’s 30-30 was fun and is very nearly as calming as the slide action. I own a pump-action rifle as well, a classic Remington Model 14, and it is so smooth that the recoil from one fired .30 Remington round completes two-thirds of the cycling for me. But when I think about shooting my mind always comes back to the cadenced, metallic “chick-chick” of the 870 moving empties out the breech.
I could give you technical reasons why the pump gun is a wise choice. The in-line motion of the action helping to maintain a level sight-plane for second and third shots. Improved safety over the risk of inadvertently firing a second shot with an autoloader. The precision to fire planned shots rather than simply putting up a rapid-fire ‘wall-of-lead-or-steel’ but these are mostly anecdotal and in years of looking for it, I’ve never found a definitive technical reason that would give a pump shotgun the edge other than reliability and ease of use.
And for some people, those two reasons are reason enough.
For me though it is something less tangible, and if we were going to break me down psychologically then I’m certain the comfort, tradition, ease of use, reliability, versatility, and control of the pump shotgun would trump all the new-wave, fancy, high-technology, ultra-magnum, occasionally high-maintenance autoloaders out there. Do not take it personally and just shoot whatever it is you like to shoot.
I will just occupy my corner of the blind and saw away at the slide action as the ducks and geese lock onto the decoys and begin to float in, sometimes knocking down a bird here and there and grinning like a dummy.
This week, police officers in the City of Toronto shot a sick coyote. There was a hue and cry about it from many areas and these vociferous arguments appealed to the basest instincts in the animal versus humanity dichotomy: anthropomorphism, concepts of value relative to human versus animal life, and some abstract concept of kinship with wildlife.
A June photo of the coyote in question. Photo lifted from www.cp24.com
Most of it was bunk.
You see, per the media narrative, this coyote was a ‘single father’ raising three pups after his companion female coyote met her demise under the wheels of a car. This coyote’s death put the orphaned pups in danger (presumably more danger than they already were in as simply being urban coyotes), and the Toronto Wildlife Centre came to the fore in their objections to this course of action, making arguments that stray domestic animals were more harmful than this solitary coyote, that a coyote had only once been documented to ‘nip’ a person in Toronto, and that they themselves could have undertaken the humane treatment and rehabilitation of this heroic animal (although there was no indication, at least in the media, that they had actually attempted said treatment program, even though they admitted that they had been to the den of this coyote).
The theme is all too common. The abstract and presumed well-being of wildlife being secondary to some ‘what-if’ scenario involving injury, inconvenience, or danger to a human population. The coyote just wants to ‘live’ while humanity is the intruder in the animal’s domain. Who is the real animal in this equation?
Et cetera, et cetera.
To put a finer point on this, let’s just do a thought experiment. Imagine if you will, a member of the Toronto Wildlife Centre, or any other member of the public for that matter, attending the pup-laden den of said coyote w3ith nothing but good, helpful intentions. Then the father coyote shows up. Would there be hand-wringing and debate on the part of the coyote about the appropriate course of action, or debates about the merits of the intentions of the human, or would there be a reaction to defend the den and his offspring? I can say with at least some degree of certainty (having been in reasonably close quarters with coyotes) that they can be vicious and dangerous when faced with survival situations, and while they are supremely adapted and bafflingly clever, they are still wildlife with instincts prone to defense of territory, defense of offspring, and defense of food. It is presumable that the intruder in the den might face a sobering situation, and concepts of humane treatment or the abstract details of the human’s life likely would not enter the coyote’s frame of reference.
Who’s being anthropomorphic now?
Of course, that we can have debates about humane practice at all truly crystallizes the fundamental difference between the animal and human experience. Observations of coyotes has shown me that they can do some basic planning, they can do some basic problem solving, and their will to live and ability to adapt is second to very few other native animals in Ontario. But they are not rational, they are not erudite, they do not do math, and they are single-minded in one thing: survival.
And on the topic of survival, it is very likely plausible that an animal in such wretched shape could only have survived that long in an urban environment with access to human-generated food sources; severe mange of the kind seen on the coyote in question is a near-certain death sentence to truly wild coyote. Again, the coyote apologists would use the stock answer of that being at least a ‘natural death’ with seemingly little concern for the suffering endured by the animal. Also, and I’ve always stated this with conviction, a slow, potentially agonizing death, is still a death. That it is caused ‘naturally’ by the chill of a vicious January night on a mangy coyote’s body or ‘unnaturally’ by the bullet from an urban police officer really has little bearing on the final outcome.
So here I am, walking that dangerous and controversial line between the rationalist viewpoint that in terms of safety and what could nebulously be termed ‘the greater good’ having a mange-riddled coyote that is attempting to support pups wandering and hunting through urban and suburban Scarborough is probably a bad idea. At the end of the day I can understand, if not outwardly support the actions of the officers in this scenario. A more impulsively misanthropic sentiment in me does somewhat lament that the situation has come to this, and I can certainly sympathize with the predicament the coyote (and less outwardly relatable wildlife like skunks, raccoons, squirrels, and possums) found itself in. As someone raised with a lifelong conservation ethic, I never want to see the waste of wildlife.
But this is also time to consider the behaviour of people, and what the hue and cry (not to mention the legal and social ramifications) that would appear if said coyote had injured a person, or done worse than injure a person. Would an angry populace be so ‘humane’ had it been a more violent scenario, such as the one from Cape Breton in 2009?
Of course there are stock responses for that argument as well from apologists. That was an isolated incident. That was the fault of people for not giving wildlife respect/a wide berth. That was a rogue animal. People (whatever that means) deserve aggression or should expect animals to ‘fight back’…as though animals know there is even a fight happening, as opposed to just acting on instinctual behaviours.
Et cetera, et cetera.
Of course the fundamental issue with these arguments is that, like it or not, at the most base and primal level, human life is more valuable than animal life. It is a fairly recent, and probably impermanent paradigm, and most certainly not to be taken on a case by case basis (because there are several thousand people that I find less enjoyable than I find a wild turkey or a white-tailed deer) but on the overall balance. We often hear that when it comes to drug use, car accidents, preventable diseases, and the like that ‘one person’s death is one too many’, and without a hint of apology I stand by this ethic when it comes to wildlife encounters at large. Essentially I adhere to the following principal: If an animal can kill you back, and you are not being reckless or unnecessarily provoking to the animal, then I’m okay with people taking reasonable steps to end the animal before it has the opportunity to end you. This is not radical thinking. It is pragmatic and realistic. I personally am not some callous, gun-toting hillbilly that shoots every animal he sees on sight, but even if I were, that would not be germane to the greater argument surrounding this specific scenario in Scarborough, because the argument is about whether the coyote should live at the potential future risk to the people in that area at large.
I have seen many coyotes from afar that were simply doing ‘coyote things’ like hunting, travelling between territories, and generally doing a good job surviving. I had no desire to shoot those specimens. If I saw one in my backyard, acting erratically, sniffing around my door, or looking either sick and/or aggressive, then that’s a different set of circumstances and I would want to be granted (as I would grant any individual or agent of the state, like say, police officers) the liberty to handle the situation in a proactive manner.
Because it is not just hunters, conservationists, and animal rights activists that get a say here. It is people at large and how they view interaction with all levels of wildlife that are required to make their own ethical decisions; decisions which often compromise some level of their personal ethical integrity.
Because even though the situation in Scarborough ended with the black and white choices of life or death for that coyote, the grey areas in urban wildlife management policy, the inevitable reliance on the almighty dollar, humanity’s occasionally misrepresented beliefs about animal behaviour, and our modern view of human-wildlife interactions informed the preamble to that final, some might say inevitable, outcome.
At an hour that was too early, even for a turkey hunter, I rolled over when the farm’s downstairs smoke detector chirped. In an old farm house heated with a wood stove, that sort of things gets your attention. Careful not to wake my peacefully slumbering spouse, I slipped out of bed and glanced at my cell phone, muttering in my head about the apropos fact that my alarm was due to go off in less than ten minutes.
There would be no oversleeping that Saturday morning, and the smoke alarm chirped again as if to confirm my jaded realization.
In the muted glow of my cell phone screen, I doffed my pajamas and donned my camo like a middle-aged ninja before I tip-toed down the stairs and inspected the still-beeping device. The batteries had seemingly given up the ghost and I was in no mood to attempt a pre-dawn repair. I texted my brother to wake up and heard him stirring in the room above the kitchen. I wolfed down a banana and a glass of orange juice, then gathered gun, decoys, and vest before stepping out into the still night.
Because even when using the most liberal application of the word ‘morning’, what I was experiencing at that moment was firmly entrenched in the category of ‘night’.
Eventually my cousin showed up in his truck and we weighed the options. I had been informed that the turkey haunting my preferred location had been killed earlier in the week, so I opted for a second choice where my father, uncle, and several others had been seeing a pair of longbeards. My brother hopped in with my cousin and made for their preferred location in the hopes of doubling up on turkeys. The crunch of the laneway gravel under my tires made way for the smooth hum of pavement, which shortly deferred to crunchy gravel again as I made the short drive to the field. I snuck up a thin line of trees and cedars before deploying my hen and strutter decoy setup. I nestled in between a small round rock and the sinewy mass that was the base of an uprooted tree and I looked at my watch. There were six minutes until legal shooting light. I opened the action to my 870 slowly and when the time came I dropped in a shell before firmly but inaudibly sliding it closed. Gloved fingers slid two more shells in the underside of the gun and I checked the safety as my habit dictates.
Ten minutes after settling in for a long sit, I heard a gobbler sound off from a tree two fields over to the west of my position. As if in response across the road and three fields to the east of me I heard another gobbler. I yelped softly on my box call before turning up the volume and interspersing some cutts and cackles. Nothing answered and the area fell silent. For almost two hours I called and waited for a response, and eventually a jake and two hens showed up. At about the same time I got a text message from my cousin informing me that my brother had killed a beast of a gobbler with two 10 inch beards, a wide tailfan, and daggers for spurs. Shortly after that I watched the hens and jake run off as my compatriots pulled up to the field I was in.
A single text message from my cousin Dane said “Come out”. So I did.
Dane and my brother were parked at the gate next to my vehicle and both were all smiles. My brother’s bird was a real trophy tom and in the hand it was sure to exceed 20 pounds. Officially it was 21.2lbs, with 20 inches of beards and sharp, curved spurs of 1-1/4 inches each. A true brute of a turkey.
My brother with his trophy Bruce Peninsula gobbler.
We cleaned my brother’s bird and spent the rest of the day running and gunning without much success, and just after dinner I went on a quick scouting tour. In the same field I had hunted earlier that morning I found four hens and two longbeards, and all were exceptionally skittish. When I slowed my vehicle they looked up and began fast-walking away to the west. Now, if you’ve turkey hunted for very long you know the “fast-walk”. It is not quite walking but it is not quite as quick as a trot; turkeys do it when they are uneasy and these ones did not like me peering through binoculars at them from the side of the road. I pulled in behind some greenery before I saw them cross into the next field over and continue walking away towards the sunset in the west. Having seen nothing else on my drive around, I resolved to be back in the same field the next day even earlier than before with the hopes that when they woke up they would see my decoys first.
Thirty minutes earlier than the day prior, my alarm gently buzzed on the nightstand and I went through the turkey hunter’s morning ritual again. Curse the early hour, silently dress, eat something marginally healthy (or at least filling), and sneak out of the house without waking anyone. I was greeted by a clear night, a blazingly full moon, and a cold, stiff wind from the northeast on my face. Throwing everything on the passenger seat, I once again rolled down to the field. Being extra-paranoid, I shut my headlights off for the last hundred yards of road and then sat in the car for ten minutes after I had powered down before slowly opening doors and unpacking. I was sure the whole flock had roosted in the hardwood stand west of the field and I crossed the ditch to the east of there and into a triangle of cedars and swampy ground under the weight of two decoys and my vest. My gun was in a sock tucked under my right arm (such is the law) and that I managed to quietly cross the foot of still water in the ditch without sustaining a soaker is more attributable to luck than to any particular skill on my part.
In the silver moonlight I put out a strutting tom decoy and a lookout hen from Avian-X before settling against a page wire fence under some low cedar boughs. I was looking towards the setting moon to the west and I was sure that I would hear turkey talk ringing from that direction at sun-up. In the pre-dawn darkness I tucked my hands into my pockets and, sheltered from the wind in my copse of cedars, I actually fell into a light sleep for a time. Rousing myself I found it to be that certain shade of purple-grey that means dawn was rapidly approaching and a glance at my wristwatch confirmed my suspicions. I once again loaded my long-serving 870, hoping I would get to unload my constant hunting companion the loud way that morning.
My gaze was transfixed on the hardwoods to the west and I eagerly waited for the gobbling to start. Except it never did. At 5:30 a.m. or so I heard a hen turkey fire up from the block I was watching, and then another joined before a third distinct voice chimed in. The hens were a cacophony of cutting, whistling, and raspy-yelping and I tried to outmatch them so that the longbeards would come check out my set up first instead of falling in line with the real thing. Before long those loudmouth hens all flew down one-by-one, making cackles so loud and clear you would have thought they were taping a ‘how-to-call-like-a-hen-turkey’ instructional video. They hit the field and milled around but never showed any real interest in my setup or my calling.
Still I had not heard a single gobble from the hardwoods to the west.
I tried a few more strings of calling, but still the gobblers remained tight-lipped, and I was beginning to get that paranoia that sets into turkey hunters when they are pretty sure there is a gobbler in the vicinity, but the cagey bastard won’t reveal his precise whereabouts. At 6:10 a.m. I picked up my phone and texted my cousin Dane to see if he was having any action, and then it all unraveled in such a casual way I could scarcely believe it.
As I set my phone down after hitting “Send” I glanced nonchalantly over my left shoulder and was temporarily stunned. Two longbeards were sprinting across the field from a position east of me and both were in half-strut while looking at my decoy setup with malicious intent. They had never made a peep. I moved both hands onto the gun and slid the safety off, just as the birds approached into range. At about forty yards both birds quit their sprinting, and as one of them dropped strut and began to slowly and deliberately take a wide circle around the decoys, the other bird held strut and made a bee-line for the fakes. It had all happened so quickly that I had not even had a moment to get excited, but now my heart was thumping as I eased the gun to my shoulder in as painfully slow a motion as I could muster.
All the while my only thought was “How in the hell did those birds backdoor this setup and just how did they get back over to where I had first seen them the night before? Crafty.”
When the closest bird hit about twenty-five steps from the decoy, he must have realized something was very wrong because he also dropped strut, turned away, and craned his head up to full periscope. He started walking straight away but was still giving the evil-eye over his right shoulder to the fake gobbler when I snapped the gunstock to my cheek, found the crease between metallic black feather and red throat with my front bead, and pulled back on the trigger.
I barely felt the gun kick such was my adrenalin response in that moment, but the Remington roared and I saw his head snap forward, hit the ground and flop limply over his wing. His legs had quit on him by that point and he was burying his head in the dirt as I put the gun to safe and jogged out to him. Amazingly the other turkey had stayed stock still at the shot and simply watched me walk over and put my bootheel on the Ontario longbeard’s neck before he started putting and sprinting off to where I had mistakenly thought they had been roosted the night before. It was 6:15 a.m. and not four minutes had passed between seeing the birds and pulling the trigger.
Another gobbler falls to the Remington 870.
I snapped some photos and tagged the bird before rounding up all the gear and heading back to the vehicle. In the early morning sunlight the wind no longer felt as cold, the gear, gun, (and now) gobbler were somehow lighter than before, and I could sense that I was grinning uncontrollably. After stowing all my gear at the van, I sat on the open hatch and petted the bird’s feathers flat where they had ruffled.
My hands were still shaking.
A good end to a good morning.
He was a trophy tom as well, and although his inch long spurs lacked the scimitar-curve that my brother’s sported, he had a head the size of a softball, his body was long and heavy coming in at 22.1 pounds and his bushy 10 inch beard confirmed that he was a very mature bird. Statistics aside, though, he was the culmination of what had been a long, frustrating season of lousy weather, bad shooting on my part, cagey birds, bad luck, more lousy weather, and one badly placed coyote. There was redemption in that hunt, and all the crippling self-doubt that sometimes creeps in during turkey hunting’s lowest moments was washed away. No one had guided me to him, no one had done the calling or the scouting for me, and when things got unpredictable, I was still able to seal the deal on my best bird to date. There’s probably a deeper meaning about personal independence or a spiritual metaphor in what I’ve put myself through in the last five weeks, but there’s not much room for that here right now. A turkey in the freezer notwithstanding, right now all I have is the memory, and I’m going to spend some “me time” with it thank you very much.
That is, until the next early morning hunt when I try to forge some new ones.
