TWELVE
Blood Sports
WHEN HER JOB ENDED AT the Jewish lodge, the mother accepted employment from a growing number of summer residents as a cleaning lady. For his part, the boy was now able to make his own modest contribution to the family finances, giving half of his earnings from all sources to his mother, starting with those from his paper route, as had been his original plan. Like the other boys in the village of his age, while not paid much, he found sporadic employment on weekends in the spring raking leaves, painting porches, and carrying out the myriad of tasks needed to prepare cottages for occupancy. In the summers, he worked part-time at Hanna’s General Store, stocking shelves and bagging groceries. He was hired from time to time by local contractors helping out with maintenance work at the homes of summer residents, washing windows, cutting grass and firewood, and in his spare time, he caddied at the nearby Muskoka Lakes Golf and Country Club. In the winters, he shovelled snow off roofs. He also began to make a tidy sum collecting empty pop and beer bottles spring, summer, and fall, and redeeming them for two cents each.
If he had really wanted, he could have earned much more. An elderly stranger came to the village with a supply of cash and an ambition to make his fortune in real estate as fast as possible, even if he had to cut a few legal corners to do so. In short order he bought a block of land located on the other side of the road behind a dozen high-end cottages on one of the most desirable local lakes, as well as an old cottage on the Indian River close to the boy’s home. His intention, which he shamelessly made known to anyone who would listen, was to subdivide his land into lots and find some way to force the nearby wealthy summer residents to buy them at exorbitant prices. Meanwhile he would live in the old cottage until he found some way to offload it at an inflated price to some unsuspecting tourist.
The summer residents had no interest in buying the lots behind their cottages since none of them fronted on the lake. The old rascal knew this, of course. So he rented a truck and started hauling garbage and derelict cars out to his property, telling his intended victims that he would turn his holdings into a dumpsite if they did not buy him out. In short order, they yielded to his blackmail, and the stranger pocketed a quick and easy profit.
Having made his money – and made himself unwelcome in the village as a result of his shady dealings – the stranger wanted to get rid of his cottage as soon as possible and move on. But how could he make a fast dollar on it? He devised a plan, but needed partners in crime. But where could he find collaborators in a small, law-abiding village? The boy and his brother were the obvious candidates. As aboriginals living in a ram-shackle old house, they were obviously good criminal material. He invited them to come see him and made a “business” proposal.
Would they burn down his cottage? He had insured it for much more than it was worth, and wanted to cash in. He proposed establishing a good alibi for himself by returning to visit his family for a day or two in the distant city from whence he came. In his absence, they could do the deed and in return he would pay them handsomely after the insurance company settled his claim.
The boy maliciously played along.
“And how much would be our share?”
As his brother looked on smiling, he then raised the expectations of the old scoundrel by pretending interest and bargaining hard for a higher payoff. After squeezing out a higher offer, he dashed the crook’s hopes by telling him to find someone else to do his dirty work. The disappointed stranger then abandoned his scheme, eventually selling his cottage for as much as he could get for it legitimately and leaving the village.
The boy thought no more of the matter, for by that time he had decided to go into the scrap metal business. It had all started with a conversation he had with his Scottish grandfather. He was a fierce defender of the rights of workers and the common man and was opposed to all conflicts, including the Korean War, as a matter of principle.
“Do you realize, laddie, the capitalists are constantly fighting among themselves and want wars because conflicts make them even richer! For them it’s just a blood sport. It’s a shameful thing. Metal is needed to make weapons to fuel the war machine in Korea and prices have skyrocketed! Today, as we speak, there are profiteers making a killing selling scrap copper, lead, and zinc!”
The boy listened carefully to the wise words of his grandfather. He shared his political sentiments, or at least he thought he did. But if prices had skyrocketed, just think of the money he could make selling scrap metal! And he knew exactly where to find it. He headed for the dump.
But the boy quickly learned that the competition among capitalists to corner the scrap metal supplies at the Port Carling dump was ferocious. He had been delighted to find abundant supplies of old copper wiring discarded by electricians and damaged lead and zinc pipes thrown out by plumbers. But as he was pulling his treasures from the trash, the woman who owned the property around the dump came out of the bush, shaking her fist and spitting.
“You git outta here! That scrap is mine. If I ever see you around here agin, I’ll kick your bum right up to your shoulders!”
The boy withdrew grudgingly and empty-handed. He did not want to abandon his acquisitions but knew she meant business. Although getting on in years, the woman, tall, lean, and broad-shouldered, was exceptionally powerful, and capable of giving a good hiding to most of the men of the village, not to mention a twelve-year-old kid.
A second-generation descendant of an old pioneer family, she operated a hard-scrabble pig and dairy farm within the village limits. The sight of her animals grazing in the rough pasture carved out of a swamp in front of her farmhouse was an accepted part of village life, and no one complained about the occasional whiff of pig manure that drifted over the village from her barn. In fact, her pigs had become something of a tourist attraction. So inbred were her boars and sows, their offspring more often than not were hermaphrodite – sporting male and female sexual organs on the same body.
The word hermaphrodite being a big one, the locals as often as not described them as “them thar haemorrhoid pigs over at the old farm,” but everyone knew what they meant. Visitors from the big cities in the south made side trips to the village to see them. And in response to requests for directions to see the unusual pigs, village wits would respond that “there’s piles and piles of them at the old farm leading out of town” and laugh uproariously, pleased at the subtlety of their secret joke.
Unfortunately, the woman’s pigs and cattle often broke through the poorly maintained fencing around her property and roamed the village at will. To make matters worse, her animals were not Disney World kind-and-gentle Clarabelle Cows and loveable Porky Pigs. They were mud-and manure-covered rampaging sows, boars, cows, steers, and bulls – gigantic, organic throwbacks to the original stock of the pioneers, with wicked eyes and attitudes to match. Boars and sows alike resembled miniature hippopotamuses; with tusks village for the boys tocurling out of their mouths, and teats and testicles on high alert, they would charge anyone foolish enough to try to shoo them away. As for the errant cattle, they came equipped with racks of huge, sharply pointed horns, one side always longer than the other, Texas Longhorn style; they strutted rather than walked down the main street, tails snapping, daring anyone to take them on.
The village fathers, while appreciating that hermaphrodite pigs constituted a valuable tourist attraction, frowned on exposing summer visitors to close-up views of them wandering the streets. Times were changing, and they were anxious to cultivate a more genteel image of their community to attract a more sophisticated tourist trade. The woman’s neighbours, for their part, did not appreciate pigs rooting in their potato, carrot, and beet beds, and running amok through their corn patches. Those with lawns were unhappy with the presence of cattle grazing in their front yards. Complaint after complaint was lodged with Old Jack. The woman, however, scoffed at their grievances and thumbed her nose at the fines the local authorities levied on her for letting her animals run wild.
The boy and his best friend, however, maintained good relations with her, and often dropped by her farm to pass the time of day, gossip, and joke. There was not a more fascinating place in the village for the boys to hang out. Where else could they witness free-ranging chickens wandering from the barnyard unhindered into an acrid, dung-bespattered dairy, defecating at will, and drinking their fill from milk being bottled for delivery to unsuspecting summer residents? Where else could they watch trucks laden with barrels of reeking swill from the kitchens of tourist resorts roll in to be slopped to snorting, groaning, grunting stinking swine? Where else could they obtain privileged close-up views of the giant hermaphrodite pigs and their intriguing sexual organs? And where better to admire the feats of strength of the strongest woman in the village as she heaved heavy bags of pig feed around like feather pillows? She, in turn, had always extended the boys a friendly, if rough-and-tough, welcome.
However, business was business and capitalism was capitalism. She was also in a bad mood and not disposed to be flexible after a recent incident that had made her the laughingstock of the village. Another old-timer, whose property abutted hers, had shot one of her bulls carefully between the eyes with his .303 hunting rifle. It had been grazing in his front yard, and he wanted to send a message to his neighbour to keep her animals at home. The woman summoned Old Jack, who decreed that it was illegal to shoot someone’s livestock even if said livestock was eating one’s flowers and leaving enormous quantities of unwanted fresh fertilizer on one’s lawn. He issued a summons for the old-timer to appear in court.
The scene was thus set for a confrontation between the ageing offspring of the pioneers. Unlike the characters of High Noon, the award-winning film then playing in the movie theatre of the nearby town where a hero faced off against a set of villains, there were no good guys in this showdown, for the old-timer was no Gary Cooper. He had been notorious for years in the village for his anti-social antics and his hateful opinions. With a floppy felt hat on his head, corncob pipe clenched in his yellow teeth, and with one brace holding up his raggedy overalls, he could be counted on to provide to anyone who would listen his unvarnished and ignorant views on the perils of modernity, the inferiority of women, the vanity of his wife, who had dared to put curtains on the windows of their house, the nefarious influence of rich tourists who were ruining the pioneer legacy of the community, the evil influence of “furriners” who were undermining the Canada he had known in his youth, and the lazy Indians, who spent their summers “up to no good” down at the Indian Camp. He was also the village drunk, and his mishaps had become the source of local folklore. The villagers were still talking about an incident the previous winter when he fell asleep on the side of the road during an evening snowstorm and was scooped up by a snowplough and deposited unhurt in a snowbank, where he slept contentedly until dawn.
Everyone recognized his faults, but he had blood ties to more than half of the people in the village, who felt obliged to defend him on the grounds he was family. The other half, with the exception of the boy and his family, who winced whenever they heard him rant on about Indians, tolerated his excesses and looked upon his actions and words as harmless. Some even said he was so colourful, he had become an attraction as valuable as “them thar haemorrhoid pigs” in drawing tourists to the village. The only time his antics outraged everyone was when he called a distinguished Jewish war veteran from the big city “a dirty Nazi.” The Legion members expelled him from their ranks. In revenge, he took to getting drunk, covering his face with his old felt hat, and sleeping off his binges on the lawn in front of the Legion hall.
On the day of the trial, the woman travelled to the nearby town to testify against her neighbour. She demanded and expected justice. But to her chagrin, a convoy of villagers took a day off work and travelled in their pickup trucks and cars to the courthouse to show support for the shooter and not for her. At the trial itself, the old-timer was fortunate to find himself up before a judge who preferred making jokes that would amuse the crowd to dispensing justice. He observed that it was the first time in almost fifty years on the bench that someone had been hauled up before him for “shooting the bull.” He laughed so hard, and his sally was so well received by the villagers and by the usual loafers hanging out in his courtroom, that he levied the minimum fine and let the offender go.
By trivializing and making fun of the case against the village drunk, the judge humiliated the woman. Now, clearly, she was in no mood to tolerate the competition that came so soon afterwards from the young whipper-snapper seeking to help himself to what she had come to believe was her personal scrap metal preserve at the dump.
But the next morning, at a time so early even the sun and farmers were not up, the boy woke up with a start in the bed he shared with his brother. So intent was he on returning to the site of their confrontation and retrieving his scrap metal, he had needed no alarm clock to tell him it was time to rise. Everyone else in the house was asleep, which was the way he wanted it to be.
As the youngster slipped out of bed, he had a momentary fright as his brother muttered to himself and shifted his position – but carried on sleeping. Picking up his shoes and gathering together his pants, shirt and socks from the floor where he had tossed them before crawling into bed the night before, the boy crept down the stairs. After quickly dressing, he stuck his head under the faucet and drank his fill of ice-cold water. Pushing open the screen door, he tiptoed across the porch and stood facing the highway. The air at this time before sunrise was cool and humid and a sliver of moon was still visible in the brightening Eastern sky. Off in the distance, invisible birds were starting to call to each other and the smell of decaying vegetation and the occasional deep croak of a bullfrog came from the direction of the creek that ran into the Indian River, a stone’s throw away at the bottom of the hill. On a small knoll close to the house, the malamute huskies, attached by long chains to their kennels, greeted him with low-pitched friendly yelps. They seemed to sense he wanted no one in the house to know he was up and outdoors, and kept their greetings discreet. The boy, as he always did when leaving the house, went first to the dogs to murmur an affectionate hello, to embrace them and to scratch their ears.
Then taking a shortcut off the path and up the hill, soaking his pants to the hips in the process, he waded through tall dew-drenched grass to the highway and was soon on the side road leading to the dump. His days of play-acting and hunting imaginary Nazis long over, he was a boy on a mission to reclaim what rightfully belonged to him. As expected, he met no one. The three families who had lived on the dump road in the summer of 1946 had moved on and abandoned their houses. Their dark silhouettes, deserted and silent, loomed against the lightening sky as he hurried past them. One, a burned-out shell, had been torched by arsonists some months earlier and the smell of charred, damp wood still hung in the air. The boy wondered if the old stranger who had sought to recruit him to burn down his cottage was in some way implicated.
The deserted road was transformed into a long black tunnel by the overarching branches of the trees along its sides. The boy was nervous and on edge, afraid that wild animals, or worse, the woman who had chased him from the dump, were lying in wait for him in the shadows. But he was so angry at her and so consumed with humiliation and self-righteous indignation at the injustice of it all that he soon forgot his fears, and before he knew it, was at the dump. As expected, his scrap metal was no longer where he had left it. He could see it, however, in plain view in the milky-grey predawn light in a clearing on the other side of the rundown barbed wire fence that marked the woman’s property line.
“She thinks I’ll be afraid to touch it. She can’t scare me. I’ll show her!”
The boy removed his scrap metal and took it home. Thereafter he confined his foraging trips to the dump to the earliest hours of the morning. He also spread the word of his new business interests to his newspaper customers, who started saving scrap metal for him. The owner of an old hotel told him to take what he wanted from a pile of lead and copper pipes that had been lying in the tall grass behind the building for years. Soon the boy branched out and began to collect scrap iron and steel as well. The village doctor gave him a damaged metal operating-room table. Villagers began dropping off at his home old metal bedsteads and worn-out cast-iron stoves. A mound of scrap metal took form in his backyard.
When it was time, the boy went to see his parents.
“If you hire a truck and driver for me to take the metal to a scrap yard, I’ll split the profits with you.”
The scrap merchant in the distant town paid him eighty dollars. He paid the driver twenty dollars and he and his parents shared the other sixty. Capitalism, even the tooth and claw variety, he discovered, brought handsome rewards, even if he was no longer welcome at his competitor’s farm.
With his share of his scrap metal earnings and other savings, the boy set out to buy an up-to-date shotgun. He was now old enough, he told himself, to move from hunting small game and go after deer like the big guys and men. His best friend had already shot his first deer, and the boy wanted to prove himself as well. To do so, however, he would have to put aside his .22 rifle, too light for his new purpose, and the ancient ten-gauge monster that he had never been able to master. After consulting the advertisements in the Family Herald, he sent away for a Winchester repeating shotgun.
Tiny WP stamped on the barrel from Olin Industries, Inc., New Haven 4, Conn. Metal parts are “machined” from Winchester Proof chrome-molybdenum Steel. The Natural Pointer. Genuine American Walnut stock and slide handle, richly finished. Fool-proof cross bolt trigger lock. Shells chamber perfectly, eject easily.
His father disapproved. “Life is sacred, my boy, and we humans are animals too. And the days when our family needed game for food are over.”
The father’s advice came at a time when he had started to pay more attention to the boy and his brother. Their formal education he ignored, and he was indifferent to whether or not they did well in school. Yet now that his boys were almost the age he had reached when he left home to make his way in the world, he wanted to pass on to them his values and the meaning of life as he understood it. Not one to set limits, he wanted his boys to learn from his example.
Just to be certain they did not think he was becoming sentimental, however, he repeated to them a little private joke.
“My boys, I want you to know that I have always regretted raising kids instead of pigs. Both are messy, but with pigs I could have made a bit of money with a lot less bother.”
And then, with a laugh, he took them on hiking and berry-picking trips on the trails back of the dump to reinforce his conviction that life in all its forms was sacrosanct. He identified for them white-throated sparrows, belted kingfishers, sandpipers, and pileated woodpeckers. When they encountered snakes, he stopped his sons from killing them on sight, as had been their practice, and picked them up to show they were inoffensive and beautiful in their own way. When they saw rabbits, squirrels, foxes, and partridges, he wondered aloud what pleasure anyone could obtain by killing such attractive creatures endowed with such life force.
In the spring, he exposed them to the beauty of the wildflowers that carpeted the bush floor at that time of the year, drawing attention in particular to his favourites – trilliums, jack-in-the-pulpits, touch-menots, lady’s slippers, dog tooth violets, and bluebells. Wildflowers, he told them, were not to be picked. Wild leeks, with their powerful onion and garlic smell, and watercress with its pungent petals, traditional spring foods of the native people and early settlers, were another matter, and he pointed out to his boys where, when, and how to gather them. In excursions that summer, he took his sons on blueberry-picking expeditions and identified for them Queen Anne’s lace, daisies in all their varieties, orange hawkweeds, black-eyed Susans, and buttercups as well as the bullhead lilies, white water lilies, and cattails in the mud lakes and swamps. The orange hawkweeds, trilliums, and bullhead lilies would remain the boy’s lifelong favourites.
He also took them around the big lakes in a second-hand Dippie, purchased for ten dollars, to point out navigation hazards and show them the best angling places, just in case they decided to make fishing their life vocation. The father’s Dippie was a heavy, much-patched dinosaur with a worn-out engine that failed at least once every time it was taken out. The boys eventually grew tired of rowing the leaky old tub home and started to make excuses to avoid further trips to the outer reaches of the Muskoka Lakes.
Even though the brothers learned more from their father that spring and summer than at any other time in their lives, they were also of an age when they thought they knew it all. For the father’s attention to them came just as they were readying themselves to break free of parental constraints. The boy’s brother, now almost fifteen, was looking forward to leaving school and getting a job, and in fact would do so within the year. The boy had ambitions that involved remaining in school and staying at home for a few more years to do so, but he had not discussed them with his parents, and was uncertain whether his dreams were mere fantasies of the type he had indulged in when he was younger. Thus while the boy listened to his father’s words about his gun purchase, he paid him no heed.
The boy’s mother said nothing about his hunting plans, but he believed that she approved. Game was the traditional food of the native people and good hunters were highly regarded among the Chippewa. She had already praised the boy when he returned home in previous years with rabbits, partridge, and ducks.
Every weekend, starting in early October, the boy with his new shotgun loaded with number one shot for bringing down big game, and his best friend with his father’s .303 hunting rifle, roamed the bush back of the dump. They now disdained the rabbits and partridge they had previously coveted. As the weeks passed, the leaves changed colour and fell from the trees. Soon frost lay on the ground when they went out early in the morning. Then in late October came the first snowfall. And with the first snow appeared the tracks of a deer.
The two set off in pursuit. The boy’s heart was racing. He had heard many stories of first-time hunters becoming gun-shy and freezing when faced with shooting their first deer and letting the animal escape. They became the laughingstock of the hunting fraternity.
“What’s a matter? Afraid of a little deer? Did you do it in your pants when you saw the deer?” And so on.
That would not happen to him.
The boys followed the tracks in the snow through swamps and over ridges. The deer frantically tried to outrun them, but the boys pressed on. Late in the day, many miles from where they started, the boy finally saw the deer, a mature stag with a huge rack of antlers standing and looking at him quietly from a short distance away.
He would not be gun-shy. He would not freeze. He would not be a laughingstock. He would shoot and become a man.
He raised his shotgun, aimed it hurriedly in the general direction of his prey, and pulled the trigger.
The stag leapt in the air and with two bounds was gone.
The boy felt sick. How could he have fired on such a magnificent living being. He was heartbroken when he saw the blood. He had hit the animal but not brought it down.
“Good shot! He can’t be far!”
His best friend was triumphant.
The boy put on a brave face.
“Let’s go get him. Can’t be far.”
The boys tracked the deer in vain until it grew dark. When he went home that night, the boy put away his shotgun and vowed never to hunt again – a promise to himself that he would not keep.