Last Hunter: An American Family Album

Chapter One

The Last Hunter i Harold Weaver, 1941 ii The Last Hunter A n A m e r i c a n Fa m i ly A l b u m Will Weaver iii Borealis Books is an imprint of the Minnesota Historical Society Press. www.borealisbooks.org©2010 by Will Weaver. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, write to Borealis Books, 345 Kellogg Blvd. W., St. Paul, MN 55102-1906. The Minnesota Historical Society Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. International Standard Book Number ISBN: 978-0-87351-776-8 (cloth) ISBN: 978-0-87351-811-6 (e-book) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Weaver, Will. The last hunter : an American family album / Will Weaver. p.   cm. ISBN 978-0-87351-776-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-87351-811-6 (e-book) 1. Deer hunting—Minnesota. 2. Fowling—Minnesota. 3. Hunters— Minnesota—Social life and customs. 4. Weaver family. I. Title. SK301.W347   2010 799.292—dc22 [B] 2010023349 iv To my family. Everywhere. v vi The Last Hunter 1 2 3 Chapter One M y mother, Arlys, was born in 1920. Her parents, Oscar and Sarah Swenson, came from North Dakota and landed northeast of Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, on one of the last patches of the Great Plains. ­ Locally the area is called the Ponsford Prairie; geographically it has the empty feel of North Dakota. The farm had a narrow white house, white barn, wooden granary, chicken coop, machine shed, and well house; a windbreak to the west; a thin scattering of imported trees, including a row of lilacs in the yard. North Dakotans tend to cut down trees in order to name streets after them, but on my grandfather’s farm there were no trees to fuss about: unbroken fields stretched in all directions as flat and wide as God’s dinner plate. However, four miles to the south were the Smoky Hills, their rounded crowns blurred by hardwood and aspen, and just east of the farm the beginning of pine and lake country, with forests that stretched across northern Minnesota and Wisconsin and into Michigan. If my mother paused on the front steps of the 4 will weaver farmhouse and looked about, a dark tree line would have circumscribed most of her little prairie. In the fall, when Canada geese came through and when partridge season opened, she heard the far-­ off thudding report of shotguns, and in November the heavier poom-­ poom! of deer rifles in the hills. However, hunting seasons were not important to her or her two brothers. On the Swenson side of my family, there were no guns. Oscar Swenson, my grandfather, was born in the south of Norway in 1894 and emigrated with his family in 1898. One of his earliest memories was of delivering water to “rich men” on the deck of the passenger ship. I imagine him as a Dickensian boy, hat in hand, wearing a rough wool shirt as he carries a water pail toward a man in a deck chair. The man is wrapped in a blanket against the salt chill; perhaps he wears muttonchops below a tall hat and is having a bowl of tobacco. Maybe he is reading. There’s a good chance he is annoyed at the little boy offering a wooden ladle full of water, or perhaps he is seasick, as the ship leans through heavy seas and the seagulls bark overhead and, grateful, he fishes out a coin for my grandfather. This is the ending I prefer, but the encounter itself is the thing—a transaction weighted with­ issues of wealth, class, and privilege. In 1989, when I was thirty...