Last Hunter: An American Family Album

Chapter Sixteen

132 133 Chapter Fifteen O ur new house (thanks to my first novel) in Bemidji was situated on a gravel street on the west side of town. The neighborhood was mixed, with a Republican city councilman on one side and a traditional Ojibwe family on the other. There were no fences, and lawns were made for kids’ play, not grass. Caitlin and Owen walked three blocks to elementary school, and we did not worry about stranger-­ danger. It was small-­ town living in all the best ways. However, our social life tended toward college teachers and literary types—none of whom hunted or had much connection to the land—and slowly, inexorably, Caitlin and Owen became “town kids.” If Owen’s future as a hunter was increasingly in doubt, my ability to influence my daughter’s life was also largely gone by the time she was eleven or twelve. Caitlin was drawn more and more into the drama of middle-­ school life but maintained her own personality (she had some of her grandpa Harold in her). By age thirteen she made her own dental appointments and attended to family infrastructure 134 will weaver items such as ordering call-­ waiting for our home telephone. It is not that her mother and I were bad parents; rather, Caitlin was a girl who liked to be in charge of her own life. Hunting , however, was Dad’s and Grandpa Harold’s thing. She didn’t mind it; she just wasn’t interested. Our outdoor dad-­ daughter time was hiking and bicycling and lots of basket­ ball—serious front-­ yard hoops—usually followed by a trip to the Dairy Queen. I still held out hope, however, that Owen would hunt. There is a rare photo of Owen with a gun. It’s my old Daisy-­ brand BB shooter. He is aiming (left-­ handed) at a paper target while I stand behind him holding back my father’s Chesapeake Bay retriever. When Owen got taller, I introduced him to my battered .22 rifle. The sharp, whipping report of the little long gun made him flinch at first—as a small boy he had always disliked loud noises—but he soon enough became a passable shot. One summer Saturday at his grandpa Harold’s house, I brought out a shotgun. It was a twenty gauge, a nice, lighter-­ weight gun without a lot of recoil. I fitted Owen with earmuffs, and first we shot a paper target just to see the spray of pellets, then a green tomato just to see it explode, then a clay pigeon set up as a stationary target. Fun, guy stuff. “Now you’re ready to shoot one in the air,” his grandpa called from his electric cart. Owen looked dubious. “Your dad will show you how it’s done,” Grandpa Harold said confidently. I helped Owen load a clay pigeon into the hand-­ thrower and showed him how to launch it—a quick flick of the wrist. “Pull!” I called. the last hunter 135 He threw; I swung and fired. I missed the first one but exploded the next couple. “Now you try,” Grandpa Harold said to Owen. Owen did but had no luck on the first one. Nor on several consecutive discs. He looked crestfallen and embarrassed and soon rubbed his shoulder. “That’s enough for today. You’ll get one next time,” I said. “I doubt it,” he muttered. On two or three occasions he and I tried again, but Owen could not hit a clay pigeon. This was a boy who could sting the palm of my catcher’s glove time after time from our backyard pitching mound and who had a silky-­ smooth, three-­ point shot on the basketball court. “Not a big deal,” I said. “It will happen someday.” One fall afternoon when he was in seventh grade, I got him to go partridge hunting with me. I would carry the gun. He had been noncommittal about taking a gun safety class and so did not have his official badge, as did most boys his age, a round patch sewn onto his hunting coat and worn with pride. It was a grand October day—the motley of maple and oak and birch leaves would be enough, I hoped, to hook him on the woods. We were walking down a quiet trail, slowly getting into the hunting state of mind (I thought), when two...