History, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools. - Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

I was performing barn loft cleanup chores the other day when I ran across a bag of dirty, tattered, wind sock goose decoys. You know the kind that waddle seductively in any measurable amount of wind.

This led to a general sorting and folding and stacking and counting of heads and stands and in the process I began to recall the goose hunt of a lifetime.

That is how the whole affair was advertised around my house in Miami. There was too little goose hunting in South Florida and my buddy from Tombs Co. Ga., home of the Vidalia onion, had just spent the better part of a year co-sponsoring and talking up the "Hunt of a Lifetime."

He had buddies in Toledo Ohio that hunted geese in Canada every so often and a southern contingent had been included to fill some vacant slots in the next expedition to the great white north.

I quickly located a map, fabricated one of my best excuses, and presented my wife with a birthday present that was sure to soften her heart come October when the goose hunt was planned.

We flew into Toronto and checked through customs without a hitch. From there we bumped into a gold mining town about the size of Cleveland TN., Circa 1960, called Timmins, Ontario. There we met a chain smoking old broad of an outfitter in a cheap hotel room for further instructions.

She flicked filter-less Camel pieces off of her tongue between answers to nervous Yankee hunter's questions.
"How are the ducks in Kash camp?"
She softly spit tobacco from her lower lip and snorted, "More mallards and blacks than you can shake a stick at!"
Her weathered and wrinkled face as expressionless as a Reno card shark. I seriously doubted that she had ever left the room, or Timmins.
"How about blues and snows?"
"Plenty blues and snows." She snorted.
"Are there lots of Canadians to shoot?"
"I am Canadian, you are surrounded by Canadians! We DO NOT shoot Canadians, we shoot Canada's!"
She growled, putting the stupid Yankee in his place.
She realized she had winged the boy from Ohio badly, so then she coughed and said, "But there are waves upon waves of Canada's to shoot."
The mood from the gruff put down shifted slightly and we all smiled self-consciously. Then the goofy guy blurted out, "How many shells do you think we'll need?"

Now we had been advised that we could not fly in with more than 90 pounds of gear in our bags and like most good southern boys we had deeply overcompensated in the area of ammo. We looked at each other and then at the Buckeye geek like he was a moron. Let me say it this way, after seeing Lee's Army of Virginia run short on powder and shot during the later days of The Great Conflict, no born in the blood Southerner would ever again cross the Mason- Dixon Line without at least one wars worth of ammunition. We could barely lift our duffel for all of the lead we were packing.

FORGET HELL!

The Southern contingent left the room as a group before the old guide's wife could verbally assault another chump, comfortable with the realization that we could probably recover some of the trip cost by selling inflated goose loads to stupid Yankees, if need be.

We roamed Timmins after dark and were quickly advised that the tallest, and only hotel in town, had the best strippers in the Great White North. Having never actually seen a nude Canadian we were drawn to the hotel like a bunch of Arkansas share croppers to a county fair. It was October and a carnival atmosphere was in the air.

The Timmins Hotel was five stories and had two bars. One for the young Canuk disco crowd and one for gold miners, wounded hockey players, young Indians attending trade schools and goose hunters. The feature dance included a Plexiglas shower, complete with a shower massage, lots of sweet smelling bubbles and plenty of steamy hot water that fogged up Indian's glasses.

This was well worth the plane ride from Miami. While we were watching Indians foaming at the mouth and speaking in foreign tongues, being drug from the shower by burly bush league hockey players moonlighting as bouncers, a topless cigarette girl, wearing only a tray of smokes, pointed out to my buddy Wingo, from Alabama, a gift shop there in the bar.

Having never actually seen a gift shop in a strip club before, my buddy returned from his shopping spree with a big grin on his face and what can be most delicately described as an anatomically close marital "device". Maybe gift shops in clubs in Canada are common. I just do not know for sure, but we all quickly agreed that it was indeed a ludicrously novel concept.

When I asked him just what he needed the "device" for on a goose hunt, he just tipped the cigarette girl and laughed, "You'll see." I assured him that I did not want to see, and if I saw the thing again I would most definitely spill the beans to his wife when he got home. He just giggled madly and I knew this would be trouble. I got the uneasy feeling that we could very well end up dead on the banks of James Bay, in some shallow and unmarked grave, where about February, we would be dug up by some starving polar bear in need of a quick snack.

At dawn we boarded an Air Canada prop job and flew four hours over road-less, village-less, swamps, lakes and forest wilderness. This was the only air carrier I had ever seen where dogs were free to wander the isles of a plane, free to sniff butts, climb up and look out windows and smell the stewardess's lower extremities. The lone stewardess appeared to be more afraid of the forty camo clad waterfowl hunters than she was the five tail wagging retrievers.

We landed on a gravel strip in a village of about one hundred houses surrounded by about one mile of gravel road. As we unloaded our gear and the dogs, half of the town of Cree's came out for some entertainment. Walking to the boat dock past a Hudson Bay Company store we chatted with the young Indian maidens that appeared to be in need of a way off of the reservation. They explained that the trucks that ferried our gear to the dock were brought in by barge and there was no road out until the Bay iced over in December. We boarded big canoes powered by 25HP outboards and launched the fleet down river to an uncharted island on the edge of James Bay.

Unpacking in our cabins, the boys from Ohio un-sheathed huge quantities of La Batts Blue. Cases of La Batts. Island life was looking up. I did not ask my new friends how they had circumvented the ninety pound gear limit. It was unimportant. A full moon was rising over James Bay and a great many geese could be heard honking about in the moonlight.

For three days my buddies from Georgia and Alabama and I paired up with our Cree guide, Andoninas. He did not speak much English. We kept him in shells and La Batts, and he kept us in calf deep water, wild rice and geese. He deftly managed to teach us many rudimentary Cree cuss words. By the end of the third day we were beginning to worry about freezer space in Miami.

The last night on the island we traded goods with the camp staff and their families in the dining hall. Hand carved geese, footwear, coats and gloves made from Caribou hide and other trinkets. Then we retired to the cabin to eliminate the last of the La Batts with our guides, their wives and daughters and a fond farewell was had by all, until our ex-82nd Airborne Ranger from Ohio got carried away with a dissertation about his first ex-wife. You see his first ex-brother-in-law, an iron worker from Toledo, was along with us and the iron worker was not taking the airborne rhetoric about his sister in stride.

The more La Batts we drained the louder the discourse on family values became and even the Crees that could not speak or understand English sensed the drama that was about to unfold. The Crees excused themselves, folded their tents and called it a night and we were left to deal with one obnoxious, ax grinding ex-paratrooper.

Before the ex-brother-in-law could get a wrench on the sky diver's mouth he mercifully passed out in the middle of the cabin floor. We thoughtfully worked on the beer and planned a suitable retribution for conduct unbecoming from an ex-brother-in-law.

The iron worker wanted to load the boy up in a canoe and launch him into the darkness of James Bay with the out going tide. He swore he would put a life jacket on him first. Having been stranded in the Atlantic a couple of times recently, the contingent from Miami vetoed the vote since we had seen no Coast Guard station near-by and we figured he would surely wakeup and manage to get himself drowned, causing a rather messy international incident.

This recall vote caused great consternation with the iron worker but after a great deal of discussion and a few more Blues, we devised an alternative plan that we all agreed was righteously suitable. My buddy from Georgia crept into the Indian camp and borrowed a huge white bra off of a clothes line. We covered the lifeless body with a mound of empty La Batts cans. Then we took camo face paint and painted his nose brown. The massive D cups were draped over his chin.

Someone produced a camera. It was the fallen paratrooper's Kodak. It was a fine camera. It was truly a Kodak moment.

We had a much fun with this photo shoot. One fellow even loaned his rather large and hairy red rear end to the photo shoot. We now refer to this excellent bit of Canadian photo journalism as "Indian Moon Over James Bay."

Someone produced a tube of Crazy Glue from their possibles bag and asked my friend from Alabama for his purchase from the gift shop back in Metro Timmins. When he unveiled his newly acquired prize the iron worker was ecstatic as he applied liberal amounts of super glue to the Airborne Rangers forehead.

As the glue set up nicely, we finished the few remaining beers and called it a night. The guy with the new hood ornament never moved from his bed on the floor.

At daylight an Indian came into the cabin to stoke the fire box to ease off the morning chill and we were jolted from our bunks with his hysterical laughter. Within minutes most of the camp was assembled outside our cabin as the groggy goose hunter stumbled through the cackling crowd to the showers where the only mirror in camp was hanging.

We lay in our bunks, quietly loaded our guns, and braced for the impending turmoil like a pack of nervous lap dogs hiding from a sudden thunderstorm. When the enraged man from Ohio kicked the cabin door off of the hinges he was sporting a rather severe head wound that was bleeding profusely and there was a look in his eyes like most all 82nd Airborne Rangers get when they land in a hot LZ. We had hidden his gun and his knife and we figured that maybe six of us could handle him in hand to hand combat. Indians were scattering like flies, gut laughing into the underbrush.

Our medic soothed him slightly as he gently bandaged up his badly bleeding forehead, telling him that a truly huge and very irate Indian had done this to him because of something to do with his wife's missing undergarment. Maybe something had been lost in the translation, but we figured we all had somehow adroitly managed to save his scalp. He took the bait gently and we set the hook. We told him we really did not know how his nose had turned that color but we figured that it had something to do with his new set of D cups.

A deadly calm slowly settled over the small Island. We never turned our backs on him. His forehead healed slowly.

He was still married to his second wife when he asked her to pick up his photographs at the camera shop back in Ohio. He wanted to show her what a good time he had on his goose hunt. We had all urged him to hurry up and get his rolls of film exposed and send us any extras. We wondered how he would explain his badly scarred head to his wife.

Now he has another ex-brother-in-law. Too bad this one was a lawyer and not a goose hunter.

We used windsock decoys when we hunted with the Cree. They were light and easy to carry around James Bay. You could pack more La Batts that way.

I have not had a La Batts Blue since, but the White Oak Mountain Ranger photo archives include some excellent examples of Canadian photojournalism.

When the moon rises full and a cool breeze wafts, I slip away and hunt with the Cree.



Copyright ©2000 The White Oak Mountain Ranger