My Boyhood Among the Pigeons
M
MY boyhood was made active and wholesome by a love for outdoor pastimes that had been bred in me by generations of sport-loving ancestors. From which side of the genealogical tree this ardor for field and forest and open sky had come with stronger influence I cannot say. While my father was the one to use the fowling-piece and cast the fly for the glorious speckled trout, my mother was a willing conspirator, for it was she who packed the lunch basket, often called us for the start in the gray morning, and went along to "hold the horse" while we shot pigeons. And when we were bent on a day in the woods in bracing October weather she drove old Dolly sedately along the winding trail, while I hunted one side of the woods and father hunted the other. On such days we were after partridges, of course, ruffed grouse, the king of all game birds. Often mother marked them down and told us just where they had crossed the road, or whether the bird was hit, for the cloud of smoke from the old black powder made seeing guesswork on our part. She loved the dogs, too, those good old friends and workers, Sport, Bob, and Ranger.
I remember calling my mother to a window early one morning and shouting: "See there! a flock of pigeons! Ah, ha! April fool!" This time I did not deceive her with the threadbare trick. The joke was "on me" for once. There was a flight of pigeons that morning, the first one of the season, and behind the foremost flock another and another came streaming. Away from the east side of the river at the north of the town, from near Crow Island, they swept like a cloud. Crossing the river to the west they reached the woods near Jerome's mill and skirted the clearings or passed in waves over the tree tops, back of John Winter's farm, and then wheeled to the south. Out of the tongue of woodland, just back of the Hermansau Church, they poured, thence over the fields, too high to be shot, and then away to the evergreens and stately pines of Pine Hill; on, on, on across the Tittabawassee, to some feeding ground we knew not how far away.
Now that the pigeons had come they would "fly" every morning. This we knew from years of observation in the great migration belt of Michigan. They would fly lower to-morrow morning, and in a day or two more sweep low enough for the sixteen-gauge and the number eight shot to reach them. Sometimes, even now, forty years after the last of the great passenger pigeon flights, I fall to day-dreaming and seem to hear myself saying in the eager, piping tones of those golden boyhood days:
"Mother, I am going for pigeons to-morrow morning! Do call me if I oversleep. I must be awake by four o'clock. We'll have pigeon pot-pie to-morrow. I'm going to bed early so as to be sure to be up by daybreak. Old Sport is going along to 'fetch' dead birds."
"Hello, dad," cries a voice in my ear, "what are you up to? What are you hustling around so for with your old shot pouch and powder-flask? There's nothing to shoot this time of the year."