This cake is delicious,” Elaine told her mother-in-law.
“It always tastes better when someone else makes it,” Donna said, licking the last smear of icing off her plastic fork.
“Open your present, Mommy!” Connor nagged for the third time.
“OK, OK,” Elaine said. She set her plastic plate on the hood of her SUV and picked up the parcel she’d brought home from the bus station that morning.
The Hanson family had surprised Elaine on her birthday. When Donna asked her to pick up some icing sugar and eggs at the Co-op, Elaine had thought nothing of it. When Elaine’s husband Jeff sent her to pick up a parcel at the bus depot, it never occurred to Elaine that this package wasn’t just more machinery parts. Even when both combines stopped in the middle of the canola field, Elaine had no idea it had anything to do with her until they all started singing “Happy Birthday.”
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After a few mid-harvest weeks of hauling kids back and forth to town to run errands and feeling like a single mother while her husband spent long hours out in the field, Elaine was so touched by this show of kindness it was all she could do not to cry as she opened the odd-shaped present.
“Are you sad, Mommy?” Connor asked as one tear slid down her cheek.
“Of course not Connor!” Elaine said. The rest of the Hansons laughed.
But she shifted quickly from emotional to puzzled when she opened the present. It was a large spice container and a cookbook.
“Oh oh,” Jeff’s grandfather Ed said. “I don’t know much about women, but I know you don’t get them cookbooks for presents.”
“It’s OK,” Jeff said. “She said she wanted it.”
“Really?” Donna asked dubiously.
“Cookin’ with Wild Game,’” Elaine read the title out loud. Then she examined the bottle. “Wild Game Spice Rub?” She didn’t want to seem ungrateful, but she couldn’t recall asking for this.
“Remember last fall?” Jeff said. “When those American hunters kept coming around to shoot ducks on our dugout? You said we should try it.”
“Oh, right,” she said, remembering she had said it.
“With people from all over the place coming to our backyard for these ducks, it doesn’t make sense that we don’t eat them,” Jeff explained to the rest of the family.
“Good idea,” Dale said. “Let me know how it goes.”
“We should eat more local food,” Elaine said. “Talk about the 100-mile diet! Those ducks are gliding right over my kitchen. But… I don’t think I would be much of a shot,” she hesitated, then looked at Jeff. “Maybe you can take care of that part.”
“No problem,” Jeff said.
Later that week, Jeff stopped in at the post office to buy a hunting licence when he went to town to pick up more glyphosate for fall spraying. That evening, he found his father’s old hip waders in Dale and Donna’s basement. “You sure you don’t want to come along?” Jeff asked Dale.
“No, that’s OK,” Dale said. “No point shooting one if we’re not going to eat it. And Donna’s not much for cooking duck.”
“I don’t remember having duck when we were growing up,” Jeff said.
“You wouldn’t. It was a long time ago.”
After supper, Jeff and Elaine loaded the kids up into the back seat of the truck and drove out to the slough. They left the kids playing in their car seats and walked to the edge of the water in the fading sunlight.
“There’s dozens of birds out there,” Elaine whispered. “It’s like a free grocery store.”
“You didn’t see the bill for the hunting licence,” Jeff said.
A few minutes later, the flock of ducks lifted off toward the trees. Jeff raised his gun, took a deep breath and fired carefully. The first shot missed. But the second and third hit their marks.
“All that practice paid off,” Jeff was pleasantly surprised. “I’ve been aiming over the coyotes’ heads to get them out of the yard. I wasn’t sure I could actually hit anything.”
Jeff pulled on the hip waders and lurched out into the muddy slough edge to pick up the birds.
When they got back to the house, Jeff found some old newspapers in the recycling box and spread them out on the table. Then he brought the two birds in.
They were beautiful. They glistened under the dining room lights. One of their wings was spread out, revealing rich dark-blue feathers. But their necks lolled off to the side, and Elaine couldn’t look straight into their shining dark eyes.
Jeff brought his phone to the table, fiddled with it for a few minutes, then played a YouTube video of someone cutting the breast from a duck.
He got a sharp knife from the kitchen and brought it to the table. He looked at the video, down at the duck, then back at the video. He set down his phone, picked up the knife and touched it carefully to the first bird’s chest. Then he turned yellowish green, dropped the knife, ran to the bathroom and threw up.
Connor and Jenny ran to the bathroom to see what their dad was doing, and Elaine was left alone with the ducks, the knife and the plaid-shirted man in the video.
She picked up the knife and took a deep breath. The she brought the knife to the duck’s chest and a rush of tiny grey feathers fluttered into the air.
A few days later Elaine made supper for the Hanson family and packed it into Tupperware containers. Jeff took it out to the soybean field they were combining while Elaine put the kids to bed.
When Jeff gave Ed his container, Ed opened the lid and sniffed. Then he eyed Jeff suspiciously.
“It’s something with chickpeas,” Jeff said sadly. “And maybe some rice. It’ll be all right. At least it’s not tofu. Yet.”
“Tofu?” Ed asked, incredulous.
“There was an incident with the ducks,” Jeff said.
“I told you women prefer jewelry. She punishing you?”
“Not really,” Jeff said.
“She didn’t like the duck?” Ed asked. “Wild game’s not for everybody.”
“Actually,” Jeff said, “the duck was delicious. But if it’s so hard for us to butcher two small birds, Elaine doesn’t think we should eat so much meat.”
“Huh,” Ed snorted. “Let’s hope that passes quickly. Tofu. I don’t even know where the heck that comes from. At least the ducks grew close to home.”
“Tofu comes from soybeans, Grandpa,” Jeff said, rolling his eyes. “You’re combining some right now.”
“Yeah, well. Whatever,” Ed said. “I’ve got to get this machine running again.”
Ed took his Tupperware container and turned back toward the combine cab. Before he left, Jeff heard his grandfather talking into his cellphone, asking his girlfriend Helen to pick up a Number 11 from the Chinese Café and bring it out to him. “Good thing we’re just about done harvest,” Jeff heard him say. “I don’t know how long this ‘no meat’ thing is going to last. Took about three weeks with Donna, after Dale shot that duck and made her clean it.”
Leeann Minogue is the editor of Grainews, a playwright and part of a family grain farm in southeastern Saskatchewan.
