As soon as the driver pulled open the door, seven-year-old Connor flew out of the school bus and raced full speed toward the Hanson’s house. He took the front steps two at a time, until he was caught by surprise when his father Jeff opened the house door from the inside just as Connor had reached out to open it.
Connor fell face-first through the open doorway, where he lay like a stranded turtle with his heavy school backback strapped onto his back.
Jeff tried not to laugh.
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“Can I go? Did Mom say I can go?” Connor shouted.
Jeff had forgotten all about what he’d said to Connor that morning before school.
“Hello Connor,” Elaine said, coming out of her office where she’d been reconciling their September. books. “Did you have a good day?”
Connor wasn’t taking questions. He needed an answer.
The boy was a natural alarm clock, always awake by six, even though his sister often slept until someone woke her up. This morning, Connor had been up early enough to go out to the shop with Jeff after breakfast, before the school bus came.
In the shop, Jeff and Connor found Mark in front of the Keurig machine, making himself a skinny mocha cappuccino. After having Mark on the farm for a year and a half, the Hansons had already made all of the jokes about fancy coffee drinks they could come up with. They’d resorted to looking jokes up on the internet, then repeating their jokes, then finally they’d just given up and looked the other way while Mark made his hot drinks.
Mark had a question.
“Jeff, I know this is short notice, we’ve still got the combine ripped apart, and you’ve got the Petersons bringing soybeans to clean, but could I take a couple days off next week?”
“Sure,” Jeff said. “After all the time you put in during harvest. Take the week if you need it.” It would’ve been nice to have Mark’s help with the combine, but Mark didn’t ask for much time off.
“Are you going on an holiday?” Connor asked.
“He doesn’t have to tell us,” Jeff said to Connor. “It’s his own business.”
“It’s no secret,” Mark said. Then he stood straight and proud, like a man about to go to war. “I’m going hunting.”
That didn’t surprise Jeff. Last fall, Mark had spent most of his free time hunting. Geese. Ducks. Ring-necked pheasant. Even a moose.
Jeff was a pretty good shot himself but he didn’t love hunting. He wasn’t a morning person. For Jeff, it was bad enough that he had to get up early with Connor every day. He didn’t want to get out of a warm bed to sit out in a cold, dark field in his winter parka. And since the year when Elaine had gutted and cooked a duck, then turned her family into reluctant vegetarians for most of a month when she felt guilty afterwards, Jeff wasn’t in a rush to bring game meat home again.
“Do you want to go out back?” Jeff asked Mark, nodding in the general direction of a clump of trees and bush around a slough in the field about half a mile from the house, where there were usually quite a few birds. “I told some guys from Estevan they could hunt ducks back there. I think they’re coming next Friday. Not that there’s many birds around here this fall, with most of the sloughs dried up.”
“Not here,” Mark said. “I’m hunting wolf.”
“Wolf?” Jeff asked.
“Wow!” Connor said.
“First year it’s legal in Saskatchewan.”
“Daddy, are there wolves here?” Connor asked, looking worried.
“No, not here,” Mark said. “I’m going north. Up by Nipawin. That’s why I need time off.”
“Are you going to eat it?” Connor asked.
Mark laughed. “Nope. I might stuff him.”
Connor was confused, so Jeff gave a forty-second explanation of taxidermy.
“Cool,” Connor said. “Can I come with you?”
“Mark’s going to be away for a few days,” Jeff said. “I don’t think he has room for you on his vacation.”
Connor’s face fell, until Mark saved the day.
“You can’t come all the way to Nipawin,” he said. “But I could take you out bird hunting right here in the morning before school tomorrow if your dad says it’s okay.”
Connors’s eyes widened. “Can I Dad? Can I?”
Jeff was torn between relief that he wouldn’t have to take the boy hunting, and worry about what Elaine would say.
“Do you think I’ll hit one?” Connor asked Mark. Mark looked terrified at the idea of this rowdy seven-year-old using a shotgun.
“You can’t shoot a gun until you’re 12,” Jeff said. “Those are the rules.”
“I thought maybe you’d come out in the truck with me,” Mark said. “If we get one, you can come along and help me drag it out of the slough. We’ll take it home to your mom.”
“Take it your girlfriend,” Jeff insisted. “Not Elaine.”
Connor still looked excited, even if he couldn’t shoot.
“So I can go, right Dad?” Connor said.
“We have to ask your mom first.”
Connor wanted to ask Elaine right that second, but before they got halfway to the house the school bus drove into the yard and Connor had to leave for the day.
After more than eight hours with the idea of going on a backyard hunting trip with Mark rolling through his mind, Connor was more than excited by the end of the day when he could finally ask Elaine’s permission.
Once Jeff helped him take off his backpack and get up from the floor, Connor looked up at Elaine with hopeful eyes while Jeff tried to explain how this question had come up, and why he’d managed to put Elaine in a position of deciding whether she wanted to break her son’s heart or let him do something that some people might think was crazy.
Mark was safety-conscious and had always been good with Connor.
On the other hand, Elaine thought to herself, guns are… guns. She knew what her city friends would say. Some of them would “unfriend” her on Facebook if they found out. But a lot of the neighbours’ kids Connor’s age had already been shooting their own BB guns for years.
“Okay,” she said, finally. “But only if you go along, Jeff.”
“Hooray!” Connor shouted, running in a circle in the porch. “I can go!”
“Should I set your alarm for early morning?” Elaine asked Jeff. He had to laugh — Elaine had him.
Then little Jenny ran in. “I’m going too!” she yelled, running with her brother. Elaine knew Jenny had no idea where her brother was going, and that Jenny would still be asleep by the time Connor came home from hunting, so there was no need to ruin her fun and tell her she couldn’t go.
“Promise you won’t tell my mom?” Elaine asked Jeff, mentally filing this project under the heading of “things only other farm moms will understand.”
“Agreed,” Jeff said.
Elaine sighed, and turned back to her office, shouts of “I can go!” still ringing through the house.
