The boys and I spent the weekend bird hunting in Canada.  Or, should I say, the boys hunted and I was there as a part of the overall milieu.  Despite being an omnivore with access to edible animals, the only thing I’ve ever killed is the setup to a potentially great joke.  It’s not like I hold any misperceptions as to where my food comes from – never once has a goose walked in my front door, announced, “I hereby give you permission to consume any and all parts of me,” and then dropped dead of old age into neat wax paper-wrapped parts – but still, the eating and the doing are not really the same thing.

You don’t need to be a hunter to enjoy a good bird hunt, though.  The boys were after geese and ducks (and technically cranes – but in the words of my father-in-law, “The best way to eat a crane is to cook it with a brick and then eat the brick”), and the Kosior Method for hunting for those birds is to get in a vehicle and drive all over every square inch of the greeny-brown universe until you find them.

After scouting (aka, driving) for miles around Kyle’s hometown the evening before in search of birds, we awoke in the morning with a plan: to drive for miles around Kyle’s hometown in search of birds – because it’s not like birds hang around in one place to make it convenient to catch them.  We ate breakfast, got dressed in camo (or, in my case, Lululemon yoga pants and a sweatshirt with “Mommy, Mom, Ma, Bruh” printed on it), and loaded up in the trucks.  Kyle drove with our twelve-year-old and our nephew, my brother-in-law took his friend, and Eight and I brought up the rear with my father-in-law, Lionel.  Since Eight and I only had Lionel’s binoculars and a clever sweatshirt between us, and since Lionel was more interested in making sure the other boys had the opportunity to hunt rather than himself, our truck was basically there for an eight-hour tour of the countryside.

It was a gloriously sunny and warm day.  We started off at a section of Lionel’s farm named Mary’s Farm, because it used to belong to Lionel’s Auntie Mary.  Mary didn’t actually start out as Lionel’s aunt – as we walked around the farmyard, Lionel told me how Mary was married to a farmer named Sam, whom Lionel called Uncle Sam.  Sam did so well for himself that he needed hired help, so he built 27 grain bins and outfitted each of them with a stove and a bed.  Bins in those days were made of wood and looked like tiny houses, and Uncle Sam’s help lived in those bins.

Once harvest was underway and fewer men were needed, Uncle Sam would send a handful of them on their way and then fill their bins/houses with grain.  When those bins were topped out, he’d release some more workers and fill their bins with grain…and so on until they were out of men and empty bins.  Before Uncle Sam died, he told Mary to take care of Lionel and his siblings, and so Mary married Lionel’s (actual) Uncle Ernie and turned the farm officially over to the Kosiors.  Only a couple of those bins remain on Mary’s Farm today, and so while Kyle and the other big boys did hunter-y things (stare off in the distance, mainly), Lionel pointed out where some of the hired hands signed the doors of the bins, and then showed Eight and I the remains of an old wagon and a wooden culvert at the edge of the property.

(A side note: when I told Kyle I was going to write about Mary’s Farm, Kyle said, “Oh, man, Uncle Ernie was awesome.  He was this cool old guy who drank, smoked, and only had some of his fingers.”  And then Kyle held up a hand with his middle and ring fingers bent down so I guess Uncle Ernie was always throwing horns.)

At some point, Kyle and Co. saw geese in the distance, and so we got back in the trucks and headed out…or more out, since we were already outside.  Lionel’s Uncle Leo’s farmyard was nearby, and so Lionel talked about how there had originally been a house there, and it was the house where he had been born.  He said there wasn’t any running water out there, and so Kyle’s Grandpa Sim would fill the bathtub and then they’d all bathe, with the dirtiest guy going last.  Lionel and his brother, Brian, slept up in the loft on feather tick bedding under piles and piles of blankets because the only source of heat was a grate in the floor to capture the rising warm air from the floor below.

“It was so cold that some mornings we’d wake up and find ice in the pee bucket,” he told me.

We took an extended hunting break over the lunch hour so that we could walk over to Kyle’s former K-12 school and watch our niece play in a volleyball tournament.  Eight spent the game on the playground with his cousin, and Twelve ate a puffed wheat cake (like a Rice Krispie Treat but with popped-up wheat), which he deemed “Bussin’.”

Hunting resumed mid-afternoon.  Lionel and I had decided we would knock off early to come back and check on the ribs that were smoking for dinner (Lionel) and take a shower (me), and so there was a bit more of an urgency on our part to find some birds before the day came to a close.  We passed by a patch of tall grass we had scouted the night before, and I shared with Lionel how Eight and I had followed the big boys to the edge of that grass while they were sneaking up on a field of geese.  Eight and I had patted down the grass into a fluffy bed of sorts, and then sat down and took 200 Snapchat pictures of one another and whisper-sang songs while the big boys army-crawled to the other side.

“That’s a pea field,” Lionel said, pointing to where the geese had been lounging the night before.  “Geese love peas; maybe they will be back today.”

He turned the truck onto the field to get a better look.  We leaned out the windows as a gentle breeze swooped by.

“Nope, they are all done here,” Lionel said.  “Nothing left but goose poop and feathers.”

“I want a feather!”  Eight said, jumping out and retrieving one.

Our detour had taken us out of the visible range of the other trucks, so we drove slowly for a moment pointing out grey and white flocks of geese in the distance before determining that now was as good a time as any to go back home.  Then Lionel said,

“Does something smell funny to you?”

That funny smell was a can of ether, which Eight had accidentally knocked when he had gotten back in the truck.  Lionel tossed the ether into the truck bed (ether is used to start up diesel engines, if you were wondering why he had it) and we all got out to give it a moment to clear.

“Wow, look at all those geese,” Eight said, pointing to in the near-distance to field covered in thousands upon thousands of snowy-white geese.

“Those are a lot of geese,” Lionel said.  He picked up his phone and called Kyle.

By the time Kyle and his brother got back, hundreds of geese were over our heads – like the monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, if those monkeys honked.  Lionel shot two of them, one landing nearly in the back of the truck.

“I want to take that one home!”  Eight said.

“We can’t take it home, we’re going to eat it,” I said.

“WHAT IS THE POINT OF THAT?”  Eight said, annoyed that I was ruining his dreams of a dead bedroom goose.

We celebrated a successful hunting trip with ribs and Caesars, per Canadian tradition.  My nieces gave Eight a couple of feathers from one of their guinea hens (my sister-in-law and brother-in-law keeps chickens, turkeys, and hens named things like “Sandwich” and “Thanksgiving Dinner”) so he forgot about the geese.

“Did you have a good day?”  Kyle asked me as we climbed into bed.

“Yes, I did,” I said, as a chorus of quacking ducks passed in the starlit sky.

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The photo above was taken by moi during the hunting trip. I also stuck a few more photos from Canada up on Instagram, including a picture of one of two moose Lionel spotted.

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This week on North Dakota Today we talked about Brightness Bouquets and woodworking firefighters.  Check it out!  (Valley News Live)

Jamestown’s Diane Hanson bicycled 350 miles to represent North Dakota in the Cycle Oregon Classic. (Jamestown Sun)

Last week, I told you about the Ken Burns American Buffalo documentary.  This week, you can read about the soundtrack, created in Bismarck. (KFYR TV)

Holy buckets, did I go the whole summer without sharing a story about dinosaurs?!  Yikes.  Well, better late than never. (UND Today)

The 6-12th grade students at Wing Public School have written a book, titled Cherry Street 58493. (Valley News Live)

Oh, boy, I think I may be opening up a can of worms with this one.  This article claims that these are the Seven Wonders of North Dakota. (Only In Your State)

As a reminder, I’ll be appearing on North Dakota Today on Monday mornings. Tune in, and send me the people and stories that are nice.  Thank you in advance!

ALSO as a reminder, Kyle now has a North Dakota hockey podcast on Pulltab Sports. It’s called “North Dakota After Dark” and he hosts it with our friends Kelly and Corey. Episode 11 with Margo Miller is now up. Click here to listen.

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