Perusing David Carpenter’s book inspires an eerie sense of déjà vu. I too started with a BB gun, a Red Ryder carbine purchased with money squirrelled away over the course of the year, accumulated at my second-hand comic book stand from miners heading home at shift's end. I too was bemused to have managed to knock a dickey bird—in retrospect a starling, I hope—off its perch and, upon presenting it proudly to my father, was devastated to have him comment wearily: “We have so few birdsaround here [Red Lake, Ontario] and you had to shoot one for no reason at all.” And I too started hunting in earnest with my father, being shocked as I listened to the handsome young man my father had invited along on our first outing recount stories of serving in a German U-boat. Later I had exclaimed: “Dad, Freddy was a Nazi; we hate Nazis, right—why did you bring him along?” To which he replied: “Freddie was a German, and he served his country as a Hitler Youth. It was the system that was evil...
Ehor Boyanowsky teaches criminal psychology at Simon Fraser University. He lives with his wife, Cristina Martini, and his English setter, Thompson S. Hunter, at Hole in the Wall near Horseshoe Bay, British Columbia. He divides his time between wandering the rainforest coast and the more remote desert landscape of the Thompson River Valley.
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