AFTER GREENHEADS IN ALBERTA 



By Paul E. Page 



Mallards packed like the hiving bees 

 Climbing high o'er the sundown seas: 

 Seasons gathering one by one, 

 Forty-three years I've followed the gun. 



— McGaffey. 



^Y early boyhood was spent near the Horicon 

 marsh, in Wisconsin, on the outskirts of which 

 I was born and raised. Full many a day have 

 I pushed a canoe into the rice and studied the little 

 people of that then great expanse of aquatic life. 



Nature was my teacher, for there were few books on 

 hunting at that time. 



I trapped on this great marsh with the Indians, too, 

 and saw them gradually melt away to the West. I have 

 shot ducks and geese all through the Northwest since 

 the early '70s, and have shot 10,000 shells in a season 

 at game. But this story is of a recent modern duck 

 hunt, a story of the birds in the fat living of the Cana- 

 dian grain fields. 



On a beautiful day last October I stepped off a train 

 /at an Alberta siding in Canada with a letter of intro- 



