My day afield can't come close to others. I've told it often. My grandchildren and great-grandchildren appeared interested. It was a hunt long ago, of double guns, shells sparingly used, meat was important, and before outboards in our fishing village on Nova Scotia's Eastern Shore. From my eulogy for Warren Baker eight years ago:

"Warren and I are cousins. We grew up together, next-door neighbours, and went to our one-room school together, and when I went away to work in Halifax I always returned to the village to hunt birds together.

There were no rough edges on Warren. He was the quiet and steady one, a wonderful companion, and he didnt use bad words like the rest of us.

Warren made the best of the stuff he was. He worked and loved, and he and Neva made a good life and brought up a family from the place where he was born.


Ive always thought making a living from the sea as something special, a sort of mystery of being able to find fish every day in the ocean, from places he couldnt see.

He did that all his working life, and he did it well.

Now, here we are on this beautiful day, at the church where he and Neva were married, in the churchyard by the sea which provided their living for so many years.

I saw Warren miss a bird---once. It was a shot at a partridge going away across a little bog near Goose Lake. It didnt happen often to one of the finest gunners on the Eastern Shore. Theres another story, though, that Warren would like me to tell.

From the blind at Rum Point we saw birds flying into Leaders Lake, and Warren said Thats where were going tomorrow. We rowed up the harbour next morning, pulled the skiff up Big Brook into Leaders Lake and shot 16 bluebills in 10 minutes.

We walked to Goose Lake where Warrens beaver trap held the biggest beaver I had ever seen, maybe 80 pounds. On the way home, there was a smelt net to pull, with so many fish the headrope was out of sight.

While picking the fish, with a cold north wind making whitecaps all over the harbour, Warren saw a big buck swimming to Leaders Island. He dropped me off at the middle of the island with instructions to make enough noise to push the deer back to him. I heard the shot---and when I got to that little cove Warren was smiling.

Warren stepped the sail and, down to the gunnels with deer, beaver, 16 bluebills, and five- or six-hundred smelts, we sailed all the way to the slip, home before nine."