Auroras of Autumn

From our November/December 2025 Issue

The scholar of one candle sees
An Artic effulgence flaring on the frame
Of everything he is.
—Wallace Stevens, “The Auroras of Autumn”

The last time I hunted waterfowl in Canada, the northern lights (aurora borealis) seemed almost shy, pulsing one morning like a disco strobe but otherwise pretty much hiding in the wings, promising, but never really striking the band. This time was different. The drive from the Edmonton, Alberta, airport up to Dog ’N Duck Lodge, near Viking, took just long enough to put us there at dusk. During the drive, Keith Rankin, one of our guides, mentioned that the light show had been unusually good recently, so after dinner several of us wandered outside to watch. I wasn’t prepared. As we rounded the last outbuilding, the northern sky opened up like a lava lamp—curtains of color, sheets of light, rippling and churning across a pitch-black screen pierced by stars, planets and a couple of meteors and split down the middle by the white streak of the Milky Way. I thought of John Donne: “go and catch a falling star . . . .” But, no, that wasn’t quite it. This was pure Wallace Stevens and “The Auroras of Autumn.”

The stars are putting on their glittering belts.
They throw around their shoulders cloaks that flash
Like a great shadow’s last embellishment.

We watched, rapt, for more than an hour, until someone reminded us we might want to get some sleep before it was time to head out for the morning hunt.

Our group included six writers together with representatives from Franchi and Fiocchi, who had asked us to field-test the new Franchi Affinity 3 shotgun and Fiocchi’s premium 3" bismuth and steel shotshells. We had come to Alberta in early October to catch the duck and goose migration as it began. Most of the greater Canadas had already moved on by the time we arrived, but the lesser Canadas, specklebellies, snow, mallards, pintails and wigeon were still moving through the area in force. With luck, we'd see enough birds to fill even Alberta’s generous daily limits of eight dark geese, eight ducks and 50 snow geese.

A 4:45 AM wake-up got us moving, and by 6 we were setting decoys and A-frame blinds in a peafield as the last of the aurora faded behind us. We finished with plenty of time to spare, so I indulged in one of my favorite pastimes: letting my mind wander amidst the sounds of a light breeze rustling the piled willow branches of the blind and the pre-dawn chattering of several thousand ducks and geese on the potholes around us.

The Stevens poem was still on my mind, and I tried to remember as many bits and pieces as I could. He wrote it, I thought, when he was in his late 60s or early 70s—not much older than I—and though it refers at points to a man on a northern beach, he could as easily have been watching an Alberta horizon, adrift in the gloaming as the seasons changed.

. . . the north is always enlarging the change,
With its frigid brilliances, its blue-red sweeps
And gusts of great enkindlings, its polar green,
The color of ice and fire and solitude.

“One minute to go,” Keith's voice brought me back to the moment and to the strings of geese circling overhead. “Go ahead and load.” I shoved three shells into the gun and crouched, watching the nearest group of Canadas wind in and out as Keith called . . . dropping, dropping, then angling in from the right. “Take ’em!” Keith shouted, and we did, two falling immediately, two more as they climbed and banked away. Carbon, Keith’s black Lab, made her retrieves as Keith began to work the next group, a cycle that continued with brief lulls for an hour, and then more slowly for another hour and a half.

This being Alberta, we were hunting the birds near the beginning of their migration—the grainfields and potholes around us an early stage in the long trail of prairie, fields and waterways heading south. At this latitude, for example, the male pintails that would appear farther south as bull sprig drakes hadn’t had time to grow their long tailfeathers.

By midmorning when we repacked the decoys and blinds in the trucks, we had picked up nearly a limit of geese—mostly lesser Canadas, with two greater Canadas and a half-dozen specks—as well as two mallards. The guns and shotshells had performed flawlessly, as had the dog, and we were ready to celebrate a fine morning’s shoot with blueberry pancakes at the lodge.

Meals at Dog ’N Duck, provided by chef Raylene Hugo and served in shifts to guests and staff at the long dining table, were plentiful and fun. Originally operated by longtime guide Bob Clark, Dog ’N Duck Outfitting has now been turned over to Bob’s son, Jordan, and most staff members, including guides Mark Thirlwell, Keith Rankin and TJ Kaczynski, have been associated with the lodge for many years. This continuity has no doubt contributed greatly to a general atmosphere of cheerful confidence. The lodge itself is comfortable for small groups, with three bedrooms, two baths and an adjoining sitting room, kitchen and dining areas. Just behind the main lodge is a vintage outbuilding that serves as a separate lounge for cocktails and sitting by the fire. The gunroom and bird-cleaning facilities are located in other nearby structures.

As is usually the case in duck camp, there was quite a bit of time between the morning and evening hunts. We never had to drive more than 20 minutes to get to a hunting spot, so that left two or three hours for napping, reading, watching a game on television and general hanging out. The weather was inseasonably warm while we were there—more like Indian summer than autumn—and a book on the back deck under enorous skies and rapidly changing fall colors was very pleasant. Again, the day seemed to have been taken from the poem:

A season changes color to no end,
Except the lavishing of itself in change,
As light changes yellow into gold and gold
To its opal elements and fire’s delight,
Splashed wide-wise because it likes magnificence
And the solemn pleasures of magnificent space.

In midafternoon we gathered at the trucks and headed back to the fields for the evening hunt—another harvested peafield, with the blind in a small hollow sloping to distant water. Given our success with geese in the morning, we focused mostly on ducks, in this instance mallards and pintails. By the end of the day we had managed to take a full limit of geese and a near-limit of ducks, the highlight being a long retrieve on a high mallard drake that sailed for Montana after being hit. The dog spotted the hit, and once sent, raced in a cloud of dust under the gliding bird until both disappeared over the horizon. A long minute passed, and then a black head appeared above the hill and the dog came trotting back, the big greenhead in her mouth and a satisfied look on her face. Whether she caught the bird on the fly I couldn’t say.

This was the pattern for most of our five hunts, the exception coming on our second afternoon when we took advantage of a large influx of snow geese the guides had spotted the previous day. We put out an extra hundred or so white decoys, hunkered down in the blind and enjoyed wave after wave of noise and feathers—the flocks of snows interspersed with smaller groups of psecks, ducks and Canadas in endless spirals and whorls. And, again, Stevens:

The theatre is filled with flying birds
Wild weadges, as of a volcano’s smoke

As our guides pointed out, our hunting was actually slower than usual due to the warm weather, but for someone like me, whose duck hunting is usually done in Georgia beaver swamps, the spectacle of waterfowl clouds filling an autumn sky was as impressive as the aurora itself. In fact, the combination of the two made for a pleasing symmetry between, in Stevens’ words, the “gusts of great enkindlings” of our Alberta days and nights. That sense of the place, perhaps even more than the superb shooting, is what will draw me back.

Meals at Dog ’N Duck, provided by chef Raylene Hugo

and served in shifts to guests and staff at the long dining

table, were plentiful and fun. Originally operated by longtime

guide Bob Clark, Dog ’N Duck Outfitting has now been

turned over to Bob’s son, Jordan, and most staff members,

including guides Mark Thirlwell, Keith Rankin and TJ

Kaczynski, have been associated with the lodge for many

years. This continuity has no doubt contributed greatly to a

general atmosphere of cheerful confidence. The lodge itself

is comfortable for small groups, with three bedrooms, two

baths and an adjoining sitting room, kitchen and dining