Nothing could have prevented us from hunting, fishing, trapping, and generally fulfilling ourselves as predators. I think there was not a boy who did not have a .22 by the time he was ten or eleven; my brother at ten was shooting a twelve-gauge shotgun, picking off cottontails and snowshoe hares, an occasional duck, an even more occasional grouse, which he sold to a lath-like woman who was anemic and had been told to eat wild game. Though she was a market, she gave us the creeps; we had seen her break a raw egg into a glass of beer and drink it down.
Without anemia to justify us, we had our own savage feasts out in the willows, dining upon sage hen or rabbit broiled on sticks over the fire. When larger game failed we netted bullfrogs, or caught them on a fish hook baited with a scrap of red flannel, and hacked off their legs and roasted them. We stole old frying pans and cached them in our hideouts in the brush so that when occasion offered we could fry up a panful of chubs or a big intricately boned sucker. I remember one whole day below Martin’s dam when we waded the shallow clear water hunting for the tracks of clams in the sandy bottom; and the saltless, emetic chowder we cooked up and bravely ate; and the distorted little knob of a pearl that one of us found in a clam smashed open on a rock, and the instant dream of fortune it aroused, and the decimation that resulted as we employed against the clams the mass destruction that our fathers and grandfathers had employed against placer gravels and buffalo and virgin timber and free land. We had it in us to be as blindly destructive as any in the history of North America. Only our opportunities were limited.
—from Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier (© 1955 by Wallace Stegner; published in 1962 by Viking Press, N.Y., and Macmillan of Canada Ltd.).
