My people on the Gaspé were farmers and woodsmen and seamen. One of my great-great-uncles operated a schooner and traded in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, another bootlegged rum. They hunted caribou and bear, moose in the fall. They fished for salmon and planted out gardens. Getting to town was an occasion three or four times a year. Even when I was a boy my grandmother would go months between visits to places that had sidewalks.
My uncles on my mother’s side went into the woods to work from the time they were ten years old. I say this to show that my affiliation, my heritage, runs back three centuries now, and most of my ancestors have depended, in one way or another, on the land for their welfare and survival. They have been historians, and writers, painters, and professional men as well. My father was honorary chief of two reserves, and I have First Nations nieces and nephews.
We are the first generation in my family to have anything more than high school education, and before us only a few had that. But we might realize that Prince Charles was the first of the Windsors to receive a B.A.
At first, most of the educated in our family were women, as education was always thought of as domestic, and somehow attached to the Bible. The idea of a man having an education when he had arms and a back was slightly preposterous—to the women as well as, or more so than, the men. If you didn’t have two good arms, how could you work a farm? That is, the women took the idea of a strong man very seriously. The inclination to think that women were looking for education and ideas in a man is a notion born of the last generation, the first that went to university in any number, many of whom gave up everything to do with their parents and grandparents. Only lately have they started, in late middle age, to drift back to what they relinquished. (The back-to-the-landers, I will later show, are a different case.)
My paternal grandfather came with a degree in music from the London Conservatory. But before he died of diabetes, he had his own hunting and fishing lodge, and he was both an entertainer and a woodsman. In fact, most woodsmen are entertainers in one way or the other.
My mother’s father, a proud Scot, worked until he died; my grandmother was still doing a hard day’s work when she was eighty-five, and questioning me about Churchill’s reckless gamble in 1915 to try and take Constantinople. Their lives were as expansive and as hard as that of anyone who ever went to the gold rush, or travelled across the prairies by horse.
It was still this way when I became old enough to hunt. In some sections of our country it is this way still. What is wrong with this? Absolutely nothing. Of course I have written about it enough to know that some tend to make light of it.
“I have no desire to shoot a moose,” said a professor from Ottawa I once knew, offering the voice of definitive wisdom in the argument (which means that anyone really knowing enough about it, knowing how to do it enough to actually write about it, would be sanctioned and condemned as well).
I might have told him that a butcher’s hands were over the blood of the steak he was then enjoying.
Intellectuals believe they have the answers to all of today’s questions, well thought out. They are diplomatic in front of their own kind. So there is an unspoken lessening of one’s humanity the farther you get from the intellectual centre, and I know people as far away from the intellectual centre as you could imagine.
So then many of my professor’s rank have ceded fishing as a benign and enlightened and intellectual pursuit of well-thinking, hearty, and well-meaning fellows, who might spout Yeats if afforded the time (of course not commercial fishermen), and made hunting a pariah worse than dogs of war. But in many respects they are exactly the same kind of pursuit. Between hunting and fishing there is a difference not of kind, but of degree, as Mortimer Adler would tell us. The pastoral intellectualization of fishing will do nothing to change that fact.
It seems this relegation is allowed without much reflection, even by some men I admire. My idea is that if you ban one activity, ban the other. If we are not willing to do this, one shouldn’t immediately put more value on a white-tailed deer than on a fifteen-pound salmon.
I was on high ground that day years ago, and the wind had stiffened, and I was walking back toward the car when I heard the crack of a branch on my right.
I turn and see a young buck (I think about a four-pointer) rushing out toward me, not even caring that I am there. At the very last instant he changes direction. Very startled, I hold my rifle up in protection, thinking he is going to rush into me. But he turns slightly, and bounds across the road in one leap and is gone in the tangle toward the river, and once again I am alone. The evening darkness and smell of fall and the soundless beauty of the darkening autumn world surround us both. He came out of the bush and at me so quickly it seems as if I was dreaming it.
I am young but I am not foolish enough to turn my sights on him with a .22-calibre single-shot rifle at dark. So I simply stand where I am, on a slope toward my car in the approaching night, and watch him disappear. It is a startling, moving moment.
I wonder, though, why he was in such a hurry. Perhaps there was another hunter on the old overgrown road that this one intersected somewhere beneath my car. Perhaps the deer caught this hunter’s scent and turned and ran across in front of me.
Deer seem somehow ethereal and almost phantomlike. One could hunt them for days and not see them, only their hoofprints along a muddy lane, and then all of a sudden in late afternoon they stand before you. Suddenly they loom large in front of you when you least expect it.
The old logging road is now part of a highway going off to other places, and the animals have been pushed farther away. That little buck might have lasted into that winter or he might not have. There were three weeks of hunting season left, so his chances rose slightly with each passing day. But with each passing day, more hunters would come to make their claims, and the air would be crowded with the subtle scent of rifle fire. So it was an uneasy tradeoff. The number of hunters and weather in the hunt’s favour rose exponentially with the passing of time. The snow would come, as it did a day or two later, so he would be easier to track. (But only the best hunters, sure of themselves and the woods, would track him with success, for getting lost in the woods while tracking is easy.) There was also his predilection at this time of year for making his scrapes and coming back in a rather obvious circle to check them, to see if a doe had come by and left her urine—which meant a chance at mating. Bucks become more insensible as their desire to rut crowds out everything else. They are not unlike humans in this regard. So any half-decent hunter can sit on a trail, or just off a trail, and wait.
If the buck lived he would likely have a bigger rack next year with more tines, be twenty or twenty-five pounds stronger. This would make him more of a target to some. For big deer, like big moose, are a prize, which makes the theory of “survival of the fittest” somewhat suspect and duplicitous. That is, what the deer would grow to protect him from any other predator would not protect him from the weakest of men with a rifle. In fact, he would finely fit into a category called “the big buck”—the legendary animal that all hunters, good or bad, young or old, hunt. That you go out with your father to hunt as a youngster, and the vision of which remains in your blood a lifetime. By his very nature, this big animal is a target and a symbol and a scapegoat all at the same time. A lord no longer a lord but a prize, like a doomed prince in a besieged castle. The trouble, for hunters at any rate, is that he is oftentimes smarter than that mythical prince. Deer have gotten away from a half dozen hunters in one day. Their scrapes, their tracks, and droppings are fresh in newly fallen snow, and through the muted numbing woods they are heard. But suddenly they stop, wait, and then move again, off in a direction not anticipated, and as silently as shadow slip away.
Cold, night dark, food scarce, coydogs, lynx, and eastern panther (as I say, it still exists), yet they are tenacious in their God-given ability to survive. Deer qualify as one of the toughest animals in the world.
I do not know what happened to that buck I saw for
ty-five years ago, but I can estimate fairly that it lasted only a year or two longer at the most, which would give it four years in the world. And four years in the world its way (as so many men and women know) is better than ten in the world where you play toady or trained seal.
At any rate, that deer, that buck I saw when I was sixteen, went off to an uncertain future, and so did I. It might have ended that year, or the next—if not, certainly no later than the next after. He might have been shot, or died in winter—though deer are as tough an animal as there is, able to withstand temperatures dropping to minus-forty, and gales and blizzards sweeping in off the Northumberland Strait. But some way or another it would have met its end, somewhere in those deep woods, when I was still a boy, when all those paths led somewhere mysterious and earthen. The last thing it might have seen was a grader along the road, or a backhoe that moved into that section in 1967. Its eyes might have witnessed the change of its very world, without understanding why.
By the time I was fifteen I had stayed in camps in January and slept in the open woods in winter with my friends. I knew how to fire a rifle and was a fair shot—actually, a fairly good shot. These were the credentials of most of my friends, and probably tons of kids across our country. At that time I hunted partridge, and unfortunately (I regret this very much) one or two porcupines. And over time I became a better hunter than I was a fisherman.
I thought of this on our way home this fall. Snow came over the Plaster Rock Highway, and all the way along that secluded road I was looking into the hardwood ridges and back bogs for deer and moose. Making a bet with my younger son, Anton, I told him I could stop the car and find a fresh deer track within two hundred yards. It was an easy bet. The tracks had to be fresh because the snow had just fallen.
As boys (and many girls) most of us fished in the summer—those short, hot months of growth, when blueberries thickened in the hot, still blueness of afternoon. And after, when the ground cooled, and the wind became thinner and the days short, with clear blue autumn skies, we, or those we knew, took up our rifles and went hunting. School, cramped as we were in the baby boom generation, was an agony.
The woods told us everything we needed to know about what was important. There isn’t a boy I grew up with who wouldn’t have given up a high mark in math for a buck deer. (Well, maybe one or two.)
Now as a man of sixty I go into the woods, along the northwest Miramichi in late summer, and smell musk and snow in the drafts through the dark trees, even after the full moon in late July. I will think of hunting. If I am fishing up on the Black Rapids, on the main Souwest, or far off Disappointment Pool on the south branch of the Sovogle, it is in me now as it was always. I cannot imagine a time when it wouldn’t or couldn’t be—even if I hunt less and less every year.
I have come to Toronto to live, and live unsettled among the urban souls, in a literary world I have never been comfortable in and more often than not have been excluded from. Travelling outside of Toronto, on autumn nights I still search fields that have remained untamed—see hawks in the sky, hold on to the smell of winter as I hug the highway. I can still spot an animal fairly quickly, for I have grown up doing so. In among the ravines I catch a shadow and see a scrawny coyote move across the road, in the middle of the city, whose shouts and sounds, as Lowry said about cities, remind one of the “unbandaging of great giants in agony.” I look at the ravines along the Don Valley and Don River, floating diluted with stink and foulness, and know that they were once as pristine as my Miramichi as a boy. In autumn in the city after the leaves have fallen, we are reminded, by the false fronts and dark alleys and neon signs expostulating our greed, that anywhere man goes he makes into self-mockery. The woods, too, if he stays there long enough.
I see my boys sleeping and realize they have become city-dwellers. Once, coming back to New Brunswick on October 17, we went through the Plaster Rock at midnight. It is a road eighty miles long through the centre of our province. The trees hug the highway and make driving nerve-wracking. One-third of the way along, a young bull moose, about three years old, was standing broadside. Of course it would not get off the road, even though I turned off my lights and shut off the car, waiting in the complete silence and darkness. Four times I shut my lights off and waited only to turn them on again, and see the moose, with its shiny black coat and large hump, looking at me. Finally it turned and began to walk up the highway as I crept up behind it, with my lights out. Reaching its back quarter I suddenly turned the lights on and tramped on the gas. It was the only way I knew to get around it. Turning the lights on startled it so much that it reared up like a horse on its hind legs as we went by. My children were ecstatic. They had seen the animal up close. In Toronto they see them made of fibreglass, at different places in town.
The Maritimes, New Brunswick in particular, are like nowhere else. Isolated we might have been, in snow and camaraderie I have rarely seen elsewhere. No dense cities or long prairie walks, we were creatures of the woods and furious streams, of houses cut close to country lanes, within the smell and protection of the sea.
Once, driving a young Saskatchewan man downriver, he became literally terrified because the road was so winding and the trees were so close.
Most people I knew fished in the summer, hunted in the fall. For anyone I knew, this was as natural a way of life as could be imagined. When I come back here in the fall, I realize how much tradition has a hold over us. There is still in my blood that desire to go on a moose hunt, or get my deer rifle out. I make phone calls, as I did when I was home last week, to ask who has lucked in this year. My brother-in-law tells me there is a large buck behind his wood cut, and along my own land I have seen three doe. While down on the shore, my wife’s cousin’s husband has seen an eastern panther once again, walking along his road on a cold autumn day. So black it was, he believed at first it was the bear he had seen in spring, but then he realized it was no bear.
It is even better that no official voice will say they still exist.
I went out to the car that day I was sixteen and hunting partridge, and the wind had picked up, and the ground had turned cold, the smell of cooling mud in autumn twilight. I would take the breasts of the birds I had shot home to my mother, who loved partridge, having grown up in the wilds of Matapédia as a child. In fact, her world was much rougher than the world I knew. Beside her house, on the hill, was a summer home of the actor Walter Pidgeon, who was originally from Saint John, and who built his place in the wilds of Canada. My brothers and I, as children, used to play there, running around his veranda and leaning against his log cabin walls, looking in his windows to see a caribou head mounted over the fireplace. Whether Mr. Pidgeon took this caribou or not, I do not know. Called back one day by my mother from her veranda, my brother and I saw our first deer, standing in the gloom of afternoon, by the family brook.
That day I got back to the car, the evening sun had fallen down behind the hemlock and spruce, and I realized that I was in serious woods—not the little jack pine and stumped cuts of local loggers. I’d needed a car to come this far up the road, and for the first time I realized what it was like to be alone. Besides, the back tire was flat.
So this was my first test as a hunter. And it had nothing to do with hunting. Or, in a way, I suppose it had everything to do with it.
Our machines have made hunting less than it once was, and perhaps less than it was intended to be, but still, if done right, there is something noble in its design.
That my great-uncle when he was sixteen shot a moose where the high school now is in our hometown meant he was able to walk to his game. He grew up close enough to the industry and husbandry of animals that he could tell a pig from a goat. With our modern advancements children know (or we assume they do) the different kinds of dinosaurs, and winged reptiles of ancient millennia, but have nothing to measure the farm that still must sustain them.
I suppose nothing tells us this more than a city.
There are many who have never seen woods telling
us we have no right to go into one, while they walk over city sidewalks, each block of which has destroyed ten thousand animals. That is perhaps the highest compliment vice pays to virtue.
2
It was sometime in the 1920s when my Uncle Richard, being very young, was given a task one late September. His father, Hudson, my grandfather, was away guiding richer men to moose far to the north, on the Gaspé, against the background of a river where they had scouted earlier in the year. They had gone in with backpacks and mule, past the place where my grandfather hauled lumber for one of the lumber barons there, and it was deep woods beyond, heavy hemlock and spruce, and frothy bunting streams that roared down from the mountains into the green waters of the Matapédia, hills and wilds that no one had ever been to, streams that made endless rainbows as they cascaded down, rainbows for the world that no human saw. Even now the Matapédia and Miramichi are so obscure that most people could not point to them on a map—though great men come to fish and hunt in both. In fact, there is one encyclopedia I own that has three pages on Al Capone, and three paragraphs on Canada.
Back then, less than a hundred years ago, there were places where, at any given moment as you walked, yours might have been the first human foot to have touched. It is possible that it is still that way now in some spots along our great rivers of the east. In fact I am sure it must be, that I myself stepped, in the golden days of my youth, where no one else ever had.
If my uncle didn’t know that, he knew much else. Once I asked one of his brothers—a man whose hands were three times the size of mine, and who had been perpetually whipped in school because he was left-handed—how long was the canoe he had lying up against the barn. Never having learned feet or inches, words or numbers, he thought a second and then, spitting his tobacco, said, “Well, boy—she’s long enough, I guess.”
Facing the Hunter Page 2
