“How can you say you failed? You can reason it out this way,” he tells me. “To get into the wood, to have your adrenaline flowing—to have a chance, to be free of the usual structure about your life—that makes it a success. For the three days of a moose hunt, or the week in November you take off to go deer hunting, you have to become someone else—that is, you must rely upon yourself like you have not done before, in an environment that is different from your usual one. Everything you do in the woods that complements this enriches you, and is a success. At any rate, that’s the way I look at it.”
As I mentioned in my fishing book a few years ago, camps are places that allow for this reacquaintance with our essential nature. They are places that allow one to think of humanity in all its great and tragic character. It is where I first thought of the MacDurmot family in my novel Blood Ties, where I first thought of writing the novel about Jerry Bines. And why is this? What is in these woods, along these ancient roads, that allows it? Well, for one thing, we are. We travel roads and old trails that have not seen commerce in a century, and yet we can still see signs, in the overgrown remnants, of our forefathers’ hardships—my uncles as young boys working fourteen hours a day, my wife’s grandfather guiding hunters up along the old Bartibog in the 1930s. Pictures of bear and deer being taken in the bygone era by men hunting to feed the lumber camps. We treasure it because it is gone now, but its foundation was laid down for us, and wisdom is everywhere.
Of course, there are better hunters than me, and the greatest of the guides—those who lived in the bygone times and guided men like Babe Ruth—may have disappeared. I would never need a guide now—and never did for deer. But few, the Micmac Paddy Ward being one, hunt on their own for moose.
However, there are still great guides. In point of fact, it might not be that the skill of the guides has diminished at all; it might just be that the guiding industry, which flourished back at the beginning of the twentieth century, has gone out of fashion, and famous men and women no longer require the service. Famous men and women no longer make a point of telling their interviewers in New York that “hunting moose in the wilds of Canada was every bit as thrilling as when Bunty and I bagged a rhino in the last true game reserve in South Africa.”
The topography of the land changes now in the relative blink of an eye. Places we might once have been able to hunt as familiar territory are no longer there for us in the same way. For our pathways are always being rerouted.
“The road to the river is a mighty long way,” as Willie Nelson sings, but many have been bulldozed back, and old-growth forest of mossy black spruce have been lost to the tree harvester. Now three years makes a big difference in the woods of New Brunswick. We cannot be certain—any more than that little buck I met forty years ago—what awaits the woods today. Our companies do not come from here—they come from places as far away as Finland. They couldn’t care less for one deer on the upper stretch of the Sovogle. In fact, they know nothing of it. They have never been here. And the Dutch and German families that have moved here for space and adventure have at times, in their singular dismissive nature, cut us off from places we once considered homestead. The Dutch and Germans are the new Euros, and we are like First Nations.
Now there are orange and yellow and red circles painted on trees, to ward off hunters. Just as so much of the fishing has become private, will hunting go this road as well?
In late August of that long-ago year, I came back up to the river (I was living in Fredericton then) and went with David Savage to scout out a place along the main Bartibog River, thirteen miles down the Miramichi from the town of Newcastle. I arrived at my mother-in-law’s house on the main Bartibog and met with David the next morning. The region behind my mother-in-law’s house is filled with old-growth spruce and wetlands that run all the way down to the Oyster River and beyond. It is a veritable sanctuary for moose. All summer they can be spied from the roadway, at the back of Oyster River in the swampy water. They move off in the fall, into deeper woods behind the Gum Road.
There had been a lot of moose signs that spring and through the summer, and David mentioned that he had seen two young bulls and twin calves and a cow, which generally meant that the moose herd was healthy. He had seen them in the spring of the year just after ice breakup, when he had taken some men far up the Bartibog River in his twenty-two-foot Restigouche canoe to fish for black salmon. There in the haggard trees of spring the young moulting eagle sat perched, a wingspan already longer than its mother’s, who glided in the air above almost to those wisping clouds.
Far up on the river, as the ice went out, he often had his first sighting of moose or deer that had wintered in yards beyond us.
“There is a fair population, so we might luck out. When do you take your shooting test?”
“Next week,” I said. (Don’t remind me, I thought.) In years gone by, a shooting test was not required, but because of the moose draw—and because many people who had not used a rifle before applied for the chance—a test was compulsory now. (This test has since been given up because of other qualifying exams, hunter safety courses, and the like.)
We went down toward the river from the Bathurst highway, and came at midmorning to a giant clearout. David told me:
“Just happened—I was up here hunting deer last year and came back this way toward the road, on what I thought was a dirt road all the way, and just at twilight came out on this. So, they have done us in up here a bit. It is like an industry unto itself—a part of mankind hidden from view.”
Yes, and in that way something like a crime.
The chop-down was now miles long, and at the edges of the old road there were some signs of moose, but not as much as we’d hoped, and it was also a hard walk to the river. At noon we stopped for lunch, had some chicken sandwiches and some tea, and spoke of strategy. A chop-down was a good place to hunt, but neither David nor I was completely comfortable hunting there for three days.
“This might be okay in a month, it might be great, but—I am thinking if we go down toward the Gum Road and check it out,” David said. The Gum Road, named because of the spruce gum woodsmen collected for their kids years before, ran parallel to the Bartibog River up past my wife’s ancestral lands, and old-growth forest and swamp still hugged its shores.
That was fine with me. I had seen two moose along the Gum Road the fall before, when I’d gone snowshoeing just after deer season had ended, and it had always been a good place for moose. As we spoke, a small weasel walked onto the birch fall where we were sitting and watched us with happy curiosity, while osprey circled above us in the blue, blue sky. We went toward the Gum Road and checked certain spots, and that afternoon I sighted in my rifle at the gravel pit. I had just bought a scope, and this would be my first time using it. I was not sure if I could get used to it. Added to my concern was the pressure of taking the mandatory shooting test, scheduled for Fredericton the next week. There was added pressure, of course, because people told you how easy it was, and a blind man should be able to pass it with no trouble. The trouble was, at that time my vision was still pretty good. If I failed it I would certainly be a laughingstock. I had always been a fairly good shot (with a few notable exceptions—once when I encountered a whole flock of partridge and missed each and every one). But I was not going to look past the test right now. I told David not to either. I told him I had hunted deer and birds, and took my young hunter’s test at fourteen with three bull’s eyes, but that still did not matter.
“You’ll pass that,” he said, to encourage himself as much as me. “I’ve seen you shoot before—if you can shoot well enough to sight in the rifle you can pass that test.” He did, however, tell me of certain men he knew about who had failed the test, regardless of the fact that they were also fine shots.
The next week, when I was back in Fredericton, David went every night after work to the Chatham side of the river and looked at spots he knew in and about the Napan area. I was unfamiliar with this region. The world of the deep
woods, to me, was always on my side of the river. But David told me that he knew where moose were, along an old Black River road that he had hunted deer on some few years back. In fact, on three occasions there in the late fall he’d seen huge moose. And as he said, “If you are uncomfortable there we won’t go. I find it better to hunt an area you like.”
“We need to look over a few places, to be sure,” I said. “There always should be a backup area.”
I felt most comfortable on the Bartibog, though. It seemed more my territory, and I felt I knew it well enough not to be an interloper upon it.
An interloper is someone who believes a territory is as much his as anyone’s. In some respects he or she is right and should be accorded civility, according to the law. But in actual fact, reality does not work that way, for humans are, well, human. If you have hunted on a tract of land close to your own house for years, and have made long journeys in November weather to track deer, you have some reason to think this land is yours. You might not be very civil to someone you view as a stranger on your land.
Nor did I feel comfortable on a land I did not know, because I was always aware that others did, and a man who does not know a piece of land might end up stumbling upon and spoiling another’s hunt.
I paced the floor that night because of the mandatory test. Of course I had tried to get out of it by saying I had had my moose licence before (no go), I had already been in on a moose kill (no go), I had hunted since I was two years old (no go).
The test was on the north side of Fredericton, across the Saint John River and behind the forestry building. Now, I knew I was a good shot when alone. With people standing around watching me, that was another matter. Besides, I was certain I had knocked my gun while putting it in the car.
When I arrived there were three people ahead of me, a woman and two men. The target was in fact quite large: four feet by four feet. It was only forty yards away. You had three shots and had to hit it twice. It should have been no problem for anyone familiar with guns. I knew this just by looking at it. Yet people, because they got overexcited or too worked up about hitting it, did miss. In fact, the man who fired before me did. He fired in the kneeling position, two rapid shots from his .308. (How else, I thought, does anyone ever fire a .308 semi-automatic but rapidly?) Looking through the telescope, the forest ranger told him he had missed on the second shot. The man lay down in the prone position and, aiming carefully, fired again. He missed, and therefore wasn’t able to hunt moose that year.
I had seen the barrel wobble as he aimed the third time. He tried to make a joke of it but it was devastating for him. The woman came after, with a Browning .308. She made the cut by hitting the target on the second and third shots. The man after her did as well. All these people either kneeled or lay down, for steadiness.
The ranger looked at me and asked if I was ready. I nodded, stepped up to the line with my .303, put a bullet from the clip into the chamber, and fired in the standing position. I brought the bolt-action back, ejected the shell, brought another bullet up, and fired again.
“There you go,” the ranger said. “One bull’s eye, one on the upper right.”
Though I was happy enough to be able to phone David and tell him to get ready, the shot to the upper right bothered me, because I shouldn’t have been that far off on back-to-back shots. But I was. The target is essentially set up for a rifle sighted in at a hundred yards; if you can hit a bull’s eye at forty-five yards, the sights allow you to hit the same target at a hundred. The trajectory of the bullet leaving the rifle allows this.
At any rate, I had passed. I picked up my moose licence and prepared to go hunting on September 27. I lived in Fredericton at that time, and was Writer in Residence at the university—in fact, it would be my last year in that position. I received about one-eighth the salary of a professor who would teach my work to students.
My wife and I didn’t have much money, so a moose would be a good thing for the winter months. I had shot a deer the fall before, and it had kept us in good stead, but the meat of a white-tail is not as good as that of a moose, even though a friend from Newfoundland who had not tasted white-tailed deer before said they gave the finest chops he had ever tasted.
I thought over my hunts in the past. When hunting deer I was becoming familiar with how they moved, and I liked to be alone in the woods—for everyone hunts differently. Moose hunting was in some ways the same, but in certain respects vastly different.
I remembered seeing old pictures of British officers attached to the garrison here hunting in the wilds of New Brunswick in the nineteenth century, with their Mausers and Enfields. There is a cairn here to those boys of the regiments of foot who died and were buried four thousand miles from home. Most of them, the regular soldiers, were very likely akin to the Cockney boys I met when travelling some years ago, with their wobbly smiles and tender hearts. In 1971 a young man named Dennis and I went through a hurricane off the coast of Africa and were the only two on the old ship not to get seasick.
Dennis was much like those ordinary soldiers. They wouldn’t have been like the officers I spoke about, who headed into the wilds with baggage and staff. They would have been the youngsters carrying heavy packs who dealt with the First Nations one on one.
I was more out of place in Fredericton in 1987 than I was in the wilds of New Brunswick, for the city was still filled with British and American professors, most of whom did not want to be in Fredericton and complained to their friends in larger centres that their immense talents were being wasted teaching rural barbarians.
The woods was a good place for me to go whenever I got the chance, for many of them frowned on the woods, and on our identification with it.
So going back to it took my mind away from the literary world.
I left in my jeep for the Miramichi waters, and it was a warm afternoon. I dropped in on Peter McGrath and had a cup of tea. He was loading his three-wheeler in his truck to go to his camp. There were two licences there that year, and he and his friend Les Druet would guide. (One year Les carried a disabled gentleman on his back for three days moose hunting—I am not sure if this was the year or not.) I wished Peter good luck on the hunt and went across the river, to Chatham. I got to David’s house at about four o’clock and soon saw the company truck coming up the road.
“Warm,” he said.
“I know,” I answered.
Our first order of business was to decide which one of the three places scouted we should go. David liked the Gum Road, but he worried that there would be too many hunters in along that part of the Bartibog River.
“I think we should stay on this side of the river for the time being,” he said, meaning the Miramichi. “Check out that road near Black River—there are still a lot of moose signs there.”
“That’s fine by me,” I said. Though I did not know that area well—certainly not as well as I knew the Bartibog region—David Savage did.
That night we went to my place on the south shore, just at the mouth of the Miramichi Bay, and barbecued some deer steak, and listened to late-run salmon flip a hundred yards out from the breakwater. We were hoping for cooler temperatures, and listened by radio to a weather report that said it would be sunny and warm in the morning. With that, we went to bed.
The first day of the moose hunt was indeed warm, with temperatures at noon up to about 72 degrees Fahrenheit. I saw a robin hopping along the muddy road near my truck when I took my gun and backpack out in the morning. It was not the best temperature to hunt moose in.
We arrived at the road just about dawn and moved up toward a small, enclosed field in a back wetland about a hundred yards in circumference, where moose had been seen earlier. There were tracks of a large bull there that might have been two or three days old. The grass in this back pasture was about two and a half feet high. The moose, if we were lucky, would enter it with us downwind on the far side.
All that day we waited, and called—both of us calling at various intervals during the day
. It was a tedious wait, for there was absolutely no response or sound. Small birds now and again flitted in the row of alders as we ate our lunch of lobster meat and warm tea. Two o’clock gave way to three, and then four. Since we were still on daylight saving time, the extra hour went by very slowly. Finally shadows began to creep through the lonesome wood, and we picked up our calling.
Later in the day David took a walk down toward another side road, to see if he could spot how the moose were travelling. Unfortunately the signs he saw were well over a week old. We called, though, until almost dark. Then I pocketed my bullets and we walked back to the truck in the dark, my hands sweaty—which is never a good sign for hunting.
Out on Highway 11, just before I turned down to my place along the bay, we saw a truck coming back across the main Miramichi with a large bull. I wondered if it was a Bartibog moose. The Bartibog moose were actually quite famous, because of certain guides, like John Connell, and woodsmen who had operated camps there a century or so before. I had heard of the Bartibog as being a place to hunt long before I met my wife and took that river as a second home. I longed to go back there the next day, but I trusted David. He was also from the Bartibog, and he was one of the finest woodsmen I’d had the privilege to hunt and fish with. And he wanted to stay up on that road on Friday.
“I am certain,” he said, “there are two bulls there and three or four cows—and that big bull that left the tracks should be still about.”
“Fine by me,” I said.
We turned in a few hours after dark. I heard the wind blow down over our cottage, coming from the east, and hoped for cold weather. I did not know then, but have come to conclude since, that David took it as a very serious obligation to have me luck in with a chance at a moose. For me, though I was a hunter, and like most hunters I cherished the chance at a shot, it was not overly pressing. That is, I would blame no one if I did or didn’t sight one, and certainly not one of the finest hunters I knew.
Facing the Hunter Page 6
