How had this happened—to be on the far side of that hidden lake?
Late in the day, just as they were about to leave, they’d seen a buck on the far side. They’d tried to get closer to it, and of course found themselves at dark in an unfamiliar area. As the day darkened, all the trees became as ghostly as ash, silent and muted. The fellow with John became more and more hysterical as the day darkened. He kept falling to his knees and crawling about.
“Look for stumps,” he kept yelling at John. “Look for stumps.”
“Now why would I look for stumps?” John said.
“It means humanity,” the fellow kept saying. “It means humanity—it means we are close to humanity.”
“Buddy, we’re only half a mile up the road from two camps,” John said.
They found stumps, stumps cut up on that old logging road, maybe thirty or forty years ago, by men long gone and ghosts. They hadn’t a match between them. And no one knew where they were.
“Humanity or no, unless we hear a car, so we can figure out direction, we’re here for the night,” John said. “We’ll find our way back to the lake in the morning.”
“We can keep going,” the fellow said.
“Keep going, one of us will lose an eye,” John answered.
It would have been a damn cold night. But I happened to take a run back to see him and fired that shot into the air. Even though they had an idea of where they were, they were in no real position to keep bulling themselves out of the woods.
Once, a fellow I was supposed to meet at Portage River didn’t show up until almost two hours later. I waited as the day got black and the coyotes began yelping and rounding each other up. We were on an upland road, and each of us had taken a different direction. I had, as usual, hunted in a small back field surrounded by swale, waiting on deer that would move back and forth. But I hadn’t seen a deer that day. My friend was a hunter who had to keep on the move.
I fired a shot and honked my horn, and waited. Finally he came out of the woods, where he had collected a friend’s traps, and told me I shouldn’t have worried about him, and gave me one of his large rakings about it. But I believe to this day he had gotten turned about, and my honking the horn helped him. Though I cannot say, nor would he.
Some people don’t mind being a little lost, because they have enough experience and faith in themselves to match the difficulty. The great opponent, the imagination, is kept in check. No one has written more profoundly about how imagined terrors can direct your life than Joseph Conrad in Lord Jim. A young officer on a merchant ship panics, thinking the ship is about to sink, and deserts his post with the rest of the crew, leaving two hundred passengers to die. They decide on a story in which they valiantly tried to save them, only to find that not only did the ship not sink, but it was towed to port before their lifeboat got there.
The imagination causes panic when no panic is necessary. This is the worst enemy in the wilderness, or anywhere else. Years ago my friend David Savage used to hunt deer on the birch ridges along the Restigouche. He always got deer there—he was and is a fine tracker. But tracking an animal can cause problems. Now and again he knew he was lost, but he always managed to find his car. Getting lost on birch ridges is extremely easy. One ridge looks very much like the other. Unfortunately they trail off in very different directions, and if you are not careful you can be literally miles from where you think you are.
David explained to me that he never took a compass in those days, relying instead on his own intuition, which was always good. Sometimes he would have to backtrack two to three miles, and not find his car until well after dark. Oftentimes he told the friend he was with that he might be late, but he would return. Sometimes his friend, almost giving him up, would see him coming along two hours or more after dark.
It is, I suppose, like Daniel Boone’s answer to the question about being lost.
“No, I was never lost,” Boone asserted. “Though I was well mixed up for a month or two.”
To David it was not a case of panic as much as an intellectual dilemma. He wondered why he was getting turned around at a certain spot, when he was sure he knew the area well. He determined to discover what his mistake was.
And he did. One late afternoon, he came on a friend of his tracking a deer that he himself was tracking and realized that he was over half a mile from where he’d thought he was, because he was on a completely different ridge. It was a slight misstep at the base where two ridges joined a third and crossed each other, but this misstep caused him to be turned around. Once he realized this, he was never turned about on those ridges again.
9
The night I went back to the Mullin Stream camp and brought John and his friend the fish, it started to snow. The woods here are thick and old, and it was ten years before the new road was pushed through by new logging considerations. So it was the old land of our ancestors still, people who had worked these roads and streams for lumber barons from the old days, and took moose and caribou for the lumbermen, and cut with axe and saw, and hauled wood by horse and two-sled. All of that age was an age ago the night I visited my brother, which seems to me an age ago now. The men who lived so much in hope and hardship were gone, ghosts from another era.
Soundlessly the snow fell through the old-growth forest, and we ate our dinner and played some cards. The boys had a beer or two, and John decided to stay up another day, to cross the old Mullin Stream bridge and make his way up along the tractor road at dawn. He did not much like hunting in where I hunted.
Hunting by the lake is a very different proposition to hunting in a chop-down or along a road, or in a stand, for that matter. Hunting in and about that old forgotten lake is my kind of hunting. A hunting done on the ground, near a deer mark or trail, and without sound, or movement. It is close, face-to-face hunting. There is a chance you will see nothing, and hear a deer as it passes by. It means that I have stood up to four or five hours in one spot completely silent and still, trying to keep my scope from fogging up. There are days I have done this from dawn to dusk and have seen nothing. On other days, however, deer walk through the growth and come almost up to me. And a big buck up close in swale, in rut, and close to two hundred pounds, is not guaranteed to be passive.
Even so, if I cannot see them I never risk a shot. (And now that the deer hunt is bucks only, it is absolutely essential you be absolutely sure it is a buck.) Or moose pass by unconcerned, now that moose season is over, or a bear crosses the river beneath me and saunters by, groggy with sleep.
John was up early, before light, and couldn’t rouse his friend. Nor did he rouse me, since I had no intention of hunting. He poked about for some coffee, and made his way out before dawn. The light was just coming into the sky when he got to Mullin Stream. There he had to cross the icy pilings of a bridge torn down the year before, and he made his way up along the silent road, deserted and snow-covered, where thrashed-up and disposed trees lay on either side, a whole canopy of our woods on the ground. The snow had stopped, and everything was white and silent. Heavy snow hung off the muted branches of oak and birch; Mullin Stream had frozen and twisted away into the blurred corners of his vision, under a foot of snow. All was fresh, and there was hardly a stir of wind. This road twisted for a mile or two into the backwoods beyond Mullin Stream, where it came to a sudden, inexplicable stop, as if the men building it had decided they had not intended to go in that direction.
Soon John was up beyond the first bend, and the day was brightening. John hunts like my uncle, who hunted successfully with a twelve-gauge shotgun for years. He had a slug in the chamber, and number 7 birdshot in his pocket, for he was not interested in partridge this day. He looked down at the side of the logging road and saw a buck track, and then another, deep prints rounded off at the toes. It was a large deer, he knew.
At first he wasn’t that excited, thinking the buck might have passed sometime in the night. But there would have been a topping of snow on the hoofprint if that had been the case—and the prin
t was bare, with some slight bluish compressed water at the base. And the buck had not crossed the road, but had turned and was walking ahead of him, somewhere up beyond the next turn. When he realized this, he paid much more attention. Judging by the length between the tracks, the deer was not in a hurry, it was moving leisurely up the centre of the road. The fluffy light snow had made John’s walk almost soundless. John took the safety off and moved carefully to the right side, as if walking on eggshells. Then he looked ahead—and sure enough the deer was standing broadside, looking back at him.
It might have been well over a hundred yards, and he had a shotgun, not a rifle. That is, he had no real sights. You point a shotgun, and anything over a hundred yards can be unpredictable. Still, it was a shot he had to take, knowing that if he moved the deer would bolt. He had to bring the shotgun up and fire in one quick motion, and that is what he did. He raised the shotgun just shoulder high, pointed, and fired, as the buck was beginning to jump. The buck hit the shoulder of the road and disappeared. John put another slug in the chamber and walked quickly ahead.
Back at our cabin, John’s friend was awake, and called over to me.
“I heard a shotgun.”
This piqued my interest.
“Birdshot, maybe.”
“No, it was a slug, I’m sure.”
He might have been firing at a partridge and forgot he had a slug in, I thought—that happens on occasion. Or it very well could have been someone else; the shot was far enough away. But I was up, and we were both out the door.
We headed along the camp road, to Mile 17, where we heard a second shot. We waited a moment, but there was no more. We crossed the bridge, covered in ice, and ran up the other side as fast as we could. And we followed John’s tracks up the silent road and into the woods. Where John fired the first shot, we saw the spent shell. There John’s tracks moved quicker. Where the buck had jumped, there were spots of blood. Across the ditch was the second shell.
The buck was down, just off the road. It had fallen in a small clearing. The first shot had hit it in the neck, on the run, so it was a fine shot. The second shot had been to kill the wounded animal.
It was an eight-point buck—but very heavy, and the tines were thick and broad. We helped John get it out. He had, by chance, forgotten his knife, and I, by chance, had brought mine. You never need a large knife to dress an animal down. The huge knives they have in those stores are ridiculous. In fact, when I was younger a man came into the woods with us all the time wearing a knife with a ten-inch blade, two bullet belts strapped across his chest, and camouflage grease for his face. He was a good enough lad, walked stealthily, etc., but I guarantee you he never once shot a deer. Often he would pull out his huge knife, look at his reflection in its gleam, sharpen it with a stone, then look over at me and smile.
I’ve seen David Savage take the hide off a moose with a small three-and-a-half or four-inch blade. Anything else is not needed, and might damage the carcass.
After we dressed the animal we carried it back across Mullin Stream, put it on the truck, and were out by mid-morning, the thought of John’s experience the night before, in the black spruce, long put behind him. It is a strange part of fate but I missed a deer almost the same way the year before, up on a road near the Norwest at the end of deer season. I was coming out at dusk, and walked right up behind a buck, which stopped and turned to watch me. I made the mistake of taking a step as I took the safety off, and with one bound the great tail came up, and the deer was gone, into the healthy gloom of a cold November night.
There are, of course, other ways to be lost.
10
I have eaten porcupine and beaver, frog and groundhog—all for the sake of expedience, and as a kind of formal declaration that these things can be used if a man in the woods is in difficulty. I am sure all of these things were eaten by many in bygone days, by the Micmac and Maliseet, by ancestors of mine. The Micmac were and are hunters and hunted caribou and moose for generations, and I have been told that their diet consisted mainly of meat, fish, and berries picked by the women. They captured beaver in their winter dens and were able to run moose to the ground. I doubt if much was wasted by them, of bear or fish or fowl. They were the first and ablest guides of the great era of non-resident game hunting, when men from other nations found us a wilderness place to be, to hunt or fish. Of course, foods like frog are still a delicacy.
I thought of all of this one night when I was on a plane, going down to Windsor, Ontario, to give a reading. I was at the back of the plane and the weather was wild; there was a chop the plane was against the entire way. It was a prop plane, and we were squeezed together. There, on the other side, just down from my seat, were five American hunters, travelling home from a successful hunt. I thought a hunt in northern Ontario, but as they spoke I realized it was a trip into northern Saskatchewan. They were buoyant and uncomplicated in their glee. All except one, maybe, had lucked in and had taken deer. I am not sure, but I assumed it was mule deer, although it very well may have been white-tail. Both deer are there, I think. I do not know the land of northern Saskatchewan, and I am sure I never will, and I am no less certain that I will never need to. I have enough land of my own.
I was sure by the way they spoke that they were from the northern States, and most likely hunted there, so, it meant that they were on a big deer hunt—which is not hyperbole, but the hunt for large buck deer. So they had made reservations, and had travelled by plane, with their rifles, to a hunting lodge in the North. But there was an unfortunate side to this hunt. I do not mention this with the intention of it reflecting poorly on all American hunters. Most are wonderful people all the way around. But these five were very festive in their amusement about the backward people of Saskatchewan, and how little they knew about hunting. As they spoke, I realized a few things. The people they were amused by—those who “shot a deer and it didn’t matter the size”—were the very people who had taken care of them in this wilderness setting. And I would make a bet that none of them would have lucked in to anything without the very people their cynicism now emasculated. And that these people “who drove cars with bald tires,” as one reminisced over his bourbon, were men who in any way and in any day would have outlasted these men in the woods, and walked them into the ground in a second. (I guarantee I would have.)
If those they ridiculed shot deer without trophy racks, it was because they used their game for something these men might never have needed to—they used the deer for food, not trophies. I realized that so much of the animosity toward people like this comes not because they are manly killers, but because they are boyishly naïve. They are, in the main, what urban ideas have done to the hunt. Animals are no longer animals to certain hunters. They are trophies. They are not used for food—they are used for show. They hunt for big racks, and are guided to big racks by someone whose own relatives may shoot a spike horn, or a non-trophy buck, knowing the quality of the meat will be better—or they might even realize that too many big bucks taken changes the genetics of the very animal. This is at least as important as bragging rights over a fourteen-point buck.
None of these men had shot a fourteen-point buck, and I did not lean over and tell them that I had. What I did do, however, was defend these certain fellows from Saskatchewan whom I did not know, had never met, and who might not ever defend me. I did say that these men didn’t hunt for trophies—it was a different hunt altogether, and one that was just as noble. In fact, I bet them that these men might have been the very ones who built the insulated tree stands that those hunters sat in comfortably to shoot huge buck without knowing much about the land, the people, or the animals at all. That perhaps these fellows had placed those stands exactly where they would offer the best opportunity for a rack that any half-assed shots could take home, with bragging rights, to their wives.
They stared at me in that self-complicated silence that unknowing people often have, their brows screwed up, and, as always happens with me, sooner or later I cursed mys
elf for my tongue. One of the youngsters was perhaps nineteen, and he believed his taking a deer made him brave—and who was I, this middle-aged man who almost never went out on a hunt any more, to try to dash a self-delusion that all of us should have for a while in our youth? I didn’t want to dash it so much as tell them that they hadn’t really been on a hunt, that perhaps none of them would have made out as well in those woods on their own as the men they now, in comfort, mocked. That, in fact, was the essential point—they had always been in comfort. The whole point of hunting lodges, from what I knew about them, from the midpoint of the nineteenth century on, was to keep hunters in relative comfort, to feed them, to amuse them if need be, to guide them to the animals they were to kill. My uncles were guides who did this half a century ago, and my cousins and friends were guides who did this now. And how in God’s name could they say anything about anyone with “bald tires” who took a deer to feed his family? In fact, the very point of hunting was that which they now in ignorance defamed, and which the urban world that looked upon nature as “pretty” did not understand.
So much of it was amusing to them. Would it have been amusing to them if I had told them that the Micmac captured beaver from their dens by first patting them? Would they have ever been able to do the same?
These were the hunters so many who don’t hunt see.
And I realized that hunting, or the terrible reputation it has among “civilized” men and women, is and can be its own worst enemy. And one reason for this is that hunting is now a product of that very civilization that decries discomfort and work, and ingenuity, and in the end bravery. In relative terms, so much care is taken of those hunters who pay big bucks for their hunt that they might just as well be at a health spa for the weekend. Some of the hunting done is on the same level as travelling middle-class retirees visiting a bed-and-breakfast near Annapolis Royal. I know a good fellow who never shot a deer, and tried each year to. He was fed up with his inability—once, standing on a rut mark, a deer walked right past him, and he didn’t see it until it was beyond his range. Finally he paid for his deer by going to one of these lodges. He knew he had, and it did not sit well with him, and in the end he was teased as much about this as he had ever been teased for not getting a deer. I prefer not to tease him. I know we all have our own inconstancy; our own grand design is not really our own but given to us by some Higher Power we do not understand.
Facing the Hunter Page 11
