There is much rancour about this kind of killing. But I am not faulting those who make a living by it. They still set up a hunt that is essentially industrious and workable. In the old days, and perhaps still, they hired Indian guides. In fact, at the first of the last century most of the guides for men like Braithwaite et al. were Micmac or Maliseet, and without a doubt they were the finest guides in the province. In a way, the terms of the hunt have not changed at all. Men are relied upon to take other men to the game. There is nothing wrong with this, but one should know which side of the square root of the equation he is on, and be mindful and humble about this. Writers, themselves, some who are terrified of guns, have made a great deal over this—and writers who have never been in the wilderness speak with authority about the First Nations. I am all right with this, except it is an obsession among Canadian writers to demonstrate how well they know the soul of the First Nations people. In some ways it is understandable. Though, in the end, it never does justice to the Micmac, Huron, Cree, or Sioux.
These boyish hunters flying with me to Windsor, laughing at the men from Saskatchewan, are the personification of this debate. The only thing I believed was that I would not hunt with these fellows claiming their racks, and that their guides in northern Saskatchewan perhaps did not respect them. I wondered how many of them, set down in a woods, would last. Not as many, I didn’t think, as those they bullied with their comments. In the movie The Deer Hunter, the character played by Robert De Niro hunts a big buck along mountain ravines with one bullet in the chamber, while his friend kills a little doe in the small pond outside the cabin by firing nine shots into it. My contention is that many of the fellows travelling on that plane resembled not the former character but the latter, and there was no way to make them see it.
11
In the 1930s my wife’s grandfather hunted both deer and bear on the Bartibog, and guided as well. Many nights my wife’s family relied upon game to eat. In my earliest days I heard of mighty bear in the Bartibog region. In the early years there was a bounty on the animals, looked upon as a nuisance. They were trapped and shot whenever people had a chance. Now, living on the Bartibog four or five months of the year, I see bear regularly in the spring. Deer come into our fields all summer long. Does and fawns stand in my garden.
My dog no longer chases those deer—at fourteen years old and with bad hips, she runs out to the shed and barks. When I yell to her to sit, she lies on her belly and watches the deer graze. She knows that she no longer has a chance at catching them. Or maybe she has gained wisdom over the years and now leaves them be.
Wayne Curtis has gained as much wisdom as anyone. In the early years he hunted with his father, and depended upon it. He remembers, when he was a boy, his father shooting moose for the winter. One was shot with an old Boer War rifle at well over three hundred yards. He also remembers his father as a guide being accidentally shot in the arm, by another guide, along the Cains River in the early 1950s. I imagine they were guiding for a deer hunt. Many thought he would lose the arm, and for days they didn’t know if he would be able to function on the farm any more.
To Wayne, knowing the things of the wilderness, of the deep woods, was something people of his generation were taught to believe was instrumental. Years before this accident, Wayne’s grandfather was on perhaps the last caribou hunt in New Brunswick. Fish and deer and other wildlife were as much a part of their diet as hamburger and fries might be for the kids today.
He hunted birds as a boy with a slingshot, and later on, deer with a rifle. He was an excellent shot with both. I have seen him walk along the roadways trying to find smooth stones to carry. He took many deer from the woods, and hunted every year. Even now, though he no longer hunts deer, he carries a slingshot with him along the old trails that meander near the main Souwest River, where he has his guiding camp (he has forty years’ experience as a guide, and has guided me to fish on more than one occasion), and he searches for birds in the popal or birch trees on late-fall afternoons. These are the best times to hunt for birds, just at dusk when the wind has died down and night is coming on. The birds rise to the trees and sit above the ground. You have to be careful, and stalk them, as you would any game, and, using a slingshot, you have to be able to get almost under them to fire.
Those trails and overgrown fields bring him back to a time that was simpler and, in many respects, kinder. To hit a bird with a slingshot and bring it down—which he did once on the fly—is great sportsmanship.
He was a hunter from the time he was a boy—and essentially it was what saved him, when he came back from the industrial cities of Ontario where he had gone to work. In those cities, and from his exceptional writing, you begin to get a glimpse of what it was like to be a Maritimer in the 1950s and ‘60s. We were left out of the equation, as certain of our third-class citizenship as any people of the day. Wayne didn’t have it easy. He was self-taught, did not finish high school, yet his strength of character and his writing ability earned him a large audience, much respect, and an honorary doctorate. As a young man trying to earn a living and help support his family by sending home money, he also learned to play golf as well as some men who had much more privilege and opportunity.
When he finally came back from those industrial cities, realizing that, as a Maritimer, those cities would never belong to him, he would go every day into the woods, with his rifle and knapsack. He said his main object was not to kill, but to simply do something that was so much a part of the natural world, after being so long immersed in the urban one. The short, cold autumn afternoons, with the sky filled with snow clouds and the world folding into itself for winter, made his spirit soar. He had to once again connect with who he was. He would take a few provisions, and carry his Winchester lever-action, and follow deer trails along rushing half-frozen brooks. Sometimes he would follow a deer for miles, through the dense spruce hills, and catching sight of it decide not to fire. Up along the Cains River, he was able to be alone, with the scent of autumn on the foliage. There, he said, he gave up deer almost every other day, and said to himself: “No, that’s not the one.” That is, he was like many hunters—more compassionate than they are sometimes given credit for.
In fact, Wayne Curtis’s story about giving up deer doesn’t surprise me. I know many, many hunters who have done this. It was to him the least significant part of hunting. Like Jason, his son, who is a guide to bird hunters from the States, it is the quest that is important. The fact of being ethical is a stamp of honour.
One time, Wayne followed a deer for miles along the hills above a frozen river. It trailed away into the gloom of early dusk. There was a heavy snow in the woods, and Wayne had been waiting on snow to track. But the snow was deeper than usual at that time of year. Wayne’s hands were frozen raw on his weapon. The deer knew it was being followed, and tried to lose him. It was a big deer, with a ten-point rack. Wayne got to see it twice that day, and did not get it in his sights. He had seen this deer on many occasions before as well, but had not been able to track it successfully. This day, however, he was determined—determined to prove to himself that he had not lost himself in the mire of Ontario’s industry. He began to track this deer in early morning, and this went on for some hours, and sometimes Wayne was up to his knees in snow, and had to navigate hillsides slippery with frost and ice. When he caught up to it, late in the afternoon, the deer was exhausted and had stumbled on icy shore boulders, and was an easy shot.
Wayne, only about fifty yards away when he stepped out on the shore, raised his rifle and took the safety off. But didn’t take the shot.
“No, that’s not the one,” he said, putting the rifle down, and he smiled to himself. All that way, all those miles of woods, he had been able to do what one man in five hundred might—he had been able, like men of the old days, to track a deer to ground.
It is important to know that this is a feat, tracking deer down, that very few hunters ever get to accomplish. A feat that those in the union halls of Ontario who made sp
ort of him and his “Newfie” accent might never match. For many hunters today, going into the woods alone is something they have no stomach for. They have been given the “things” that render them dependent on the world, and even hunting doesn’t take them away from this dependence. They ride in comfortable truck cabs and look out over chop-downs from which wood and trees have been pulled to be sent to other nations. There might be deer there, hides almost orange in the sun, and they can take the shot. But to track a deer for miles, or to refuse to leave the hunt because an animal is injured, is the domain of the best hunter.
Tracking deer requires a kind of stamina and intelligence that many hunters don’t possess, or don’t have time to learn. If you leave an office on Friday afternoon to drive to your camp, and stay up Saturday, and hunt in and about the camp roads—this is fine, and it is the way that many of us hunt. (I hunt this way now.) But it is not conducive to being a good hunter.
A good hunter goes where the deer tracks take him or her. You have to be as silent and careful as possible, and your sense of direction has to be impeccable, especially along the hardwood ridges up along the Saint John River, because in a matter of moments you might find yourself in deep woods. Just like the gentleman David Savage was hunting with up on the Restigouche, not everyone has this ability. The deer I have shot when tracking have been few, and I have been lucky—once because I lost the tracks and had turned to go when the buck came up behind me. I don’t call that a success—just luck. My hunt is called still hunting—that is, I cross into deer territory, find where the buck has scraped, and wait. Wait, and wait.
Wayne knew how to track them, and didn’t shoot.
He shot his last deer some years ago in the field behind his home. He never felt right about taking that deer, for the deer had been there all summer.
I have seen him intentionally lose fish, realizing that he has had many in his day. (I have seen David Savage do this as well.)
Wayne has all of this as a lament now. He is a plain-spoken, good-hearted man who has lived his life as close to the woods as anybody I know. But the woods have gone, or at least are changed forever. The camp where he once guided fishermen has been taken over by hunters from Alabama. And though I have liked most of the people from Alabama I have met, there is something disconcerting about this.
The world no longer belongs to us. In so many ways, we are now in the same position the First Nations peoples found themselves in. Thinking this, and multiplying it a thousand times, we might begin to realize the tragedy that occurred here four hundred years ago.
There were no snowmobiles or four-wheelers, or many four-wheel drive trucks when Wayne was a boy. The trails weren’t as broad or as well marked as they are today. This is what allowed him to learn how to hunt on foot and on his own.
One day, in deep wood, with snow on the boughs of spruce, far up along the main Souwest Miramichi River, Jason Curtis shot a deer that had come over a hill into view. It was a long shot in dense wood, but he knew he had wounded it, and he began to track, for he would never leave a wounded animal. He tracked it for three hours, down through swampy and marshy ground. He was on its trail but he couldn’t seem to catch it. Then the buck seemed to make a conscious decision to go up against the current when he came to a brook. And Jason had to trust his instinct that this was where the deer had travelled, even though all his experience told him the deer would travel down current. So he turned up along the slippery brook in the cold, splendid autumn day. He kept looking at the leaves floating down in the current. By this he surmised how fast the deer was moving. Then, just when he thought he’d been mistaken and was about to turn back, he saw something on one of those leaves that floated past him. It was a spot of blood. He kept moving. Soon he saw more, on some stone. And finally he was able to find the eight-point buck on the shore, far upriver.
He had a long haul with an animal well over two hundred pounds, but he dressed it out, and made it back to camp by nightfall.
12
Years ago, David Savage began to hunt along the stretches of the Bartibog River, in Northumberland County, New Brunswick. He was an average kid of that time. He was a fine hockey player and a good baseball player. He was a fair student. But more than anything else, like so many boys here, he was an avid fisherman and hunter. He would listen to the tales told by his father, who was a fisheries officer, and uncles around the wood stove on cold winter nights, tales about the woods, and its trails, its uncompromising grace, and the animals hunted. The difference between a buck track and a doe track, or the difference between a cow call and a bull, or a bull track and a cow, if it was a young bull. How to react when a bull charges, how to call one almost to you. The way to track deer—how a deer sometimes tries to move behind you, in order to watch you. How to let a wounded animal, especially a moose or bear, go and lie down before you begin to track it.
The main thing these stories gave him was a desire to hunt as well. And by the time he was sixteen he was hunting on his own. He would leave school each autumn afternoon and, taking his 30-30, go into the woods. Waiting on a trail filled with the scent of autumn, of musk and bark and fallen leaves, he would listen for deer that moved out toward the back fields at twilight. His was not an idyllic childhood, far from it—but it was an exceptionally fortunate one in certain respects. Along those back autumn fields downriver was a good place to learn to hunt. There, in the late gloom of one long-ago afternoon, he shot his first deer, a spike horn, about 130 pounds, as it moved along the pine and spruce in back of a field. He hunted birds, as well, those grey-feathered partridge with their glossy necks and beautiful heads. He hunted them with a shotgun or .22 rifle, and became a good shot, and had an excellent eye for spotting game. In fact, most of the men I write about in these pages have an uncanny ability to spot game, either deer or moose or bird, where 80 percent of humans might pass them by, not noticing. He went on duck hunts, and learned how to call ducks and geese that flew in the large sky over Bartibog Island.
The second year he went deer hunting he shot an eight-point buck, and after that, time after time he spent the deer season away from most people, by himself in the woods, either on the Miramichi or along the Restigouche, with an old army sack filled with a lunch, an extra bullet or two, and a skinning knife. In fact, the first time I heard of David, my wife, who is his cousin, described him as a fisherman and a hunter. He was eighteen at the time. And he has gained a great deal of wisdom since then.
Sometimes he hunted deer with buckshot, and he carried number 6 birdshot that he could change to very quickly when he needed it.
Soon even the back trails were too crowded for him, and he meandered his way deeper into the woods, to hunt alone. He realized that when fly fishing the hard-running small rivers on the Miramichi, or the vast pools of the Restigouche, one would often meet people, and hunting was the one activity for which there was still enough comfortable woods that he could be entirely by himself. Besides, he could prove to himself that he knew the woods as well as most, and prove that to others by being there. So complete was his comfort that he would tell those he was with never to worry about him if he was not back at dark, for he would find his way, sooner or later—and his hunt was such that he often waited in a spot until almost the last light, before he took the clip out of his rifle and headed back, making his way out to his car on those long autumn nights, walking miles in complete darkness. I can attest to this from the days when I hunted with him.
“Just because hunters haven’t seen deer does not mean there aren’t deer,” he told me. “Most of the men hunting pick a road near woods, and wait—or a side logging road is the farthest into the woods they go. That is fine—for them—and there will be deer crossing those roads to and from their scrapes. The best thing, however, is to go beyond or behind those places, mooch about in the real wild, in where the deer live.”
One day, leaving the small 2.2 Mile Road that years ago ran above the south branch of the Sovogle (with all the new chop-downs and work this road might ve
ry well be a memory now), and leaving hunters who had posted themselves on that road to catch deer crossing in the very early morning, David walked down toward the water just after daylight—and a half mile below that road, where the hunters waited, he heard a deer approaching. It was just light in the woods. The deer had crossed the river at 2.2 Mile Pool far below and was making its way up toward its rut marks on the high ground at daylight. It would travel in this pattern, coming back to all its rut marks over a three-day period. Now David heard it on the lower ground as it made its way toward him. He took the safety off and waited. Soon the buck came up over the embankment, almost in front of him, and he felled it with one shot—a 280-pound buck that the men above him were still waiting for. It took him well over an hour to dress and drag it back up the long-overgrown hill toward where those men, confident they were hunting a wilderness road, waited. The men were amazed to see the large buck he had taken.
And that was not the largest buck he ever shot. The largest buck weighed over 305 pounds, which is a monster buck. He tells the story, which I am sure is true, of being offered any amount of money to give up the tines of this great buck, by an American hunter in a truck stop one autumn day. He of course refused, but he never hunted for the tines. He never was a trophy hunter. Still, he took an eighteen-point non-typical buck (with a rack that wasn’t completely symmetrical) one year when I was living in Saint John, and drove into the yard with it. It was the only year I shot a doe, if I remember correctly, just before doe season ended. (I never felt good about it, and I mention it because I never felt good about it.)
Facing the Hunter Page 12
