I have never seen a larger rack on a deer, although I am sure they exist. But this was a mythical deer. The year before that, he had shot a twelve-point buck on a dead run across a field in South Napan by leading it just a little, and knowing exactly when to fire. You don’t practise a shot like that, you either have it in your arsenal or you don’t. But David is an excellent shot with any kind of rifle, and, like Wayne Curtis, is an expert fisherman and guide, without being written up in any guidebook.
One of the things growing up along the river gave David was a love of canoes, and he is an expert in a canoe. The canoe he has used most often on the Miramichi and its tributaries is one called a Norwester, made by Ralph Mullin. It is a sturdy and wonderfully responsive canoe that he has used for well over twenty years now. I once poled down Green Brook with it, and discovered how easily it handled.
Often canoeing the Bartibog River, down from above the Bathurst highway in the summer, he would see along the banks places were deer came down, and birch stands where partridge fanned themselves in the sun. Content with his fishing, he would make a note of this, and one clear, crisp fall Saturday, he took his rod to fish some late salmon and decided, since it was deer season, to bring his shotgun. (The old-timers did this often in the early part of the last century, and “sports” would come up from the States for just such an event.)
He put in about a mile above the mouth of Green Brook, a fertile trout brook that runs into the Bartibog about three quarters of a mile or so above the Bathurst highway. That day, poling down the pastoral river with its small rushing rapids here and there, its water brownish green, stopping now and again to fish, he was able to shoot a few partridge that he saw fanning themselves along those side banks. Then, just at dusk, when the river sounded like all the musical instruments in the world, and the day was fast ebbing away, with the tall spruce shading the river and the leaves of maple and birch trees tinged gold and red, he saw a large buck come down to the water and start to cross to the far side. He was able to down it from seventy-five yards, as the canoe glided silently along. That night he poled down the Bartibog with a buck deer and salmon in the canoe. This must have made his father, a hard-fighting veteran of the Second World War, a fisheries officer, and a fine woodsman, very proud.
He began to do this each season at least once. The canoe was silent on the water, and being able to look from the river into the woods gave him an advantage that he felt walking or standing did not. The days, too, were a treasure, just before the river made ice, and the sun still warmed the earth by noon. He found it immensely pleasurable, whether he lucked in or not. It was, in fact, something of a fabled hunt, the autumn water filled with fish and clear and cold, the canoe gliding down with the slightest pressure from his pole.
One time he brought a friend to sit in the bow, rifle across his belly, who seeing a deer crossing the river far below them, fired at it three times, missing it each time. Finally David put his pole down, letting the canoe drift with the current. He grabbed the rifle from the fellow and fired just as the deer was coming out of the water. The deer dropped with one shot. It was a 190-pound buck. Other times he would pole for a while and, seeing some deer sign, he would leave the canoe and walk up into the small groves beyond the water and hunt the deer from that position, deep back in the Bartibog, a place very few hunters ever see. He took a large buck one day, leaving his canoe for a romp through a ridge of hardwood, and often as not he was successful.
He was and has been content with his hunting for many years now. But cynicism has also crept into his world. He is not fond of how many bucks are taken now, since the doe season is closed. He is also aware of how many does have been shot by accident, by hunters too quick to fire before they make sure, and left in the woods. For no one wants to bring out a doe without a doe licence. This is a terrible and hidden tragedy of hunting. While taking only males puts pressure on the buck, on the genetic blueprint of the herd, people must be aware that holding big buck contests in every nook and cranny of the province also leaves small bucks shot and abandoned in the woods as well. To say this might sound cynical, but hunting can be a cynical business. I myself have known men who were sure, raising the rifle to look through the scope, that they saw horns, and fired, only to walk up to a small doe, mortally wounded. Panic sets in. They know that they could be charged and lose their rifles and their vehicles, and so they abandon the doe to the coyotes. This does not help anyone, least of all the animals. But the big buck contest is fraught with the same kind of sentiment, so some (some) might leave a four-pointer in the woods because they are sure they will get a twelve-point later on in the season, so that they might enter a contest to win a four-wheeler. All of this is just greed and stupidity.
But David also has, as he told me one night, hunted enough. He has been on bad hunts, but not many. There was one time he mortally wounded a moose and couldn’t find it, though he searched all one long night and all the next day. By the time he found it, the meat had been tainted. He still remembers that with agitation and sorrow. But the deer hunt is, to him, the best hunt, the most rewarding and the most challenging. The days can freeze you solid, and you are pitted against vast, uncompromising nature in an elemental way. This is the secret that real hunters have—that is, their desire for the rawness of the hunt overcomes all obstacles to it. In fact, the conditions are a prime motivator, for sunny, leisurely days are not conducive to it. Most hunters I know come alive in conditions that would make many stay inside. This is a fact of life. And they greet it by being alive. One of the biggest deer I shot was taken in a raging blizzard years ago. I decided that I would hunt the area I had prepared to hunt, no matter if it was storming or not. With the heater almost nonexistent in my old Suzuki jeep, I travelled up the twenty-five miles only to walk another two into the woods. There, almost freezing, and finding it hard to hold the rifle, I started out, only to meet the buck moving up the woods road toward me, the very storm drifting off his back.
One time my father shot a buck—this must have been back in the 1950s, or early ’60s. He tracked the deer down across the roadway, and found a lot of blood in a ditch, was sure the deer had travelled no farther than that. Later, sometime in late fall or early winter, getting his hair cut, he was told a story by a man who declared that up on the Chaplin Road, earlier in the year, a buck deer had sauntered out of the woods and dropped in front of his car.
I suppose people are people and will do what they do. It is not reasonable to assume honesty in a hunt any more than anyplace else. But for some reason you do expect this.
You do not expect a man to come back to camp and tell you he has shot a huge doe by accident, and is frightened, so he has simply left it there. But this happens. It is not too hard to see horns that aren’t there when you are excited. I suppose you can be talked into seeing them, at any given time. The way the deer blends in with its surroundings sometimes allows you to think that the branches above its head are tines. This is not such a far-fetched thing.
One year a friend of mine was hunting in a blind and watched a buck approach, on the last day of the season. He waited for a shot, and finally raised his rifle, saw the buck’s antlers, and waited for it to raise its head. It took only a minute or two for him to realize his mistake—the buck had kept moving, just at an angle away from his scope view, and he had his rifle trained on a branch that he swore looked like buck antlers. By the time he realized his mistake, the buck was beyond him, and turning his rifle, he wasn’t able to get a shot away. It was a silly mistake, he knows, but it did happen.
A few years ago, up on the Miner’s Road, just before the Miner’s Bridge, in off a logging road and along a back trail, I trained my rifle on a deer, and waited—waited it seemed forever—for it to show its head. I could make out its body, and had a clear shot—but I couldn’t tell by this, by the way it was standing, if it was a doe or a young buck.
I didn’t fire, and I am glad of it, because when it finally turned and bounded away, it was a doe—a big one; but a d
oe nonetheless.
There was also the case of my friend Peter McGrath who one day hunting saw a buck cross the road up along the Sheephouse stretch and fired, only to see he had shot a doe with horns. An anomaly, to be sure, but there you go.
Peter McGrath and Les Druet own a camp up on the main Norwest, and have had great hunts in and about their area. It is a camp that looks out across a beaver pond, and a marshy inlet, and over the Norwest Miramichi in the distance as it flows below the Portage River. Peter’s main hunt is moose, though he has taken many deer along the Sheephouse, and up along the Johnson Road. He, too, is a guide without being a guide—many people rely upon his or Les Druet’s expertise to help them find game. I have seen him take large buck in a chop-down, and he is a hunter who refuses to stay in one place, which is the one infuriating aspect of being with him. He will simply decide at any given moment, no matter how much proof to the contrary (in fact he could be standing in a fresh buck track), that he is wasting his time where he is, and will decide, on the spur of the moment, to go in an entirely different direction, because, as he says, he can “sense something” or has a “bad feeling” or a “good feeling.”
Once, on the Sheephouse Road, he took his three-wheeler from the back of his half-ton and travelled to the end of the road, and into the woods another mile, and climbed to a tree stand he had made there earlier in the year—all in a blizzard. Once situated in the stand he came to his senses and realized that the blizzard was so bad he could hardly see the ground. So he got down, took his three-wheeler, and drove back to his half-ton, and made his way out to camp. All in a day’s work, so to speak.
But he has had success nonetheless, and has shot a bull moose to the ground charging him at forty yards. He is one of the best hunters I know.
In fact, the last moose he shot he had called from the camp porch the first morning of the hunt. He called the long and mournful cow call, and, putting the horn down, he went inside for a cup of tea. Looking out the window he saw in the far-off distance something crossing the river (initially he thought it might be a bear). Taking a closer gander at it, he realized it was a bull moose that had responded to his call. He went out and called again. The moose came out of the river and abruptly disappeared in along the marshy ground, among high old grass and alders. He took his rifle and went down, walking the narrow planks over the old beaver pond. The moose was nowhere to be seen, so, standing in a small opening in the field, Peter decided to entice the animal again by giving the bull call. He gave the short, deep grunt of the bull.
“Uugguh,” he called. (This is a challenge to any bull in the area.) And again “Uugguh.” And as soon as he put the old horn down, he heard a crash on his right and the bull, a large fourteen-point, eight-hundred-pound animal, came running toward him. He raised his rifle and fired, and the bull dropped about forty yards away. The bull got up again, and came again, and it was the second shot that was the killing shot.
“I’ve had some close calls,” he said, “but that may have been about the closest—doncha think?”
13
There are anomalies of another sort. How can I say this without being laughed at? Well, I can’t, and I can’t verify it, either. But being brought up close to the woods, to its vast hold over my mother’s people, for instance, I have come to think that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in my philosophy, to quote the Bard.
That is, perhaps there are ghosts in the woods, and they allow themselves to be known only when woodsmen are alone.
My Uncle Dow died when he was a child six years of age, falling on a jackknife. This is a story from the 1920s that fits into any time in the 1940s or ’50s, when people alone far up the Mullin Stream, or on the Fraser-Burchill Road, said they saw things no one believed. (Or they didn’t tell them for years because no one would have believed them.) Hudson, my grandfather, left the lumberyard on hearing his son was ill. As he was walking, he looked to the far side of the river, where a road (much like the road to his house) suddenly appeared to run down through the gloomy old-growth trees, and on this road he saw a horse-drawn hearse, with large plumes on the horses’ heads. The horses rushed right toward him, and then vanished.
He knew at that moment that this must be a vision of his child’s death.
It is eighty or so years after Dow’s death that a nephew he never knew, a man in his fifties slowing down with arthritis in both arms and hands, is writing about his death, which seemed to be told to his father by a phantom hearse. How ridiculous!
There are other stories I have heard.
One man saw a Native woman doing her washing and braiding her hair. When he got closer, the woman turned, smiled, and disappeared.
In another story, an old Indian man points in the direction of the falls, on Mullin Stream, late in the afternoon. A friend of mine swears to this day that the old man was there, yet when he went to speak to him, he disappeared into the evening air.
It fits into the 1960s, when the deer came out of nowhere and ran toward me, a boy who was hunting partridge that cold night.
A woodsman once told me that he had spent a day in the woods talking to an old fellow, dressed from the early 1900s, who told him he had hunted woodland caribou on the barrens in toward Big Bald Mountain, and that his “sport” was lost, and they must come and help. The woodsman ran to get his coat and, coming back out into the yard, could no longer see the old-timer. He said he thought the old lad confused, until a few years later he saw a picture in a lumberman’s book, taken circa 1905, with a group of hunters from long, long ago. In this picture one of the men was the one who had come to his camp to tell him his “sport” was lost, in 1974.
This, too, is a silly story—except when the fellow told it, it wasn’t silly. For to him, it had happened as surely as I am writing it.
These stories come from somewhere, from our own psyche, perhaps. Yet how many men mock these stories when safe in their own houses, and feel them when they are in the wood? That is, men perfectly able to call all or any of this ridiculous when on a road will begin to question everything ninety yards from that road, in the deep bush. I have not really met anyone yet who is frightened to stay alone in the woods, who has any particular fear—such as fear of coyotes, or bear, or bull moose in rut. Those things are hardly considered. But the agitation comes from some other quality, not only in our own psyche but in the very nature of all that the woods implies. This is, in fact, a part of the hunt as much as anything else.
“If you are up in Christmas Mountain and see the devastation that the wind wrought in 1995—and you are alone up there—well, I will just say if you believe in anything at all you will begin to pray,” says a logging trucker I know. He is as self-reliant as most men, and said this without apology at all.
An older man, a friend of David Savage’s, a grand old man of the hunt, tells the story about years ago hunting up in the raw fields of the Bartibog River and, coming on to dusk in a blinding snowstorm, seeing a huge deer with rocking chair horns—that is, a deer with horns more like an elk or caribou—standing in the field. This old gentleman has taken enough deer and moose in the woods to fill two chronicles, and he says he was not fooled here. He had five shots in his rifle (I am not sure what kind of rifle it was, but he had hunted with it for years). He took his first two shots standing, while the deer was broadside to him. Then he kneeled and took another. For his last two shots he lay on the ground and fired. The deer finally moved off without a sound into the trees. He thought this strange and didn’t mention it for quite a while. But then the next year a young man dropped in to visit him, and told him the strange story of coming down the Bartibog to hunt and seeing, in a field far away along the Gum Road, this huge deer with rocking chair horns. It was standing broadside in the late afternoon, the sun shining off its back. He fired six shots at it, and it never moved. After the last shot, the deer turned and walked into the woods.
This deer with the rocking chair horns was seen again, farther up the Russellville Road l
ater that year, and again fired at, again missed.
Then, a year later, one dark night, someone knocked on David Savage’s door and told David he had shot this deer with the rocking chair horns that afternoon, and it was an ordinary deer. But David never got to see it, or the horns, and remains skeptical that this deer was ever taken. He believes it will appear again someday to some unsuspecting hunter in the depths of the Bartibog wilderness.
14
I began to learn about deer slowly, but when I did the world of the hunt was opened up for me. It is not a mysterious thing; it could be said that buck deer are predictable, just like all other things in nature. There is a season and a time for them, just as for birth and decay. The mating cycle might go on three or four good weeks, during the colder weather in November. The buck marks out his territory, telling other bucks and doe a bit about who he is. This also provides information to the hunter. The buck will come back around to check these marks at given intervals to see if the doe have called. They will do this in enclosed ground, like black spruce or fir, so that they might walk right up to you. (One deer I shot was no more than fifteen feet away when I first noticed him, and he noticed me.) But they will do this in wide-open spaces, too, like hardwood ridges, or in querulous territory, along ragged chop-downs, where man’s machines have pulled roots and all from the ground and left nothing embedded except the remnants of a forest.
Facing the Hunter Page 13
