Facing the Hunter

by David Adams Richards

  On a large chop-down once, waiting on a buck I knew was making its rounds there, I had no idea another hunter was waiting on another buck some three hundred yards up the chop from me. He did not know I was there, either, so blended we were. I have long worn deer musk during the hunt (I actually think it works, so more fool I), so even though he now and again smoked a cigar there was no way I could have smelled it, even if he had been close enough. Then, as darkness began to encroach upon me, and with no sign through my scope in any direction of any deer, I stood to leave. Just as I did, the fellow sat up and trained his rifle on me. I turned and realized I was in the crosshairs of a .308 semi-automatic, up on Urquhart Road, and that this might be the last breath I ever took. It happened that fast—and there was nothing I could do, for I was afraid to wave lest he fire. Except the fellow stood to get a better look, and lowered his rifle in a kind of apology. But as I left the chop, in the dark, shouldering my rifle, I dropped it. I picked it up, examined it, and believed it to be no worse for wear, which was a silly mistake on my part.

  The next day I went back to that chop-down. This might have been twenty years ago now, and I doubt it is there any more—I believe the forest has once again claimed it. It was a cooler day and I was alone, except for the jays that now and again bobbed about near me looking for bread. I had my scope and field glasses, and I began to survey the corners of the chop at early morning, and periodically throughout the day. The one thing the day can be up in this quiet is monotonous, and it is patience that counts there. It was sometime after four o’clock in the afternoon when all of a sudden (and it certainly seemed like all of a sudden) I noticed something far across the chop that hadn’t been there a minute before. I leaned slowly ahead, and raised my rifle, and looked through the scope—it was a buck, about ten points, standing face on two hundred yards or so away.

  There were two things I should have done. The first is, I should have sighted in my scope that morning after having knocked my rifle the night before. That was just common sense, but I was too impatient to take the time. The second thing I did wrong was to lack patience in the shot. I could have waited until the deer turned sideways. But the last thing I have ever been accused of is logic. So I trained my sights on the small portion of the deer I could see and squeezed the trigger. I missed it. I leaned forward more, brought another bullet forward, and fired again. I came very close, but missed again. The deer turned and fled, without my being able to get another shot. I had been very foolish. I am certain I would have taken that buck if I had waited until it turned broadside. But then I remembered having dropped the rifle.

  The next day I went out to the gravel pit near my mother-in-law’s home and checked. That knock had jarred the scope, so it was firing very high to the right. I sighted the rifle in, and prepared for the next year’s hunt.

  Peter McGrath, just driving along in his truck, can spot game in a chop-down a quarter of a mile away. It is a location that he has been very successful in, and he likes the chop-down (as do many others) because it gives him both a place to blend in with the torn-up ground and a fairly open shot when the game comes. In fact, a chop-down is a very inviting place for a deer or moose hunter, and some hunters I know spend their entire hunt in one chop-down or another and do not go beyond them into the woods proper. In a way—as strange as it might seem—it is a romantic place to hunt, with its deer avenues between huge mounds of thrashed and torn earth. On the cold days, after a snow, tracks are everywhere.

  Another place Peter and other people I know like to hunt is along power lines stretched out for miles through spruce and bog. Deer will cross these places steadily, and many hunters wait on the top of a power line ridge to watch across this opened space (sometimes about a hundred yards wide and miles long) for those deer. Sometimes, however, they see deer too far away for a practical shot, and many times they are interrupted in their hunt by someone else staking out the power line and aiming back toward them. Then it is best to move.

  The power line is undulated, with valleys and hills, overgrown by small maples or poplar, and distance can be deceiving. You might think a deer is closer or farther from you, depending on where you are situated. Peter McGrath, hunting one day along the line near his camp, with a bit of raw snow down, saw a doe and fawn cross far down the line and decided to get closer, because the buck would be handy. He quickly and quietly moved down along the line, and realized the deer were about two hundred yards farther away than he had initially thought. Still, he walked until he could see the doe and fawn tracks in that raw November snow, and he moved into the woods to wait for the buck. Facing the woods along the deer trail he sensed something behind him and, turning, saw the buck walking toward him, coming from the same side at which the doe and fawn had entered. Peter believes another hunter had spooked this buck to unwittingly come toward him.

  Still, chop-downs or power lines are not the hunt I prefer. To get into the woods far enough and wait on a rut mark is the way I am best able to “control” the hunt (if anyone can do that). I have no qualms about saying that I would be a poor tracker overall, but I am not a poor waiter. I can wait on deer for hours without moving a muscle—I have done this along the Fundy coast and the south branch of the Sovogle, and along the Norwest. If you are in the proper spot, the deer will come right out in front of you sooner or later. I do not use deer calls or bring deer horns with me to rattle. For some reason I always believed that these things weren’t that effective, and that one should wait upon the deer in its natural environment naturally. If you believe something is not going to be effective, I will guarantee you, most likely it will prove ineffective. That is, belief in the divining rod brings the water.

  But I have been with lots of others who use deer calls and rattles and they seem to work just fine. David used a call up on the Sovogle with me one year and had a buck coming to it. The buck moved away before we got a look at it, but it was no more then twenty-five yards or so away, in the thick alders.

  His antler rattle has brought deer to him as well. Not only buck but doe will respond to a rattle of horns—imitating two bucks in rut fighting, or a buck scraping horns to mark territory.

  To use a call or rattle during the bow season is probably effective, for most killing shots are taken at about thirty to fifty yards, and you have to bring the deer to you. My cousin has hunted with a bow successfully for years. The bow season starts earlier in the fall—leaves are still very much on the trees, and it is a close hunt. Much like Wayne Curtis hunting partridge with a slingshot and smooth stone, a bow hunter must get close to his quarry in order to take the shot. To start the arrow back on a 120-pound pull might be difficult, and requires a strong arm, but once the pulley action takes over, it becomes more diplomatic, and one can hold it on his quarry a much longer time, and spring it forward with tremendous force.

  Of course, stands are now the thing, and people are mostly in trees, with their bows, waiting on the deer to travel beneath them. The killing shot with a bow is usually below the fore shoulder, between the upper rib cage and the heart. The deer runs after the arrow strikes, and weakness and loss of blood force it to lie down. The bow hunter usually does not follow it immediately but waits for fifteen or twenty minutes or more for it to weaken. It is easier to find then, and stillness is more beneficial to the meat. One man shooting a deer with an arrow, following it quickly, was on a desperate chase through the Black River area for acres, and lost sight of it a dozen times. If he had waited, the problems he faced may not have arisen.

  Usually, though, deer taken by bow tend overall to be smaller animals. I am not saying large deer can’t be taken by bow; I am saying it is essentially the time of year that just might allow the smaller buck deer to wander more than the larger, dominant, and rutting buck.

  15

  But sometimes—and I realize this as well—hunters are simply … simple.

  A man I know fired through his truck window, while sitting in it, so excited he was at seeing a deer. I know a man who began to shake so
badly when he saw a big buck up near our camp at Mullin Stream that he could not for the life of him raise his rifle. Nor did he know why.

  One day, a man I know got out of the car and, taking his .22 semi-automatic, fired eight shots at a partridge on a limb twenty feet above him, and missed it every time (I’ll swear to this on any Bible). The bird, in the end, seemed to be making fun of him, shrugging this way and that, bobbing his head, fluffing up his feathers, picking up first his right foot, and then his left. All of this in view of three men, who were by this time rolling on the ground laughing. Finally, the man, who had regaled us the night before with his hunting prowess and the hunting prowess of his tribe, got into the car, shrugged, and said in his soft, Micmac way:

  “Well, you see—I decided to let it live.”

  Then he could not stop laughing himself.

  There is a picture in an old book of a wispy boy with a huge nineteenth-century musket waiting for a bear who is approaching behind him. This is more or less what happened to a man I know, whom I went to the Norwest to visit. I saw him poking his head out of a blind, looking desperately into the chop for a deer, while a huge—and I mean huge—buck was standing behind him twenty yards away on the road. It took off when I came toward it.

  Like the buck my father had to stop on the road for, in upper Blackville one afternoon in 1965. It wouldn’t move, while men were hunting on both sides of the road, in the woods, and in the fields.

  My father waited a moment then said to my brother, “Check the trunk and see if I brought my rifle.”

  My brother was able to get out and open the trunk and look before the deer decided to take off. (No, my father had not brought his rifle.)

  Or the man I know who was high in a metal tree stand looking at the fawns beneath him, saying, “Little fawns, so tiny so far below,” and turned to see if the buck was behind them, when something let go on the stand, and down it went, thirty-five feet in half a second, and came to a stop a foot before the ground. The man was still in his chair, his gun still resting across his lap, a fresh chew of tobacco in his mouth, and he was staring at the little fawns’ legs, while the little fawns looked down at him.

  Or the man who waited an hour, seeing a black bear down the road, for this bear to get closer so he could take a shot, and suddenly out of the woods, after all his waiting, came a backhoe to finish digging the hole that was started that morning, making the clump of dirt the man thought was the bear that much bigger, but not a lot closer.

  Or the man who with his friend snuck up on, as he described it, “an entire herd or two of ducks.” He’d poked his sixteen-gauge out, took the shot, and realized all of a sudden that they were his neighbour’s decoys, and tried his best to slink away. When his neighbour told him the story that night, he feigned a kind of universal outrage: “Some kinda nuts like that there are still walkin’ about in the woods—makes ya scared to do anything!”

  Or the man hunting with a friend, tracking the buck backwards. Or the fellow with another friend, who was creating so much of a commotion my friend went to see if he was in distress, and saw him walking back and forth, his rifle shouldered as if he was in a military square, shouting orders at the top of his lungs at himself. Or the young man who went hunting with Mike Kenny one long-ago day, shot the first two partridge out of the tree, both head shots. And then later in the day, when a quota of birds were walking in the woods before him—that is ten or fifteen birds—so close one walked over his feet, he missed each and every one, so finally Mr. Kenny took the .22 and shot a few.

  However, these events are universally knitted into hunts, of people and places, and autumns of daring and laughter long, long ago. Most of them are integral to the nature of the time and place, and the hunt would be far less if there weren’t enough of them.

  The boys drinking a cup of tea who decided to change the teabag, “because it was a little stale,” and realized, much to their surprise, that the teabag was a mouse.

  16

  I have said that those who eat meat should, at least once in their lifetime, kill that which they eat. I think this is a philosophical and moral duty. I think being a vegetarian is fine, but one should not be forced to practise vegetarianism. I am also saying that in my experience most hunters do no more killing than that. That is, the majority of hunters never kill many deer or moose. Some never kill any. Others only one or two. The idea that there is a great killing field is not evident upon examination—at least not with reference to the average hunter. The average hunter does not belong to the contemptuous class of killer who takes whatever he can. Those people are not hunters, and no law in the world would stop them. For those who act with such lack of restraint are bound by no law. The average hunter is shamed by them, and because of them shamed as well. You will not stop them by laws or decrees; they will only stop if forced from the woods (and this is unlikely), or if they come to realize that killing like this shows a lack of personal self-respect. That might sound silly, but I’ve known men who, once having realized this, have discontinued the practice that caused it.

  When I was young there was a ban on moose hunting. It has been reported, and I have been told, that Louis B. Robichaud promised to end this ban, and therefore won the election in 1960 and became premier of our province. It shows the power of the tradition, the way of life we have tried to keep here. We have not succeeded completely, still, I do not know if we have failed.

  My friend the Acadian sculptor Donald Dorion told me that he chiselled out of stone a giant moose, to be his offering to the god of the woods, for keeping him alive as a child. “For moose kept us alive for the first ten years of my life,” he said. I have no reason not to believe him. My friend Hazel Francis Wood, a Micmac woman, says that moose didn’t have the nutrients to keep her people alive, and she herself could not hunt anything, but she also recognizes in the same breath, and with a good degree of pride, that her brother is an excellent hunter. At the same table, another friend of ours says that moose is what she ate all during the harsh years of childhood, and she is thankful for it. My friend Giles Kenny, whose father, Mike, was one of the finest woodsmen I have had the privilege to know, says he himself has hunted enough and will not hunt again. He has killed and will not kill again. While at the same table on the same evening, another friend of ours says that not to hunt closes us off to a life that is both tradition and honour.

  All views are discussed among the men and women I grew up with; each person has come to their own place in their heart in their own way. But what is essential to me is that no one at the table makes light of it. All of them know too much about it—and none of them make light of the animal that is hunted, which to me is perhaps the worst thing any hunter can do. Not to have respect for the animal is a blasphemy and I do not listen to it. If you do not respect the animal you hunt, then you do not have knowledge of it. You might end up snaring it in the woods, and allowing it to suffer unconditionally because of greed, and you would never honour it by chiselling it out of stone.

  The idea of having an animal suffer is appalling to almost every hunter I know, and certainly every hunter I have come to respect. My youngest brother was with Giles Kenny’s father, Mike, near his camp one cold autumn day. My brother walked right by something in the ground that Mike himself noticed. It was a tin barrel cut into wedges and buried in the ground to be used as a snare for moose. It would have been as much of a torture for the moose as some implements of the Spanish Inquisition were for hapless victims in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. My brother told me that he never saw a man so angry as when Mr. Kenny noticed this. He hauled it from the ground and kicked it to pieces.

  When I was down south, I infrequently shot a coyote along the Fundy coast. I did not feel particularly terrible about this. I know they have a right to live—but when doing it, I thought of deer in the deer yards in winter, and their plight against the coyote.

  At certain times throughout the winter, Peter and Les will bait coyotes near their camp on the Norwest. (Others
will do this as well.) Even so, they are hard animals to corral and harder to shoot. Coyote are tenacious and smart.

  Sometimes only the bait (horseflesh, usually) can be seen moving. They approach the bait almost on their bellies and from angles that often prevent a clear view. (One crawled on his belly behind me one November day along the Fundy coast some years back. At first I thought nothing much of it, but lately I have been of the opinion that he was thinking of jumping my back. And if I had not turned he might have.)

  Coyotes can be found everywhere here now. And in cities, too.

  Once I was walking on Hillsdale Avenue in the heart of residential Toronto and saw a scraggly dog approaching me. When afforded a better look, I realized it was a coyote. A few weeks later, playing golf with my son on the eighth tee at the Flemingdon Park Golf Club, in residential Toronto, a coyote walked (not ran) in front of us, across the seventh green and down into the ravine below. She was nursing, and her pups must have been somewhere down there.

  Often on those bleak days along the Fundy coast, with the fog coming in off the bay, I would stand in an alder swale and watch a deer trail covered in an inch or two of snow, broken windfalls, and pulped leaves. Now and again a coyote would cross so low to the ground, the very colour of those leaves, that I would have to determine whether or not I actually saw something.

  Something else happened when I hunted along the Fundy coast, in the southern part of our province, years ago. Deer were plentiful there, and the narrow trails to and from the secluded rocky beaches, surrounded by jagged cliffs, afforded the deer access to the salty shoreline, where they moved in the later part of the day. They bedded down at night in the high ground above the water, which had excellent cover for them, of alder swale and hardwood. Many days I would arrive just after sun-up, and take a position in the swales among the various pathways that led out to the beach. I would stay there during the day, hardly moving until dark. There the deer would pass unaware of my presence, small doe and fawn mostly.