Facing the Hunter

by David Adams Richards

  He had come a long way from the day he had, on the Miramichi side of Plaster Rock Highway, gotten so turned about on the rugged hardwood ridges that he was sure he was lost. For one thing, he now made sure he carried a compass when he went into unknown territory—especially along ridges. But he knew as well that this snow was unusual, and that it looked as if a major storm was brewing. He continued, however, to move away from the camp he was staying at, move farther into the myriad of hardwood, where the deer were moving freely in rut as the snow got deeper. By noon it looked as if it were three o’clock, and the clouds were low.

  David Savage was up at dawn and that morning hunted the right side of the 2.2 Mile Road, that is, the side farther away from the river. He had passed up a doe (though he had his doe licence) and he was concentrating on a giant set of tracks, which he followed most of the morning. At about ten o’clock he sat down and opened his small rucksack for his lunch of tea and corned beef sandwiches. The snow now obliterated the buck’s tracks, but trailed away across the 2.2, and he decided the deer must have been checking its scrapes back down toward the Sovogle River. So after his tea, he strapped his rifle on his shoulder and started out again, following the slurred impressions of the large buck, toward the river both of us, and Peter and Ken and Bill, had fished many times, on sunny days. He went down almost to the river, and waited until well into the afternoon.

  By afternoon, as the snow fell over the trees and deepened in the hardwood ridge, Peter, some 150 miles to the northwest, found himself at least five and a half miles from the camp. The snow was now deeper than he had travelled in before, and deeper then he’d imagined it would be. He had, well, cigarettes and matches, a half pint of rum, and some candy bars. He had no change of clothes, no extra pair of underwear or sweater. And as the wind picked up and began to drift over the footprints he would use to travel back out, he wondered if he was not to be stranded there. It was difficult to see very far. On good days he would be able to see from one far-away ridge to another, and with his scope check movement at five or six hundred yards. But now he could see no more than five or six yards altogether, and it was worsening. His beard was frozen, and so too had his eyelashes turned to ice.

  “I knew I had to find a shelter or get the hell out of where I was,” he said. He had his fur-lined hood up, which mightn’t be the smartest outerwear except for the fact that he seemed totally by himself in these ridges, and the snowfall was becoming harder and turning all the trails into almost identical topography: a blur in front of him, and a blur to the side, and a blur behind. He turned and made his way in the direction he thought he had come, checking the compass once. He headed out toward the southwest, uncertain which ridge he was on but at least certain, this time, that he was heading the way he wanted.

  At some point in the afternoon David’s friend shot that doe, hung it in the trees for the night, and made it back to the trailer. David, too, made his way back toward late afternoon, when the storm was so bad he felt he couldn’t see anything in front of him, and it was useless trying to keep his scope clear. Every time he lifted it, it was filled with fog. So he started back, while a whirlwind surrounded him. He got to the trailer at about five that afternoon, told Blair about the big buck he was tracking, and, as he and Blair had supper, Blair told him about the doe he had taken. David spoke about getting the doe that was hung in the tree in the morning, but there was no way they could get it now. They sat up late, listening to the sound of the storm as it closed in upon them, wondering if they would be able to leave the 2.2 anytime soon.

  My brother and Ken both had a long, hard day as well. My brother didn’t want to give up on the deer he was tracking, but the tracks became blotted out by one o’clock that afternoon, and as he walked, thinking he was still in the spruce wood above the tractor road, he realized suddenly that he had crossed behind the end of that road, and was in the thicket near where my brother John had taken the deer a few years before. The only reason he knew this was because of a great old oak that stood alone, and rose up above the surrounding spruce, that he knew was well to the east of that tractor road. He had gotten there by crossing a road that was now completely snowbound. Realizing this, at about two that afternoon, he made his way back, toward where he thought the road would be, and finding it, as the day was fast becoming unlivable and dark, he made his way south toward the cabin. Ken also had come back from the woods, without seeing any game that day. For a while they waited, for me, thinking I would be coming in. I hadn’t been able to tell them I was in bed sick and unable to get there. At seven Bill went out to the end of the 17 Mile Road, to see if I had gotten my jeep stuck, but finally came back, unconvinced I was safe but not knowing what else he could do.

  It was late afternoon when Peter made it down to a brook, from which he believed he had left earlier that morning. But it was now past twilight, and he had over a mile and a half still to travel. The storm ferocious, he didn’t know if he should attempt it. His beard frozen solid and his hands and feet numb, he saw a small cabin at a point in that brook where an old road came down. He decided, if he could get in without breaking in, and light a fire, he would stay the night. And this is what he managed. He lit a warm fire in the stove, took his boots off, and dried out his socks and boots, then sat with his feet on the oven door and drank his rum. Unfortunately it caused his friends some major panic, and they all went out searching for him, well after dark, and worried all night where he might be. But be that as it may, he did the right thing, and perhaps the only thing he could do. He would move when the storm blew itself out.

  The storm was over by Monday morning, and David Savage got up at first light. Huge drifts of snow angled along the old 2.2 Mile Road, where I myself spent days of my youth travelling from one fishing spot on the old South Branch of the Sovogle to the other. It meant that the main road into the Mullin Stream area was drifted over as well, and dozens of hunters were now stranded.

  Blair had to get the trailer ready to leave—they didn’t know if they could get it out onto the main Mullin Stream Road or not. While Blair began to get things packed, David took his rifle and went down the 2.2 to bring Blair’s deer out. He had walked about two or three hundred yards, the world about him completely white and the sun dazzling on the new fallen snow, when he saw a spot far down the road, at a turn, almost four hundred yards away. He stopped, raised his rifle, looked through the scope, and saw the big buck he had been tracking two nights before. He had his 30-30 with him, and a four-hundred-yard shot at a deer with a 30-30 is a long shot. But David decided to take it. He fired once, and the deer seemed to go sideways just slightly and leave the road. David walked through those drifts, and down to where the deer had crossed, and saw no blood. But he did see a small, very small tuft of deer hair in the middle of the road. To him this was unusual, and he decided that, blood or no blood, he had come very close, so he followed the tracks into the woods, and within forty yards, he saw a spot of fresh blood, and then more. He followed the tracks, as the snow got deeper and deeper, and found more blood. Then he saw where the deer had fallen. He continued on, and then stopped and, looking to his right, saw where the deer had finally lain down, burying itself up to its back. When he reached it, it was dead—a ten-point buck, 240 pounds.

  He dressed the deer with his small knife and then, using some rope in his pack and making a litter out of spruce poles, he hauled the deer back up the road, where he went into the spot where Blair had hung his doe in the trees. Bringing it down, he put it on the litter with the buck and hauled both back to the trailer. There they tied the deer down on the top, and Blair started his truck, and with David following they made it out from the Mullin Stream before almost anyone else.

  Peter made it back to the main camp and apologized to those who had searched the area for him the night before, but, as he said, he couldn’t help wanting to stay alive, and keep warm while doing so. It was not his last trip into the ridges along the western side of our province, and the next year he took a buck from that very p
lace. Perhaps the buck that he had tracked in the great storm of November.

  All about the province hunters became stranded in that storm, and many did not get out for some days. It was one of the worst November storms in memory. Three men would have died of asphyxiation if friends of mine hadn’t come across them, their exhaust pipe buried in the snow of the road and their windows rolled up.

  One man, finding himself overcome by deep snow, built himself a lean-to and planned to wait the storm out. He then tried to make his way out, but by Monday morning things seemed hopeless to him and he felt he was utterly lost, without food, water, or warmth. He kneeled in the snow and took his life, not knowing that he was less than half a mile from his car, and that searchers were only twenty minutes or so from discovering him. In fact, they thought his shot was a signal to them.

  That though he believed he was abandoned, and forsaken, it was not so.

  18

  I have hunted most of my life. And I have always been of two minds. I loved the hunt, but I never thrilled at the killing. Still, that was a part of it. And I knew an animal living in the wild, even if taken after only four years, was given a better life than cattle. I hunted most areas with the idea that I was getting out in nature with friends, and that was a good thing. In the last few years I have taken a hiatus. I don’t get back to my former ground in the fall of the year so much now. My guns remain in the cabinet, and I have .303 and .32 Winchester bullets in cases I have not opened. I have not drawn a bow in eight years. And though I love my New Brunswick home, I am often away. The days of my fall sojourns into the wilderness have become more a trickle than a flood. And I am reminded in the winter, when the sun is bright on the snow, and there are at times hawks in the Ontario sky, of days when the hunt was in my blood as much as anything I have ever done.

  The first time I took my son John, some years ago, he was five years of age, and I brought my shotgun to do some partridge hunting.

  It was November, but the day was bright and warm, and leaves were still on the trees. John, dressed in hunter’s orange from head to foot, looked like an advertisement for hunter safety, and we drove into a side road, along the coast, where I had taken a deer the year before. There we spent the afternoon, me with the old Coleman stove that once belonged to my father. I heated up hot chocolate and set up some targets in a field for John to shoot with a small .22. I helped him hold the rifle and fire, and though he didn’t hit many targets it was a kind of baptism, in a place and age where rifles and guns of all sorts are now in question. (I know a famous writer of wilderness tales who is terrified of rifles and the very wilderness he writes about—which is perhaps how things even out in this life.) But the main aspect of all of this was safety—and as much as I would have liked to have seen a partridge, it was not as important for us as taking a few practice shots.

  Last year, the day after we drove the Maliseet hunters out to the village, my son and I went back to those hills. There was a good deal of snow, and the sky was blue and cold. John is now twenty-one years old and taller than his old man, who used to carry him on his shoulder across half the world when his mom and I were young.

  The deer were moving—and we went to the road I had wanted to the afternoon before. I have put a scope on my .32 Winchester and my son John uses it. We arrived at 8:49 in the morning, walked to the brook, and realized it had made ice. We stood there no more than twenty minutes, on the other side of the chop where we were the day before. I knew it was only a matter of time. And a little four-point buck came walking toward us. I did not raise my rifle, and I told John nothing—that is, it was up to him. The buck turned, jumped high across the frozen water, and John fired as it went up toward the road our truck was parked on.

  I showed him how to dress it, we hauled it up the bank in midmorning, and we drank strong, dark tea I made on the old Coleman stove. We took a picture for posterity—a simple moment between father and son.

  So I have done what I said I would do, and it is not important if I hunt again.

  I do not think that those I have met in Australia or other places know what snow means to the Canadian psyche and how much a part of us it has become. That there is in our very being the North Land, Strong and Free, I am not so sure any more. But the pulse it gives us is still a wild one. It is also a hot-blooded one. I have been out in nights of 35-below and lived, and so have those I have spoken about in this text. I am still amazed and gladdened by what men of the north woods can do, how they are self-reliant like few people. I have known enough men to know that there is enough credit and discredit to go around. Those who blame the English or the French or the First Nations for the problem of game management, etc., will never know the truth—that all men are countries and nations unto themselves.

  We meet a new nation each time we stare into someone’s eyes.

  This fall they took a large moose at Peter’s and Les’s camp. Once again their expertise lucked in. I don’t know any of my other friends who got a moose licence this year. I am away from the hunt now, and it is almost as if I have abandoned it, or it has abandoned me. I still know enough about it all, however, to know I would be able to once again take deer or moose if I put my time in.

  Last year was the first year in many that David Savage didn’t get his deer. He tells me that he doesn’t care that much now. There is still enough fire in his voice when he gets to speaking about it all, though, that I know he knows he will hunt again. But so many of my hunting friends are wary of the rules and the laws, and the scent of officialdom on everything, and the “bucks only” tag that good hunters feel is a damage to the woods in the end.

  Guns are now registered, and a special permit is needed to buy bullets. Some who refuse on principle to do this—and there is a principle involved—find themselves unable to hunt when the weather changes up.

  My friends are growing older as well. When David Savage (and I’ve seen him pole a canoe down the Norwest with a broken leg) goes out now in his canoe to take birds from the gravel along the shore, or to spot a buck crossing with the light of the lowering sun on its back, he can remember more hunts than he probably has left. It has been fun, but someday it will be over. And with almost every drift of the canoe, and every jab of the pole, he can remember other times, other hunts, and the voices of men and women who are no longer here. His father, who died recently, poled this river before him for forty years, and so did his uncles and the fathers of his friends. He remembers the little doe hiding in the swale and a buck coming behind her to butt her up with his antlers so she would move and be safe. And seeing this, he couldn’t fire.

  This is a fine memory and important, because it shows that the animals, though not like a Disney creation, are still, all in all, a creation of God, able to live and breathe and anticipate, and deserve our understanding and respect.

  David asks me if I will hunt again, now that my son John has taken his first deer, and I always say sure, though my guns more often stay in the cabinet, like Wayne Curtis’s. Peter McGrath, too, is getting older, fifty-four now. I remember him in his teens, and as a young man, hunting and fishing alone along the little Souwest, a place of wilderness, salmon, deer, and bear, where he would fish and hunt from dawn, and get out of the woods after dark.

  I think sometimes he has grown old hunting, and I am sure he knows that someday others will take his place. His beard is now greying, and he is not as young as he once was—though still and all a capable man. He still works in an industry where men use their muscle and blood to live, and grow old fast.

  But he might prove me a liar, Peter, for even on the hottest summer days, he will travel eighteen miles upriver on his old three-wheeler to find a pool, and he can still shoot moose on a dead charge at sixty feet. Which not many have the guts to do. But then again, many people of the Miramichi would do and have done the same.

  I have been surrounded all my life by men who are, for the most part, common men, and who are, for the most part, generous and noble and have in their hearts a life force that
is undeniably proud.

  The greatest hunt, I think, is from the canoe. I ask David about this, and he says it is. He tells me that he doesn’t mind tracking, and tracking in snow comes naturally to him and he is able to do it well. But still and all, the canoe is one of the best ways to hunt.

  My brother Bill built me a new cedar canoe last year. This is great for me, to get a canoe built by my brother, after the old canoe that I had for twenty years was—well, let’s just say “misplaced.”

  Bill and his Micmac friend Kenny Francis of Big Cove started building canoes a while ago. Ken’s people, of course, are masters, and Ken has built canoes from birchbark. But now he too is building cedar.

  I plan to hunt along those stretches of that river I have fished, just once—caring nothing but for the experience of doing it, whether I see anything or no. When the day is bright and cool, and shadows of the trees lean against the water, and now and again an osprey is in the sky. A deer might come down to the river as you pole. And if it doesn’t, so what? Many of the old-timers did this—there are hundreds of pictures of men transporting game back from the kill in a canoe. But the age has moved on, and the idea of being that much a part of the world is somehow no longer in fashion.

  The men I have hunted with, and known since I was a child, have grown older, just as I have. In some respects I would not be able to tell the difference between them and a picture of hunting guides from the last century. During October and November their eyes are as sharp and beards as coarse as those of many old caribou guides from camps set up in 1905. They have lived the same kind of life, and in many ways expected no more from it. Some, like my poet friend Eric Trethewey, have lived lives probably at times harder and at least every bit as dangerous. To read Trethewey’s essay “On Drowning” is to experience a small but brilliant glimpse into this world.