Rock, Paper, Fire

by Marni Jackson

  Next came the CORE (Conservation Outdoor Recreation Education). We needed that for a B.C. Resident Hunter Number Card, with which we could buy our hunting licenses and species tags. The CORE was another weekend course, another multiple-choice exam, this time in a Masonic hall. Finally, we were legally entitled to hunt. But all this didn’t make me a hunter any more than my CPR certification made me a doctor. I still didn’t have the slightest clue where to start.

  WHEN IN DOUBT, buy some gear. The item of equipment that figures most prominently, of course, being The Gun.

  Ideally, we would each have a rifle handed down to us from our fathers. It would be an old Remington Wingmaster, the deep gun-blue burnished to a dull silver in spots from the repeated touch of hands, patches worn like familiar trails through the forest. Instead, the gun that my father passed along to me, when I was six, was a plastic, belt-fed toy machine gun, complete with bipod and scope. I’d accumulated an array of other toy guns, ranging from gunnishlooking pieces of driftwood to an exact replica of a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum revolver that I’d built from a plastic model kit. I’d outgrown these toys, but nevertheless I’d spent a significant amount of time with “guns” in my hands—without learning a thing about gun safety, gun care, or the responsibility involved.

  The Los Magnificos Vancouver Chapter—JP, another friend from business school, had joined Nazzy and me—convened early one morning to gear up at a local gun store. It was the store’s annual sale and, as we rounded the corner, we saw a lineup that went down the block and disappeared around the far corner. There was an air of festivity as people enjoyed complimentary coffee and donuts while they waited for the doors to open. We took our place in line.

  I’d done some research (Remington, founded in 1816, is one of the oldest continuously operating manufacturers of anything in America). But we relied on Nazzy for his superior knowledge. This first season, we three would share one rifle until Nazzy could bring his own back from Peru.

  Inside the store, the atmosphere shifted. There’s something proudly utilitarian about a gun shop, with fluorescent light shining down on unadorned shelves. Behind the long counters, the walls were lined with gun rack upon gun rack, and they were emptying at an alarming rate.

  I noticed a group of prosperous-looking men being served at one counter, behind which were the “black rifles”—civilian versions of weapons used by the military and law enforcement, designed for use against two-legged animals, the kind that might shoot back. These were the kinds of weapons at the heart of the gun ownership debate in America. I shied away from this area and the cases containing the handguns too. I didn’t want to be grouped with these people: gun nuts. As far as I was concerned, hunting legitimized my boyhood fascination with guns. I was shopping for a tool, not a toy, and definitely not a weapon.

  Strictly speaking, to be able to take down any game animal in North America all you need are three firearms: a .22 rifle for small game, a large-calibre rifle for big game, and a shotgun for birds. Anything more is gratuitous. But for some, guns are like tattoos. Once you’ve acquired one, you’re in danger of accumulating many others.

  We waded up to the counter, and JP and I stood aside.

  “We’re looking for an all-weather thirty-ought-six,” Nazzy said. (As he’d explained to us beforehand, given the wet conditions we’d be hunting in, we’d want a rust-resistant finish and a stock that wouldn’t swell with the moisture. The .30-06 was a versatile calibre.)

  “We’re sold out.”

  “Okay, how about a three-oh-eight?”

  The salesman unlocked a sleek rifle with a black synthetic stock and matte stainless barrel from the rack and brought it back to us.

  “Ruger. A good brand.”

  Nazzy removed the bolt—the sliding mechanism that extracts the bullet from the magazine and pushes it into the chamber—and looked up through the barrel at the lights above us. It was a brand-new gun, so inspecting the bore was not strictly necessary, but we were suitably impressed. He passed the rifle to me. It was heavy. I tried to think of something perceptive to say. Fully retracted, the bolt seemed loose and rattly.

  “The bolt seems loose and rattly,” I said.

  “It’s a Mauser-style controlled round feed, based on the Mauser 98k. One of the most reliable rifle actions ever developed,” said Nazzy. “It’s meant to be like that.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  I passed the rifle to JP, who pointed it at the salesman, who patiently redirected the muzzle to one side with a forefinger.

  “We’ll take it,” said Nazzy.

  THE NEXT TIME Los Magnificos VC met, several weeks later, it was to go to the range and “sight in” the scope. When you screw a scope onto a rifle, the crosshairs aren’t going to line up exactly with the bullet’s point of impact. The object, in making minute adjustments to the crosshairs, is to get the perfectly straight line of sight through the scope and the slightly arcing trajectory of a bullet to meet exactly—at say, 100 yards.

  When shooting at a deer or other large game, you’re not aiming for general centre of mass. You are shooting to hit the vital organs, to deliver death as quickly as possible. Given the anatomy of a deer-sized creature, this is typically a dinnerplate-sized target, centred about six inches behind the shoulder. Broadside, this will mean a heart or double-lung shot. A head shot is riskier. The brain is less than the size of a fist and, being an extremity, the head will move more erratically.

  The worst possible case, worse than a clean miss, is to leave a wounded animal loose in the wild to die a painful, protracted death. Bullet placement is everything.

  At a rifle range out in the suburbs, we were assigned a shooting lane next to a couple of disenchanted youth with baseball hats askew. They were shooting Glocks and a sniperstyle rifle with a muzzle brake, a device at the end of the barrel that redirects the exhaust gases. When they shot the gun, the sonic blast caused our organs to jiggle in our rib cages.

  On the other side of us, a tall, pale fellow in reflective eye shields had a European-made AR-15, the kind of thing you see U.S. soldiers carrying in Iraq. He took dozens of offhand shots from a standing position. We were a long way from any combat zone, so perhaps he was training for the apocalypse.

  Between getting pinged in the head with hot, spent brass from the left and being deafened through our earplugs on the right, we spent a couple of hours sighting in our scope. This would be the only target practice I would get before attempting to shoot a live animal.

  GEAR ASIDE, I was still up against the biggest hurdle a newbie hunter faces: the business of how to hunt. It is, one could say, a natural act. But even a baby tiger needs to be taught how to catch its prey. And urbanite humans, whose kibble comes neatly packaged, have lost the skills involved in hunting for our food.

  My father hadn’t hunted and neither had his. An intergenerational passing of hunting knowledge is ideal, but if that link is broken you have to get it where you can. Before that first successful hunt, I spent time with a people for whom hunting was a necessity and a source of pride: the Inuit of Northern Labrador. I was on a writing assignment to explore Canada’s newest national park, the Torngat Mountains. We stayed in a base camp encircled by a 10,000-volt fence to keep the predatory polar bears at bay. The Inuit, the only people allowed to carry firearms in the park, acted as our guides. They also supplied the camp by hunting for fresh meat.

  This remote park sees fewer visitors each year than Everest. It’s a harsh land, where kilometre-high mountains, containing some of the oldest rock on the planet, curve straight up from the North Atlantic’s frigid waters. Turquoise icebergs float in surreal contrast to the green scrub that clings like tattered velvet to granitic islands. Tivi Etok, a local Inuit artist in his eighties, recalled that when he was growing up, “To be a candidate for marriage a man had to be a competent hunter: a provider.” Among the most important milestones in his life, he said, were “my first fish,” “my first rifle,” and “my first seal.” One of our guides talked about shooti
ng, at age eight, his first ptarmigan—which, following tradition, he gave to his grandmother. Historically, the good hunters were among the most respected members of their society.

  I joined them on their hunts for caribou and seal. One day the hunting party landed on the shore of an inlet to gut a seal one of the hunters had shot (while standing on the rocking deck of a small boat, using a beat-up .22 with no scope). Once the entrails were exposed, everyone dove in with their knives, slicing off pieces of the liver to eat raw. Then they took scoops of the brain. They bagged the meat, the fat, the hide, and the intestines to take back to camp. I was honoured with the gift of one of the eyes to eat, which I did, squeezing the viscous liquid into my mouth. While I can’t describe the precise flavour, I remember the feeling of freshness, the vitality of eating it straight like that. It was like shucking a fresh ear of corn, still radiating the sun’s energy.

  But what I learned in Labrador was that successful hunting is a long sequence of decisions and actions, based on knowledge of the habits of animals and the local terrain. The act of shooting the animal is both nothing (it represents a blip of time in the overall venture) and everything (the exact point when you’ve taken a life).

  Which is why, the first season Nazzy and I hunted, we got skunked. It wasn’t until late in our second that I got that first spike buck and learned, firsthand, what it means to take another mammal’s life.

  It would take me a full two days before I stopped feeling terrible. On the drive home, Nazzy parsed my emotions for me, separating the feeling of sadness from the shame. The shame, I felt, was pure socialization, a holdover from my childhood when I had watched Man, the Hunter, kill Bambi’s parents. In any culture in which hunting plays a natural part, this emotion would have been as inexplicable as if I’d felt shame over buying my first car. But my sadness went deeper, and was harder to articulate.

  But before I had the luxury of analyzing these unexpected feelings, we still needed to field dress and butcher the animal. Being apartment dwellers with nowhere to hang the carcass, we had to butcher it into manageable sections right there. The two of us dragged the deer to the roadside by its front legs. I didn’t like how the head dragged along the ground, the tongue lolling out. It felt disrespectful. But I had to get it into my head that though the animal was still warm, Elvis had left the building. From the truck Nazzy retrieved a book, Dressing & Cooking Wild Game: From Field to Table. While he read out step-by-step instructions, I cut.

  The first incision was tougher than expected. I was scared of perforating the stomach. The knifepoint just did not seem to want to pierce the thick hide. I started and stopped several times, relocating the notch of the sternum again and again. When I finally pierced the skin, the blade sunk in several inches and, just as I had feared, I perforated the stomach. The entrails bulged outward. The knife separated the abdominal wall with a faint tearing sound as the dull knife split the hide. Material the colour of fresh-cut grass spilled out into the body cavity and the pungent smell of G.I. juices wafted up.

  Still taking directions from Nazzy, I slit right down to the anus. Then, turning around, I planted the blade’s edge up under the sternum, gripped the handle with both hands, and rested an elbow on each knee. Leaning back, I leveraged the knife up through the bone, which separated with a shudder. I kept going until I’d sawed up through the neck, a few inches shy of the jaw. I reached up into the neck and severed the trachea as high as I could. It had the feel of plastic, flexible airduct tubing encased in a gluey membrane. I carved around the anus.

  All that was left was to slice around the diaphragm, then cut and pull apart the connective tissue that held the organs in the body cavity. That struggle finished, we tipped out the guts and were left with meat, bones, and fur.

  The sloppiness of the initial gutting done, we searched for a tree from which to suspend the carcass using some cord and a couple of climbing carabiners.

  We made cuts down the insides of the legs and around the knees, attempting to keep the hair out of the meat. We sawed off the head and lower legs, then peeled the cape back. By this time, it didn’t feel like it was a living creature that we were stripping down; rather, just a massive piece of bone-in meat. Then we got into the major cuts: the backstraps, the shoulders, the roasts. As we worked, we heard the sound of a truck approaching and Nazzy hurriedly hid the book. Four hunters drove up and leaned out the window to chat. They hadn’t had any luck, they said. We made some remark about our deer being small, to which one of them responded, “Well, it’s meat, eh.”

  After four and a half hours, we were finished. I cut the spike horns off and said my last thank you to the animal. We left the hooves, spine, ribcage, head, and cape in the brush beside the road for the birds and scavengers.

  The year after that, I moved up to Haida Gwaii to build an off-grid cabin and learn to live off the land. There, hunting is more than a seasonal activity. The Sitka black-tailed deer are an introduced species that, lacking any natural predators, have proliferated exponentially from the first eight animals brought over from the mainland in 1878. Now estimated at over 200,000, they’ve ravaged the landscape, but have compensated for this by being exceptionally tender and tasty. The hunting season was once year-round, but now it runs from June to March, nine months long compared to two or three elsewhere. The bag limit is fifteen deer a year, compared with one or two in other regions. Because of this, I’ve been able to pack about a decade of hunting into one year. Hunting has become an integral part of my life.

  One evening hunt, alone, reminded me of the subtle things I had come to love about hunting. The light was fading as I left my cabin and biked to a clearing I’d scouted. I would lose shooting light within the next half hour but I resisted the urge to move too fast. This would be about the journey rather than any destination.

  I put a gumbooted foot down and broke a small twig. With the next step, a minute later, I snagged the toe of my boot under a long blade of grass and snapped that, too.

  In my bones, I felt that I would see a deer here. I could even smell something “deery”—the fresh breath of biomass coupled with the pong of wet fur. Even at the rate I was moving, about as fast as a baby could crawl, my perspective on the world surrounding me changed. I examined sight lines and dug deeper with my eyes into the dark brush, areas that might hold a deer. I kept all my motions, the back-and-forth sweep of my head, slow and smooth.

  My index finger was on the trigger guard of my rifle and my thumb rested on the sharp point of the safety. I was taking in the natural environment, savouring it in a way that rarely happens when I’m in the woods. When I hike, I’m mostly thinking about how far I have to go, or chatting with companions.

  Here, I was aware of the wind, its direction, where my left foot was and where my right foot was about to go. The sound my hair made as it brushed against the collar of my rain jacket. I took in the game trails and tracks criss-crossing in all directions, the distant chatter of a squirrel, even the incessant thump of waves on the nearby shore. A stand of trees changed form and mood with every step I took.

  Fifteen minutes later, I stepped into full view of a clearing to my left. My heart bumped as I saw the unmistakable form of a deer taking unhurried steps toward a hillock at the clearing’s edge. My thumb pushed the safety halfway forward but I didn’t even get a chance to shoulder my rifle. With several flicks of its tail the deer stepped, head down, out of my view.

  In full stalking mode, I crouched so that my pack wouldn’t catch on a tree branch that drooped over the path. I was still in slow motion but moving with a purpose, straining to listen for branches breaking. I wanted to intercept the deer before it slipped into the forest.

  I came to the end of the road, a pond to my left. A large, sedge-covered hill separated the last clearing from this one. I could wait for the deer to crest the rise, or I could make my way toward it. The light was dissipating fast and soon it would be too low to make a shot.

  I pushed through some alder saplings toward the water, tr
eading carefully toward the hill. Then an unexpected movement caught my eye. On the far edge of the pond another doe had emerged from the forest and was ambling along the shore, its reflection moving in the water. I froze. When I moved forward, gravel crunched beneath my feet. The doe paused and looked around, cupped ears swivelling, scanning, then continued on its way.

  I knew that if I dropped the deer at the far end of the pond it would be that much harder to drag back to the road, but the deer might disappear into the thick brush at any time. I needed to trust that it would continue along the water’s edge. Instead of trying to get closer, I spun the magnification dial on my scope to full strength and knelt as I raised the rifle to my shoulder. I was always surprised by how much brighter the scope made the landscape.

  The deer seemed unaware of me despite my bright orange jacket. I centred the crosshairs behind the shoulder and followed the deer. It moved behind a bush and I panicked, thinking I’d missed my chance at a clean shot. I put my head up and saw that it would soon emerge from the other side if it continued on its course.

  I picked out a tree and chose that as my marker; when the deer reached the tree, I would take my shot. I waited, both eyes open, as I peered through the scope, keeping the deer in context with the background, all the while aiming at the shoulder.

  When the doe reached the tree, I let out a low whistle. It stopped dead in its tracks, on high alert. I pulled the trigger and the gun jumped. Everything exploded. As the air settled, I could see the deer sprint up the far bank and disappear into the treeline.

  If the animal was wounded, it was best that it not think it was being pursued, since it would run deeper into the forest. I waited a few moments, stooping to pick up the empty casing.

  I found the deer laid out at the bottom of a slope just within the edge of the dense forest. I gently touched its eye to make sure there was no life. I slung my rifle over my shoulder, then grabbed hold of the deer’s front legs and dragged it back up the hummock and down into the clearing.