Rock, Paper, Fire

by Marni Jackson

  Using the climbing rope I’d brought for just this purpose, I made a loop around the deer’s neck and pulled it along so that it slid with the grain of its fur. By the time I got back to my mountain bike, I was sweating.

  I pulled out a game bag and dragged the deer off the road and into the forest. Drawing my hunting knife, I field dressed it by headlamp. But first, I stopped and gave the deer thanks, something I’d forgotten to do in my initial haste. I placed a hand on the warm body and lowered my head, eyes closed, fervently willing that my gratitude be conveyed.

  Twenty minutes later, I cut the liver and heart from the gut pile and put them into the canvas game bag to cool. I would eat them when I got back to my cabin.

  Now, the problem of getting the deer home. Using the rope looped around its neck, I lashed its head to the handlebars and draped it lengthwise along the bike with the seat up in its body cavity, legs hanging on either side of the frame. It looked like it was levitating. For a fraction of a second, I considered riding the bike by sitting on the deer’s back, but I decided that would be offensive to the dignity of the deer—and probably dangerous. It would have been apt revenge for the deer to stick a hoof into the front wheel and send me over the bars.

  It was only a couple of kilometres to get back, so I decided to walk along the dirt road, pushing the deer beside me. The full experience began to sink in. At the path leading to my cabin, I stopped for a while with my companion on the bike beside me to appreciate the bright clusters of stars above.

  The outing encompassed much of what I enjoy about hunting. But “enjoy” is not quite the right word. I find it satisfying, engaging, rewarding. First, there are the places we go in search of game. Places that we otherwise would have no reason to visit: estuaries, forested slopes, fog-bound marshes studded with Tim Burtonesque trees. Even the clear-cuts, piled with slash or scrubby young second-growth, have something to offer, if only the distinctive water-drop call of a raven. A saw-whet owl may glide past as the moon comes up, or the first frog of the season will chirrup out in the bog. Every trip has yielded some sort of reward, even if it’s simply the time spent outdoors, being out for a sunrise or a sunset.

  The other thing I appreciate about hunting is the time I spend with friends in a shared purpose. I feel especially lucky to have introduced a handful of people to their first hunting experiences.

  Then, of course, there’s the meat, the ultimate in organic, the reward for hard work. It’s as different from store-bought meat as a bleached-out tomato bought in a supermarket is to the rich globe pulled off a vine in your backyard. It’s a special feeling to feed yourself and others with what you’ve hunted and gathered. It’s a direct connection to the life forces that sustain us. And to share something so vital with someone is as primal a gift as one can give.

  I’m proud of my new skills as a hunter. However, my initial reaction after dropping an animal is still sadness. I still don’t enjoy the killing.

  A hunter I went out with recently will no longer take the shot. Now in his fifties, he’s fine with the stalking, the field dressing and butchering, but the act of taking life is too much for him. As a veteran hunter and retired military search-andrescue technician, he’s perhaps seen too much death already. He said it wasn’t so much a rational choice, but something he felt in his gut. Which, from my experience so far, is where hunting resides: not in the head, but in the gut.

  Ian Brown

  WHAT THE MOUNTAINS

  MEAN TO US

  Did you have too much to drink last night? Are you talking too much? Are you knowledgeable about anything? Is your life a failure? Are you getting a sunburn? What about your lips? Are you going to get lip cancer? —from a notebook kept by the author on a recent ski mountaineering trip to the Selkirk Mountains, listing everything he was afraid of.

  SKIING IN the backcountry of the Rocky Mountains: it makes me nervous even to type the sentence. I am at best a very amateur mountaineer, but a persevering one. I have travelled, on foot or on skis, on some trip or another, in the Rockies or the Purcells or the Selkirks or the Monashees or some nearby mountains, every year for the last thirty years, hauling my city body out to play in the high country. And whereas I think those visits have transformed the way I see the world, to the point where I believe we need the mountains, as human beings and as citizens, I don’t qualify as anything more than a tourist mountaineer.

  This is especially true in places like Banff and Canmore in Alberta, and in Golden, B.C.—the staging towns for most of our trips. Out here, every other resident is an extreme skier, or a daredevil kayaker, or a radical mountain climber-slash-environmentalist-slash-producer, or a writer referencing post-Nabokovian conceptions of nature.

  On the other hand, it was timid mountain tourists like me who helped make Canada’s mountains famous 120 years ago. They came out by train and hired guides to haul them up to the top of as-yet-unnamed mountains. Ever since, we tourists have always been considered a necessary nuisance. We pay the bills but we drive the locals crazy.

  I spent an evening not too long ago with one of my own heroes, Chic Scott, the longtime explorer and chronicler of the Rockies, who lives in Banff. The man is a national cultural hero, and you can still walk into the Cake Company, his favourite café in town, and have a coffee with him, a fact that to this day gives me a bit of a thrill. You couldn’t have done that with Mordecai Richler: he would have eaten you alive. But mountain society tends to be more democratic, because it revolves around the physical: if you go outside, and hike, or ski, or bike, or climb, or curl, or in any way attempt to use your body, you are welcomed into the society of the outdoorsperson, those who seek grace through physical effort. You don’t even have to be very good at it, because sooner or later the mountains humble everyone.

  Chic and I were talking about the mountains, and life, and work, and the great challenge of trying to combine all three, which is something we often talk about. (The overall problem is that it’s hard to find work in the mountains that will make you enough money to let you stay in the mountains.) Then Chic said something interesting: “I’m a mountaineer who’s done a little writing. You, on the other hand, are a writer who has done a little mountaineering.” And while I think he was being modest, I could tell which side of that divide he was happy to be on. I wished I could say the same.

  I was talking to Chic because I wanted to meet an old skiing pal of his, Donny Gardner. Together, these two men discovered or opened up most of the glaciers and big winter ski traverses in the Rockies. Roughly forty years ago, Donny Gardner put on a pair of skis, and with little more than a credit card and a safety blanket in his pack, he decided to ski, on his own, from Calgary to the Pacific Ocean. Which he did, sleeping in a lot of tree wells along the way. It took him twenty-nine days. That’s pretty fast—it’s about 700 kilometres from Calgary to the Pacific Ocean by ski. But then, Donny Gardner has always been a winter man. He once travelled the fifteen kilometres between Canmore and the town of Banff along the unwelcoming ridge of Mount Rundle—a long way up (4,970 metres) and a long way across—in the winter. The base of his first pair of cross-country skis consisted of a coat of green paint: he figured that might make them slide more.

  I heard the story of Don Gardner’s trek when I first visited the Rocky Mountains, and I’ve never been able to forget it. There’s something about taking a walk in the woods in the winter—and Don Gardner’s ski to the Pacific is still pretty much the ultimate as far as that sort of thing goes—that speaks to all of us. No sooner do I start to think about what skis he was wearing than I start to think about ski wax (which I gather he sometimes disdained), which in turn gets me thinking about the wax wagon, which is essentially a semi-trailer manned by professional ski waxers that the Canadian Olympic cross-country team hauls around with them in Europe . . . which in turn gets me thinking about my own relationship to gear, and how it both reassures and intimidates me—because it’s one thing to have good gear, but is it the right gear? And why do I want such precise, ac
t-specific gear? I need my climbing skins and my knife and my Schoeller hoodie; I do not need the titanium pulley and a second, backup thermos. But I take them all anyway, just in case: the motto of the mountaineer.

  What am I afraid of? A lot, as it turns out. Do you ski with enough verve? Why are you so nervous? Should you do the dishes tonight? This is another reason why even lowly altitude tourists like me long for and need the mountains. They help us figure out who we are.

  The attraction is partly physical, of course, because the mountains are just so damn big. They’re a place from which to see the natural world in a clear and startlingly delicate form, because being in a dangerous place makes you realize what you cherish, and the things you cherish then seem that much more vulnerable. But we need mountains emotionally, as well. Travelling on foot in the mountains is itself a form of meditation. You repeat the same movement over and over again, like a physical mantra, whether you are walking or skiing or biking or hiking. And by the time you get to the top of the hill, your mind has freed itself to step back and watch its own progress.

  In the mountains, you end up having the time to think, and then you think about what you’re thinking about. Mountains are both physical and metaphysical. They free our minds by engaging our bodies in a neurochemically liberating way. A walk in the woods in the mountain wilderness may have been the earliest form of Prozac.

  We live—as someone tells us every day—in an increasingly crowded and technologically inter-wired world, where distinct regional cultures are melting into a global monoculture, driven by digital technology that forces us to be more and more conventional and “other-directed.” The mountains, by contrast—especially these raw-boned, undomesticated Canadian mountains—are one of the rare places left on earth that encourage us to be introspective, and alone. You can’t be too social, because you have to concentrate on your next step, and your remoteness forces the demands of the so-called “real” world to fade away. Where else does that happen these days? People come to the mountains to have fun, but they also come because here there’s a chance they’ll be left alone.

  But mostly we need the mountains because, despite their size and their ferocity, they force privacy upon us, and therefore feel more personal. Travelling through high country feels intimate: the mountain has a relationship with you and you alone, an arrangement that is perforce intense, even jealous. After hearing stories about people like Donny Gardner, I started coming back to the mountains regularly—every year, for thirty years, to undertake ski mountaineering trips with the same group of friends. We still spend a week or two every winter, visiting places like the Tonquin Valley and the northern Selkirks and the Columbia Icefield. We have a thing for glaciers, for getting as high and clean as we can.

  For this reason I can now reveal a few of the secrets shared by our group of slightly overweight amateur mountaineers.

  For instance, we never travel with women (although one or two have been our guides). We get a lot of grief about this from our wives, who refer to our outings as “the penis trips.” But in a meditational sense, we want to clear our minds of distractions, even welcome ones: travelling in the mountains in the winter, even at our fairly safe and relatively undemanding level, gives you lots of other things you have to pay attention to, such as not falling down a crevasse, say, or remembering to bring an extra pair of gloves and the stove, in case you get into trouble.

  You might ask why a group of men pushing sixty insist upon returning to such dangers annually. I would like to say that I know the answer. But every year the answer changes—yet another reason the mountains are so instructive, because nothing about them stays the same for long. The question is not, will it rain; the question is, how often, and for how long, and what kind of rain will it be? The kind of rain that makes you want to cry, or the sort that makes you grateful, that seems to operate like a giant facial moisturizer, like the one I passed through when I was hiking with my wife around the mountains that surround Lake O’Hara? As we walked along a stretch of uncannily well-spaced, hand-placed granite steps, we were singing a song my wife made up, to the tune of The Addams Family theme, about the chivalrous Lawrence Grassi, Banff’s great trail maker. The opening line was “The man who built these steps . . . I love him, I love him.”

  The longer my pals and I do these trips, the harder they get, and the more theories we have as to why we still want to do them. It isn’t simply our desire to prove we are still the men we once were . . . because we aren’t. But in the mountains you have ample opportunity to find out what makes you afraid.

  Recently, on a trip into the Selkirk Mountains, I started making lists of everything that worried me. Do you have your climbing skins? Will you need your watch? Do you have water? Enough water? Lunch? Extra hat? Sunglasses? Goggles? Will your asthma act up? Will you collapse? Will you fall? Do you have your heel ascenders set at the right height? Are you fit enough? Is your skiing good enough? Will you keep everyone waiting at the bottom of each pitch? Have you been a good enough model as a parent to set your lovely daughter firmly on her feet for the future if you die in an avalanche? Are you getting a sunburn? My list ran on for twelve pages.

  But here’s another secret: you get braver as you get older—or at least, you get more resilient.

  The last time my companions and I visited the Clemenceau Icefield, just west of the Rocky Mountain Trench in British Columbia, we were the first visitors to sign the hut’s logbook in two years. The two-storey Quonset hut with three door-sized windows, one on each side. was buried to the roofline. One of my pals who was in the mountains with us for the first time in his life at the age of fifty volunteered to find the door and dig it out. After an hour and a half of digging he got it on the fourth try.

  The mountains don’t care how old you are. In the mountains—and this is another reason we need them—it doesn’t matter how much money you make, or how many servants or hedge funds you have: altitude demands that you earn your pleasure, and because you have to earn it, you remember it. In an age of forgettable instant communication when everything appears at our fingertips, this is a valuable gift, at least if you want to remember what actually happened to you in the blink of time that comprises a single human existence. (On the geological timeline of the mountains, which were formed by a continental scrunching 65 million years ago, we humans are mayflies.)

  Of course, things can go wrong, as well. I’ve often told the story (because the stories are proof that we lived, that we did this, that we filled our time well) of how one of my ski companions once broke a binding on a remote icefield. (The guide told him not to move, and, being a Magoo-like character, he moved anyway, and then he disappeared over the edge of a cornice. We found him fifteen feet below us. I still remember the small, awed way he said “oh” when he landed. The broken binding issue was serious, though.)

  We fixed it that night using a strip of an empty white gas can to make a new binding plate, the work done in a circle of Coleman light on a table in the centre of the hut, the rest of us peering down from our bunks, each turn and rivet of crucial importance. (The Ski Repair Channel has potential.) It wasn’t just the technical problem of fixing Mackenzie’s ski that absorbed us, but the bigger, existential challenge that an accident in the remote mountains creates: his small mishap could have become a huge problem. It didn’t, though, thanks to ingenuity, which thankfully shows up a lot in an environment where you have to make do with what you have. In that way the mountains make you both serious and resourceful. People long for that experience.

  Above all, mountains are beautiful, especially in winter, when everything is so tightly upholstered in snow, an image you hang on to in your mind back in the city. And there is the sensation of skiing itself, if you’re a skier—the silicate powder snow, the grace-kissed runs you never forget. The way we wait for each other at the bottom of each pitch, just in case, just to make sure no one gets left behind. We all do get left behind, eventually, but not up there, not if we can help it.

  In the cit
y, we look forward to our trips for months. Then, as soon as the trip starts, we can’t wait to get home again, where we can once again appreciate ease and comfort and laziness. You discover after a week in the mountains that laziness has a lot going for it.

  But we also never want the trip to be over. “The free mountain and camp life was at an end,” Norman Collie lamented when he finally had to head back down from discovering the Columbia Icefield back in the 1880s, which he wrote about with Hugh Stutfield in their classic book Climbs and Explorations in the Canadian Rockies. “All our difficulties and struggles would now be with the complex fabric of civilized life, not with the forests, rivers, glaciers, and snow-clad peaks.” Life is simpler up there. Everything you do feels necessary, and sufficient. It is a repudiation of the lives we tourist mountaineers live most of the time, measuring our success against the standards of others. I come to the mountains because it makes life in the city less daunting.

  Did you take a shit before you set out skiing this morning? Should you have taken another? Did you wash your hands after? Do you smell? Why do you lean so far forward when you ski? And why are you afraid of the steeps—it’s just speed. Can you make it to the end of the week? Will your body hold up? Will your spirits? Why didn’t you bring more gin? Are you too big, too old, too small? Are you shallow? Does anyone in your life really love you? Will you ever not be lonely? And why are you so worried in such a beautiful place? Why can you not live in the moment?

  WE DO try to be civilized on our trips. We spend our days looking out for one another on the slopes, waiting for the stragglers and avoiding slots and avalanches. Then we do it again with courtesies that evening, in the tent or the cabin—holding doors for one another, mixing drinks, waxing someone else’s skins as well as our own—to prove that all this is more than self-interest.