The Best Hunting Stories Ever Told

by Jay Cassell

  In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy: how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks.

  We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.

  Since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise. In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers.

  I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades.

  So also with cows. The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf ’s job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea.

  Excerpted from A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, by Aldo Leopold. Copyright © 1949, 2001 by Oxford University Press. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

  PART III

  Big Game

  Luck of the Draw

  LEE WULFF

  I had my archery equipment and cameras with me when a sudden change in plans led me through St. John’s in Newfoundland, and to a meeting with my old friend O. L. (Al) Vardy, the province’s tourist director. Al lost no time telling me that the hunting film I’d made for him in 1939 had pretty well covered its audiences, and that he’d like a new one on moose and caribou. “Do you suppose you could build a film for us around the bow and arrow?” he asked.

  Right then I wished that Fred Bear or some other top archer were with me, for while I can shoot a bow well enough to cluster arrows at twenty yards, the arrows begin to scatter when the target distance reaches out to forty or fifty yards.

  I realized that if I were to be the archer in the film Al wanted I’d have to get very close to the game. Assuming that I could, I’d also need a cameraman who could ghost through cover with me, to be sure of getting both the animal and me in the picture when the moment came to release the arrow.

  And of course I’d need all the luck in the world to combine the stalk of a well-antlered animal with a short shot in a sunlit clearing where the cameraman could record the kill.

  It all added up to quite a challenge, and I readily accepted it.

  Al arranged for a warden named Ron Callahan to go with me to act as cameraman, and also for Jack McNeill to be our guide. He got permission for me to take a caribou and a moose (normally the limit is one animal per hunter), and made plans for a camp to be set up in a good game area.

  While the province’s fish and game service uses planes for making big-game animal surveys, none was available for film work. The fact that I was traveling in my own seaplane was a big plus and a major factor in my decision to take on the job.

  The season opened September 1, less than a week after I’d met Al, and, as luck would have it, by afternoon of that day we’d almost managed to film the essential sequences. Almost—but not quite.

  We’d met—Ron Callahan, Jack McNeill, and I—on opening-day morning at a lumber camp where a supply road touches a lake, and by noon the tent was set up and Ron and I were ferrying in the last of our supplies. Our course led over fifteen miles of hilly country to the western side of a great basin draining down to Meelpaeg, a large and swampy lake.

  When Al told me he’d send a warden to be my cameraman, I expected to meet a quiet man, bred of long, lone years in the bush. Ron Callahan didn’t come much above my shoulder, wore an infectious grin, and had a sparkle in his eye. His girth was ample, but his legs were spindly.

  At first glance I doubted that he could travel through blow-downs very far or very quietly, and my spirits fell when I learned that his camera experience was limited to a box model and that he’d never seen a live moose or caribou before the previous season.

  My worry soon evaporated. Ron has amazing endurance, and though he often crawled under logs that I crawled over, not once during our hunt did I look for him but what he was in position. He quickly learned how to set and operate the cameras. Planning, making decisions on use of lenses and lens settings, framing, and duration of sequences were things we worked out together.

  We were flying above an old cutover area when I looked down and saw a granddaddy moose. Bright sun flashed on his antlers, spread high and wide. His coat was dark, shadowed by alders and young birches. He stood motionless, listening to our engine. Ron saw him too and said, “Lord, what a head he’s carrying.” I was already looking for water.

  A small pond glistened in the sunlight half a mile beyond, and I headed for it. From a high circle above the bull we looked over the terrain and made mental notes—the half-grown logging road that stretched toward him from the pond, the white birches clustered at a point where we should leave the road to work uphill, and the scattered birches, evergreens, and low bushes all about him.

  A gliding spiral brought us down to three hundred feet. My first good look at those broad antlers and the high-held head told me the moose would be a good model. Then my eyes were on rocks, open patches of swampy grass, a leaning tamarack, a scrubby birch with yellow leaves, and half a hundred other little things I wanted to remember once we began to stalk.

  Though most moose placidly hold their ground until a plane is almost on them, others spook easily. I let the ship swing toward the pond, but when the bull was well behind us I added power and climbed a few hundred feet to look the pond over. The water was peat-stained and typically dark, but I spotted what seemed to be a clear stretch and made the landing. The shores were overhung with brush and dead timber, and we got soaked to the hips when we slogged from the plane to solid ground.

  From the air the earth looks like a map. But the pathways on it, so easy for the eye to follow from above, become a maze of small rises and shallows when you ease down among them. Where Ron and I should have turned left for the last hundred yards of our climb, we continued onward. That’s how we missed the big bull’s feeding spot.

  The cutover was a mixture of small second growth, dead tops, down trees, and vines, with dead sticks crisscrossed everywhere. One man might travel through it with reasonable quiet, but two, one twenty paces behind the other, could scarcely manage fifty feet without making a warning sound. The brush was tall enough for a moose to hide in and thick enough to cut down a camera’s field to almost nothing.

  When I was certain we’d come too far, I climbed to the crest of a ridge and, standing atop a high boulder, decided to make for a certain twisted birch. With all the noise we’d made I had little hope that the bull would still be around. But my bow was ready, my feet paused at each step, and my eyes were searching every thicket. I should have seen him but I didn’t. I heard him first—behind me, then abreast of Ron, who whistled.

  I could see him, camera in position, but the bull was hidden. I heard the sucking sound of hooves being lifted from soft
earth, saw a flash of antlers above the leaves, and caught a glimpse of a dark shoulder and a back. Branches cracked and leaves swished—then silence. I must have passed within twenty-five feet of that bull. If my eyes had been able to ferret out his form, I would have had a standing shot at that distance.

  But it was wrong, all wrong. Even if I’d seen him and Ron had lined up the camera, it wouldn’t have made a movie. The moose would have been hidden and the camera’s field couldn’t possibly have taken in both of us. What had seemed like an excellent chance for pictures had been no chance at all. At best we would simply have had a kill.

  I knew for certain now that trying to make a film through casual stalking was a daydream. We’d have to work out a campaign combining the best available sun, wind, distance, timing, and action. I despaired of doing that with a moose, for in early September—before the rut—most of them are in timber, feeding little, loafing, often lying down. Caribou are more likely to be out in the open at this season, so it seemed logical to turn our attention to them.

  Jack McNeill is an old-timer. In his seventy years he’s seen caribou herds cover Newfoundland’s great marshy basins and cross the roads in endless processions. He can remember when the caribou were almost wiped out, when there were no moose on the island, and when the first of the great-antlered bulls began to spread downward into the central part where he did his trapping and timber work. Jack knows the caribou’s habits and the animal’s time-worn trails.

  After we’d unloaded the aircraft at the campsite, Ron and I changed to dry socks and trousers while Jack made a fire under a couple of cans of beans. We were ready to go when the sun was still two hours high. Jack led us to a sag in a timbered ridge where the woods necked down to a fringe and a great open marsh spread out on either side. A caribou trail leading from one side of the marsh to the other was deeply cut and there was fresh sign on the brown soil. We hid in cover to the west of the trail where any crossing animal would come within arrow range, and waited while the sun sank slowly toward the treetops.

  When I’d made the film Al Vardy had spoken about, a trained cameraman and two guides had been with me and I’d carried a rifle instead of a bow. Even so, we’d had our troubles. Weather tied us up for days. One stag spooked before the camera could get into action. Well-trodden caribou trails proved endlessly empty. It took us ten days to get the caribou we wanted, and we’d had every conceivable advantage. Al said the caribou herd had about doubled since then, but that still didn’t make the odds too good.

  We’d had much the same trouble with the moose section of the old film. We’d found big bulls in thickets where a bullet could penetrate but where the camera couldn’t do its work. That hunt also lasted ten days. Time dulls the memory, and in speaking with Vardy I’d forgotten many of the old problems we’d run into. As we waited now, they came back to mind.

  The tall spruces were sending long shadows across the marsh when Jack motioned for quiet. A caribou came lazing along a few paces at a time between mouthfuls, taking longer pauses occasionally as he grazed more seriously. It took him fully fifteen minutes to cross the field. By that time the entire valley lay in shadow.

  He was a small stag, a two-year-old, and his velveted antlers were short and slim. His brown sides shaded to slate gray and to white at his belly, and white shone at his neck and below his stubby tail.

  I wormed my way forward and then raised to a full stand as the stag drew abreast. Cradled against the flexed bow lay an arrow, its nock in the string at my chin, broadhead touching a left-hand finger at the grip. Ron, behind me, was on one knee, sighting the camera. My grip held firm, for the draw was for practice so that Ron would know what to expect when the right moment came.

  The caribou sensed the movement and turned to see the tensing of the bow. The draw was hardly made before he was in full flight. He was out of sight in seconds.

  It’s easy for a guide to remember a hundred caribou kills and forget that many were not in sunlight or within reach of an arrow. It’s also easy to remember opportunities when open seasons were long and caribou were everywhere. But it’s hard for a guide to realize how accurately placed both archer and cameraman must be and how swift and sure each must perform in filming a kill. The cameraman must always have the sun at his back, regardless of wind direction. He must be far enough away to show both hunter and his game in his lens, yet close enough for the images to be sharp and clear. He must move quietly, start his camera before the action starts, and not stop the camera before the action is complete. However great the difficulties may be for a solo hunter, for a camera-hunter team they’re increased a hundredfold.

  That night mist closed in over the lake just before dawn. Low clouds swept up the valley hiding the hills across the pond and blotting out the sun. But about an hour after breakfast patches of blue sky showed. Ron and I put our gear aboard the plane and climbed up to look over the country, leaving Jack to spend his day scouting around camp.

  The land rises ever higher from Meelpaeg Lake to Annieopsquotch Mountains and Harpoon Hills. Near Meelpaeg there’s swamp, pond, and rocky outcrop, but little timber. As the land lifts, the open marshes grow larger and scattered patches of timber appear. Still higher, the timber fills in to almost solid forest, broken by small marshes, a few rocky ridges, olakes, and ponds. There are no roads, no signs of human habitation in more than a thousand square miles.

  We saw a doe and fawn caribou before we’d flown a mile. They stopped grazing long enough to watch our shadow pass them. Ten minutes later we saw a half-submerged cow moose, one with a calf.

  Two casks of aviation gasoline should have been waiting for me at the logging camp where we’d met, but none had arrived. So to get some we took a winding course to the airport at Buchans, some thirty miles away.

  While there we talked with a mining company’s seaplane pilot. He reported seeing a herd of more than a thousand caribou near Newfoundland’s southern shore, a little over a hundred miles away. He’d seen them earlier in the summer and had landed on a pond amid the herd. They walked by him on both sides, only a few yards away, when he climbed a rise to watch. The area was near the headwaters of LaPoile River. With my plane’s main tanks and auxiliary filled, we took off toward LaPoile.

  We flew till we could see the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the distance, then criss-crossed a rocky plateau that lay between there and LaPoile. We counted twelve caribou in that area, but none had decent antlers. We found no sign of the herd that roamed there a month before. On the way back, after more than five hours in the air, we swung along the shady side of the Annieopsquotches and straightened away toward Meelpaeg.

  Suddenly there was game all around us. A small-homed bull and a cow moose stood in an open glen beside a brook, and farther on were two cows and a calf. At Blizzard Pond we saw a light spot on a grassy slope and made out a well-antlered stag lying less than a quarter of a mile from the pond’s edge.

  We set down on the rippling waves like a gull and idled up to the shore. The halfdown sun shone clearly. Swiftly we tied the plane to tree stumps, and with bow, quiver, and cameras began our stalk.

  We were downwind and the sun was at our backs. As we approached I moved ahead to some evergreens at the forest’s edge and scanned the field. It was empty. There was no sign of the caribou, but I was certain he could neither have heard nor scented us. We waited and watched for some minutes.

  Then we moved into the open and onto higher ground. As I scanned the field’s far boundary I saw horns projecting above the yellow marsh grass some eighty yards beyond a gully. We put a tree between the horns and us and moved closer.

  Though I had cover up to about eighty yards, I chose to see how much closer I could get by crawling in the grass. It was wet crawling. The water soaked through my clothing, and wet moss brushed my face.

  I inched along till I came, unknowing, to a gradual drop sloping more steeply toward the stag. The low grass hid both stag and slope from me until I came into his vision. He saw me, and started to rise. I jumped to
my feet and drew the bow, but the stag wheeled away. My broadhead streaked through the arch of his antlers, passing just above his back.

  Halfway across the marsh he stopped and turned to stare at me and then at Ron, who had come up from behind. We stood and watched him start to feed. He lifted his head from time to time to look at us, but apparently felt safe at that distance. There was no way I could get close enough for another shot, so we picked up our gear and went back to the plane.

  We were tired and hungry when we reached camp, but at least the day’s scouting had turned up one good chance. A sunny tomorrow might well bring us more luck, as we saw it then. There was good news at camp, too. Jack had seen a fair bull moose come out on the shore across the pond, and he’d also spotted three caribou and found fresh tracks of others in the marshes behind camp.

  The third day began with splatters of rain, but Jack’s report of caribou activity near camp encouraged us to weatherproof ourselves and our equipment and go scouting the nearby ridges. We settled in the lee of a small woods where we could watch the far side of the valley, and waited.

  Within an hour the drizzle all but stopped and the ceiling rose to more than five hundred feet. Visibility was good, though for effective work with 16 mm. color film nothing equals sunlight. Without direct sun, lens openings must be wide, and as a result less of the field is in focus. The color is less brilliant, the shadow contrast poor. Drops of water may fall on the lens, causing blurs. Yet, no matter how slim the chance or how great the obstacles, when taking a hunting film it always makes sense to have the equipment ready. We might have only one more chance in another two weeks, and to miss it could mean a clean bust.

  Jack sighted a caribou stag about three-quarters of a mile off. He was slowly feeding along a course that looked as if it would bring him between us and the lake. We watched for twenty-five minutes.