The Best Hunting Stories Ever Told

by Jay Cassell

  We were making a film, so there were three of us on the lookout point—Jim, my cameraman, and I. Halfway along, the came man gave Jim has magazine camera and promised to come with the big camera and tripod as soon as he heard a shot. Jim was over 50 then, but he was still a traveling fool, and we ran more than we walked across the rough, going till we came to a jutting finger of the forest that penetrated the muskeg. We were still breathing hard when the caribou came into the open just where Jim, knowing the caribou trails, knew he’d show. The bull stood there, a little more than 100 yards away. He looked just like the caribou on the magazine’s front cover. He was facing us and staring right at us.

  By prearrangement, I would tell Jim when to start the little camera for its 20-second run. I had to be sure he’d start filming before I shot and that I would be able to shoot before the camera ran out of time. I knelt to take the shot.

  It was a tableau. None of us moved, including the caribou. I looked along the iron sights and thought, “If I shoot now, I may hit the head or antlers and spoil them and the pictures. Should I wait? If I do, will he bolt and leave me with a running shot and a poor chance for a clean kill?” The seconds ticked by.

  Slowly, the antlered head started to swing, a sign that he was ready to run. Without a word from me, Jim started the camera. I heard it running, and as the head lifted and the antlers cleared the white of his neck, I squeezed off the shot.

  The bullet hit the spine in the neck, and he dropped in his tracks. It was a lucky shot under great pressure. Anything other than an instantaneous kill cannot be shown in a film.

  That’s just one of the animals I remember when my thoughts turn to caribou country. In memory, I recapture the look and smell of the yellow muskeg and the red blueberry barrens lying between the patches of dark timber. I close my eyes, and I am there.

  The wealth of age comes in having past reality to reflect upon instead of future uncertainty to dream about. It lies in knowing firsthand instead of relying on the word of someone else to make decisions. It comes from having done most of the things you really wanted to do at least once and knowing those you enjoy most and want to do again and again. It lies in wisdom, which can only come from experience. Knowledge is something youth may have as well as old-timers. Wisdom comes from testing mere knowledge and being able to use it effectively.

  Physical things, too, can be the gift of age. I remember 1938 and a fishing trip in the northern bush. The black flies were as thick and as fierce as I ever remember. The fly dopes of that day were not very effective, and in a few days we ran out of them. My guide said, “Wait long enough, and you’ll get used to the bugs like I am.”

  He was right. I was bitten so much that I grew nauseated and felt physically ill for two days. He called it “fly fever.”

  Then the miracle happened. After that, I could watch a black fly bite me and feel no pain. The fly would go off, leaving a tiny, round, red mark on my flesh. Within a day the red spot would turn black. There was no swelling, and by the third day, even that small black reminder of the fly’s visit was gone. That immunity is still with me, though perhaps not to the same degree, and I’m seldom bitten. When others around me are complaining of bites, I’m comfortable and disdain fly dope. It’s truly a gift of having lived and experienced.

  I was about 45 when I admitted to myself that my muscles would never again be what they once were and that I’d have to start using my head to make up for their failings. I couldn’t race full tilt across a bog to intercept a caribou. I couldn’t lift and carry as much or more than anyone else in the party and race to be the leader on the trail. Thinking comes harder when good muscles have previously given you a great advantage, but thinking helps you to do your share of the physical things when you grow older.

  I had the first light seaplane in Newfoundland and Labrador. Flying a hydroplane let me fish the then-uncharted rivers, and I fished them before the other planes came and today’s crowds moved in. As a result, I have a special sense about playing Atlantic salmon that came only with time and long experience. I have caught at least 3,000 salmon, and the total may be 4,000. I can watch one of the old movies of me playing a salmon in the late 1930s and see how much my tactics have changed. I’ve learned how well angle and pressure changes can be used to control a fish’s runs and his position in a pool. I have learned that in playing stream fish, the best position for the angler is downstream of the fish so that it fights not only your pressure, but the flow of the stream as well. I used to race downstream to keep ahead of the fish, relying on my fleetness of foot and balance to get to the right places. With time, I learned to use only light pressures so the fish stayed in the pool, instead of pressuring them into wild, downstream runs, and I brought them in more swiftly than before.

  With the big fish of the sea, there was a greater need to use my strength efficiently. I learned to work with static pressure so that the boat traveled on the same course and at the same speed as the fish as often as possible. The line neither comes off the reel nor is reeled in, so that maximum strain can be put on the fish with the minimum effort. I learned to break down the fish’s will to resist.

  At 40, when my muscles were beginning their downward slide, it would have been hard to imagine that at 72 I’d be able to set a new 80-pound-test line-class record for giant bluefin tuna. I had to play that fish for two hours and 15 minutes, and I did it more with my mind or just as much as I did it with my muscles. That 895-pound record fish has been bettered, but as I write this, I’m in my 70s and I’m still trying for a tuna record. I came close to a new record in 1982, when I was 77, with a 960-pound bluefin tuna I caught in Nova Scotia. After 50, it is an interesting game to see how much you can accomplish with a minimum of physical effort.

  Flycasting, like many other things, is a matter of skill and timing—of easy rhythm rather than power. Such things can be enjoyed all through life and perhaps most of all in the more-relaxed years of age. Paddle easily. Climb slowly. Choose the right places from the experience of other days, and enjoy the view to the fullest.

  I have been flycasting since I was nine, but it was not until I was over 40 and started flying a light seaplane that I really learned to cast a fly into the wind. Newfoundland, the old pilots told me, was too windy for a light plane like my J-3 Cub, but the Cub and I survived and I learned to live with wind.

  The gales would pour viciously over the mountains and beat down hard on the lakes and bays I had to land on. Watching, I saw that winds are rarely constant. They flowed over the earth like water over a rapid run, gusting along at varying speeds. I used to look down fearfully at the pattern of hard, black squalls in which I was about to risk my airplane and my life. Then it dawned on me that the way to beat the wind was to land into the wind at the tail of one of the black squalls. The wind was strong, and my ground speed was slow when I approached. Then, just as I lit on the water, I’d enter one of the slack wind periods and my plane could settle quickly onto the water.

  And that’s the best way to cast a fly into the wind. Let the tail of a gust take your line out on a hard back cast, and then, in the lull that follows, drive hard into and through the relatively calm spots behind the gust. Casts should be timed to the wind. Though you can’t make as many casts as you can on a calm day, it’s possible, without too much effort, to fish quite effectively when most anglers have retreated to the taverns.

  When it comes to deer hunting, it’s obvious that the older hunter has to slow down. He can’t cover the terrain he did in his youth. However, his growing experience should give him a better understanding of the animal so that he will be at the right places at the right time more and more. Most of the time, he can plan to signal a friend to help drag out the deer. Failing that, he can often shoot where the dragging is all downhill. Old bird hunters, too, manage to get their share of the game, using slower-working dogs that cover the ground more thoroughly, and they know just when, in a bird’s flight, is the best time to shoot.

  An old man can build up out of his y
ears a fund of knowledge that stands him in good stead when there are decisions to make. Watching trout in the small brooks as a boy, I learned that the hardest strikes always come when two fish are racing each other to get to the bait. Whenever I encounter an extra-hard strike, I still remember those racing trout of boyhood. As quickly as I play one fish, I cast back to the same spot, because another hungry fish should be there.

  When I went up to Newfoundland in 1938 to pioneer that island’s tuna fishing for the government, I knew the fish were big, and I hoped to set a record. I used stout hooks and stainless-steel wire-cable leaders headed up with a large bright-brass swivel. I hooked only one bluefin that looked like a record-breaker. I tossed a mackerel bait to that monstrous fish and watched him take it and race away just under the surface in smooth water. Then I saw his companion, equally large, rush in alongside. My line went slack. My tuna’s friend had snapped at the flash of the big brass swivel and the bright bubble of air it made as it raced through the water. The second fish cut the doubled line. Since then, I’ve used no swivel at all or the smallest, dullest one I thought would not break before the leader did.

  All of us are seeing things now that will vanish with the changing world, leaving those who hold such memories with a deeper realization of the inevitability of change. I had heard that the old north-woods trappers could build their cabins without a single nail and with an ax as the only tool. One of the great north-country guides built a cabin for me. I helped him cut and peel the poles of spruce and fir and then notch and place them. Using pressure and pegs and undercuts to hold things together or to hinge them, he made a beautiful cabin. Its roof was of birch bark overlaid with soil on which he planted sod to hold the whole thing steady. It was a beautiful cabin that I think is still standing. Its creation gave me a sense of similar skills our civilization has already lost.

  Another wonderful thing that makes the late years great is that your kids grow up and go off on their own. They were so big a part of your life that the change when they go is a dramatic one. You would have thrown yourself in front of an oncoming car to push them out of the way. You had them in your mind in all your waking hours. They gave you a lot of pleasure, and you’ll always remember the towheaded three-year-old, now 40 with hair as black as yours once was, catching his first sunfish with squeals of pure delight. You remember flying back to a salmon camp and looking down to see his ten-year-old brother standing in the river. You watched the salmon he was playing, his first, leap in a splash of spray and sunlight.

  When they were small, you worried that they’d fall into the Battenkill and drown. One of their playmates in the village had done that. As they grew up, you wondered at night if their delayed return meant that they’d been in an accident and you had a twinge of fear if the phone rang in the wee hours and they were still out.

  When they finally went off on their own, there was a great sense of loss at first. Then you realized that bringing them to maturity as good, healthy citizens was your real goal and that you had achieved it. They are no longer the kids you cuddled. Now they are grownups you love in a different way. And you’ve passed on to them an understanding of the wild world that endures.

  Mature, experienced people do their best creative work. It is a time to enjoy with the richness of friends, doing the things you most want to do.

  There is a wealth in having sat around many campfires in a multitude of camps. It lies in the friends you make. When you have lived with them on the waters and in the woods and time has seasoned the friendship, it is far more secure and satisfying than those that develop casually, each person showing the other only a part of what he is. It may be that the greatest wealth of all lies in our friends.

  Old friends can wade a trout stream together or walk a woodland cover and not encounter just the fish or the game of that day but also the memories of other days and other places. They’ve taken the bitter with the better and found it all rewarding.

  The years beyond 50 have been by far the best of my life. I’ve had the physical capacity to do a great many things and the judgment to do them better than ever before. I haven’t had to do anything I really haven’t wanted to do during those years. I know I put my heart fully into each effort. Because of maturity and depth of interest in what I do, whether writing, making films, or playing a fish, each thing I do should be more complete and better than the things I did in my energetic youth.

  It is good for the young to realize how rewarding the over-50 years can be—years when the mind has sorted out the things of greatest value. When I look back, it seems I spent my youth and middle age preparing to enjoy my final years.

  Reprinted with permission of Joan Wulff.

  A Hunting Memory

  RICK BASS

  Having already been blessed with an elk and an antelope, I had spent the rest of the month walking around trying to work up a desire for deer, but the electricity I had felt as a young man, as well as the need, just wasn’t there. I was mostly just out walking, now, carrying my rifle the way I might carry a rolled-up map. Sometimes, particularly at first light, I would feel a mild hunger and a curiosity, but there was none of the old fire, the old necessity. For most of the rest of the month, I was just out walking around with my rifle, to see what I might see, rather than hunting.

  It was almost as if I was looking for something lost.

  Some days I felt myself moving closer to that thing, however—that lost fire, or desire—and when it finally did return, on the last day of the season, I was overjoyed, for I had it figured out now that there would probably be a day when it might not return at all: or might simply drift past in moments, and in occasional memories.

  And that would be all right. It would be whatever it ended up being. But when I went to bed the night before the last day of the season, I finally wanted a deer, and when I woke up early the next morning—the first of December—I really wanted one.

  I had three different places that I wanted to try. I hadn’t been seeing many deer, but that morning, hiking in to the first place, a young whitetail buck stood in the middle of the trail, illuminated in my flashlight beam, and he would not leave, nor would he move out of the path.

  I took it as a good omen.

  I hunted that area hard, farther in, at first light and for an hour beyond, sitting silently in the deep cold and watching the frozen silvery world become light. I didn’t see anything else, but it didn’t matter, because finally I was hunting instead of just watching. It’s not something you can fake or force, and I had not realized how much I had missed it.

  By midmorning I had gone over to another mountain, where I watched a small herd of whitetail does for a while and then, much higher on the mountain, a young spike a long way off. I hiked all the way to the top of the mountain and then down the back side, touched the Canadian line, then turned around and hiked out, following a different watershed and hunting carefully, intensely, all the way. And mid-afternoon, I was rewarded with the heartpounding sight of the back half of a big, beautiful white-tail standing behind a giant larch tree on a steep slope. Gold larch needles were falling slowly through the stillness for no reason other than the frosted weight of their own existence: the very last ones to fall.

  I eased back up the slope until I could see the front half of the deer—how I wanted it to be a buck!—and felt the delicious joy of disappointment that it was not. The cold sun was directly in her eyes, igniting them the way it sometimes can, making the eyes look like liquid, or burning glass—and I lay there for about twenty minutes, hoping there might be a late-season buck nearby—particularly for her to be so motionless, for so long—but if there was, I never saw it, and finally, too cold to lie still any longer, I got up and eased on down off the slope.

  On the way out, I was thinking about old hunts: about amazing things that had happened to me in the woods, and about some of the stories my father and uncle and grandfather had told me about various hunts they’d made. Certainly, it wasn’t as if something phenomenal happened every time yo
u went out into the woods, but it added up over the years—a handful of astounding, luminous happenings—and I was thinking about how it had been a while since I’d had one of those amazing incidents. I wasn’t really asking for one, but was just kind of wondering when there might be another. Always, if you put in enough miles, and enough hours, there would be one more. It might be years in the coming, but always, there would be one more.

  On my walk out—headed over toward my third mountain of the day—I started to daydream about some of the old hunts, the old amazing stories, and remembered some of my own. I thought about some of the old stories in which I, or someone I’d been hunting with, had been fortunate enough to get an animal on the last day, sometimes in the waning dusk-moments of that last day. The animal surely presenting itself to the hunter, at the end of the long season.

  I don’t think I was quite asking for such a thing, but I definitely was thinking of a place where I wanted to be sitting, high on a ridge of that third mountain, when dusk came; and if I hurried, I could just barely get there.

  What a glutton! At first all I had wanted was to get my desire, my intensity, back—to want a deer—and next, I wanted not just the intensity, but the deer itself. And now here I was thinking about a miracle. Maybe not being audacious enough to ask for one, but definitely thinking about working hard to position myself in a place where, if one occurred, it would be spectacular. A beautiful ridge, one of my favorite views in the valley. A wonderful place to watch the sun go down on the last day, whether a deer wandered by at dusk or not.

  The place where I was going was at the top of a cleft, a long vertical crevice that creased the mountain like a chimney. Four times previously in sixteen years I’ve seen a magnificent animal in that chute, sometimes at the top of it, as if the animals are born from that one rock, venting from it as if in miraculous, igneous expulsion. It has been much the same way with the elk I’d been fortunate enough to take this year, the animal falling far in the backcountry, but not thirty yards from where I’d previously killed other elk.