Facing the Hunter (10 page)

In Connell’s time, poachers probably decreased the population there by another dozen moose, and there seems no way to stop them. For a poacher to quit he must believe what he is doing is harmful to the animal. And very few
poachers believe this. Yet it must be a sickening feeling at certain times for them. The idea of death, even in a legitimate hunt, can still a heart.

I know a man who took two bulls one year, and had one rot. If he cannot see himself that this is wrong, nothing you say will convince him. The more one tries to convince, the more one is turned away with an array of angry logic and stubborn fact—and the persistent implication that you are the one who is weak.

Never being weak is a big thing here. So people should make a concerted effort to understand what weakness is. To look on death or injury without sadness is considered strong, many times by people who have never made a move in their lives without the approval of others. If they only knew what strength of character really means.

Many poachers have an age-old feud or a gripe against someone somewhere in authority. Therefore they are self-justified. Besides, they want to prove themselves to their buddies. That is the real reason for their truancy, and it makes them more dangerous to the moose than any legitimate hunter ever could be. It is a strange thing to say, an anomaly of conscience, but most hunters, most are conservationists. I will guarantee that I am. If not, I would long ago have shot deer from my back doorstep just because I could.

I have taken very few pictures of my moose hunts and have kept very few trophies. The moose horns off the bull I shot are at Peter McGrath’s camp up on the Norwest Miramichi. Someday when I am older, though I am no longer young, I will bring them back to this farmhouse where I now sit.

There is an old picture of a doe and fawn somewhere near Rocky Brook—taken perhaps seventy years ago, in shadow along a bar—near where the wind blows in midday, soft, and the ripples of water caress some small boulder. Sometimes I think of such a picture I saw as a boy—up along a river on a quiet day, where the windy green begins to stir just before fall, and the trees trade colour for the paramour they display before dark chill sets, and those quiet places begin to wail and toss in the squalls of winter. I wonder if in fact we ever find those places any more, what happens to them after—and where that picture is now, that once sat on a mantel in some house that is no longer there.

All or most of that life is perhaps now gone. But there came something from that life—an instinct about who can be trusted and who cannot be.

Years ago, Giles and I would borrow Peter Baker’s Suzuki 180 to visit our girlfriends downriver. It was as cold as hell, and often we would ride only a mile or so before having to switch to give the driver time to warm up as a passenger. This was in November of 1967. And each of us trusted the other to drive the bike until he was too frozen to bring the clutch in to shift.

So trust came, because it had to be.

We went hunting that year, up to his camp, and then onward to Bald Mountain where his dad, Mike Kenny, shot a nine-point buck just at dusk that night.

That night on the ground we almost froze, the weather as still and as calm as something in the petrified forest, and far below us trees were stunted and bare, looking like the grey ghosts of the Confederacy, while above the stars were sharp as spikes. We had left wilderness at the Kenny camp and
travelled to a greater wilderness, where men had hunted caribou a generation or two before, meat for the lumber camps in the woods beyond.

And one autumn day Giles and I took his dad’s International truck, and Giles decided to drive in through the woods, over the long wooded bank, to try and find an old road to the river. We had to cut trees and jack it up, moving it forward a foot at a time through most of the afternoon, but we got it down to the river and out to the bridge. When I read
A River Runs Through It
, I realized I had spent my childhood with the same type of men.

I now spend my summers in a farmhouse where two generations ago the road wasn’t ploughed in the winter. There are some mementoes of hunting and fishing, portraits of friends standing about a campfire in the snow, with a white-tailed deer up. Antlers from deer I have shot.

My neighbours do not understand me. That I am the fellow who has devoted his life to writing books—they cannot seem to get their head around it. But their hearts are very much the same, and their love extends to me because of my wife, who grew up beside them and is related to many. And I think of many of them like this:

“If people were actually paid for their value, these people of self-reliance would surely be living in the finest houses.”

A nice enough woman novelist once told me I shouldn’t give too much credit to the working class. I don’t—it’s just that I refuse to give them less credit than I give anyone else.

I keep waiting for the nights to come cold and bitter so I can go out deer hunting this year. I know there is a
buck just beyond the field—I have seen its markings. You know at the very stillest of moments just before dark he will be there.

But now it is November and still warm. So my wife and I can go out on our bikes many nights—she taking the Sportster 883 and I on the Soft Tail. Often the November nights are warm enough to ride along the old Souwest road, or up toward the mines where I saw just last year a cow and beautiful twin calves in downy grey coats cross before me. I still search always for deer.

Most of the families along here have some association with us. They have hunted and fished most of their lives. Most of them I have known from my youth. There are very few of them I wouldn’t trust.

There are those I have learned not to trust—at least not to trust with my life. For that is what is at stake when you are in camp or alone.

The woods are like this too—you have to know this before you enter in. There is no way to leave your integrity at the door.

These things have a lot to do with hunting, for a man who is deceitful in small things will have no courage in big matters.

So late last week I sighted my rifle in at the gravel pit. I fired seven shots and hit the small target every time at over a hundred yards—however, the shots weren’t in the greatest concentration. Then my son John came home from Woodstock and we headed out toward the hills of the south. My son, whom I carried in my arms through the streets of Sydney, Australia, past ladies of the night who all patted his head for luck, and along the breakwater in Denia,
Spain, during the turbot war in 1995, is now three inches taller than I am, broad-shouldered and fit, and at least as strong as his old man.

He is back where he belongs, in the province of his youth.

Two days ago we travelled south from Fredericton to look for deer. Here is the best deer country in the province.

Yesterday we saw four deer but none were bucks, and a large cow moose came out along the edge of a barren chop where an old moose stand rested against the winter sky. My son climbed it, to look across the barrens and take a look through the scope. (He can climb much better than I can—and used to scare me to death by climbing to the top of our house as a kid.) But he saw nothing as the day got shorter.

Then I walked down toward the stream. Snow had fallen along the hardwood ridge, and I saw a buck’s tracks slewed off in the snow. He had been there just a while before—perhaps when my son climbed the stand it had startled him. Who knows, anyway. And the bright day was falling away.

We started to head out, because I knew a road that intersected the stream, and thought that if I could get up on a ridge somewhere in the last hour of daylight he might stumble toward me with his nose to the ground, picking up doe scent—and I remembered the little buck I first shot years and years ago.

But as we drove slowly along toward the upper ridge we came across two First Nations Maliseet hunters, a father and son whose truck had broken down. They were trying to get it started and they were thirty miles from the nearest village. So my son and I were required to stop. We spent
the rest of the daylight, or a good part of it, but we couldn’t get fire to the engine. So they locked the truck up, and we drove them back in. I suspected, and so did John, that they had a deer hanging—but they probably wouldn’t have left the deer, so perhaps a moose down, for as First Nations men they would be still allowed to hunt moose.

At any rate, our hunt was over for the day, but we were obligated to do what we did. And that’s all a person can do.

Here and there I still see houses that once belonged to some back-to-the-landers. Most have gone. Those who have stayed are indistinguishable, really, from most of the people they live beside. Others have gone back to where they originated from. And as my son falls asleep on the long drive home, I think of all the earnestness of those people who came here to start a new life, in a new world.

Many years ago I got to know a young woman. Her name was Stevie—she wore granny glasses, and knitted in Uncle Tate’s kitchen as the sunlight glanced over the chimes. She was from Toronto, and the man Darren, her mentor and the mentor of the group, came from New York, with four or five other city-dwellers. I have a memory of him looking like Jesus, leaning against Uncle Tate’s sink and pouring water out, as if at a baptismal font. From the first, Darren seemed to be the guru in this new paradise. At any rate he spoke of tolerance, while keeping the others in line, dividing up the chores.

They were back-to-the-landers in that age of unrest. They had bought an old house from the family of a man we called Uncle Tate, who had died of a heart attack
pushing though a road when he was fifty-four. Uncle Tate had smashed a hospital window and was thrown in jail the night his wife died, because he had tried to pick her up and take her home, as he had promised her. That, too, was trust. And now he too was gone.

Neil Young sang about “a town in north Ontario,” and suddenly half my generation wanted to be old, or from a previous generation. A generation that lived off the land, never knowing that even the First Nations themselves wanted, at least in part, to escape from this.

So they came in the summer, this little band; they were going to make a canoe out of bark, fish in the traditional way, plant under the June moon. They had a pocketful of seeds, pocketful of dreams.

“Man, you don’t know what you got here—so you better take care of it,” Darren said to me the only time I ever spoke to him, pouring out his cup of pure well water. That is, he ordered me to take care of something his own urban culture had reduced to nothing.

They spent October in the yellow trees, cutting and limbing the wood they were to burn, but didn’t get it yarded until late and then left it where it was until well after the first storm. After a time they reminded me of a little band of orphans, with nowhere much to go. Stevie’s cheeks were often streaked, as if she had just cried. I wondered where she had come from. But she was here now, and in the power of a guru who probably gave orders as relentlessly as any daddy she had run from. I saw her trying to carry wood to the house and stumbling under the weight, as if she were carrying a cross she could neither bear nor understand. It might have been like forcing an Indian
woman to go to church in the eighteenth century. The feeling of being displaced must have been almost as strong.

But she continued to carry her wood.

Watching her in those days, I thought of a thousand women who had done the same a century before. Of my mother-in-law, left a widow with nine children at the age of forty-two, a country girl. Of my mother, who grew up in the heart of what any one of these people would have considered the wilderness and did housework from the time she was four. Of my uncle, who, at thirteen, was sent through the woods to find my grandfather, while my grandmother, holding a doublebarrelled shotgun, held off a group that was trying to take the property. Of my paternal grandmother, who knocked a cow cold with one punch (a feat not to be equalled by any literary figure in Canada, save Malcolm Lowry).

When it became very cold, Stevie would sit in our corner store for hours, pretending to do crossword puzzles in the daily newspapers. She was hiding from the guru who intimidated her and intellectually bullied her, from the stillness and coldness of the house beyond.

I often saw a look of dull confusion, as if she were a lost Girl Scout. And where, I thought, could she ever go now? Nowhere. Not with winter setting in and no ticket home. Frost clung to the turned-down and twisted grasses; their wood lay yarded as haphazardly as fallen soldiers. There was no way to dispel the cold and no way to get rid of the smoke from their damp maple and birch. No way to make the light stay when it was getting dark, no way to make the chickens look happy, no way to make the barn stand straight again. No one had money for those things. And night—night came at six, at five, at four-thirty.

The locals became interested in helping out, for no better reason (and a damn good reason it was) than that these were people and it was Christmas. And many of my friends who were their age dropped in on them with presents.

They brought deer meat from a buck killed up at Mullin, and moose meat from the first moose we had taken, fifty pounds of potatoes, homemade wine, fresh-grown grass, and other forms of libation. But it became a strange celebration. It reminded me of Tolstoy’s quip that at least as much is known in the country as the city, and probably more.

When Darren spoke to us of wanting to build a geodesic dome, he was very surprised to find out that our friend Giles had quit school in grade ten and had built the first dome in New Brunswick, drawing on his own plans and intelligence and reading Buckminster Fuller. He, Darren, had not known that universal ideas were actually universal.

When Darren said he would fish for his food, it was Peter McGrath who brought smoked salmon. Yes, he told Darren, he had taken them on fly, running the river from Little River down to Miner’s Camp. He had taken them on butt bugs he had tied himself. No, it was not a big thing—here, take them all.

Yes, we will teach you to hunt and fish—it is no problem, don’t ever worry or be afraid to ask!