Facing the Hunter (12 page)

There is more waterfowl hunting along the coast than inland, but inland here is always watery with rivers and islands, so there are waterfowl to hunt. Some days are perfect, with clear, cool weather and a flock of birds coming in on a call. Friends of mine have experienced these days, on occasion. But more often than not, it is wet and cold, and a long time waiting between birds.

The store windows of the outdoor suppliers, like the Bass Pro Shops, which have a huge Outdoor World store off Highway 400 near Toronto, show an idyllic scene. Hunter mannequins are always clean, the faces jovial and clean-shaven, to look virtuous, and the air is filled with ducks. Or the bear is easily spotted up a tree, and the mannequin up a stand is not cold or frostbitten or so tired he is frightened of falling. The deer beneath him is always a buck with a fine rack. The wind does not blow—there is no wind in the willows here. Pictures of trout on inland lakes—with the nineteen-foot Coleman canoe and the fisherman—are idyllic as well.

The Outdoor World off Highway 400, outside of downtown Toronto, is where I go to escape the glass and tall buildings, the miles of concrete. Though it is an Upper Canadian place, I can walk about and think of the Maritimes. I am not fully alive in it, but by God I am more alive.

There is so much “stuff” now—that is the feeling I come away with at times. We are overburdened with “stuff.” This means everything from goose calls to chair-warmers to hand-warmers to portable toilets to an array of seemingly
useless things for the camping trip you are about to take. If a hunter—especially a hunter from the Maritimes—brought half of this stuff he would be laughed out of the woods, not only by the hunters but by the game itself. We don’t need it, it is a burden to us, and its selling point relies on man’s desire to be more comfortable “there” than when he is home, and not to succumb to anything in nature that might force him to confront nature itself. It is based also on aspects of man that the outfitter bargains on—his actual fear of the elements themselves, and his constant hope that he can be like everyone else, the worry that accompanies man when he is on his own in the natural world. This “stuff,” these commodities, do say one thing, just as a by-product of our instinct. We can gather by all this “stuff” that a good 35 percent of hunters (and it might be more) never see an animal they are hunting—and the failure rate of hunters is high. This is a good thing, actually. Many men I know have never shot a deer, or shot at a deer, or have even seen one. (One man I went hunting with, well into his twenties, came to me to tell me he had seen some deer sign. I went to look and realized it was bear scat. I simply pointed this out in the most diplomatic way I could, and know that I myself have much to learn in the woods.)

I do not wish these men or women bad luck—but I am assured by this that hunting is a very subjective activity. We are emboldened by the activity as much as by the game we seek. If these stores tell us anything, they tell us this. No one should frown at the poor hunter who buys himself too much needless equipment to go and sit on a road where, for three days, he will see nothing more than leaves blowing and trees laid bare. For many, that is what the
hunt is, and no one should belittle it. To some it is the finest time they have. The paralyzed man that Les Druet carried on his back for three days is a good case in point. No animal, I think, was taken, and yet Druet gave this gentleman the finest wilderness experience he had had in many years.

And here, too, at these stores there are so many rifles to choose from, so many different weapons that have come along since I was a boy. There are pump-actions and lever-actions and semi-automatics, bolt-actions, .270s, .308s, .306s, etc. All of this is fine, but I have used a .303 with 180-grain bullets since I was nineteen; I bought it for $23.

I have my Winchester lever-action, I have a shotgun, and I own an old 1913 .22-calibre that hasn’t been fired since its original owner died in the 1940s. It is the .303 I hunt with most of the time now. I have not fired the Winchester in some years. Last year, at these outfitters, I checked out the price of a reel for a rod I had. The salesman wanted to sell me a nice reel for $730. I told him I was hoping to get one for about $30.

What do we see when we go into these stores but an aching for a time that is no longer ours to hold. That has passed us by, or, to put it more clearly, has bypassed most of us. Most of the men who wander through these places, sometimes for hours on end, are men from outside the city. Although I wouldn’t be able to prove it, it is a feeling I have that many here, just as in my early days, are from small towns.

What the store owner or distributor is selling is the past—selling our past back to us, to some of us men who are lost and far from home. A fly tackle shop salesman is overcome when he hears I am from the Miramichi. And
I add to my singularity when I tell someone else that I have shot moose as large as the stuffed one near the rifle stand. (He doesn’t believe me, and winks at his lady friend, who doesn’t believe me either.)

So many of these things are in the past for me now that I am nostalgic as I look at commodities like the Coleman stoves and lanterns that I remember from times gone by—my father boiling water at nine o’clock for tea, or our first camp long ago at Mile 17 of Mullin Stream. The night of wet snow falling over Davy Lake. (This was named after me by my brothers because I haunted it all one year, going after a buck. I didn’t get it, but I managed to get a smaller buck just up the road on the second-last day of the season.)

Most of the equipment, continually updated, has come along since I shot my last deer. This store is here to seduce us, to tell us that the way of life we have dreamed about is still possible; the fake rocks and decoy ducks are presented to us as willing participants in our own imaginary outdoor adventure. Tents, hunting chairs, wilderness camping equipment, and satellite tracking equipment that will enable a man to drive from his suburban home to the wilderness of his choice and be directed at every instant along the way, so he will not have to deal with the wilderness itself.

I am not against any of this, but I am suggesting that many of these things will be bought and rarely if ever used, part of man’s unquenchable desire to portray himself to himself as other than he actually is.

Or other than the hunt. I remember freezing half to death for a few ducks in a miserable blind on a cold, bitter day far out on the bay. I am not complaining, I am simply suggesting that this is never a real selling point. Perhaps it
doesn’t have to be. Most of the men and women there that day probably knew this as well as I. Maybe better. For hunting is still a part of us. We come from the corners of the country to the centre, but it is the corners we still dream of.

Now we can no longer hunt geese or duck with lead pellets in the shells, they have to be steel, and people complain that these do not work as well, do not hit with the same killing power so more geese are left to suffer.

There was a day when my wife’s brother went hunting black duck on land owned by his grandfather, with a twelve-gauge shotgun that had once belonged to his father. That is a shotgun that is perhaps older than I am.

It was on the Bartibog where the tide came in, and it was a cloudy, intemperate day. He had arrived at dawn and, sitting on his haunches behind the little tree-coloured plywood blind he had made, he gave a few tentative calls. For a while he saw nothing except a crow or two across the cove, and heard the splash of a muskrat. Soon, though, he saw a few ducks. Then some more. It seemed that they weren’t coming to his decoys or his calls. The ducks were coming in high, and sometimes turning away and going in the other direction, so there was no shot. And then they would come in behind him, so he couldn’t get the old shotgun raised up, and they’d be off, far above him. It was as if they didn’t see his decoys, or worse, as if they saw him and were laughing at his plan.

He kept the gun raised, though, and finally he felled two ducks that came right out from his blind, with the
same spray. Down they fell into the cove, some distance away from him, their bodies bobbing on the surface.

Now he wondered how he would retrieve them. He had no dog, and he was not so sure if the water wouldn’t be over his head. Some use a spincast fishing rod, and he at times had, but he hadn’t brought it with him. He watched his ducks bobbing in the small, cold eddies in the middle of this cove and, hauling his chest-waders up, he took an eight-foot stick with him and entered the water. The cove is a fine place for ducks, but it also has a muddy bottom. He didn’t consider this carefully in his worry over retrieving the fowl. He was about twelve feet from them, and realized he couldn’t take another step. He was caught up to his thighs in mud. There he was. His eight-foot pole was useless to retrieve the birds, which now floated in toward the opposite shore. That is, the tide was coming in on this back cove, and he was alone, and caught in it. His decoys still bobbed about him, as if to add insult to injury. All this trouble for birds who were now being carried into the reeds opposite him. He realized he would look somewhat ridiculous drowning in this position for two ducks that had made it to dry land without him. The wind blew ripples about him, lapping against his waders, and the day was silent. In fact he struggled in this position for quite a while, and realized he must be master of his own fate, since he was the engineer of his own predicament.

There was only one thing to do. He had to chance kicking his legs up and falling backwards into the water, waders and all. He felt he was strong enough to get himself out, if he didn’t become completely immersed in the cove. If he did, and if his waders filled while his head remained under,
and his legs caught, he would be as good as dead. He knew this—but there was no rational reason to be cautious. Using the stick to loosen the muck about him, he made a hard backward flop, and his feet came out of the suck. He was able to kick himself away and find a toehold in the firmer soil near those reeds the ducks had floated into.

He was safe, soaking wet, and two ducks richer. It was an experience he would remember, and relate to others, for some years to come.

In the celebrated story “The Ledge,” by Lawrence Sargent Hall, a father takes his son and his nephew hunting on Christmas Day out to a tidal island. One of the boys forgets to anchor the boat, and they are all stranded a mile offshore, while the tide envelops them. It is a heartbreaking tale, wonderfully written. I have a friend who told a similar story about his own duck hunting a few years ago.

One October afternoon he told no one where he was going and, seeing black duck on Sheldrake Island, he took his canoe over to have a day hunt. He had his twelve-gauge with him and, leaving his canoe in one place, set out toward the north tip of the island, which looked out toward the cold and seemingly endless Northumberland Strait. It was a blowing day, yet a good day for shooting. The wind blew across the desolate grasses, the implacable sand made hard as granite by wind. Soon he had down three black duck and had wounded a fourth, which he went looking for. At this time he happened to see a small V of geese coming in low overhead, and he managed to shoot one. This left him with the three black duck, a goose, and one duck wounded. During all this time walking about in his chest-waders he
never gave a thought to his canoe, and that the tide might catch it with the wind rising the way it was.

He spent some time searching for the wounded duck until he found it, in some grasses, and calling it a day decided to go home. He walked back toward the centre of the island, an island still covered in spruce, with cold yellow sand driven up along the shore and deep withered grasses, an island that sits just at the mouth of the Miramichi Bay about a quarter mile from the mouth of the Bartibog River.

It was getting past twilight, and he was alone, and, as sometimes happens, the wind from the east had picked up and made it almost unbearably cold. When he got back to where he had left his canoe it was no longer there. He kept moving along, thinking that he had left it some other place. But he finally realized that the tide must have ripped it away, and it was now loose. He began to run along the shore looking for it. Though certainly not in the predicament the poor people in “The Ledge” were, he was still in an awful bind. No one knew where he was, and with each passing moment he could envision himself stranded. In fact, his wife thought he had gone partridge hunting. Any search for him would have started upriver—not out toward the bay.

Night, and no one at all on the opposite shore. He might fire shots all night and no one would hear him. In fact, my farm is only a mile or so up a laneway from this lonely island, but at that time there might have been no one walking that shore for days.

Still, as luck would have it, he saw his canoe bobbing away from the land, with each outgoing wave, at the very tip of the island. He set his sights on it, figuratively speaking,
and began to wade out into the swells, feeling the cold wind upon him. Each moment the canoe got farther, and the grey, seaweed-filled water got deeper. It was up to his knees, and then thighs, and then waist. He kept going, feeling the water lap higher up upon him, with his breath getting shorter because of the pressure of the water against his lungs.

The only thing that saved him: he was on the inside of the island, where the water is not as deep as on the far side. He had to hurry, knowing that he did not have an unlimited amount of time, and he managed, and he did just manage to get a fingertip on his canoe, when he was almost up to his chest in water. He proceeded to get a hand on the stern, and hold it, and finally kick it back to shore, where he picked up his rifle and his birds and made his way back to the mainland, shore, and home.

Sometimes deer will swim the river and out to that island. You might see deer signs there. Sheldrake Island is a place where, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they left sick and infested passengers from ships. Though it has a well and stakes of an old settlement, it is still wooded. (Since I wrote this a cottage has been built, and a family now summers there.)