Facing the Hunter (16 page)

“No, that’s not the one,” he said, putting the rifle down, and he smiled to himself. All that way, all those miles of woods, he had been able to do what one man in five hundred might—he had been able, like men of the old days, to track a deer to ground.

It is important to know that this is a feat, tracking deer down, that very few hunters ever get to accomplish. A feat that those in the union halls of Ontario who made sport of him and his “Newfie” accent might never match. For many hunters today, going into the woods alone is something they have no stomach for. They have been given the “things” that render them dependent on the world, and even hunting doesn’t take them away from this dependence. They ride in comfortable truck cabs and look out over chop-downs from which wood and trees have been pulled to be sent to other nations. There might be deer there, hides almost orange in the sun, and they can take the shot. But to track a deer for miles, or to refuse to leave the hunt because an animal is injured, is the domain of the best hunter.

Tracking deer requires a kind of stamina and intelligence that many hunters don’t possess, or don’t have time to learn. If you leave an office on Friday afternoon to drive to your camp, and stay up Saturday, and hunt in and about the camp roads—this is fine, and it is the way that many of us hunt. (I hunt this way now.) But it is not conducive to being a good hunter.

A good hunter goes where the deer tracks take him or her. You have to be as silent and careful as possible, and
your sense of direction has to be impeccable, especially along the hardwood ridges up along the Saint John River, because in a matter of moments you might find yourself in deep woods. Just like the gentleman David Savage was hunting with up on the Restigouche, not everyone has this ability. The deer I have shot when tracking have been few, and I have been lucky—once because I lost the tracks and had turned to go when the buck came up behind me. I don’t call that a success—just luck. My hunt is called still hunting—that is, I cross into deer territory, find where the buck has scraped, and wait. Wait, and wait.

Wayne knew how to track them, and didn’t shoot.

He shot his last deer some years ago in the field behind his home. He never felt right about taking that deer, for the deer had been there all summer.

I have seen him intentionally lose fish, realizing that he has had many in his day. (I have seen David Savage do this as well.)

Wayne has all of this as a lament now. He is a plain-spoken, good-hearted man who has lived his life as close to the woods as anybody I know. But the woods have gone, or at least are changed forever. The camp where he once guided fishermen has been taken over by hunters from Alabama. And though I have liked most of the people from Alabama I have met, there is something disconcerting about this.

The world no longer belongs to us. In so many ways, we are now in the same position the First Nations peoples found themselves in. Thinking this, and multiplying it a thousand times, we might begin to realize the tragedy that occurred here four hundred years ago.

There were no snowmobiles or four-wheelers, or many four-wheel drive trucks when Wayne was a boy. The trails weren’t as broad or as well marked as they are today. This is what allowed him to learn how to hunt on foot and on his own.

One day, in deep wood, with snow on the boughs of spruce, far up along the main Souwest Miramichi River, Jason Curtis shot a deer that had come over a hill into view. It was a long shot in dense wood, but he knew he had wounded it, and he began to track, for he would never leave a wounded animal. He tracked it for three hours, down through swampy and marshy ground. He was on its trail but he couldn’t seem to catch it. Then the buck seemed to make a conscious decision to go up against the current when he came to a brook. And Jason had to trust his instinct that this was where the deer had travelled, even though all his experience told him the deer would travel down current. So he turned up along the slippery brook in the cold, splendid autumn day. He kept looking at the leaves floating down in the current. By this he surmised how fast the deer was moving. Then, just when he thought he’d been mistaken and was about to turn back, he saw something on one of those leaves that floated past him. It was a spot of blood. He kept moving. Soon he saw more, on some stone. And finally he was able to find the eight-point buck on the shore, far upriver.

He had a long haul with an animal well over two hundred pounds, but he dressed it out, and made it back to camp by nightfall.

Years ago, David Savage began to hunt along the stretches of the Bartibog River, in Northumberland County, New Brunswick. He was an average kid of that time. He was a fine hockey player and a good baseball player. He was a fair student. But more than anything else, like so many boys here, he was an avid fisherman and hunter. He would listen to the tales told by his father, who was a fisheries officer, and uncles around the wood stove on cold winter nights, tales about the woods, and its trails, its uncompromising grace, and the animals hunted. The difference between a buck track and a doe track, or the difference between a cow call and a bull, or a bull track and a cow, if it was a young bull. How to react when a bull charges, how to call one almost to you. The way to track deer—how a deer sometimes tries to move behind you, in order to watch you. How to let a wounded animal, especially a moose or bear, go and lie down before you begin to track it.

The main thing these stories gave him was a desire to hunt as well. And by the time he was sixteen he was hunting on his own. He would leave school each autumn afternoon and, taking his 30-30, go into the woods. Waiting on a trail filled with the scent of autumn, of musk and bark and fallen leaves, he would listen for deer that moved out toward the back fields at twilight. His was not an idyllic childhood, far from it—but it was an exceptionally fortunate one in certain respects. Along those back autumn fields downriver was a good place to learn to hunt. There, in the late gloom of one long-ago afternoon, he shot his first deer, a spike horn, about 130 pounds, as it moved along the pine and spruce in back of a field. He hunted birds, as well, those grey-feathered partridge with their glossy necks and beautiful heads. He hunted them with a shotgun or .22 rifle, and became a good shot, and had an excellent eye for spotting game. In fact, most of the men I write about in these pages have an uncanny ability to spot game, either deer or moose or bird, where 80 percent of humans might pass them by, not noticing. He went on duck hunts, and learned how to call ducks and geese that flew in the large sky over Bartibog Island.

The second year he went deer hunting he shot an eight-point buck, and after that, time after time he spent the deer season away from most people, by himself in the woods, either on the Miramichi or along the Restigouche, with an old army sack filled with a lunch, an extra bullet or two, and a skinning knife. In fact, the first time I heard of David, my wife, who is his cousin, described him as a fisherman and a hunter. He was eighteen at the time. And he has gained a great deal of wisdom since then.

Sometimes he hunted deer with buckshot, and he carried number 6 birdshot that he could change to very quickly when he needed it.

Soon even the back trails were too crowded for him, and he meandered his way deeper into the woods, to hunt alone. He realized that when fly fishing the hard-running small rivers on the Miramichi, or the vast pools of the Restigouche, one would often meet people, and hunting was the one activity for which there was still enough comfortable woods that he could be entirely by himself. Besides, he could prove to himself that he knew the woods as well as most, and prove that to others by being there. So complete was his comfort that he would tell those he was with never to worry about him if he was not back at dark, for he would find his way, sooner or later—and his hunt was such that he often waited in a spot until almost the last light, before he took the clip out of his rifle and headed back, making his way out to his car on those long autumn nights, walking miles in complete darkness. I can attest to this from the days when I hunted with him.

“Just because hunters haven’t seen deer does not mean there aren’t deer,” he told me. “Most of the men hunting pick a road near woods, and wait—or a side logging road is the farthest into the woods they go. That is fine—for them—and there will be deer crossing those roads to and from their scrapes. The best thing, however, is to go beyond or behind those places, mooch about in the real wild, in where the deer live.”

One day, leaving the small 2.2 Mile Road that years ago ran above the south branch of the Sovogle (with all the new chop-downs and work this road might very well be a
memory now), and leaving hunters who had posted themselves on that road to catch deer crossing in the very early morning, David walked down toward the water just after daylight—and a half mile below that road, where the hunters waited, he heard a deer approaching. It was just light in the woods. The deer had crossed the river at 2.2 Mile Pool far below and was making its way up toward its rut marks on the high ground at daylight. It would travel in this pattern, coming back to all its rut marks over a three-day period. Now David heard it on the lower ground as it made its way toward him. He took the safety off and waited. Soon the buck came up over the embankment, almost in front of him, and he felled it with one shot—a 280-pound buck that the men above him were still waiting for. It took him well over an hour to dress and drag it back up the long-overgrown hill toward where those men, confident they were hunting a wilderness road, waited. The men were amazed to see the large buck he had taken.

And that was not the largest buck he ever shot. The largest buck weighed over 305 pounds, which is a monster buck. He tells the story, which I am sure is true, of being offered any amount of money to give up the tines of this great buck, by an American hunter in a truck stop one autumn day. He of course refused, but he never hunted for the tines. He never was a trophy hunter. Still, he took an eighteen-point non-typical buck (with a rack that wasn’t completely symmetrical) one year when I was living in Saint John, and drove into the yard with it. It was the only year I shot a doe, if I remember correctly, just before doe season ended. (I never felt good about it, and I mention it because I never felt good about it.)

I have never seen a larger rack on a deer, although I am sure they exist. But this was a mythical deer. The year before that, he had shot a twelve-point buck on a dead run across a field in South Napan by leading it just a little, and knowing exactly when to fire. You don’t practise a shot like that, you either have it in your arsenal or you don’t. But David is an excellent shot with any kind of rifle, and, like Wayne Curtis, is an expert fisherman and guide, without being written up in any guidebook.

One of the things growing up along the river gave David was a love of canoes, and he is an expert in a canoe. The canoe he has used most often on the Miramichi and its tributaries is one called a Norwester, made by Ralph Mullin. It is a sturdy and wonderfully responsive canoe that he has used for well over twenty years now. I once poled down Green Brook with it, and discovered how easily it handled.

Often canoeing the Bartibog River, down from above the Bathurst highway in the summer, he would see along the banks places were deer came down, and birch stands where partridge fanned themselves in the sun. Content with his fishing, he would make a note of this, and one clear, crisp fall Saturday, he took his rod to fish some late salmon and decided, since it was deer season, to bring his shotgun. (The old-timers did this often in the early part of the last century, and “sports” would come up from the States for just such an event.)

He put in about a mile above the mouth of Green Brook, a fertile trout brook that runs into the Bartibog about three quarters of a mile or so above the Bathurst highway. That day, poling down the pastoral river with its small rushing rapids here and there, its water brownish green, stopping
now and again to fish, he was able to shoot a few partridge that he saw fanning themselves along those side banks. Then, just at dusk, when the river sounded like all the musical instruments in the world, and the day was fast ebbing away, with the tall spruce shading the river and the leaves of maple and birch trees tinged gold and red, he saw a large buck come down to the water and start to cross to the far side. He was able to down it from seventy-five yards, as the canoe glided silently along. That night he poled down the Bartibog with a buck deer and salmon in the canoe. This must have made his father, a hard-fighting veteran of the Second World War, a fisheries officer, and a fine woodsman, very proud.

He began to do this each season at least once. The canoe was silent on the water, and being able to look from the river into the woods gave him an advantage that he felt walking or standing did not. The days, too, were a treasure, just before the river made ice, and the sun still warmed the earth by noon. He found it immensely pleasurable, whether he lucked in or not. It was, in fact, something of a fabled hunt, the autumn water filled with fish and clear and cold, the canoe gliding down with the slightest pressure from his pole.

One time he brought a friend to sit in the bow, rifle across his belly, who seeing a deer crossing the river far below them, fired at it three times, missing it each time. Finally David put his pole down, letting the canoe drift with the current. He grabbed the rifle from the fellow and fired just as the deer was coming out of the water. The deer dropped with one shot. It was a 190-pound buck. Other times he would pole for a while and, seeing some
deer sign, he would leave the canoe and walk up into the small groves beyond the water and hunt the deer from that position, deep back in the Bartibog, a place very few hunters ever see. He took a large buck one day, leaving his canoe for a romp through a ridge of hardwood, and often as not he was successful.

He was and has been content with his hunting for many years now. But cynicism has also crept into his world. He is not fond of how many bucks are taken now, since the doe season is closed. He is also aware of how many does have been shot by accident, by hunters too quick to fire before they make sure, and left in the woods. For no one wants to bring out a doe without a doe licence. This is a terrible and hidden tragedy of hunting. While taking only males puts pressure on the buck, on the genetic blueprint of the herd, people must be aware that holding big buck contests in every nook and cranny of the province also leaves small bucks shot and abandoned in the woods as well. To say this might sound cynical, but hunting can be a cynical business. I myself have known men who were sure, raising the rifle to look through the scope, that they saw horns, and fired, only to walk up to a small doe, mortally wounded. Panic sets in. They know that they could be charged and lose their rifles and their vehicles, and so they abandon the doe to the coyotes. This does not help anyone, least of all the animals. But the big buck contest is fraught with the same kind of sentiment, so some
(some)
might leave a four-pointer in the woods because they are sure they will get a twelve-point later on in the season, so that they might enter a contest to win a four-wheeler. All of this is just greed and stupidity.