Facing the Hunter (19 page)

The idea of having an animal suffer is appalling to almost every hunter I know, and certainly every hunter I have come to respect. My youngest brother was with Giles Kenny’s father, Mike, near his camp one cold autumn day. My brother walked right by something in the ground that Mike himself noticed. It was a tin barrel cut into wedges and buried in the ground to be used as a snare for moose. It would have been as much of a torture for the moose as some implements of the Spanish Inquisition were for hapless victims in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. My brother told me that he never saw a man so angry as when Mr. Kenny noticed this. He hauled it from the ground and kicked it to pieces.

When I was down south, I infrequently shot a coyote along the Fundy coast. I did not feel particularly terrible about this. I know they have a right to live—but when doing it, I thought of deer in the deer yards in winter, and their plight against the coyote.

At certain times throughout the winter, Peter and Les will bait coyotes near their camp on the Norwest. (Others will do this as well.) Even so, they are hard animals to corral and harder to shoot. Coyote are tenacious and smart.

Sometimes only the bait (horseflesh, usually) can be seen moving. They approach the bait almost on their bellies and from angles that often prevent a clear view. (One crawled on his belly behind me one November day along the Fundy coast some years back. At first I thought nothing much of it, but lately I have been of the opinion that he was thinking of jumping my back. And if I had not turned he might have.)

Coyotes can be found everywhere here now. And in cities, too.

Once I was walking on Hillsdale Avenue in the heart of residential Toronto and saw a scraggly dog approaching me. When afforded a better look, I realized it was a coyote. A few weeks later, playing golf with my son on the eighth tee at the Flemingdon Park Golf Club, in residential Toronto, a coyote walked (not ran) in front of us, across the seventh green and down into the ravine below. She was nursing, and her pups must have been somewhere down there.

Often on those bleak days along the Fundy coast, with the fog coming in off the bay, I would stand in an alder swale and watch a deer trail covered in an inch or two of snow, broken windfalls, and pulped leaves. Now and again a coyote would cross so low to the ground, the very colour of those leaves, that I would have to determine whether or not I actually saw something.

Something else happened when I hunted along the Fundy coast, in the southern part of our province, years ago. Deer were plentiful there, and the narrow trails to and from the secluded rocky beaches, surrounded by jagged cliffs, afforded the deer access to the salty shoreline, where
they moved in the later part of the day. They bedded down at night in the high ground above the water, which had excellent cover for them, of alder swale and hardwood. Many days I would arrive just after sun-up, and take a position in the swales among the various pathways that led out to the beach. I would stay there during the day, hardly moving until dark. There the deer would pass unaware of my presence, small doe and fawn mostly.

So my brother and I saw many deer there, and each of us took a buck on the same day, ten years ago now—perhaps the last time I seriously hunted. My brother took his four-point buck with a bow, which is what he hunts with now. It was a killing shot at forty yards, and the buck was dead within five minutes of being hit.

When we were there we saw old graveyards—one from the 1850s and another from the 1880s. The people buried there were part of a failed community, a place that didn’t make it—a people whose descendants moved on, and they were left to themselves in graves that were overgrown and forgotten under those turbulent Fundy skies. They were people from the 1850s, part of the Irish immigration to our land, part of my ancestry as much as any other.

Last year, when my brother was in the village registry office talking about land he once owned there, a person told him very excitedly that they had finally discovered the graves of those ancestors—that they had been hunting for them and hadn’t known where they were exactly. It was a strange thing for us to learn—that just by accident we could have helped them discover what they were searching for much sooner.

What Disney did—as many writers, naturalists, and biologists tell us—was humanize animals, make their environment a utopia, and criminalize anyone who would enter what essentially is portrayed as Eden.

In Disney’s Eden, the lions do lie down with the lambs. Deer play with wolves, and the trees and valleys are places of eternal bliss. Only when man enters is this bliss sadly disrupted. The idea that this bliss never was—that animals prey upon animals, that white-tailed deer take over moose habitat, and that all vie for life in a world of danger and death—is not conducive to the kind of propaganda that satisfies urban sentiment, and this is one of the falsehoods that anyone who lives near the woods understands.

That is not to say that those who recognize this error do not believe that the world of the woods is beautiful and aesthetic—it is, however, to say that things must be placed in perspective. Seeing
Bambi
as a child, and coming home to a father and uncles who hunted, was a clear disconnect
with what the world wanted from me. For these movies and television plays want as much from their audience as they are ever prepared to give. What they demand is a kind of enlightenment about a world they have intentionally made false in order to achieve the result.

Besides, the woods are used in a multitude of ways by urban environments that are far more destructive to their inhabitants than hunting. This fact, if acknowledged at all, is simply written off as the price of urban living. But I will guarantee that many urbanites don’t think of it at all as their problem. They believe it is a rural problem, and consider blaming those closest to the woods, charging them with implementing solutions. But in spite of this, clear-cutting is not done primarily for rurals, papermaking is not done primarily for rurals, lake and river pollution is rarely seen in rural Canada—and deer are more plentiful now than they were a century ago in hundreds of places in North America.

When I was Writer in Residence at the university in Fredericton some years ago, I was the only one in the department who went hunting. It seemed a long-established point of view that those who were educated, men and women, did not do this, and found it beneath them.

This was so prevalent a “feeling” that one of the professors, who was born thirty miles from my river, used to talk about how nervous he was to go there, because “our car might slam into a moose.” He distanced himself from a place in his own province in order to coddle men who had never been there. This demeaning sleight of hand was considered, of course, progressive.

My Uncle Harry hunted for many years with just a twelve-gauge shotgun. I think it is a part of our blood, for
this, somewhat like bow hunting, means a close hunt. One day, he told me, he stood on an old lumbering bridge that had not been used in years. It crossed a small rock-strewn stream somewhere on a side lumbering road up in the Norwest region of the Miramichi. His friends moved on, went to different parts of the area, but he decided to stay on the bridge. And he said:

“They moved off, and I was alone. It was a small, halfrotten bridge secluded in trees, and the woods had grown up about it again. I ended up standing there for hours watching the ripple in the water forty yards downstream, thinking to myself a deer had to come out sooner or later. It was just a feeling about how the little maples hung over the water and the space between them. It was just an instinct, a feeling I had. It was a pretty damn warm day, but I was confident, and never left my position. I know others would have given it just a look and kept going but I was sure, this is where deer were crossing. At about 4:35 in the afternoon, I saw something near the small maples that hadn’t been there before. It looked like a brown part of a tree. I watched it intently for a minute or two, and suddenly it disappeared. I waited, and it appeared again, and stepped out exactly where I thought it might. I raised my shotgun and took it with one shot—a six-point buck.”

That certain instinct, whatever it is and wherever it comes from, serves a good many hunters well. I know that Mike Kenny told me this the one day I hunted with him. He said to me, too, that sometimes you just “know” the deer is going to be there. I think when you hunt at close quarters this feeling can come over a hunter and benefit him greatly.

But the feeling comes at other times as well, when we are not at such close proximity. Peter McGrath and I were hunting one day up at Sheephouse, on the Norwest Miramichi, and had come back to the truck to have a cup of tea in the afternoon. It was strange, but at the exact same moment both of us looked down along the old lumber road and saw a deer crossing. Both of us saw it at the same moment, and both of us somehow knew we would. It was, however, too far away to get a good shot, and neither of us took a shot at it.

But at close quarters the feeling is more intense. One day down on the coast of New Brunswick, in among some swale, I stood, I swear, for five hours solid—remembering not only the story my uncle had told me, about the deer and the maple, but reminding myself that deer had to follow a certain ritual, and this would bring them out in my direction. Well, I was sure there were deer around me that day—I knew there were, but I didn’t see any. I went home, slept, and got up early the next morning. As soon as I stepped into the woods, I swear I could smell deer. However, most people would tell me that what I smelled was simply the musk of rotting leaves and dying grasses at the end of the year, and the stale waters of fallen snows. Still, just as I had when I was a boy hunting partridge, I smelled deer, and I found a comfortable spot, and leaned back in some grass and waited. I waited for one hour, two, three hours, four. I never moved except for breathing. Suddenly it simply came over me. There was a deer coming toward me. I couldn’t see him, but I sensed there had to be. I stood with my rifle at my shoulder, and was staring at a buck no more than twenty-five yards away.

I told this story about, and some people believed and agreed with me, and others said it was just luck, and I was not a good hunter, just a lucky one. Well, it was luck, but I knew I would have luck that day. A strange occurrence.

There is also the story that David Savage told me about being in close quarters when he shot the huge non-typical eighteen-point buck down in the Saint George area of the province. It was pouring rain, and early on they had seen some doe. But he and his friend were in among some alders and dead grasses and old-growth trees, and they could see very little. His scope, too, was continually fogging. That is the problem with scopes, especially in poor weather, and he was being rained on for over three hours. He said he finally told Jim Martin, his friend, that he was going back to the camp to get dry. He stood, and saw the eighteen-point non-typical, staring back at him about fifteen yards away. So he, who is one of the finest hunters I know, did not sense it. But I am sure in his life that he has sensed much else while hunting.

It brings me back to the rather ludicrous point that hunters sometimes “know” beforehand that they are
going to see game. In fact, I’m willing to say that this sixth sense, on a few occasions, predicts the future. Oh, I know I will be heckled by those who are stingily correct about everything and right about nothing. But there is this fleeting nanosecond moment that has come upon me, and others, when we know we will see a deer an instant before we do. What or who tells us this? What or who directs us to look up at that moment? I do not know. But it has happened. Once, in a lonely field far off the main highway going to Heath Steele Mines, I suddenly turned and knew I wasgoing to see a deer if I started to walk back. That was long ago—one of my first hunts—and I did see a deer but never got a shot.

It happened to my brother-in-law the first time he saw a deer in at the Mullin Stream camp. He told me, and I believe him, that he knew he was going to see it a second before it came out on the road. It was like predicting the future. But seeing it caused him to be too excited to take the shot—a case of “buck fever” that he has long since overcome.

I watched a program once in which people were involved in an experiment predicting the future. Now this was a very technical experiment. What they were asked to do was stare into an optometrist’s viewfinder in order to watch flashing lights that were directed first toward one eye, then the other, in a random pattern, so one never knew at which eye the flash would be directed. Yet at a certain point the subject was able to close the eye that was being targeted before the flash occurred, in essence predicting the future. A very humble predicting of the future, to be sure—but still, an example of the mind’s unknown abilities. Did our ancestors forty thousand years ago have this ability? Quite possibly, and maybe even to a greater extent.

I think it was a hunt about twenty years ago. I was still in Fredericton, and had just finished a novel, called
Nights Below Station Street
. What I remember about this book is that I wrote a section about hunting in it, as I did in its sequels,
Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace
and
For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down
.

In the days when these three books were written I was at my most dedicated as a hunter. I knew if I put my time in I would get deer. I was comfortable hunting alone, and I knew the woods well enough. I hunted with others as well. I suppose it was the same as some people getting together for a curling bonspiel once a year or so. I went hunting—a few days with Peter McGrath, a few days with David Savage, and a few days with my brother. With Peter I would hunt along the Norwest Miramichi, with David I would hunt the Sovogle area of the Miramichi, and with my brother I would hunt the southern part of the province along the Fundy coast. These were good times hunting—and usually on one of these hunts I would luck in, or one of my hunting friends would. To tell the truth, I was just as happy if they, not I, lucked in.