Facing the Hunter (3 page)

I do not know what happened to that buck I saw forty-five years ago, but I can estimate fairly that it lasted only a year or two longer at the most, which would give it four years in the world. And four years in the world its way (as so many men and women know) is better than ten in the world where you play toady or trained seal.

At any rate, that deer, that buck I saw when I was sixteen, went off to an uncertain future, and so did I. It might have ended that year, or the next—if not, certainly no later than the next after. He might have been shot, or died in winter—though deer are as tough an animal as there is, able to withstand temperatures dropping to minus-forty, and gales and blizzards sweeping in off the Northumberland Strait. But some way or another it would have met its end, somewhere in those deep woods, when I was still a boy, when all those paths led somewhere mysterious and earthen. The last thing it might have seen was a grader along the road, or a backhoe that moved into that section in 1967. Its eyes might have witnessed the change of its very world, without understanding why.

By the time I was fifteen I had stayed in camps in January and slept in the open woods in winter with my friends. I knew how to fire a rifle and was a fair shot—actually, a fairly good shot. These were the credentials of most of my friends, and probably tons of kids across our country. At that time I hunted partridge, and unfortunately
(I regret this very much) one or two porcupines. And over time I became a better hunter than I was a fisherman.

I thought of this on our way home this fall. Snow came over the Plaster Rock Highway, and all the way along that secluded road I was looking into the hardwood ridges and back bogs for deer and moose. Making a bet with my younger son, Anton, I told him I could stop the car and find a fresh deer track within two hundred yards. It was an easy bet. The tracks had to be fresh because the snow had just fallen.

As boys (and many girls) most of us fished in the summer—those short, hot months of growth, when blueberries thickened in the hot, still blueness of afternoon. And after, when the ground cooled, and the wind became thinner and the days short, with clear blue autumn skies, we, or those we knew, took up our rifles and went hunting. School, cramped as we were in the baby boom generation, was an agony.

The woods told us everything we needed to know about what was important. There isn’t a boy I grew up with who wouldn’t have given up a high mark in math for a buck deer. (Well, maybe one or two.)

Now as a man of sixty I go into the woods, along the northwest Miramichi in late summer, and smell musk and snow in the drafts through the dark trees, even after the full moon in late July. I will think of hunting. If I am fishing up on the Black Rapids, on the main Souwest, or far off Disappointment Pool on the south branch of the Sovogle, it is in me now as it was always. I cannot imagine a time when it wouldn’t or couldn’t be—even if I hunt less and less every year.

I have come to Toronto to live, and live unsettled among the urban souls, in a literary world I have never been comfortable in and more often than not have been excluded from. Travelling outside of Toronto, on autumn nights I still search fields that have remained untamed—see hawks in the sky, hold on to the smell of winter as I hug the highway. I can still spot an animal fairly quickly, for I have grown up doing so. In among the ravines I catch a shadow and see a scrawny coyote move across the road, in the middle of the city, whose shouts and sounds, as Lowry said about cities, remind one of the “unbandaging of great giants in agony.” I look at the ravines along the Don Valley and Don River, floating diluted with stink and foulness, and know that they were once as pristine as my Miramichi as a boy. In autumn in the city after the leaves have fallen, we are reminded, by the false fronts and dark alleys and neon signs expostulating our greed, that anywhere man goes he makes into self-mockery. The woods, too, if he stays there long enough.

I see my boys sleeping and realize they have become city-dwellers. Once, coming back to New Brunswick on October 17, we went through the Plaster Rock at midnight. It is a road eighty miles long through the centre of our province. The trees hug the highway and make driving nerve-wracking. One-third of the way along, a young bull moose, about three years old, was standing broadside. Of course it would not get off the road, even though I turned off my lights and shut off the car, waiting in the complete silence and darkness. Four times I shut my lights off and waited only to turn them on again, and see the moose, with its shiny black coat and large hump, looking at me. Finally it turned and began to walk up the highway as I crept up
behind it, with my lights out. Reaching its back quarter I suddenly turned the lights on and tramped on the gas. It was the only way I knew to get around it. Turning the lights on startled it so much that it reared up like a horse on its hind legs as we went by. My children were ecstatic. They had seen the animal up close. In Toronto they see them made of fibreglass, at different places in town.

The Maritimes, New Brunswick in particular, are like nowhere else. Isolated we might have been, in snow and camaraderie I have rarely seen elsewhere. No dense cities or long prairie walks, we were creatures of the woods and furious streams, of houses cut close to country lanes, within the smell and protection of the sea.

Once, driving a young Saskatchewan man downriver, he became literally terrified because the road was so winding and the trees were so close.

Most people I knew fished in the summer, hunted in the fall. For anyone I knew, this was as natural a way of life as could be imagined. When I come back here in the fall, I realize how much tradition has a hold over us. There is still in my blood that desire to go on a moose hunt, or get my deer rifle out. I make phone calls, as I did when I was home last week, to ask who has lucked in this year. My brother-in-law tells me there is a large buck behind his wood cut, and along my own land I have seen three doe. While down on the shore, my wife’s cousin’s husband has seen an eastern panther once again, walking along his road on a cold autumn day. So black it was, he believed at first it was the bear he had seen in spring, but then he realized it was no bear.

It is even better that no official voice will say they still exist.

I went out to the car that day I was sixteen and hunting partridge, and the wind had picked up, and the ground had turned cold, the smell of cooling mud in autumn twilight. I would take the breasts of the birds I had shot home to my mother, who loved partridge, having grown up in the wilds of Matapédia as a child. In fact, her world was much rougher than the world I knew. Beside her house, on the hill, was a summer home of the actor Walter Pidgeon, who was originally from Saint John, and who built his place in the wilds of Canada. My brothers and I, as children, used to play there, running around his veranda and leaning against his log cabin walls, looking in his windows to see a caribou head mounted over the fireplace. Whether Mr. Pidgeon took this caribou or not, I do not know. Called back one day by my mother from her veranda, my brother and I saw our first deer, standing in the gloom of afternoon, by the family brook.

That day I got back to the car, the evening sun had fallen down behind the hemlock and spruce, and I realized that I was in serious woods—not the little jack pine and stumped cuts of local loggers. I’d needed a car to come this far up the road, and for the first time I realized what it was like to be alone. Besides, the back tire was flat.

So this was my first test as a hunter. And it had nothing to do with hunting. Or, in a way, I suppose it had everything to do with it.

Our machines have made hunting less than it once was, and perhaps less than it was intended to be, but still, if done right, there is something noble in its design.

That my great-uncle when he was sixteen shot a moose
where the high school now is in our hometown meant he was able to walk to his game. He grew up close enough to the industry and husbandry of animals that he could tell a pig from a goat. With our modern advancements children know (or we assume they do) the different kinds of dinosaurs, and winged reptiles of ancient millennia, but have nothing to measure the farm that still must sustain them.

I suppose nothing tells us this more than a city.

There are many who have never seen woods telling us we have no right to go into one, while they walk over city sidewalks, each block of which has destroyed ten thousand animals. That is perhaps the highest compliment vice pays to virtue.

It was sometime in the 1920s when my Uncle Richard, being very young, was given a task one late September. His father, Hudson, my grandfather, was away guiding richer men to moose far to the north, on the Gaspé, against the background of a river where they had scouted earlier in the year. They had gone in with backpacks and mule, past the place where my grandfather hauled lumber for one of the lumber barons there, and it was deep woods beyond, heavy hemlock and spruce, and frothy bunting streams that roared down from the mountains into the green waters of the Matapédia, hills and wilds that no one had ever been to, streams that made endless rainbows as they cascaded down, rainbows for the world that no human saw. Even now the Matapédia and Miramichi are so obscure that most people could not point to them on a map—though great men come to fish and hunt in both. In fact, there is one encyclopedia I own that has three pages on Al Capone, and three paragraphs on Canada.

Back then, less than a hundred years ago, there were places where, at any given moment as you walked, yours might have been the first human foot to have touched. It is possible that it is still that way now in some spots along our great rivers of the east. In fact I am sure it must be, that I myself stepped, in the golden days of my youth, where no one else ever had.

If my uncle didn’t know that, he knew much else. Once I asked one of his brothers—a man whose hands were three times the size of mine, and who had been perpetually whipped in school because he was left-handed—how long was the canoe he had lying up against the barn. Never having learned feet or inches, words or numbers, he thought a second and then, spitting his tobacco, said, “Well, boy—she’s long enough, I guess.”

That, my son, is genius.

His brother had it too. He had to have. With children at home and hardship in living where they did, he took on a man’s job along the Matapédia from the time he was ten. He guided fishermen up from New York or Rhode Island in the spring and summer and went to work for the lumber company when he was twelve.

Now he was going through the woods to find his father, with little idea of how to get exactly where he must, yet prodded forward by his mother’s words:

“Bring your father here, now.”

If at all possible he could do no less. The woods were dense, the rapids strong, the nights turning cool, and he was not more than a boy. The woods very often are more like a living, breathing obstacle course, where windfalls and intractable ground hamper your progress and make
necessary so many detours that it is easy to confound your way.

He had never been that far into the real woods—the great woods, as Faulkner reminds us in “The Bear,” the deep woods that weave and knit against the hills of our rivers and swallow us whole. That is, at the time, ten yards from a beaten path and he would have remained unseen.

But he walked in the general direction, and forded small, swift streams alive with coloured rocks, and the first fallen leaves, in his heavy pants and corked boots. At noon hour he found himself in an apple orchard and shook the tree, and filled his pockets, and moved quickly off, for the apples were a treat for bear as well, and he knew bear were nearby (now, over his eighty years in the woods he must have met every bear in the neighbourhood at least twice). There were white-tailed deer he saw, just coming into the area and replacing the caribou, and after a time, about supper, he smelled some smoke, and made his way through a cedar swamp, where he noticed a bull moose in a little grove.

His father was in camp, as were the man and boy he was guiding. The “sports” had taken the train up from New York—my uncle had never been on a train. And to him they were people as exotic as from another world. He would not speak to them to interrupt his father or their supper. This was something much more subtle and complicated than “knowing your place.” From the time my uncle was a boy, he knew three times as much about the natural world as any man he guided, but he would be loath to say it, knowing they themselves knew things about the world he himself didn’t, and to have them here was to their, and not his, disadvantage. He would have expected the same
consideration in their territory, one commensurate with the politeness he showed. I often wonder if he ever got it.

By the time he was fifteen he was relied upon by men who might in their world make millions of dollars but knew nothing outside their own offices or their function as businessmen. This is a fact absolute. And he was kindly toward those men. By the time he was twenty he spoke English, French, and Cree, and knew much about the history of all, and took men into the woods who knew nothing of their own history even as their policies tried to rewrite it. But I have more often than not felt sympathy for those men, who rode on trains, or flew in planes, to meet their destiny in the dark woods of New Brunswick.