Facing the Hunter (5 page)

His stance was the strange by-product of laws that are both insincere and useless. The government either does not feel this or know it, or is unconcerned about it. They do not know, or care to know, much about rural life, and they listen to urban concerns about kinds of guns the rural people themselves rarely own. That is not to say that deer rifles have not been used in crime. It is not to say that hunters are not at times willing to use rifles to commit crimes. But I am making a case that most hunters never use a rifle in this way.

The point is not that we shouldn’t have laws to regulate guns, the point is that these laws will not regulate in the way the law intends.

Relating this does not make me a champion of the unlawful death of animals. I have always disliked men who have made animals suffer for their peculiar sense of enjoyment, or in rebellion against an unwise law.

I have seen grown men kill animals for sport, chuckling at their own actions like misbehaving children. It is a different breed of human who allows himself to do this. But let me say this: no ban on hunting would stop the cruel misuse of power. And a ban on hunting in a “fair chase” sport would do nothing but stop those men and women who refuse as much as most to be pitiless, while allowing the pitiless to roam in self-proclaimed rebellion against unenforceable laws.

I was still very young when I shot my first deer. However, not as young as some.

The year before this hunt I had seen a deer far away in a back field as I was leaving the woods on a raw, cold evening, thinking only about warmth and supper. I was cold and my hands were frozen, in pain. The deer I saw, just a sudden dark spot at the edge of the wood, jumped and flashed its tail and was gone. I was no threat to it. But I patiently waited for the next year.

It was early November—in an age before cellphones, or faxes, when electric typewriters seemed a luxury. I was in the rough-boarded camp attempting one of my first stories, one that I would take and read later on to men, professors, who had come from the States and I suppose back then saw both me and my stories as far more exotic than they do now. I was left in camp by a friend who told me he would be back in a day. (He would berate me most of my life for my books while never bothering to read one. Better,
I suppose, than being berated for books by those who do read them.)

A day and then another went by, and I felt very alone. Each tree, cloud, and knocking of woodpecker was an indication of my profound aloneness at that time, and was enough to prompt my realization that we, as men and women, are both always and never really alone. Camps can accomplish this perception very easily. An old stove has been used for thirty years, and sitting alone you remember the men who once were warmed by it on late November evenings, now gone for good, and the nostalgia that overcomes you is profound. Deep, as well, are the thoughts of people who are far away from you at that moment. As are the old pictures that are taken there—of men, yes, but of game as well, in the bush thirty years before. Of deer standing near brooks a lost age ago, looking quietly toward the camera in soul-felt indifference. It is a sad and memorable piece of nostalgia.

Although I knew my way out, I was obligated to stay for the sake of the man who said he would be back in to collect me. If he travelled back and I was not there it would be something akin to betrayal. However, I really believed, and still do, that he had gone out to see his girlfriend and had forgotten all about me.

Wind had picked up in small gusts, over the outbuildings and the woodpile under its stable. The window at the back of the camp looked out onto a wilderness scene. In the camp was a stuffed moose head, taken by the man’s uncle in the 1930s. Perhaps a brother of one of the moose that were tagged and taken off to Newfoundland in the early part of the century. Yes, the moose from Newfoundland
came by way of Miramichi. Though they have flourished and grown bigger, with time, than the average Miramichi moose, they are the sons and daughters of moose snared and boxed and taken to Newfoundland by men hired to do so. I often thought it would be a way to reintroduce the woodland caribou to New Brunswick—by way of Newfoundland. But it hasn’t happened. And when they tried to bring caribou back to the woods of Maine, the animals died.

Along the road into camp was a cluster of high birch trees where partridge sometimes sat. These birch ran along the camp road out, and then the road picked up again behind the camp. In behind the camp the road became a path and led over the hill to a brook, and then up the other side, through fertile growth where deer travelled most of the year; three or four brooks intersected this one, at various places, all within the next mile, and tamarack and poplar trees grew in abundance. The best way we had found was to wait for the deer to meander down through those poplar growths in late afternoon, though the deer seemed smart enough not to come toward the camp, and it was more to your advantage to get on the downhill slope beyond the camp. There was a grouping of hardwood stands that had grown near a place called Otter Brook, and it was there I was hunting. I had enough knowledge then to know a buck would mark out its territory and travel back and forth in search of doe, but I wasn’t as knowledgeable about this as I was to be later on.

The days were turning very cold so deer were on the move, and that certain time of day, from about 3:45 until dark, was the best time to see something. At that time of day the woods stops. There is a sudden silence in the air.

For an hour and a half the woods and everything alive seem to become concentrated. There is a silence in the sky and the ground, and there is a grand expectation in this silence.

I was hunting with a .32 Winchester lever-action, a rifle fine for deer but not moose, and easy to carry and handle. I never used a scope back then, believing it was poor sportsmanship. Now I am wise enough to know it is far more a case of poor eyesight, and I can miss with a scope as easily as anyone else. In fact, the finest shots don’t seem to aim as much as point. I realize a lot of people have said this over the years. When the sharpshooter Mr. Boa came to the Miramichi to hunt moose in the 1890s he was able to pick matchsticks off a target board with his pistol without even seeming to look.

The day was cool, and the large leaves had fallen from most of the trees, but it hadn’t snowed as yet. That made for difficult travel even on the small roadways. The two hardest things to manoeuvre around silently are crispy leaves and gravel. The small roadway behind the camp was gravel, and off on either side were leaves a foot or so deep. You could be heard for a mile as you walked up that hill to survey the stream on the far side. In fact I cursed every step I took. Finally, at the halfway point up the hill, in among those poplars, I made my decision. It was now 3:30 in the afternoon. I could see seventy-five or a hundred yards through the opening between those trees, to the top of the hill. I knew deer would at times come along the top of the ridge before moving down toward the other side. I was in a blazing orange jacket, which I know is both needed and ridiculous. I had wanted to get nearer to the stream where my sound, if not my smell, would be muted.

But I decided to wait where I was. I would be as silent as I could. In fact, in later years I have found myself standing or sitting silently for four to five hours at a time, without much movement at all, in order to get a shot at a deer.

The day cooled and, moment by moment, became more silent. No longer was there a knocking from the woodpecker, or the call of birds. The wind seemed to die too. The crowns of trees stopped their swaying. It became very still, and I heard someone just off to the side of me. I thought it was my friend, though I hadn’t heard his truck. I turned and saw a spike horn buck walking up the hill, fifty yards away. I was surprised at how noisy it was. I had to bring my rifle around and aim and fire, in a single motion. It jumped sideways and fell backwards, tumbling. At first I simply assumed I had missed it. I am sure I was lucky to have been able to down it with a single shot. It was a good size for a spike horn. I spent the rest of the daylight dressing it and hauling it out to the camp, afraid that I had completely botched the job. Later I was to learn that I had not.

I am certain, as I am when fly fishing, that much of the so-called “expertise” of hunting or fishing has nothing to do with the person. It is something beyond our control. For instance, if I had continued on up the hill, as I had initially intended to do, I doubt I would have seen this animal. If my friend had been conscientious enough to have come for me as he’d said he would, I would have been in a half-ton truck the day before, on my way out and back to university. That is, there were a thousand reasons not to be where I was that long-ago November afternoon, and yet I was where I was, just as that young buck was. And I suppose his
story, in its own way, was the same. If it had gone to the right, along the road, and then up the hill farther along, as it might have done half the fall, it wouldn’t have been seen.

I hung it, took off my bloodied clothes and sat in my sweatpants inside at the table, and ate supper. It grew dark outside.

Far into the night, at about 10:30, I heard my friend’s truck approach, and finally saw the lights. (It is strange: in the woods alone, it is easy enough to hear a friend coming and think it might be a stranger.) My friend looked chagrined and ready to take a raking, until he saw my young buck and became certain he had left me here intentionally because he knew I would have the luck I did. He has never given up that absurdity, and I have long since stop questioning him about it.

In the woods, more emphatically perhaps than anywhere else, this is and can be seen as fate, not chance or luck. This is perhaps why so many of the old woodsmen I have talked to over the years believe in fate more than chance. Even if our world has gone on to embrace all the modern conveniences, and we have convinced ourselves that the things we do are managed by ourselves and ourselves alone, that we have become as much at the top of the food chain as the gods we once spoke about, there is a time, upon reflection, when most of us become aware of the fact that we manage very little. It can only take a second for us to realize this. A sudden turbulence while flying is one way to bring attention to this.

That is, none of us has ever been able to predict with certainty the final results of any action we start. Or of a
hunting trip we are on. Whether hunting, fishing, or any other activity, so many other factors are involved that our participation is always subject to forces over which we have little control. Or our own nature, which always, in some ways, betrays or surprises us. However, there are certain episodes in the wilderness that do seem preordained. Like the first deer I took, or the first partridge, for that matter.

A young widow hunting moose is a case in point. Her husband never managed to have luck hunting moose, though he had prepared, and scouted the territory, and was adept at calling. Hunting moose was to him, like so many from the Miramichi, the great quest.

Over time this man had come close, but he was killed in a highway accident before he managed to get his moose.

It was his widow who decided to put her name into the draw and go hunting for him. She had never hunted before, and had to take a gun course, and pass a shooting exam. She did, and went out hunting the year after his death, far up on the Renous where her late husband had hunted, asking her brother, who had come in to help her, to stop at the place her husband had last hunted.

Her brother tried to dissuade her, because he hadn’t scouted there at all and was hoping to take her toward the lakes ten miles farther in. But she insisted, though she had never hunted or even been there before.

“I am not doing this for me, I am doing this for him,” she said.

They set camp late on Wednesday night, in the dark and the rain, and she hardly slept. She was up before dawn, shivering and shaking. It was a gloomy, cloudy day, with
rainwater still dripping off the leaves, and the clearing was damp and foggy. Yet at 7:36 on the morning of the first day of the moose hunt, without them even calling, a fourteen-point bull moose came into the clearing where her late husband had called the year before. And though the shot from the .306 put her on her ass, she accomplished for her late husband something he hadn’t been able to.

To say this is maudlin and sentimental might be true enough. But to say it is grand and courageous and in a strange way life affirming is true as well. The life-affirming moments of the hunt are moments both elusive and tenacious. No man or woman who ever kills in spite will hold to them. I am not certain how much this is known or regarded now.

I think moose have more personality than deer, are more graceful in the wild, more defining of the great northern world. They are the most distinguished of the deer family, heavier than elk and, in their own sublime way, far more majestic, though it is elk that get all the press. To see a gentleman’s reading room from early in the last century is to see a bull elk head above the mantel. It proved that this gentleman had enough money to go out west and shoot something that registered to others as a kind of hunting utopia. So people have championed elk as perhaps the greatest of gentlemen’s game.

But to call a moose and have the bull answer—or the cow in curiosity appear—is one of the finest feats of a good hunter.

To wait as a giant bull approaches out of the woods, its rack cracking branches of trees so it sounds like .22 bullets exploding, makes anyone’s heart race.

To have only three days to accomplish all of this, to have this very limited time to scout out, and kill, and bring the
moose out, means for those three days there is constant excitement and movement and worry.

The hunt starts at sunrise on a Thursday morning on or about September 28, and ends on Saturday at dark. Those are the three days. People generally save up holidays to go moose hunting, and arrive in camp sometime on Wednesday afternoon.

They have scouted out their area—but you cannot scout too soon, for fear of the moose moving. Too late, though, and you might be second or third man to a place. Other camps might be set up. There is an unspoken rule that one shouldn’t intrude on someone else’s territory. However, those hunters who put their names on trees or pieces of wood to signal their ownership are not always welcome. So one has to be cognizant of rules, spoken and unspoken, and of how the moose are behaving.