Facing the Hunter (7 page)

Finally the bull moved off, and they spent the rest of the day getting their animal out.

You can lose a moose very easily. (By this I mean the meat will be no good.) It is warm and, unlike deer habitat, the moose are farther in, in deeper woods, wet woods as a rule, and harder to get at. Oh, I know many have got their moose on the road—one year my friend Peter shot an eighteen-point bull a mile from his camp. Still, more people have to go farther in than we normally do for deer. They are a much larger animal than deer, and it requires not only men but oftentimes machinery to get them out. (My Indian friend, Micmac hunter Paddy Ward, would sigh at that statement. He has always hunted moose entirely on his own.)

The time of year, late September, makes it imperative that you get them opened and up as soon as possible, to
save the meat from being tainted and to ward off the blowflies. The idea, from certain older men, is that it was once much cooler in the late stages of September than it is today. Some days in late September are as warm as August, while in the last few years July has been a cool month. I am not certain how much of this is my imagination. However, I am certain many of my hunting friends complain about it, saying the hunt is set up to disappoint the hunter, and the moose season now starts before the rut—that it might have been good in Septembers in years gone by, but not now.

In earlier times, when there were British garrisons here, people hunted moose later into the year—and caribou, as well. The First Nations people hunted them into the winter months, and could track them down to exhaustion. All of this has changed under law, and in many respects the law’s job is to take the animal into consideration before the hunter. For there are cycles in the wilderness, and there have been times when the moose was hunted almost to extinction here—not by the First Nations people but by men in lumber camps a century ago, who used them to feed the lumber crews.

Autumn in Toronto is more mellow and long, and the trees’ leaves take their time turning colour and falling away. It is the season of “mellow fruitfulness,” as Keats said, and the lights of the houses along the many avenues bathe the sidewalks and alleyways and stores and fruit stands in gold. The pumpkins lie heavy on the steps and porches of mild-mannered people.

In some ways, in a few scattered ways, it is not a good place to be a boy. I suppose I have spurned discipline all my life—at least the kind that is imposed, the kind that says before you even begin a lesson that you are the one at fault. This has become more and more of a Canadian trend when it comes to instructing male children. At least, as I found out, when it comes to certain schoolyards.

In Toronto, I had two young sons going through elementary and middle school who had female teachers at least 80 percent of the time. At first I paid no attention when my older boy would sometimes say that the teacher was sexist. I suppose many people think men are more likely to be sexist, while women try to be fair. Of course in my own life, and in the books I have written, I have always shown that human beings, male or female, can make the exact same mistakes. I also understand the hideous stupidities women have been subjected to—not only my own grandmothers, as cases in point, but girls I grew up with. And, as far as my boys are concerned, I realize too that kids are kids, and will try to get away with what they can. So I discouraged confrontation with teachers, and still do.

My first boy told me at least four times that certain female teachers, in the way they viewed boys and men, and through the novels they demanded be read, were indeed sexist. “Everyone we know back east would be considered a chauvinist or a bigot,” he said to me one day, when he refused to write an essay on the radical position of a certain well-known book.

What he was telling me, in grade eleven, was that this attitude was seen as progressive and forward thinking, and young men should realize there was a price to pay.

So, after a time I realized that he, in some respects, was right. I told him to bear it, to get through high school.

He believed there was something terribly wrong in our “fair-minded country.”

He is very bright, and he graduated and moved back to the Maritimes before we did.

Once in the Maritimes, my wife and I noticed something. He became himself again. He was no longer in a city—he was no longer a rural child in an urban place. And I suppose that is when I began to realize how much of his young life was changed by our move, for he had a hard time in Toronto, and we probably made matters worse by not seeing what should have been seen—that he was not urban, and he needed the rural woods and rivers in order to belong. And once he came home, he belonged not just to the rural world, but to the world at large. If I caused him problems by moving to the city, I am sorry for them.

My second son, too, mentioned this to me, that some women teachers who had come of age in the 1970s were sexist. Or they treated the boys with more discerning condemnation than the girls. In some ways, there was no way to be a boy. And he began to be scrutinized for being a boy, and put into detention. So he was in detention many times, for many small things: building a snow fort, having a snowball fight, playing football at recess, sliding, and chewing an icicle. Now, it is not too difficult to just forgo all of this and to say that the school and the school board in some way must be right. But in another way, in some other way they are not right at all, and their methods are as puritanical and as draconian as a strap—for most of these activities are the ones boys do automatically and cannot stop.

The persistent idea in our culture was to quiet or expel these urges, because these urges were shocking—you know, wrestling and climbing trees. And how the elementary teachers—and yes, how two of the high school English teachers—taught reflected how they believed males should now act in our culture. And in all ways, as far as I could see, the intention of this was to dampen or redirect the force that pushes young boys to be boys. Because it was seen as not being “fair” to the girls, when 90 percent of the time it had nothing at all to do with the girls. And no girl was put into detention if she did the same thing.

I would not say this if it were not true, and, true or not, I would not mention it if I thought it was a positive thing. But I believe many female teachers in elementary grades are at times one-dimensional when it comes to thinking about children, and attitudes, and what children should think, for they have learned the methodology of equality and must prove it. It does not give boys who act like boys much hope. And my youngest acted like a boy.

This was not just a matter of taking on overt rough-housing and silliness, it was a systematic elimination of what boys need to be natural. I would kiss the book on this.

And so when my sons came home and told me that they had been told guns were bad and hunting was barbaric, and as they came into high school and were given books to study in which men were the only ones who were controlling—I realized we were in a place far, far away from where I had come from.

I realized that the main problem with the teachers was not that they had progressed but that they had never seen or known what they had been taught to hate. That their
very categorization was not only wrong but ultimately deceitful. Did I tell my children this? No.

However, I mentioned to one teacher during a meeting that I would be willing to bring a licensed, empty shotgun and rifle to my son’s class. I would break them down and put them back together, to show how harmless guns, and most people who own them, are. I would talk about my uncles and show a picture of my aunt who hunted. I would show the articles written on my uncle, considered the greatest salmon guide in the world.

They declined my offer.

And I can say I do not blame anyone for this. But few were ever more certain that others were wrong, and they had the books and degrees in sociology and the right books in CanLit to prove it all.

I believe it was at this time I realized that my race of people, whoever and wherever they were, would become extinct.

A few years after I was with my brother hunting moose, I got my own moose licence in a draw, and called on David Savage, a friend of my fishing days, to come in with me. David has hunted the woods of the Miramichi region since he was a child, and is one of the finest woodsmen I know. He is a guide without being a guide. This is not at all unusual on the Miramichi. I know up to a dozen men who have a similar CV. Which means simply that more people rely upon David, phone him, ask him advice, secure his presence in the deep woods with them than they would almost anyone else, though he does not advertise or call it
a business, and he makes no money (or very little) from the venture. In the woods, just as he does in fishing season, he will see that his “sports” (though he never calls them that) are comfortable and happy. And he will do everything he can (this side of the law) to make sure their hunt is a success. He himself, like many others, believes that a hunt can be a success even if one fails to get an animal.

“How can you say you failed? You can reason it out this way,” he tells me. “To get into the wood, to have your adrenaline flowing—to have a chance, to be free of the usual structure about your life—that makes it a success. For the three days of a moose hunt, or the week in November you take off to go deer hunting, you have to become someone else—that is, you must rely upon yourself like you have not done before, in an environment that is different from your usual one. Everything you do in the woods that complements this enriches you, and is a success. At any rate, that’s the way I look at it.”

As I mentioned in my fishing book a few years ago, camps are places that allow for this reacquaintance with our essential nature. They are places that allow one to think of humanity in all its great and tragic character. It is where I first thought of the MacDurmot family in my novel
Blood Ties
, where I first thought of writing the novel about Jerry Bines. And why is this? What is in these woods, along these ancient roads, that allows it? Well, for one thing, we are. We travel roads and old trails that have not seen commerce in a century, and yet we can still see signs, in the overgrown remnants, of our forefathers’ hardships—my uncles as young boys working fourteen hours a day, my wife’s grandfather guiding hunters up along the old Bartibog in the
1930s. Pictures of bear and deer being taken in the bygone era by men hunting to feed the lumber camps. We treasure it because it is gone now, but its foundation was laid down for us, and wisdom is everywhere.

Of course, there are better hunters than me, and the greatest of the guides—those who lived in the bygone times and guided men like Babe Ruth—may have disappeared. I would never need a guide now—and never did for deer. But few, the Micmac Paddy Ward being one, hunt on their own for moose.

However, there are still great guides. In point of fact, it might not be that the skill of the guides has diminished at all; it might just be that the guiding industry, which flourished back at the beginning of the twentieth century, has gone out of fashion, and famous men and women no longer require the service. Famous men and women no longer make a point of telling their interviewers in New York that “hunting moose in the wilds of Canada was every bit as thrilling as when Bunty and I bagged a rhino in the last true game reserve in South Africa.”

The topography of the land changes now in the relative blink of an eye. Places we might once have been able to hunt as familiar territory are no longer there for us in the same way. For our pathways are always being rerouted.

“The road to the river is a mighty long way,” as Willie Nelson sings, but many have been bulldozed back, and old-growth forest of mossy black spruce have been lost to the tree harvester. Now three years makes a big difference in the woods of New Brunswick. We cannot be certain—any more than that little buck I met forty years ago—what awaits the woods today. Our companies do not come from
here—they come from places as far away as Finland. They couldn’t care less for one deer on the upper stretch of the Sovogle. In fact, they know nothing of it. They have never been here. And the Dutch and German families that have moved here for space and adventure have at times, in their singular dismissive nature, cut us off from places we once considered homestead. The Dutch and Germans are the new Euros, and we are like First Nations.

Now there are orange and yellow and red circles painted on trees, to ward off hunters. Just as so much of the fishing has become private, will hunting go this road as well?

In late August of that long-ago year, I came back up to the river (I was living in Fredericton then) and went with David Savage to scout out a place along the main Bartibog River, thirteen miles down the Miramichi from the town of Newcastle. I arrived at my mother-in-law’s house on the main Bartibog and met with David the next morning. The region behind my mother-in-law’s house is filled with old-growth spruce and wetlands that run all the way down to the Oyster River and beyond. It is a veritable sanctuary for moose. All summer they can be spied from the roadway, at the back of Oyster River in the swampy water. They move off in the fall, into deeper woods behind the Gum Road.

There had been a lot of moose signs that spring and through the summer, and David mentioned that he had seen two young bulls and twin calves and a cow, which generally meant that the moose herd was healthy. He had seen them in the spring of the year just after ice breakup,
when he had taken some men far up the Bartibog River in his twenty-two-foot Restigouche canoe to fish for black salmon. There in the haggard trees of spring the young moulting eagle sat perched, a wingspan already longer than its mother’s, who glided in the air above almost to those wisping clouds.

Far up on the river, as the ice went out, he often had his first sighting of moose or deer that had wintered in yards beyond us.

“There is a fair population, so we might luck out. When do you take your shooting test?”

“Next week,” I said. (
Don’t remind me
, I thought.) In years gone by, a shooting test was not required, but because of the moose draw—and because many people who had not used a rifle before applied for the chance—a test was compulsory now. (This test has since been given up because of other qualifying exams, hunter safety courses, and the like.)