Guts (5 page)

I had not gone a mile before I saw a grouse. It was sitting back in some willows, and I caught a slight movement of its head before it froze, or I never would have seen it. I worked in close, then closer, until I couldn't have been more than ten feet away. I raised the bow, drew the shaft, held for the outline of the bird and released.

The arrow snapped clean from the bow, followed my sight line down to the grouse and . . . missed—not by much, an inch to the right of the grouse, so close the shaft nearly rubbed it. Even with the blunt tip the arrow stuck in the soft ground and quivered. It didn't seem possible. But the grouse sat there, still, unmoving, not a feather different. I held my breath, slowly raised my arm back over my shoulder and took another arrow out of the quiver. Moving ever so slowly, I nocked another arrow; raised the bow; drew, using a solid three-finger hold on the string; held until I
knew
I couldn't miss, and released.

The arrow plowed into the ground slightly to the left of the grouse. The bird sat there, not moving, frozen, waiting.

Another arrow. Up. Draw. Hold. Release.

Miss.

Hmmm, I thought. This was not possible. The grouse still sat there. And if it seems unbelievable that a grouse would hold still for all this waving a bow around, arms over shoulders grabbing at arrows, bow-raising and hissing arrows, it must be remembered that grouse have evolved over millions of years to use the freeze defense, and it has worked against predators so well that they have it locked into their genes. At a much later date, I would see a grouse in a tree about eight feet off the ground and have time to cut a long stave with a hunting knife, carve one end into a needle point—all while the grouse watched—and spear the same grouse and have it for dinner. Once I took a grouse off the ground with my bare hands.

Still, this particular grouse was especially long-suffering. I pulled another arrow, raised the bow again, drew, released.

Missed.

With all ten arrows. They were around the bird like a cage and I simply could not believe it, could not believe that I could miss that many times from not ten feet away. It just wasn't possible.

I was out of arrows and the grouse was still there and I thought of using the bow like a club or maybe finding a rock—I certainly was never going to kill this bird with an arrow unless I walked up and stabbed it with one. Then I decided to reach forward carefully and pull one of my arrows out of the ground and use it over again. Later in my life this would work, but this time I wasn't that lucky.

I moved forward slowly.

It sat there, carved in stone.

Five feet away, then three—I could have just fallen on the bird and would have done that, except that I would have landed on all my arrows. So I crouched, leaned almost directly over the grouse and laid my hand on one of the arrows.

And a mass of feathers exploded into my face.

Anybody who has heard a grouse take off will never forget it. Along with its freeze defense it has evolved a takeoff that is, to say the least, startling. The wings cup air and beat at a tremendous rate, creating a concussive explosion so loud it sounds like an artillery round going off.

In this case, it was directly in my face. I almost wet myself. Then I fell backward, nearly somersaulting as the grouse flew past where my head had been and vanished into the dappled leaves.

Clearly, I thought, I am doing something wrong.

I hunted all that first day and shot at several rabbits and two more grouse and missed them all. Then I decided to find out what I was doing wrong. I moved to a clearing in the woods and found a gopher mound with soft dirt that wouldn't hurt the arrows—I was down to eight now, having lost two that had snaked beneath the grass and disappeared— and put a leaf about the size of my palm in the dirt for a target and shot at it from about ten feet away.

And missed.

I kept trying, slamming away the dirt until at last I realized that if I simply looked at the leaf in general I would miss it. Sometimes I would come near it, but I would still miss. At that time almost nobody used a sight, unless you counted using the tip of your arrow as a kind of aiming point. Everybody shot by instinct, simply looking and “feeling” where the arrow would go, so there wasn't a distinct spot to aim at.

There had to be a better way. I started thinking of exactly where the tip of the arrow would go, not just in general terms but exactly in what spot. I did not look at the whole leaf but at the tiniest part of the center of the leaf and I imagined the arrow hitting there, right
there
where I was looking, in the center of the center of the leaf.

And I started to hit. Not the center, at least not always—although I think that is how it happens for truly gifted people such as Howard Hill and some of the trick shooters who travel around doing exhibitions now. I think they
always
see the center of the center and always hit that point.

But I hit the leaf. Usually at the edge, but again and again. If I let my eye wander and look at the leaf in general I would miss, but when I concentrated I almost always hit, and after practicing this until my fingers were nearly bleeding through the finger tab on my draw hand, I went back to hunting.

There was an immediate difference. I hadn't gone thirty yards into the woods when I saw a grouse. This one did not freeze. It flew away, but for some reason it stopped on a limb about thirty feet from me. This seemed a bit far, but the tree was situated so that if I tried to move closer I would be in thick brush and unable to shoot straight up. I drew and held and started to release and realized that I was thinking of the grouse as a whole, not focusing. I eased off, cleared my mind of thoughts and aimed again, thinking of the very center of the grouse, and released and knew,
knew
that I would hit the bird.

The blunt took it almost in the center, driving it back and off the limb, to flop briefly and then to lie still. I moved through the brush to where the bird lay and saw the shaft, the blunt driven completely through as if it had been a sharp point and killing the grouse as fast as a rifle.

And here I found another advantage to using a bow. A rifle destroys flesh—again, because of hydraulic shock as the bullet passes through the tissue. Worse, if it first passes through the gut, it carries the contents of the gut into the meat and ruins still more.

An arrow, even a blunt, makes a simple hole and doesn't ruin any meat.

That night I cleaned and cooked the grouse over a fire and ate it, arrow hole and all. I hunted the rest of that weekend and took two rabbits and another grouse and they were all clean kills. I ate the meat the rest of that week, cooking it after school, and made more arrows.

Only this time I made broadheads. It was time to hunt bigger game.

There is as big a difference between hunting small game and hunting large game with a bow as there is between hunting small game with a bow and hunting it with a rifle.

First, of course, you cannot use blunts. With deer—or elk and moose, for that matter—the deadliness comes from the cutting power of the broadhead. This was known by primitive hunters as well as modern ones, and they used razor-sharp bits of stone or antler or flint to make a cutting edge that would do more damage as the arrow went through. The truth is, it is possible to kill with a simple pointed piece of wood—and probably all animals in the world, including elephants (or mastodons), have been killed in this manner—as long as it is very sharp and the point is placed exactly right, in the heart, for instance, or for a slower kill, in the lungs. But it is so much easier if there is a widened cutting edge involved.

And so, broadheads.

When I was young we were limited to simple two-bladed heads and the three-bladed. There were no razor-blade-type inserts as there were later, which would vastly improve the efficiency of the heads. The broadheads of the time came very dull and had to be sharpened, first with a file and then with a stone, honed until they could take hair off your arm.

I chose the three-bladed types for two reasons. First, they had an added cutting edge, which I thought was important, but perhaps more significant, they were army surplus (the military term was MA-3) and much cheaper. I understood they were used for “quiet” operations, although even when I was in the army and had knowledge of such things I could find no indication they had ever been used. Whatever the reason, they were available for just ten cents each and they were stout and well made (wouldn't break every time you missed and hit a tree limb), and while hard to sharpen they would hold a good edge once they were honed. (An aside: Last year for Christmas I was given a bronze arrowhead from about 300 B.C., and while it is smaller than the MA-3 head, it is so similar that I wondered if they didn't use the antique heads for a model.)

I bought a dozen MA-3s and made twelve big-game arrows using Port Orford cedar shafts I got for four cents each by mail order. I spent a huge amount of time on each arrow, making certain the feathers were perfectly straight and the head was truly aligned so that it wouldn't “plane” off to the side or fight the feathers for direction when released.

I had already killed a deer with a rifle—actually an old 16-gauge single-shot Browning shotgun with slugs—by the time I began to hunt with a bow, hunting with my farmer uncles in the fall. This was less hunting than it was gathering meat. Men with rifles were posted at clearings while boys and other men were sent to “drive” the woods through and push the deer out to be shot. It was not particularly sporting and was not meant to be. It was gathering meat for the family for winter. I was carrying a shotgun nearly longer than I was tall, staggering through swamp grass and snow up to my waist, when a buck jumped up in front of me and stood still, broadside to me. I raised the shotgun without thinking, cocked the hammer, and shot. The buck dropped, the big slug almost knocking him sideways. I, of course, got buck fever and stammered a yell for my uncle Gordy, who was pushing brush next to me, and he came over and helped me gut the buck and drag him out to the road so we could add him to the row of deer already taken by the posted men. It was my first deer, but it couldn't really be called hunting so much as just luck for me and panic by the deer, which stood forty feet away while a kid knocked him over with an old single-barrel scattergun and what they used to call a punkin-ball slug.

Hunting, true big-game hunting with a bow, is much more an art and much more demanding, and initially I wasn't sure how it should be done. Some people would simply find a deer trail and either hide in brush or get up in a tree and wait, on a “stand,” until a deer came by. Others would put on soft moccasins and walk slowly, very slowly, through the woods, as quietly as possible, and walk up on feeding or bedded deer and get a shot at them before they were aware.

I initially decided to hunt by moving, I think more because as a young boy I wasn't patient enough to sit and wait. Later I favored the stand method, working from camouflage. And my first bow-killed deer was taken that way.

I was near an old abandoned homestead, long ago rotted to wreckage by the northern winters, and I saw a small buck walk behind the caved-in building. I waited a few seconds at full draw until he walked out. Everything worked as it was supposed to and I hit the deer just behind the shoulder—one of the blades of the broadhead actually cut the side of his heart—and he walked a few steps, and lay down, then curved his head back and died.

But it was my second kill of a deer with a bow that truly applies to Brian's hunting in
Hatchet
. Two years later, when I was fifteen, I was hunting and absolutely nothing was going right. Normally, fall in the north woods is a time of clear days and nights, crisp weather, wonderful bright sun and brilliant leaves. That year there was none of it. It rained—cold rain during the day, all day, a soft, gray drizzle that froze at night into a thin layer on the ground, too thin to hold weight, so that when you tried to walk on it you broke through into the cold mud, and everything, everything in the world had a cold, wet drabness that made even my fifteenyear-old bones ache.

It was, paradoxically, the best time to walk-hunt. The water kept the grass unbrittle, so it didn't crackle and make noise, and the water dripping from limbs covered the sound of walking. Years later I learned that storm fronts create the best conditions for hunting because game animals lie down and are not as wary as normal. It was the kind of hunting Brian would have to do—hunting when it wasn't necessarily pleasant to hunt; hunting because he had to, hunting to live.

About three one afternoon I came to the edge of a swamp that was absolutely covered with deer trails, many of them so fresh the water was still running into the hoof prints. The swamp presented a problem. I was wearing rubber boots, hardly the thing for quiet walking, although in that weather they weren't so loud, and my feet were still relatively dry and even retained a slight warmth. But the boots were only calf high and the water in the swamp was sure to be deeper than that. I would probably flood my boots.

But there were deer tracks all over the swamp.

And I did have matches to light a fire and there were plenty of dead birch trees around for tinder—birch bark is the quickest way to get a fire going in wet weather. If I got wet, I could dry out.

So I nocked an arrow to the string to be ready, stepped off into the swamp and found I had underestimated the difficulties.

On my first step I sank through the muck on top and both boots filled with cold, muddy water. I had been looking down on the swamp from a small hill but now that I was in it, I could see that the grass was much taller than I had originally thought. Once I had sunk into the mat beneath the vegetation, the grass was about four inches over my head and I was soon walking down a narrow almost-tunnel with water pouring into my boots. I could see only about four feet in front of me.

Nobody could call this hunting. Inside thirty yards I was simply trying to keep moving, and in another thirty I just wanted out. I won't say I panicked—I wasn't in any danger. But I was becoming intensely uncomfortable and most decidedly not in control of my situation and decided that if I didn't come to higher and drier ground in a very short time I would turn and go back.