Facing the Hunter (15 page)

I thought of all of this one night when I was on a plane, going down to Windsor, Ontario, to give a reading. I was at the back of the plane and the weather was wild; there was
a chop the plane was against the entire way. It was a prop plane, and we were squeezed together. There, on the other side, just down from my seat, were five American hunters, travelling home from a successful hunt. I thought a hunt in northern Ontario, but as they spoke I realized it was a trip into northern Saskatchewan. They were buoyant and uncomplicated in their glee. All except one, maybe, had lucked in and had taken deer. I am not sure, but I assumed it was mule deer, although it very well may have been white-tail. Both deer are there, I think. I do not know the land of northern Saskatchewan, and I am sure I never will, and I am no less certain that I will never need to. I have enough land of my own.

I was sure by the way they spoke that they were from the northern States, and most likely hunted there, so, it meant that they were on a big deer hunt—which is not hyperbole, but the hunt for large buck deer. So they had made reservations, and had travelled by plane, with their rifles, to a hunting lodge in the North. But there was an unfortunate side to this hunt. I do not mention this with the intention of it reflecting poorly on all American hunters. Most are wonderful people all the way around. But these five were very festive in their amusement about the backward people of Saskatchewan, and how little they knew about hunting. As they spoke, I realized a few things. The people they were amused by—those who “shot a deer and it didn’t matter the size”—were the very people who had taken care of them in this wilderness setting. And I would make a bet that none of them would have lucked in to anything without the very people their cynicism now emasculated. And that these people “who
drove cars with bald tires,” as one reminisced over his bourbon, were men who in any way and in any day would have outlasted these men in the woods, and walked them into the ground in a second. (I guarantee I would have.)

If those they ridiculed shot deer without trophy racks, it was because they used their game for something these men might never have needed to—they used the deer for food, not trophies. I realized that so much of the animosity toward people like this comes not because they are manly killers, but because they are boyishly naïve. They are, in the main, what urban ideas have done to the hunt. Animals are no longer animals to certain hunters. They are trophies. They are not used for food—they are used for show. They hunt for big racks, and are guided to big racks by someone whose own relatives may shoot a spike horn, or a non-trophy buck, knowing the quality of the meat will be better—or they might even realize that too many big bucks taken changes the genetics of the very animal. This is at least as important as bragging rights over a fourteen-point buck.

None of these men had shot a fourteen-point buck, and I did not lean over and tell them that I had. What I did do, however, was defend these certain fellows from Saskatchewan whom I did not know, had never met, and who might not ever defend me. I did say that these men didn’t hunt for trophies—it was a different hunt altogether, and one that was just as noble. In fact, I bet them that these men might have been the very ones who built the insulated tree stands that those hunters sat in comfortably to shoot huge buck without knowing much about the land, the people, or the animals at all. That perhaps these fellows had placed those stands exactly where they would
offer the best opportunity for a rack that any half-assed shots could take home, with bragging rights, to their wives.

They stared at me in that self-complicated silence that unknowing people often have, their brows screwed up, and, as always happens with me, sooner or later I cursed myself for my tongue. One of the youngsters was perhaps nineteen, and he believed his taking a deer made him brave—and who was I, this middle-aged man who almost never went out on a hunt any more, to try to dash a self-delusion that all of us should have for a while in our youth? I didn’t want to dash it so much as tell them that they hadn’t really been on a hunt, that perhaps none of them would have made out as well in those woods on their own as the men they now, in comfort, mocked. That, in fact, was the essential point—they had always been in comfort. The whole point of hunting lodges, from what I knew about them, from the midpoint of the nineteenth century on, was to keep hunters in relative comfort, to feed them, to amuse them if need be, to guide them to the animals they were to kill. My uncles were guides who did this half a century ago, and my cousins and friends were guides who did this now. And how in God’s name could they say anything about anyone with “bald tires” who took a deer to feed his family? In fact, the very point of hunting was that which they now in ignorance defamed, and which the urban world that looked upon nature as “pretty” did not understand.

So much of it was amusing to them. Would it have been amusing to them if I had told them that the Micmac captured beaver from their dens by first patting them? Would they have ever been able to do the same?

These were the hunters so many who don’t hunt see.

And I realized that hunting, or the terrible reputation it has among “civilized” men and women, is and can be its own worst enemy. And one reason for this is that hunting is now a product of that very civilization that decries discomfort and work, and ingenuity, and in the end bravery. In relative terms, so much care is taken of those hunters who pay big bucks for their hunt that they might just as well be at a health spa for the weekend. Some of the hunting done is on the same level as travelling middle-class retirees visiting a bed-and-breakfast near Annapolis Royal. I know a good fellow who never shot a deer, and tried each year to. He was fed up with his inability—once, standing on a rut mark, a deer walked right past him, and he didn’t see it until it was beyond his range. Finally he paid for his deer by going to one of these lodges. He knew he had, and it did not sit well with him, and in the end he was teased as much about this as he had ever been teased for not getting a deer. I prefer not to tease him. I know we all have our own inconstancy; our own grand design is not really our own but given to us by some Higher Power we do not understand.

There is much rancour about this kind of killing. But I am not faulting those who make a living by it. They still set up a hunt that is essentially industrious and workable. In the old days, and perhaps still, they hired Indian guides. In fact, at the first of the last century most of the guides for men like Braithwaite et al. were Micmac or Maliseet, and without a doubt they were the finest guides in the province. In a way, the terms of the hunt have not changed at all. Men are relied upon to take other men to the game. There is nothing wrong with this, but one should know which side of the square root of the equation he is on, and
be mindful and humble about this. Writers, themselves, some who are terrified of guns, have made a great deal over this—and writers who have never been in the wilderness speak with authority about the First Nations. I am all right with this, except it is an obsession among Canadian writers to demonstrate how well they know the soul of the First Nations people. In some ways it is understandable. Though, in the end, it never does justice to the Micmac, Huron, Cree, or Sioux.

These boyish hunters flying with me to Windsor, laughing at the men from Saskatchewan, are the personification of this debate. The only thing I believed was that I would not hunt with these fellows claiming their racks, and that their guides in northern Saskatchewan perhaps did not respect them. I wondered how many of them, set down in a woods, would last. Not as many, I didn’t think, as those they bullied with their comments. In the movie
The Deer Hunter
, the character played by Robert De Niro hunts a big buck along mountain ravines with one bullet in the chamber, while his friend kills a little doe in the small pond outside the cabin by firing nine shots into it. My contention is that many of the fellows travelling on that plane resembled not the former character but the latter, and there was no way to make them see it.

In the 1930s my wife’s grandfather hunted both deer and bear on the Bartibog, and guided as well. Many nights my wife’s family relied upon game to eat. In my earliest days I heard of mighty bear in the Bartibog region. In the early years there was a bounty on the animals, looked upon as a nuisance. They were trapped and shot whenever people had a chance. Now, living on the Bartibog four or five months of the year, I see bear regularly in the spring. Deer come into our fields all summer long. Does and fawns stand in my garden.

My dog no longer chases those deer—at fourteen years old and with bad hips, she runs out to the shed and barks. When I yell to her to sit, she lies on her belly and watches the deer graze. She knows that she no longer has a chance at catching them. Or maybe she has gained wisdom over the years and now leaves them be.

Wayne Curtis has gained as much wisdom as anyone. In the early years he hunted with his father, and depended
upon it. He remembers, when he was a boy, his father shooting moose for the winter. One was shot with an old Boer War rifle at well over three hundred yards. He also remembers his father as a guide being accidentally shot in the arm, by another guide, along the Cains River in the early 1950s. I imagine they were guiding for a deer hunt. Many thought he would lose the arm, and for days they didn’t know if he would be able to function on the farm any more.

To Wayne, knowing the things of the wilderness, of the deep woods, was something people of his generation were taught to believe was instrumental. Years before this accident, Wayne’s grandfather was on perhaps the last caribou hunt in New Brunswick. Fish and deer and other wildlife were as much a part of their diet as hamburger and fries might be for the kids today.

He hunted birds as a boy with a slingshot, and later on, deer with a rifle. He was an excellent shot with both. I have seen him walk along the roadways trying to find smooth stones to carry. He took many deer from the woods, and hunted every year. Even now, though he no longer hunts deer, he carries a slingshot with him along the old trails that meander near the main Souwest River, where he has his guiding camp (he has forty years’ experience as a guide, and has guided me to fish on more than one occasion), and he searches for birds in the popal or birch trees on late-fall afternoons. These are the best times to hunt for birds, just at dusk when the wind has died down and night is coming on. The birds rise to the trees and sit above the ground. You have to be careful, and stalk them, as you would any game, and, using a slingshot, you have to be able to get almost under them to fire.

Those trails and overgrown fields bring him back to a time that was simpler and, in many respects, kinder. To hit a bird with a slingshot and bring it down—which he did once on the fly—is great sportsmanship.

He was a hunter from the time he was a boy—and essentially it was what saved him, when he came back from the industrial cities of Ontario where he had gone to work. In those cities, and from his exceptional writing, you begin to get a glimpse of what it was like to be a Maritimer in the 1950s and ‘60s. We were left out of the equation, as certain of our third-class citizenship as any people of the day. Wayne didn’t have it easy. He was self-taught, did not finish high school, yet his strength of character and his writing ability earned him a large audience, much respect, and an honorary doctorate. As a young man trying to earn a living and help support his family by sending home money, he also learned to play golf as well as some men who had much more privilege and opportunity.

When he finally came back from those industrial cities, realizing that, as a Maritimer, those cities would never belong to him, he would go every day into the woods, with his rifle and knapsack. He said his main object was not to kill, but to simply do something that was so much a part of the natural world, after being so long immersed in the urban one. The short, cold autumn afternoons, with the sky filled with snow clouds and the world folding into itself for winter, made his spirit soar. He had to once again connect with who he was. He would take a few provisions, and carry his Winchester lever-action, and follow deer trails along rushing half-frozen brooks. Sometimes he would follow a deer for miles, through the dense spruce hills, and
catching sight of it decide not to fire. Up along the Cains River, he was able to be alone, with the scent of autumn on the foliage. There, he said, he gave up deer almost every other day, and said to himself: “No, that’s not the one.” That is, he was like many hunters—more compassionate than they are sometimes given credit for.

In fact, Wayne Curtis’s story about giving up deer doesn’t surprise me. I know many, many hunters who have done this. It was to him the least significant part of hunting. Like Jason, his son, who is a guide to bird hunters from the States, it is the quest that is important. The fact of being ethical is a stamp of honour.

One time, Wayne followed a deer for miles along the hills above a frozen river. It trailed away into the gloom of early dusk. There was a heavy snow in the woods, and Wayne had been waiting on snow to track. But the snow was deeper than usual at that time of year. Wayne’s hands were frozen raw on his weapon. The deer knew it was being followed, and tried to lose him. It was a big deer, with a ten-point rack. Wayne got to see it twice that day, and did not get it in his sights. He had seen this deer on many occasions before as well, but had not been able to track it successfully. This day, however, he was determined—determined to prove to himself that he had not lost himself in the mire of Ontario’s industry. He began to track this deer in early morning, and this went on for some hours, and sometimes Wayne was up to his knees in snow, and had to navigate hillsides slippery with frost and ice. When he caught up to it, late in the afternoon, the deer was exhausted and had stumbled on icy shore boulders, and was an easy shot.

Wayne, only about fifty yards away when he stepped out on the shore, raised his rifle and took the safety off. But didn’t take the shot.