Facing the Hunter (2 page)

I was sixteen and in the woods on a logging road. It was the fall of 1966. The twilight had come, a flush of scattered red over the trees on my left; trees naked and subdued by approaching night, and the smell of snow clouds from the northeast. There was the smell of deer here, too—not an exceptional claim made by anyone who has spent some time in the wild.

I had borrowed my father’s car, ostensibly to visit a friend, and had come to hunt partridge in the place I knew. I had snuck rifles into the woods from the time I was fourteen. I couldn’t help myself. It was here where I felt most alive, and for years this feeling complemented every trip into the woods I took.

The fields, with their pit props and eight-foot or four-foot-length pulp, stretching for acres, and then the woods itself, with trails leading to brooks and brooks leading on down to rivers. The smell of deer on fallen leaves that came to you in the cooling wind of autumn—the greatest of Canadian seasons.

That day, I had a peep-sight single-shot .22, which my father had bought when he was sixteen, carried in my right hand with the barrel down. It was a nice little rifle, with the sights so refined that just the glint of the front sight at the bottom of the peep could take a bird’s head off at fifty yards. I was using .22 long shells, which my father insisted, and rightly so, was a waste of money for partridge.

Over on my right beyond the darker spruce I could hear the water, succumbing to the night itself. I knew there was an island in the middle of that water, for I had been here a number of times fishing trout in the summer. Since the early summer I had wanted to hunt here, because of the gravel along the roads and the stands of birch trees. I soon spotted the partridge I was after, in a tree some distance away. I left the road, got as close to it as I dared, and, raising my rifle, I fired, and it plummeted to the ground without a sound.

I listened for a moment to the approaching night, and the sound of the shot. Smelled the powder fading away into the twilight. The air had a sweet scent to it, of musk and rut trials, and there was a loneliness to it; and in all the world there is nothing that can measure the kind of solitude one feels from this peculiar scent in the woods at twilight—it is sanctifying, and no matter how deep the woods, it is never savage, but primal. Even then I knew that “savage” is a name applied in principle by those who believe they are not—that is, the word “savage” never seems to apply to oneself, unless in some kind of mockery. I knew this before I was sixteen, and though it was a peculiar kind of knowledge to have, it would, in years to come, measure my acceptance by and tolerance for others. It was the beginning, even though I did not know this, of a lifelong balancing act and debate, between those who dictate what nature holds for us, and those who know what nature is.

Rousseau used the phrase “Noble Savage” to imply a grace that his own class of men did not need. At least in Paris, before the revolution. But it was not used by Rousseau as a compliment (even if he, and others, thought so). It was,
in all its grandiose urbanity, an assumption that lesser men were worthy of the application.

The First Nations could be savage, then, but in a way Rousseau felt they were not, as he was, human beings.

My ideas of the savage land have led to this conclusion. Still, it implies one truism: the natural world is a world populated with danger, and a struggle for life and death. That does not mean we should exclude any other “type of life” in this assessment. Here the struggle is more marked. If you break an ankle in here, or down in there—or up on the Souwest, or on the north branch of the Sovogle—and if you are alone, and if no one knows that you have come into this wild place, you are almost certainly in a bad spot. Hunters know this. So do fishermen.

That twilight day years ago when I was still in school, I looked into the birch stands for the partridge that had lifted themselves from the ground at twilight and I soon had two birds.

The partridge were both birch partridge, not the coarser and less appetizing and ganglier spruce. Their feathers were soft, their heads graceful. Those little places of sanctuary did not afford them protection, and I always felt bad about that.

I was off the road about seventy yards when I shot them, and came back out to find that I was at a fork in the muddy, silent road.

The logging road was filled with dark ruts and stilled autumn water. The coming of winter, all right. I did not know the woods as my ancestors had, nor would I. Hell, half my uncles spent the first part of their lives in woods that most people would consider complete wilderness,
and were sent on missions when thirteen or fourteen that perhaps one boy in five hundred could accomplish today. Some would think a house five miles away was a community. I am not diminishing the boys of today for not being able to do this—but I refuse to diminish my uncles for the prowess they possessed.

I carried the birds by the feet, quite content in my accomplishment but also realizing that I was here through half-forgotten instinct more than need—the instinct that drove me into the woods (and still does) once the air freshened and the cool nights came. That is, each year the pilgrimage I make to hunt is one I take very seriously. It is not a game, or a sport, really. It is more than either if done right. It is a way of life.

So there is only one way to do it right and a thousand ways to do it wrong. You might start by knowing something about the land and the animals you are hunting.

The first of my ancestors arrived here in 1705, and I have an ancestor who was the first white woman born on the Gaspé at that same time. The links to this world, on both sides of my family, are long. A little later on, in 1746, relatives of that woman born on the Gaspé came over after the Battle of Culloden, and in 1847 other ancestors, my Irish ones, came drifting up the river during the potato famine. My wife’s family came perhaps on the very same vessel that brought my Irish ancestors. Her great-greatgrandfather lived in a cave up along the Bartibog that first winter, and made do with hunting.

My people on the Gaspé were farmers and woodsmen
and seamen. One of my great-great-uncles operated a schooner and traded in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, another bootlegged rum. They hunted caribou and bear, moose in the fall. They fished for salmon and planted out gardens. Getting to town was an occasion three or four times a year. Even when I was a boy my grandmother would go months between visits to places that had sidewalks.

My uncles on my mother’s side went into the woods to work from the time they were ten years old. I say this to show that my affiliation, my heritage, runs back three centuries now, and most of my ancestors have depended, in one way or another, on the land for their welfare and survival. They have been historians, and writers, painters, and professional men as well. My father was honorary chief of two reserves, and I have First Nations nieces and nephews.

We are the first generation in my family to have anything more than high school education, and before us only a few had that. But we might realize that Prince Charles was the first of the Windsors to receive a B.A.

At first, most of the educated in our family were women, as education was always thought of as domestic, and somehow attached to the Bible. The idea of a man having an education when he had arms and a back was slightly preposterous—to the women as well as, or more so than, the men. If you didn’t have two good arms, how could you work a farm? That is, the women took the idea of a strong man very seriously. The inclination to think that women were looking for education and ideas in a man is a notion born of the last generation, the first that went to university in any number, many of whom gave up everything to do with their parents and grandparents. Only lately have they
started, in late middle age, to drift back to what they relinquished. (The back-to-the-landers, I will later show, are a different case.)

My paternal grandfather came with a degree in music from the London Conservatory. But before he died of diabetes, he had his own hunting and fishing lodge, and he was both an entertainer and a woodsman. In fact, most woodsmen are entertainers in one way or the other.

My mother’s father, a proud Scot, worked until he died; my grandmother was still doing a hard day’s work when she was eighty-five, and questioning me about Churchill’s reckless gamble in 1915 to try and take Constantinople. Their lives were as expansive and as hard as that of anyone who ever went to the gold rush, or travelled across the prairies by horse.

It was still this way when I became old enough to hunt. In some sections of our country it is this way still. What is wrong with this? Absolutely nothing. Of course I have written about it enough to know that some tend to make light of it.

“I have no desire to shoot a moose,” said a professor from Ottawa I once knew, offering the voice of definitive wisdom in the argument (which means that anyone really knowing enough about it, knowing how to do it enough to actually write about it, would be sanctioned and condemned as well).

I might have told him that a butcher’s hands were over the blood of the steak he was then enjoying.

Intellectuals believe they have the answers to all of today’s questions, well thought out. They are diplomatic in front of their own kind. So there is an unspoken lessening of one’s
humanity the farther you get from the intellectual centre, and I know people as far away from the intellectual centre as you could imagine.

So then many of my professor’s rank have ceded fishing as a benign and enlightened and intellectual pursuit of well-thinking, hearty, and well-meaning fellows, who might spout Yeats if afforded the time (of course not commercial fishermen), and made hunting a pariah worse than dogs of war. But in many respects they are exactly the same kind of pursuit. Between hunting and fishing there is a difference not of kind, but of degree, as Mortimer Adler would tell us. The pastoral intellectualization of fishing will do nothing to change that fact.

It seems this relegation is allowed without much reflection, even by some men I admire. My idea is that if you ban one activity, ban the other. If we are not willing to do this, one shouldn’t immediately put more value on a white-tailed deer than on a fifteen-pound salmon.

I was on high ground that day years ago, and the wind had stiffened, and I was walking back toward the car when I heard the crack of a branch on my right.

I turn and see a young buck (I think about a four-pointer) rushing out toward me, not even caring that I am there. At the very last instant he changes direction. Very startled, I hold my rifle up in protection, thinking he is going to rush into me. But he turns slightly, and bounds across the road in one leap and is gone in the tangle toward the river, and once again I am alone. The evening darkness and smell of fall and the soundless beauty of the darkening autumn world
surround us both. He came out of the bush and at me so quickly it seems as if I was dreaming it.

I am young but I am not foolish enough to turn my sights on him with a .22-calibre single-shot rifle at dark. So I simply stand where I am, on a slope toward my car in the approaching night, and watch him disappear. It is a startling, moving moment.

I wonder, though, why he was in such a hurry. Perhaps there was another hunter on the old overgrown road that this one intersected somewhere beneath my car. Perhaps the deer caught this hunter’s scent and turned and ran across in front of me.

Deer seem somehow ethereal and almost phantomlike. One could hunt them for days and not see them, only their hoofprints along a muddy lane, and then all of a sudden in late afternoon they stand before you. Suddenly they loom large in front of you when you least expect it.

The old logging road is now part of a highway going off to other places, and the animals have been pushed farther away. That little buck might have lasted into that winter or he might not have. There were three weeks of hunting season left, so his chances rose slightly with each passing day. But with each passing day, more hunters would come to make their claims, and the air would be crowded with the subtle scent of rifle fire. So it was an uneasy tradeoff. The number of hunters and weather in the hunt’s favour rose exponentially with the passing of time. The snow would come, as it did a day or two later, so he would be easier to track. (But only the best hunters, sure of themselves and the woods, would track him with success, for getting lost in the woods while tracking is easy.) There was
also his predilection at this time of year for making his scrapes and coming back in a rather obvious circle to check them, to see if a doe had come by and left her urine—which meant a chance at mating. Bucks become more insensible as their desire to rut crowds out everything else. They are not unlike humans in this regard. So any half-decent hunter can sit on a trail, or just off a trail, and wait.

If the buck lived he would likely have a bigger rack next year with more tines, be twenty or twenty-five pounds stronger. This would make him more of a target to some. For big deer, like big moose, are a prize, which makes the theory of “survival of the fittest” somewhat suspect and duplicitous. That is, what the deer would grow to protect him from any other predator would not protect him from the weakest of men with a rifle. In fact, he would finely fit into a category called “the big buck”—the legendary animal that all hunters, good or bad, young or old, hunt. That you go out with your father to hunt as a youngster, and the vision of which remains in your blood a lifetime. By his very nature, this big animal is a target and a symbol and a scapegoat all at the same time. A lord no longer a lord but a prize, like a doomed prince in a besieged castle. The trouble, for hunters at any rate, is that he is oftentimes smarter than that mythical prince. Deer have gotten away from a half dozen hunters in one day. Their scrapes, their tracks, and droppings are fresh in newly fallen snow, and through the muted numbing woods they are heard. But suddenly they stop, wait, and then move again, off in a direction not anticipated, and as silently as shadow slip away.

Cold, night dark, food scarce, coydogs, lynx, and eastern panther (as I say, it still exists), yet they are tenacious
in their God-given ability to survive. Deer qualify as one of the toughest animals in the world.