Facing the Hunter (6 page)

The September days lately have been too warm, as well, and any warmth discourages movement. Still, moose are killed.

The first moose taken down start arriving at the forest rangers’ station to be registered as early as nine o’clock on the first day.

Many people who don’t get their moose the first day get agitated, feeling they have missed their chance—especially if other hunters in their area have already been lucky. Sometimes a person will leave a very prime place to go to a poor one, simply because he has talked himself into bolting, and so he spends his hunt in the cab of a truck moving back and forth from one spot to another. Sometimes a man will luck in, even then, and be able to see a moose on the road. Also, people who hardly ever hunt deer will put
in for a moose draw and have little idea of where they are going. The idea of getting a moose becomes, for some New Brunswickers, an obligation of citizenship.

Many who hardly go hunting at all will have been in on a moose hunt at least once. It is a rite of passage, but also an affirmation of tradition, and a signal that this tradition is one that is respected by both men and women.

There are other reasons for going. For women, one reason is to be kind to their husbands by pretending to like the adventure. To put up with his nonsense. And they do. However, it seems to me more women go moose hunting than deer hunting. I mentioned earlier that the deer is looked upon as the most graceful and wonderful animal, and perhaps more women think that killing them is a crime. However, the moose isn’t afforded this particular dispensation. It is considered by many people to be clumsy and ugly (why this is considered by some to be a prerequisite to its destruction still baffles me). But in all seriousness, the moose is just as graceful. Still, for whatever reason (and the size of the animal and the quantity and quality of meat is certainly one), moose are hunted by many non-hunting New Brunswickers.

Though there are many experienced hunters in the woods, there are many others there, at this time of year, who have rarely fired a rifle. This is actually something that is looked upon with a good deal of graciousness by the regular hunter. At times, however, those who do not know what they are actually doing, or hunting, can make a mess of things.

“I will tell you how that goes,” a friend once told me. “I had a lad come in, on Sunday before the hunt. He had
not hunted moose before and had rarely hunted deer. And never hunted deer successfully. He wanted to make a good impression, which of course is a common mistake, and something he did not need to do. The thing is, you can know this in a second. Anyway, I had scouted out a place near one of the lakes up on the Renous, and I took him in there Monday morning, to set camp, do a bit of scouting, and get acquainted with where he would be. I had a tree stand set up along a good spot. There were moose there for sure. By Monday night everything was fine. We had a good camp and had some solid signs of more than one bull—I had my three-wheeler and rope, an axe and pulley, and we had sighted in his .306 rifle, before we got to the area, because he had just bought a new scope.

“‘This is the place to be,’” he said, beaming in delight.

“‘Yes,’” I told him, “‘I think we’ll luck out in here.’”

“By Tuesday morning he was telling me how he had heard that there were great moose on the Bartibog. Yes, I told him, there were great moose on the Bartibog—and it was a fine and wild place to hunt, but we were here, and this was a great place as well. By supper hour that night he was obsessed with seeing the Bartibog.

“‘I would just like to have a look at it,’ he said. I told him we were about fifty miles away, and what was the use of going all the way downriver to the Bartibog where other hunters already were? We should concentrate on hunting where we were. But that did not convince him, and by Wednesday afternoon we had pulled up stakes and gone down to the Bartibog River, and on the last day before the hunt tried to find a place to set camp far in behind
the Gum Road. The next two days we wandered about the Bartibog region fromthe Gum Road to Oyster River looking for moose, while hearing shots far away. By Friday night he was certain he would like to go back to our original spot. Now that we had wasted two days and four tanks of gas. So back we went the next morning. Two bulls had been taken fifteen minutes from our campsite, but as you might guess neither one by us.”

I have been hunting moose since I was twenty. When I was young, and heard the stories of great deer hunts, I thought that deer hunting was the finest hunting achievement. But after my first moose hunt I changed my mind. For the most part, large moose have no natural predators in the woods here. Of course wolverines did at one time range this far south, and there are stories of wolverines climbing trees and ambushing moose by jumping on their backs. There is an increase in coyote now, and a full-grown male black bear is nothing to fool with. Still, a large, healthy bull moose is pretty formidable. It is wrong-headed to say they are stupid just because they are big enough to ignore you. In fact, many people speak about the moose having an instinct that surpasses that of deer. And if you are in close proximity to a bull moose in rut, they are as dangerous as any animal.

Unlike the caribou, that moved out and were slaughtered away with the encroachment of man, moose show a familiarity with us that allows them a closer proximity.

My good friend Peter McGrath touched a cow moose with the tip of his rod to get it to move along out of a pool, and David Savage touched one with the butt of his gun, when hunting deer.

Although this is true, they are still a very dangerous animal during the rut, which starts at hunting season. My
youngest brother, when he was about seventeen, was followed for two miles by a bull moose when he was hunting partridge. The moose stayed parallel to him, just off the woods road, snorting and tossing its head. Finally, as he got close to the camp, the moose broke off at a run, its huge rack tossing up as he crashed back into the woods.

Sometimes one thinks of them as almost human.

In Alden Nowlan’s poem “The Great Bull Moose,” the moose takes on the quality of humanity, or a Christ figure, or, as some say, Nowlan himself, who at times had a right to feel persecuted. The old bull moose comes down from “the purple mist of trees on the mountain” and is a gigantic solitary figure among the puny mortals who surround and eventually kill him. And although it verges on sentimentality it is a powerful poem, an indictment not so much of hunters as of those who would kill something because of fear. Those who would kill a moose for simple pleasure, or trap or net or snare one, or kill it to sell the meat for profit show the very worst of human nature.

When I was in my early twenties my brother and I went on a moose hunt far up the Little Souwest, into an area neither of us knew well but where we had heard there were great moose. This was the area I had heard about since I was a child. We were sure we would get our moose that long-ago year. It was an area of black spruce and cedar swamp, an area so thick with trees that daylight diminished twenty yards into the woods. Here big moose roamed, far away from man.

Each of us had grown up hunting, had some experience with bird and deer hunting, and my brother knew the
woods as well as many his age. But we had not scouted, as we would in later years, and though we thought we did, we didn’t have the best rigging. As would be said of many inexperienced moose hunters: “We weren’t rigged out.” The largeness of the animal did not register, as it would in later hunts. In later hunts everything we didn’t do right on this hunt would be taken care of. So this was a learning trip. We carried .303 rifles with 180-grain bullets—bullets both fast and heavy-hitting.

We arrived on the evening before the hunt. The days were hot, which is an unfortunate condition of the time of year the moose hunt is held. We had a stand twenty feet up a bedraggled spruce, and we watched a lonely moose trail from dawn until dark that first day, now and again trying a call that wasn’t answered.

Our stand, such as it was, was dangerous—a few boards placed over some branches, with our heads poking through. Any slip from that would result in a fall and perhaps serious injury, or the rifle that we carried in our hands going off. As I said, the young have no special distinction, except being young.

I remember to this day: just after sunup, as we got into the stand, a particular grey, dried-out clump of grass far down the trail near a small shale bank made it look, when it moved in the slight breeze, as if a moose had just stepped onto the trail and was moving toward us. My brother raised his gun to fire—and then put it down, catching on to the illusion. This is far from being a rookie mistake or unusual. In the thick, overgrown trails, a change in the wind can at times make one think something is there that is not. It is, in fact, all a part of the hunt.

On the second day, our uncle (my father’s brother) arrived—and he had better knowledge of where to hunt and how to call. He told us to move our position a mile or so, in toward a swampy part of ground, and he began, at intervals of roughly ten minutes, to give the grunting call of a mature bull, which is not only different from the long trail of a cow moose but different, too, from the quick bleat of a young bull.

Late on the second day we had an answer far up the black spruce hill, a bawling of a cow moose, which is the eeriest sound in the forest and makes one think, in those black-shrouded pathways, of the ghosts of old lumbermen. Some say the cow’s call is what made our lumbermen believe in ghosts like “the Dungarvan Whooper.”

I have never heard anything remotely approaching it, and I cannot describe the chill it first gives you as it comes down to you, reverberating through the old growth of woods:

“Owwwwwwwwhooooooooooooummmph.”

Its reverberating quality is what a moose caller tries to produce, with as much authenticity as humanly possible. The reverberation of both the bull and the cow cry is what makes them striking, and it is the woods itself that becomes a part of the fascinating thrill of the call, for the sound echoes and bounces from tree to tree, causing a bellow. At dark, and alone, that bellow is something to hear.

“That’s the cow,” our uncle said. “The bull will be around tomorrow.” That is, we were calling a mature bull call that would attract the female and upset the male. The male would respond to the challenge and come out at us; young bulls might come into the area as well. We went
back to the camp, and fried potatoes and bologna, ate back bacon and bread, and sat out on the porch.

But the third day was the hottest day of the hunt. Mosquitoes made their way back and forth from one ear to the other. The heavy jacket I had on, with high boots and Humphrey pants—I was dressed as I would be during late deer season—made me sweat all day. No call was answered, and at dinnertime, when we boiled up some water for tea and watched some spruce partridge walk in and out among some ferns, it looked as if we wouldn’t have any luck. My uncle began to tell us stories of other moose hunts he’d been on—how he was chased for a mile one day by a great bull who was in rut. As the day wore on our talk became sparser and more solemn.

At about three o’clock we started up the calls again. My uncle was a good caller. He mightn’t have been as grand a caller as the legendary Paul Kingston, or the Micmac who taught us the trick, but he was very fine, especially with the short huff of the bull.

But we didn’t get an answer—and three o’clock became four, and it seemed as if our preparedness and our strategy had not paid off. For at times those who are young have little strategy.

The old grown wood stretched out for miles above us, grey and solemn, where now and again in the far-off distance we would hear the sharp report of a .308 or the dull, heavy pack of a .306. This was the wood I had heard about all my life. It was older than I was by 2,000 years, and it looked upon me from its advantage as nothing more than a lonely passerby. It had heard Native boys as young as me
1,200 years before. It had heard the sounds of men in winter stalking game in the year 915.

And all the greatness of these men, and their deep understanding of this world, their songs, traditions, and those they had loved, had now passed away. The moss on the trees became shadowed, and ghostly curtains hung down, blowing a little in a nearly imperceptible breeze that told us we were in a living world, quite independent of who we were.

It was a solitary place, this woods, approaching evening, and we had a long way back to the camp, and then a longer way home.

That is what our minds were settled on ten minutes after our uncle’s last call, when suddenly, and seeming only a hundred yards or so away, came the mournful accepting call of the cow.

My brother turned, raised the old army-issue .303 British rifle, undid the safety, and right in front of us, no more than twenty yards away, came a 900-pound sixteen-point bull. He had not called at all. He’d come to the cow, had heard us, and was sure he had a rival. A rival he could make short work of. My brother fired quickly, and he needed to, or one of us might have been dead. What I think of, in retrospect, is Dolokhov’s comment on duelling in
War and Peace
. Duelling, he tells young Rostov, is like bear hunting. “Everyone fears a bear … but when you see one your fear’s all gone, and your only thought is not to let him get away.”

A friend related a story to us about a moose hunt back in the early 1990s, when he was scout for a couple who hadn’t hunted moose before. They were far down in swamp
land off Renous, “a bugger of a place to get a moose out,” he related. Finally a call brought out the cow. The cow went down, mortally wounded, and just then the large bull appeared, came out at them. Our friend said:

“We had our moose, and I didn’t want to kill him, but I had to ward him off. Sometimes he circled us no more than twenty yards away—blowing steam, his rack seeming to quiver with rage, the hump on his back as shiny as oil. We only had one bullet left. If I had to fire I wanted to make it count, because he’d certainly be able to kill one of us, if not more. I didn’t want to unless I had to—so it was a difficult thing. I was with a man and woman who had not been in the woods before—and I understood the bull’s rage and did not want to kill it, I felt for it and the cow—but still I had to keep my sports alive.”