The Hunt
“It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are.”
— e.e. cummings
The enormous beast hadn’t seen me yet. I discreetly slathered a bit more mud on my face, in my hair too. I crawled closer on scraped elbows. Stop. Just stay immobile for a while. Okay, it was feeding again. I crept closer still. As the early morning dew soaked through the knees of my trousers and the sleeves of my jacket, I felt my heart pounding. Patience. I had to wait for my chance.
It was still there, unaware of my stalking presence. I had got to get to the next shrub undetected. Ever so slowly, I inched along like a spying snake. Made it. The magnificent creature looked like it wanted to flee. No, false alarm. Phew! Shaking, I calmed myself and gently pulled an arrow from my quiver. I licked the feathers for luck as I notched the arrow onto the twisted and greased bowstring. The wait for a broadside shot began.
I observed my prey from a bushy hideout. After interminable minutes it finally moved to present its flanks to me. He sure was a big fat one. I drew my bow carefully to full extension and took aim. There’s where those hours of target practise would matter. My release was perfect. Bull’s eye!
Darn, how did that squirrel get away? My astounded nine-year-old eyes couldn’t believe it. I hit it dead on and it ran away as if nothing happened! Now where was my arrow? I finally located it and examined it with satisfaction, especially the feathers that were hard earned by plucking the tail of a sparrow I caught with an old crate pried up with a stick on a string. That bird sure flew crooked without those two feathers, poor thing. My thumb rubbed the bent beer-cap point that encircled the goldenrod shaft — not sharp enough, I guess. Next time maybe I could figure out how to tie a nail to the tip.
So no squirrel; what would I eat then? I thought I’ll head over to the swamp to catch a few frogs. After gathering birchbark and twigs to start a fire, eight miniature frog legs got a cooking. Still hungry. Might as well go fishing. Good thing I swiped those two pins from Sis’s doll’s diaper. Tied to my kite string, they should do the trick. I uncovered a few shy worms from beneath rocks, seized some mushroom-sucking slugs too, and then headed to the nearby lake. Five sunfish and two perch later, I was back at the fire ring to finish my lunch. The leaves looked like good salad. Nah, way too bitter. Let’s try these — even worse. I just ate sour grass as usual. I like those lance-shaped leaves; they taste like lemon. Especially good with fish. For dessert, I gathered some of those little blue wild pears. But maybe Mom had some leftovers of her world-famous chocolate cake. Better head home and check it out!
“Hi Mom! Can I have a piece of cake?”
“Where the heck were you for lunch? I looked all over for you!”
“Oh, I had lunch in the forest.” Pride surely radiated from my gleaming face.
“What?”
“Caught some frogs and some fish and ate sour grass and wild pears.”
I was the king of the world. Tarzan even.
“Don’t you get lost!”
“Don’t worry Mom, I always hike up the hill, so to come back I just have to go down to hit the road.”
“Okay, here’s your cake, and after you’re finished don’t forget to do a good job on your potatoes!”
Every day I had to peel a seventy-five pound bag of potatoes for dad’s restaurant. A good job meant peeling the potatoes thinly. Last time I tried a shortcut, Mom made me whittle down all the thick peels and cooked us mashed potatoes. It took me two extra hours!
That’s how my life as an adventurer all started. Mind you, I cringe when I now think of all the poisonous plants I could have “tested” as a child. Good thing I hated mushrooms! My main staple on these outings consisted of those “little wild pears,” which I recognized many years later as being juneberries or serviceberries, of the genus Amelanchier spp. This is actually a most important plant for wilderness survival, since its bushes grow wild in the middle of nowhere and are widely distributed. Of course, the lance-shaped sour grass of my youth is sheep sorrel, Rumex acetosella.
At the time my family was settled in the tiny village of Spragge, on the northern shore of Lake Huron; Dad had set up a restaurant there to profit from the mining boom of the sixties. He loved me a lot — maybe too much. To him I was perhaps a bit of a performance monkey. For example, he had enrolled me at school at only four years old, convincing me I could easily keep up to the older kids. I believed him and did.
I was quite mischievous as a youngster, my idea of fun being cutting my siblings’ hair very short to “improve their looks” just before the announced family photograph, taking Dad’s brand new watch apart with a screwdriver and hammer to figure out what made it tick, or “sharpening” Dad’s chef knives on rocks as a surprise after overhearing that he whetted them on a stone (and then hacking the wooden bed posts to test the results). So it’s no wonder that, with me as leader of her seven kids, Mom would order us to “go play outside.” And I did. I became an expert at making and using a slingshot — the best were gleaned from red tractor inner tubes — and also most enjoyed tossing rocks with a running-shoe-tongue sling such as David used in the Bible. Let’s just say that many Goliath telephone posts bore my scars, and the local police owned a huge collection of my confiscated weaponry.
Just as I hit high school my family moved into town, first to Sudbury for a few years, then Toronto. So I lost my precious contact with nature, concentrating instead on other interests. Individual sports caught my fancy, mostly weight lifting, wrestling, judo, karate, and bicycle racing. Although I wasn’t an elite athlete, I did perform fairly well, having won local competitions in all of these disciplines. On later adventures, my physical fitness would sure prove to be handy.
At the age of thirteen I developed a great passion for magic. I ate prestidigitation for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I was convinced that my career would be that of a professional magician, and I attended any and all available conventions. As an apprentice under the likes of the amazing James Randi and the late Derek Dingle, I learned the tricks of the trade. Enough so that “The Great André” (there is no market for a magician with a humble moniker) could pay his way through university by performing at kids’ parties.
It wasn’t until I entered university at the tender age of sixteen that nature would summon me once more. The click occurred while reading Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island. The engineer Cyril Smith in that story profoundly impressed me, for he could solve all problems encountered while away from modern society. I decided to follow in his footsteps and committed to avoiding dependence on stores to fulfill my basic needs. Discovering nature’s magic secrets would become my life-long obsession.