I have hunted most of my life. And I have always been of two minds. I loved the hunt, but I never thrilled at the killing. Still, that was a part of it. And I knew an animal living in the wild, even if taken after only four years, was given a better life than cattle. I hunted most areas with the idea that I was getting out in nature with friends, and that was a good thing. In the last few years I have taken a hiatus. I don’t get back to my former ground in the fall of the year so much now. My guns remain in the cabinet, and I have .303 and .32 Winchester bullets in cases I have not opened. I have not drawn a bow in eight years. And though I love my New Brunswick home, I am often away. The days of my fall sojourns into the wilderness have become more a trickle than a flood. And I am reminded in the winter, when the sun is bright on the snow, and there are at times hawks in the Ontario sky, of days when the hunt was in my blood as much as anything I have ever done.
The first time I took my son John, some years ago, he was five years of age, and I brought my shotgun to do some partridge hunting.
It was November, but the day was bright and warm, and leaves were still on the trees. John, dressed in hunter’s orange from head to foot, looked like an advertisement for hunter safety, and we drove into a side road, along the coast, where I had taken a deer the year before. There we spent the afternoon, me with the old Coleman stove that once belonged to my father. I heated up hot chocolate and set up some targets in a field for John to shoot with a small .22. I helped him hold the rifle and fire, and though he didn’t hit many targets it was a kind of baptism, in a place and age where rifles and guns of all sorts are now in question. (I know a famous writer of wilderness tales who is terrified of rifles and the very wilderness he writes about—which is perhaps how things even out in this life.) But the main aspect of all of this was safety—and as much as I would have liked to have seen a partridge, it was not as important for us as taking a few practice shots.
Last year, the day after we drove the Maliseet hunters out to the village, my son and I went back to those hills. There was a good deal of snow, and the sky was blue and cold. John is now twenty-one years old and taller than his old man, who used to carry him on his shoulder across half the world when his mom and I were young.
The deer were moving—and we went to the road I had wanted to the afternoon before. I have put a scope on my .32 Winchester and my son John uses it. We arrived at 8:49 in the morning, walked to the brook, and realized it had made ice. We stood there no more than twenty minutes, on the other side of the chop where we were the day before. I knew it was only a matter of time. And a little four-point buck came walking toward us. I did not raise my rifle, and I told John nothing—that is, it was up to him. The buck turned, jumped high across the frozen water, and John fired as it went up toward the road our truck was parked on.
I showed him how to dress it, we hauled it up the bank in midmorning, and we drank strong, dark tea I made on the old Coleman stove. We took a picture for posterity—a simple moment between father and son.
So I have done what I said I would do, and it is not important if I hunt again.
I do not think that those I have met in Australia or other places know what snow means to the Canadian psyche and how much a part of us it has become. That there is in our very being the North Land, Strong and Free, I am not so sure any more. But the pulse it gives us is still a wild one. It is also a hot-blooded one. I have been out in nights of 35-below and lived, and so have those I have spoken about in this text. I am still amazed and gladdened by what men of the north woods can do, how they are self-reliant like few people. I have known enough men to know that there is enough credit and discredit to go around. Those who blame the English or the French or the First Nations for the problem of game management, etc., will never know the truth—that all men are countries and nations unto themselves.
We meet a new nation each time we stare into someone’s eyes.
This fall they took a large moose at Peter’s and Les’s camp. Once again their expertise lucked in. I don’t know any of my other friends who got a moose licence this year. I am away from the hunt now, and it is almost as if I have abandoned it, or it has abandoned me. I still know enough about it all, however, to know I would be able to once again take deer or moose if I put my time in.
Last year was the first year in many that David Savage didn’t get his deer. He tells me that he doesn’t care that much now. There is still enough fire in his voice when he gets to speaking about it all, though, that I know he knows he will hunt again. But so many of my hunting friends are wary of the rules and the laws, and the scent of officialdom on everything, and the “bucks only” tag that good hunters feel is a damage to the woods in the end.
Guns are now registered, and a special permit is needed to buy bullets. Some who refuse on principle to do this—and there is a principle involved—find themselves unable to hunt when the weather changes up.
My friends are growing older as well. When David Savage (and I’ve seen him pole a canoe down the Norwest with a broken leg) goes out now in his canoe to take birds from the gravel along the shore, or to spot a buck crossing with the light of the lowering sun on its back, he can remember more hunts than he probably has left. It has been fun, but someday it will be over. And with almost every drift of the canoe, and every jab of the pole, he can remember other times, other hunts, and the voices of men and women who are no longer here. His father, who died recently, poled this river before him for forty years, and so did his uncles and the fathers of his friends. He remembers the little doe hiding in the swale and a buck coming behind her to butt her up with his antlers so she would move and be safe. And seeing this, he couldn’t fire.
This is a fine memory and important, because it shows that the animals, though not like a Disney creation, are still, all in all, a creation of God, able to live and breathe and anticipate, and deserve our understanding and respect.
David asks me if I will hunt again, now that my son John has taken his first deer, and I always say sure, though my guns more often stay in the cabinet, like Wayne Curtis’s. Peter McGrath, too, is getting older, fifty-four now. I remember him in his teens, and as a young man, hunting and fishing alone along the little Souwest, a place of wilderness, salmon, deer, and bear, where he would fish and hunt from dawn, and get out of the woods after dark.
I think sometimes he has grown old hunting, and I am sure he knows that someday others will take his place. His beard is now greying, and he is not as young as he once was—though still and all a capable man. He still works in an industry where men use their muscle and blood to live, and grow old fast.
But he might prove me a liar, Peter, for even on the hottest summer days, he will travel eighteen miles upriver on his old three-wheeler to find a pool, and he can still shoot moose on a dead charge at sixty feet. Which not many have the guts to do. But then again, many people of the Miramichi would do and have done the same.
I have been surrounded all my life by men who are, for the most part, common men, and who are, for the most part, generous and noble and have in their hearts a life force that is undeniably proud.
The greatest hunt, I think, is from the canoe. I ask David about this, and he says it is. He tells me that he doesn’t mind tracking, and tracking in snow comes naturally to him and he is able to do it well. But still and all, the canoe is one of the best ways to hunt.
My brother Bill built me a new cedar canoe last year. This is great for me, to get a canoe built by my brother, after the old canoe that I had for twenty years was—well, let’s just say “misplaced.”
Bill and his Micmac friend Kenny Francis of Big Cove started building canoes a while ago. Ken’s people, of course, are masters, and Ken has built canoes from birchbark. But now he too is building cedar.
I plan to hunt along those stretches of that river I have fished, just once—caring nothing but for the experience of doing it, whether I see anything or no. When the day is bright and cool, and shadows of the trees lean against the water, and now and again an osprey is in the sky. A deer might come down to the river as you pole. And if it doesn’t, so what? Many of the old-timers did this—there are hundreds of pictures of men transporting game back from the kill in a canoe. But the age has moved on, and the idea of being that much a part of the world is somehow no longer in fashion.
The men I have hunted with, and known since I was a child, have grown older, just as I have. In some respects I would not be able to tell the difference between them and a picture of hunting guides from the last century. During October and November their eyes are as sharp and beards as coarse as those of many old caribou guides from camps set up in 1905. They have lived the same kind of life, and in many ways expected no more from it. Some, like my poet friend Eric Trethewey, have lived lives probably at times harder and at least every bit as dangerous. To read Trethewey’s essay “On Drowning” is to experience a small but brilliant glimpse into this world.
All of them have lived lives as worthy as the lives of anyone I have ever met. Most of them know animals as well as anyone I have spoken to, and have as much respect for them. I would trust any man I have mentioned in this text to speak with as much wisdom about the woods as anyone in the world. I said in my fishing book that someday, in some way, the world will move on, and the river will no longer be ours. That I am sure is true. But I am glad to have been a part of this generation when it was ours.
From: For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down
Bines had told his son this story. It was just before Willie went to bed. Bines was sitting, facing his son, with his huge hands folded near Willie’s knees. Every now and then Bines would touch those knees with his hands, and draw them away delicately.
It was a story about a deer and how it outsmarted a hunter. It was a story of the woods, of gloom and darkness, of autumn ending and winter coming on.
“This happened a long time ago,” Bines said. “There was an old deer, who had been in many battles in many ruts, and this was its ninth year. It had been cold all autumn, and the trees were naked and raw. Far off it could see smoke from the hunter’s house, rising in the sky. It had lost its strength—this old buck—and kept only one doe, who had a small fawn. The afternoons were half-dark and winter was coming on hard—and the hunter kept coming—the hunters always keep coming.”
Bines looked over at Ralphie and smiled, and Ralphie nodded.
“The big deer didn’t have no friends. He usually travelled alone. But he saw all the other deer being killed, one by one. And though he gave them other bucks advice—gave them advice—they didn’t follow it.
“So all the other deer was killed, one by one. But the hunter who tracked him—who tracked the old buck in the snow—was smart as any hunter. The buck knew this, and wanted to keep him away from the doe and her fawn if he could. He was an old deer and the doe was young. So the big buck decided to draw the hunter to himself—and each day the food was more and more scarce, and each day it was colder. And each day it led the hunter farther and farther from the cabin.
“The puddles were frozen and the trees were naked, and the sky moved all day long—”
Jerry touched the boy’s knees lightly again and smiled.
“Every day the hunter would get closer—get closer to the doe. But the buck had a plan, which it had learned from living so long. It would always show itself to the hunter at daylight and lead him on a chase throughout the whole day. The hunter could never catch up to it. At the end of every day when the hunter came to the river the buck wouldn’t be there. The buck always disappeared—and its tracks disappeared, as if it had flowed away.”
“Where?” the boy asked.
“The hunter didn’t know—didn’t know. No one did. The hunter too was tired. He was a tired man. Each day he got up earlier. And remember—each day he wanted deer meat for his family. So he was only doing what he had to. Had to do there. Each day he concentrated on the buck—each day he followed the tracks to the river. Each day he found nothing there.
“And each day his children were hungry, his wife was sick. And each day the hunter was weaker and colder. And each day the big old buck had allowed the little doe and its fawn to live another hour, another night.”
Jerry looked about the room, and the boy smiled timidly.
“The buck was old and tired but so was the hunter. The hunter had a bad hand and had wrapped it in his leg stockings. His eyes were fine and could pick out a small bird in a thick bush. He scanned the river every evening. The river was a wild river and had just made ice—a wild river there, but the ice was thin.
“One day after a heavy snowfall the hunter found himself deep in the woods—the sky had cleared, the stars was coming out—the hunter had been following the buck for many hours. It was hours I guess he had followed the buck that day.
“There wasn’t a sound when the hunter come to the river.
“The day was solid and still and he cursed to think he had lost it again. Lost that buck there again. Now the stumps were covered and everything was quiet. Afternoon was almost ended—and night was coming on—and that’s when he saw the doe. She was making her way along the riverbank, and he could just make out her brown hide by a tree. She was coming right toward him. It was almost dark. She hadn’t seen him, and she was leading her fawn toward him up an old deer trail. The fawn behind her.
“So the hunter felt he must use this chance, and he knelt and aimed and waited. Everything was still. He cocked his old rifle and was about to fire—about to shoot it, you know. But then of course everyone knows what happened.”
Bines paused and lit a cigarette. He smiled and touched the boy lightly on the knee once more.
“What happened?” Ralphie asked.
Bines drew on the cigarette and looked about.
“Everyone knows what happened,” Bines said. “It has been passed down from generation to generation to all the smart deer in the woods.”
“What happened?” Willie asked.
“The hunter aimed his rifle, and suddenly the ground moved—the ground under him—and the buck come up, from its hiding place under the snow, right under the hunter’s feet—under his feet—everyone knows that—and snorting and roaring ran onto the river. The doe turned and jumped away, and led her fawn to safety.
“And the hunter made a mistake, mistake there—hunters always do sooner or later—I mean make a mistake there. He was so angry he didn’t think straight.
“‘I got you now,’ he yelled, and he ran onto the river too.
“Now, that river could hold the buck, and it could hold the hunter. But it could not hold both together. And the buck turned and stood, waiting for him to come further out. The old buck never moved. And if he was scared he never showed it.
“And when the hunter got close the buck smiled—and the ice broke, and both of them went together—down together into the wild rapids—clinging to each other as they were swept away. And this story was passed down. It’s a passed-down story.
“Now the end is going to come—in one fashion or another,” Bines said, softly and again he turned to Ralphie and smiled. “We all know, the end will come. You either face your hunters or run from them.”