Facing the Hunter (11 page)

This was no one-upmanship. The little town was just the land extended. Until I was twenty-four, I could carry my rifle from my house into the woods for a deer hunt. It was not that Darren did not know the land—he did not know himself, and the land simply told him this. Sooner or later the land does.

Life went on. There were chores to be done, by people who had never done chores before. They spoke of sharing, but it was contractual, not emotional. It seemed to me there was more love in the place when Uncle Tate lived alone and fired off his shotgun at his visitors as a joke.

By January there were arguments. That month a young man got a job in town. Another went away—and then another.

I met Stevie coming out along the back road one day. She was carrying a saucepan, with nothing in it. Someone had told her there were winter berries to collect, but she had found none, for there were none. We stood and talked for a moment in the freezing gale of late afternoon.

“We are going to have a really fine farm,” she told me. I was so sorry for her at that moment. She had come to womanhood in what kind of city, to feel so left out, like so many of my generation? Cast out, of something. I’m not even sure what. All she had known was concrete. Why had this happened? What sad turning away from her family did she have, in what hot, vacant, urban apartment or house tucked between two asphalt roads? An argument over the war—or a parent trying too hard to buy her love, or loving her too little? Did they even know where she was any more? She was still a child, really.

“So you aren’t going home?” I said.

“Oh—no—no!” She smiled. “I’ll never go.”

It was a victory for her to say this. I might have told her that I knew a family who had arrived at this little place where she was now in 1840, and lived their first winter in a cave about a mile from where we were talking, losing three children. I might have told her that my relatives came over after the Battle of Culloden, and one walked
from Pennsylvania in 1805 and settled up on the Norwest. To keep her chin up.

I discovered at that moment that there is something about the land—you look unnatural on it if you are unnatural, you look greedy on it if you are, lazy if you tend to be. If you are frightened of guns or wildlife, the land will inform you. Nervous on the water, the water will let you know. There is no escaping who you are once you are here, on the Miramichi—or anywhere else, for that matter. It is what the First Nations saw of us. It is what I saw of her—she with the saucepan with nothing in it.

In late January another one of them went and got a job. He worked at a garage in Barryville repairing snowmobiles and would come home every night late. He supported this little family of outcasts by doing a job hundreds of men did without complaint, simply because life required that he do it.

Then he found a girl in Neguac and moved out.

So there were only Stevie and her mentor, Darren, left. They were the last. And in that winter, living alone, they found that the dream had somehow disappeared. But what dream was it? I don’t think any of them, including Darren, really knew.

Darren left one afternoon, saying he would be back—that he was going into town for supplies. His poncho on a hook in the corner near his leather hat assured Stevie of his return. But he did not come back. She waited by the window, his supper in the warming oven. He had become safe again, when being unsafe was no longer a game.

Stevie stayed by herself, looking out those porch windows, waiting for her friend. She made it until March.

Sometime about St. Patrick’s Day I saw her doing her crossword in the corner store. There was a storm outside and everything in the world was white.

She was happy, she said. The wood was drier, and people had made her welcome. She was working two nights a week in this store, selling cigarettes and Tampax. But she needed to take a course, she thought, and come back next year. Next year would be better. The terrible things in the world would be gone. Suddenly she reached up and kissed my forehead and squeezed my hand. She walked on, and I watched her go out of my life. It’s been almost thirty years.

The house is gone, and no one waits, and none of them has ever been back. They didn’t have much luck. For a while many of us might have believed a new world would come. Perhaps that’s what we’ve all been watching for, whenever we look up at the sky.

I walked beyond Uncle Tate’s land late last autumn. There had been two days of snow. I walked toward the hundredth new chop-down that has come since the mill started its new process, and then shut its doors for good. I carried my little Winchester .32—but I have not fired a rifle at a deer in a few years now. I trick myself into hunting by not hunting now. Usually I find a tin can to fire at, sight the rifle in, for next year.

My family—here for over two and a half centuries—is gone from the river, and in the summer the brooks babble to tell me so. My mother died in 1978, my father died ten years ago, and all the children have left. We have gone away, but we do come back. In a sense, once a part of the land, we can never leave. We didn’t become peace lovers, but we do love, fiercely, I suppose.

There is no town here now. A city sprawls with lights toward its destiny. The trees are muted and thrashed, as pockets of the forest no longer exist at all.

I walked toward the high ground beyond his house, next to the power lines. The ground was dug up that day, with fresh tracks and scrapes. In one of those tricks of fate I saw the old saucepan Stevie had used to collect her winter berries. It had been tossed up out of the dirt that had buried it for years. I wondered how her life had gone, and if she had ever found the place she wanted.

Then turning toward the chop, I saw a little doe. As I approached she made a heroic attempt to stand. Her left hind leg was caught in a coyote snare, and she was hunkered down beneath the snow and thrashed trees. All around and everywhere I looked the snow and earth had been torn up, where a gigantic battle had raged above Uncle Tate’s old farmyard. The night before the buck had stayed, to protect the doe in the snare from the coyotes. And he must have fought like hell. The coyotes—here almost as big as wolves—hadn’t been able to get to her. I do not know if the buck lived, but he had done the job given him. Like Uncle Tate with his wife, he didn’t know why she was caught up in the way she was. The world had betrayed them both: the snare cynically said that neither of them mattered. Still, the buck fought like a bastard. Never left his poncho on a nail.

I managed to cut the snare. She stood and bolted, cracking the limbs of some birch trees, and was gone, gone into what was left of a world that didn’t exist any longer.

I know two men who were hunting with an older man up on the Mullin Stream Road a few years ago. The older man shot at a large moose that came into the open. Believing he had missed, and feeling foolish that he had shot at it from such a distance when he had been told to wait—certain that he had made a laughingstock of himself—he wanted to go home, not just back to the camp.

“You can’t go,” one of the men said. “You have to find your moose.”

“I didn’t hit it.”

“Well, we can’t be sure, can we.”

Added to this was the sudden arrival of forest rangers asking for licences and interrogating them about why this man had shot right down the highway at an animal. It was a difficult position to be in, and the older man, who had bragged about his years of hunting, was now cast in a bad light. After the rangers had decided that it was a foolhardy more than a criminal act, they left. And when they had he
wanted, as quickly as possible, to be gone too. But the two men with him had an obligation to this animal. So the choices we make and must make were played out again. That is, these choices are played out in every office of the world every day of our lives. Sometimes we just forget that they are.

They took the older man to town, left him at his truck, and went back into the woods again. After a night of fitful sleep they got up at dawn and, in a patient fashion, searched the old spruce wood where the cow moose had run. They also searched all through the swampy area where the moose had most likely fled. They spent two days searching and didn’t find it. But one of the men, a Micmac friend of ours, was certain, because of the way the animal had turned, that it had been hit. And he was very uncomfortable leaving after two days, though he had to get back home to his own duties as a council elder. The shot should not have been taken in the first place. That the man didn’t stay to help them find the moose was neither here nor there—their obligation to the animal in question remained the same. The older man would most likely never hunt again, after such an event.

I know many who have given up hunting because of events such as this. Suddenly the idea comes over them that this is not a game, or a frolic, but a very serious thing. That no one should be glib about the way he hunts, or what he must do if an animal is wounded. The paramount reason for shooting at something is to kill it. That in itself is serious enough to demand an ethical shot. For instance, people I know would never think of leaving a wounded animal.

One year Peter McGrath, guiding an American bow
hunter after bear, had this experience as well. They had built a tree stand over bait—molasses and horseflesh—and were waiting. When the huge male showed, the man fired his arrow deep into its side, and the bear took off. They waited a moment, until the sound of the animal’s crashing and thrashing stopped. Then it was my friend’s duty to go after the wounded bear. The gentleman hunting it didn’t want to, he did not feel it was safe. He was right. It was not safe. So Peter climbed out of the stand and began to hunt for the animal.

Peter was on the ground alone, following a blood trail into a thicket. He would wait for the bear to weaken, yet he didn’t want it to suffer, so he wanted to shoot it as quickly as possible. He knew he was in danger doing this, and he knew it was expected of him. It was in the spring, and there was snow on the ground, and the trees were still naked. The bowman could take this carcass home to Pennsylvania and say he had killed a large black bear with a bow in the wilds of New Brunswick (a place, he might say, “way up in Canada”).

Well, first Peter had to find the animal and kill it with a .308. This is the kind of play-acting that disassembles the argument for hunting and truly legitimizes the points made by anti-hunting advocates. Peter finally saw the wounded animal and was able to shoot it. They dragged the animal down to the roadside and put it in the back of the truck. It was the last time Peter guided for bear.

“I’m not doing it for them no more,” was all he said.

We know that to kill wantonly is cruel, and worse, stupid—but to attack all hunting as being so misses what knowledgeable writers have to say about it.

Again I will mention Alden Nowlan, who grew up in Nova Scotia, and who wrote a poem about hunters and a bear. In his poem he asks us, why would this poor beast’s terror and suffering enliven someone? This is a good question to ask those who hunt, and all hunters must recognize this as a valid question, even if the hunt is a legitimate one.

There is a wealth of writing about this topic—the topic of what is cruel and why.

My good friend Eric Trethewey, one of the finest poets I have ever met, grew up as a boy, solitary, in the woods and hills of Nova Scotia over half a century ago. His games in those woods were ones that allowed him to bring meat to the table. He hunted rabbit and deer, trapped beaver in order to get money that was sorely needed—and there was one time when trapping a beaver literally saved his life, for, as he wrote in a brilliant essay, he traded that beaver pelt for a shotgun that saved his family from an attack by a deranged relative that very night.

But even if the concerns about cruelty are at times truly legitimate, Canadians have nevertheless seduced themselves into thinking that anything more than a notional understanding of the subject is barbaric; so their ignorance of hunting conforms to a standard disingenuousness.

In the movie
Surfacing
, based on the novel by Margaret Atwood, the terrible hunter kills a moose, while the compassionate proactive feminist takes him to task for it. What anyone who has ever hunted knows is that this character is not rigged out for hunting, and apparently no one on the film—director and actor included—had the faintest idea of how an animal is hunted or even poached, or at what time
of day or year it is accomplished. The scene is almost completely artificial, and yet fulfills the purpose of establishing instant culpability. Compare this to the brilliant hunting literature in Russia (Tolstoy), the United States (Faulkner), or in any other culture where the hunt is allowed to manifest itself as what it is, and one will see how small we have allowed ourselves to become for the sake of an established academic propriety. It is not that I disagree with the scene in
Surfacing;
I simply don’t believe it.

Nothing better shows what rural Canada represents or is supposed to represent to those in our cities. The only problem being, rural Canada rarely has a say, no matter how disingenuous these treatises are.

In the cold fall we see ducks overhead, or way above us geese. They answer the calls of the hunters, who hide in blinds on the marshy shore. Most of the duck hunters I know will not have dogs; they fetch the geese themselves, sometimes with a spincast rod. In the little blinds it is very cramped, and usually the hunters use larger gauges—twelve or sixteen. They call and wait for the birds to come into range, with their duck calls that sound to me completely artificial, but to the ducks and geese must sound convincing. When the weather is nasty the birds mightn’t be too hard to convince; ducks and geese will come off the open water in a storm just like any other animal and find respite in the shallow back waters.

Hunting ducks and geese is more like hunting woodcock than partridge. It is not so easy to hunt a bird on the fly, or to be patient enough sitting in that cramped blind that looked so good in the store window. Some of these store-bought, manufactured blinds are so tight that once
you have your hunting vest on they are hard to get down over your shoulder. Of course many people still build their blinds in the same spots for years.