by John Kulish
Bobcats Before
Breakfast
JOHN KULISH with AINO KULISH
STACKPOLE BOOKS
Guilford, Connecticut
Published by Stackpole Books
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Blvd., Ste. 200
Lanham, MD 20706
www.rowman.com
Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK
First edition copyright © 1969 John Kulish
New foreword and acknowledgments copyright © 2020 The Harris Center for Conservation Education
Illustrations by Aino Kulish
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
ISBN 978-0-8117-3886-6 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-8117-6894-8 (e-book)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Preface
1. I Belonged in the Woods
2. Tools of a Woodsman’s Trade
3. Animal ABC’s: Stories Wild Creatures Write
4. Woods’ Mysteries: Secrets Nature Won’t Share
5. Untamed Affections: Compassion Among Wild Animals
6. Yankee Bobcats: Valiant, Variable Vagabonds
7. Such Hounds, Such Headaches!
8. A “Genius” Hound Comes to Stay
9. He Earns His Ph.D.
10. The Longest Day
11. Give Your Heart to a Dog
12. Beaver: Benefactors of the Boondocks
13. Mother Nature’s Corps of Engineers
14. Otter Observed: Best Hearts, Best Brains
15. The Dog Otter ls a Family Man
16. Home Is the Hunter
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Guide
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Preface
Start of Content
Acknowledgments
The Harris Center for Conservation Education would like to thank the Kulish family for their support in seeing Aino’s words and John’s stories find the light of day again and Judith Schnell of Stackpole Books for her commitment to this book. Thank you, too, to Mark Reynolds for his heartfelt and evocative foreword.
John Kulish was legendary. His spirit of adventure, deep curiosity, and love for all things wild lives on in the work of the Harris Center, where we continue to walk in John’s tracks, teaching people of all ages about the natural world.
Foreword
As the remarkable account of one man’s extraordinary commitment to the natural world, Bobcats Before Breakfast stands alone. Unlike many nature writers who glean much of their knowledge from the classroom, John Kulish learned his lessons by pitting his wits, muscle, and endurance against a variety of furbearers and eking out an existence as a professional trapper, bobcat hunter, and hunting guide.
From boyhood, John was drawn to woods and wild places—a devotion that shaped his entire life. In the 1950s, when he realized that the modern world was encroaching too deeply into the wilderness, John hung up his guns and traps and stepped from his old realm into a future for which he felt completely unprepared. Assuming it was the best he could expect, he took a job as a janitor at Boston University’s Sargent Center for Outdoor E
ducation in Hancock, New Hampshire. The staff soon recognized his expertise and set him to work sharing his rare knowledge of the natural world with college students. It was a wonderful stroke of luck for a man who thought the way of life he loved had come to an end. “I’d go to bed whistling, and wake up whistling,” he said of his new job.
After his stint at Sargent Camp, John became the naturalist at the Harris Center for Conservation Education, also in Hancock, where he taught in the local schools and led group hikes through the backcountry he knew so well.
The folks at the Harris Center and Sargent Camp weren’t the only ones who understood the value of John’s hard-won experience. His wife, Aino, a bright and free spirit born of the local Finnish community, had an artistic as well as a practical side. In addition to her success at stretching the family’s meager income to keep food on the table for them and their two daughters, she was also a painter and writer. Her painting of John’s beloved dog, Jiggs, hung over their mantelpiece. At the end of the workday, after supper, she would sit John down, pull out her notebook and pen, and say, “Start talking.” Bobcats Before Breakfast is the result of those evenings.
I first met John Kulish on a snowshoe hike he led for the Harris Center in 1986. I was thirty-five and he was seventy-five. Though I’d heard of him—he was something of a legend in the local outdoor community—I hadn’t yet read Bobcats Before Breakfast. First published in 1969, it was out of print by the mid-1980s; used copies were highly sought after, especially in this part of New Hampshire. I’m delighted that the Harris Center is now making John’s story available to a new generation of readers.
Tall and lean, John was smart, tough, and insatiably curious about the outdoors and its inhabitants. Almost until the day he died (at age eighty-five), his long stride could keep pace and cover the distances through the woods, over the ledges, and around the swamps he knew so well. He never stopped to rest or eat on a day-long hike, though, for the sake of those who attended his Harris Center outings, he would halt at noon to boil water in a #10 tin can and brew up strong tea, giving everyone else a chance to sit down and eat whatever they brought for lunch. John never sat, but stood by the fire, mug of steaming tea in hand, regaling his listeners with his endless supply of stories and woods lore.
The hikers would question John about the things they saw—some, I’m sure, in hopes of stumping him. He always knew the answer. Not only could he identify every track, no matter how old or snowed in, he could tell what the animal had on its mind: if it were hunting, for example, or just passing quickly through an area where it felt vulnerable.
Once, at the end of a long day on snowshoes, John and I followed an old woods road down a mountain. Snowmobiles had packed the snow under our feet, and we walked along, chatting, when suddenly John looked down and said, “Those are bear tracks!” In the fading light, the tracks were barely discernible—just a few indistinct depressions crossing the road. How could he know those faint marks were left by a bear? “Look where they come from, and look where they go,” John explained. There was a thick growth of whipstock and black raspberry canes on both sides of the road. “Nobody else would walk through there when he could go around. But a bear’s a bulldozer; he doesn’t care what he walks through.”
The old woodsman had demonstrated once again that, to unravel one of Nature’s puzzles, you have to look at the surrounding evidence as a detective does a crime scene, considering all the clues. Often what you don’t see is as important as what you do.
The real amazement for me on that occasion was that John saw the obscured tracks at all. We were walking side by side at the end of a long, tiring day. He certainly didn’t seem to be paying any closer attention than I was. But his years of earning a living interpreting animal sign had honed in him a keen and constant power of observation. At that time, there were fewer bear (and bobcats!) roaming the Monadnock Region than there are today, so the tracks were uncommon.
John also had an expert knowledge of ice, perfected from countless crossings of frozen lakes and streams where a fall through could have dire consequences. Once he had us cross a frozen beaver pond where the black ice seemed paper-thin, confident it would support us. I remained skeptical until we reached the opposite bank. Another time, we followed a coyote’s tracks down a snow-covered brook. Suddenly, John warned: “Don’t step there!” I poked the snow just in front of me and my hiking staff sunk into an icy slush. He had noticed the slush in the coyote track and knew it meant that the coyote had stepped near a soft spot in the ice.
But what really drew me to John’s side, and consequently what is so engaging about this book, is the connection he gave me to the past. John was an enchanting link to a long American tradition and to bygone ways and times. Born in 1911, he grew up hard: His parents were immigrants from Lithuania, and his father was an abusive alcoholic. John’s early life was marked by poverty and sporadic violence. That, coupled with his rugged and solitary lifestyle, made John someone who could be as challenging as he was charming. He took great pride in his hard-earned knowledge and could be gruff with other naturalists, especially those who hailed from academia, or anyone else who hadn’t put in the miles but intimated that they had an expertise on par with his own. And woe to anyone who dared tell John he’d seen a mountain lion in the woods he knew so well!
Those with the right credentials, however, had John’s respect and admiration. As a young boy, he sought the knowledge of reticent Arthur Leonard, a local foxhunter who had been a teenager during the Civil War. Evidently, Mr. Leonard was an uncommunicative Yankee, but young John must have impressed him enough to earn at least some of the old man’s regard. Mr. Leonard passed his handmade otter board down to John, who speculated on the number of otter pelts that had been stretched and dried over its thin frame. John also sought the company of Arthur Eastman, a noted Maine guide, who, well into his eighties, still traversed the Allagash country, sleeping in a series of crude shelters while tending his trapline. One of the most memorable evenings of my life was passed in the company of John and his lifelong friend, Vic Starzynski, as they swapped tales of their boyhood haunting of a Gardner, Massachusetts, pool hall to eavesdrop on the local fox-hunters who gathered there. John was hungry to learn from anyone who’d acquired knowledge the old way. Bobcats Before Breakfast is the account of a man continuing a tradition that stretches from the earliest days of our country.
Many today may have a problem with the fact that John spent years trapping and killing animals for profit (meager and exacting though that profit was). But John took his harvest from a landscape that was much more abundant than anything we experience today, and he hung up his gun and traps when he realized the environment no longer supported the richness he once knew.
Consider the story he tells in the last chapter of the book—the day when, as a boy, he and a companion roused thirty-eight grouse from a huge oak tree. Or, even into the 1950s, when he spied on thirty-two deer yarded up for the winter. And hear the sorrow in John’s words for the passing of that world: “Today, when I strap on my snowshoes and head for the familiar ridges, it’s as though I were going to a wake. . . . But now I am alone. My woods are dead, overhunted, barren of game, with only snowmobile tracks where deer and bobcats once walked.” It certainly wasn’t the lone hunter, such as himself, that wrought such a transformation.
I’ll never meet anyone who knows the woods like John Kulish did, and this book is his recording of the lessons he’d mastered over many years and thousands of grueling miles. “I take pride in my ability to hunt and trap,” he wrote. “I learned it long, hard, and well.”
Mark Reynolds
Antrim, NH
Mark Reynolds is a retired writer and editor and proud Harris Center member. As a younger man, he followed John Kulish through his favorite haunts—from Vermont to Maine’s Allagash country—delighted in John’s lore and stories, and quickly learned that there is no such thing as “catch and release” when you land a brook trout in John’s presence. The old bobcat hunter m
ay have given up hunting and trapping, but he never lost his taste for fresh trout.
Preface
This is a book about the woods, the animals who live there, and one man’s lifelong relationship with them. I have learned many things, some of which conflict with entrenched ideas; but what I have learned did not come out of some text book. The animals taught me.
I lived among them. I watched them; I listened to them; I pursued them; I laughed with them; I cried with them; I outwitted them one day, only to be eluded by them on the next, until I learned how they think. I started out to understand animals and ended up understanding myself.
JOHN KULISH
Hancock, New Hampshire
1. I Belonged in the Woods
The three Navy doctors stood in a half-circle facing me as I sat on an examining table in the Newport Naval Hospital. Three days of continuous probing, pinching, and peering into bowel, bladder, and brain was almost over. It was January, 1942. It seemed months instead of weeks since that dark Sunday when, en route home from a day of guiding deer hunters, I had stopped in a tiny New Hampshire village, to be told by a gasoline station attendant that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. Before the car was back on the highway, I knew what I had to do. For this woodsman, there would be no more traps to tend nor animals to hunt.
The senior physician, his shoulders and sleeves glittering with gold bars and insignia, stepped closer. A big hand tilted my head as he peered into each of my ears. It seemed to take him a long time. He motioned to the two junior officers.
“Take a look at this.”
I could feel warm breathing on my neck as, examination lights glowing, they peered into each of the last two unexplored hatches. There was a long silence. Then the trio moved away from the table. Bits and pieces of agitated sentences reached me.
“Never saw anything—”
“What do you suppose—”
“We’d better—”
The commander approached the table, and swung around briskly to face me.
“Anything wrong with your ears?”
My throat went dry. “No, sir.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty in April.”
“Ever had trouble hearing?”
“No, sir.”
An orderly quickly carried out the order to bring syringes, soap and water, and a pan. While a junior officer held the kidney-shaped dish under my ear, the commander himself fired the first salvo. Rushing noises filled my head. Another charge followed, then another. Again and again, the doctors squirted water into my resisting ears. Suddenly, with a loud gurgling, the bastion crumbled. Water splashed into the pan. From the corner of my eye, I saw the commander’s face as he barked out, “Where the Hell have you been?”