Bobcats Before Breakfast

by John Kulish

  In primitive backwoods, these doubting Thomases will travel overland from one watershed to another in the daytime, but only if the sight and scent of man is not there. Even when the origin of another river basin can be reached by crossing a little-used country road, if human dwellings watch nearby, an otter hesitates.

  One stormy March day, Jiggs and I were fighting the north wind back to our truck after a fruitless day. No one else had visited McKittrick Mountain since deer season. Four feet of packed snow carumped beneath my snowshoes.

  Coming back on my own webbed trail, I was following a tote road that balanced on a razorback ridge so neatly I could look down through the woods on either slope. Off to _ one side I noticed a disturbance in the snow. Three or four hours after I had passed by that morning, a family of three otter, lunging uphill through the deep snow toward the razorback, had approached within fifty yards of my trail. As soon as my odor was detected, they bounced back along their own tracks. Then, paralleling the road for a hundred feet, they tried again to cross. My scent still barred the way. Turning tail, they slid back over their tracks once more. Then, for the third and last time, they tried to find an unguarded crossing. My phantom still hung in the air. Not once had they come close enough to see the snowshoe trail.

  They tobogganed back to Hedgehog Pond, a mile distant, to wait another storm. I have known otter to bide their time for as long as seven days, awaiting the right traveling conditions before leaving one watershed to reach the beginnings of another.

  Many naturalists allege that otter and beaver do not get along, contending that the former will even kill and eat their hardworking relatives. I do not believe it. The proof can be found in beaver ponds and in otter scat.

  Before the recent reintroduction of beaver into southern New Hampshire, many small tributaries fed rivers, ponds, and lakes. Although these streams were full of fish, otter never visited them. They didn’t dare. How could a large animal hide in shallow water?

  When their engineering cousins surged up those brooks, intent on building dams, a New Deal began for otter. Soon, series of dams, each holding back a pond, were strung along the waterways, like a chain of fish markets. The otter patronize every one.

  They also enjoy their cousin’s lodges, popping in occasionally without warning for a brief nap. With their “twinkle-in-the-eye” attitude toward life, otter cannot resist pestering their “stick-in-the-mud” benefactors. Because they can swim circles around the single-minded drudges, there are plenty of chances between the poplars on shore and the feedpile beside the lodge.

  Ironically enough, it is the current beaver trapping laws that will eventually eradicate the otter in New Hampshire. “And what has beaver trapping got to do with eradicating the otter?” you ask.

  In comparatively recent years there were no beaver in the southern counties. The beaver the white settlers found were all trapped out. However, many well-established colonies flourished in our nothernmost counties, under the strict supervision of the Fish and Game Department. In 1940 the Department began live-trapping beaver in pairs and transplanting them to the southern counties, with the same protective laws applying to the emigrants. Being true pioneers, the settlers adapted quickly to their new world.

  By 1944 the original nucleus had multiplied so that the Fish and Game Department decided to open a short trapping season, while still maintaining deliberately restrictive laws. Part-time trappers dug out their rusty equipment and went out after the pelts. Those were the days when a blanket pelt sold for sixty-five dollars. They caught beaver, but because of the strict regulations, failed to thin out the dam builders. Meanwhile, these were becoming a nuisance in many sections. Their dams plugged up culverts; their backed-up ponds flooded cultivated meadows. A contributing factor to the problem, other than that of the beaver doing what comes naturally, was the sharp decline in the value of their pelts. Milady had discovered man-made “beaver” coats at seventy-five dollars apiece.

  About this time, land damage complaints from angry land-owners and frustrated road agents flooded the Fish and Game Department, which felt compelled to relax the beaver trapping laws. Among other things, traps were allowed to be set on beaver dams themselves. Most trappers, whose experience had been limited to muskrat and mink in the open waters of November, knew little, if anything, about the otter. Lacking woods experience, they didn’t even realize such an animal existed. During the initial short, midwinter seasons of January and February, the accidental taking of an otter in a beaver trap happened so rarely that it made no inroads on the meager otter population. But when trappers were allowed to set their traps in the spillways of the beaver ponds, they began catching an occasional otter.

  Because the otter’s mating season begins in the middle of February and extends into March, his defenses are down. This prudent gentleman of the waterways, with his keen eyes and superior senses, can easily avoid the traps of amateurs during November, December, and January. But, intent on mating, he falls easy victim to the same clumsy trapper during the rut. At that time, except for the spillways, beaver ponds are still frozen solid. The only way an otter can get into the pond is over the spillway. Usually quick-witted and vigilant, he doesn’t differ much from man when it comes to thinking with his glands instead of with his brains.

  Having a beaver by the tail, the desperate Fish and Game Department has extended the trapping season more and more until, in our southern counties, it is now legal to trap beaver for as long as four and a half months. And that isn’t all. Wherever and whenever land damage complaints occur, the local conservation officer assigns some spare-time trapper to clean out the troublemakers, be it June or January. I know one such trapper who operates until June; he’d trap all summer if his neighbors weren’t so stuffy about the skinned carcasses steaming in the summer sun.

  For more than twenty years I have lived in ideal otter country. It is crisscrossed by hundreds of miles of rivers, brooks, ponds, and bogs. I am willing to bet a 1945 dollar that there are never more than eight fishing those waterways at any given time.

  Whenever an otter loses its mate, it searches desperately for its spouse for weeks, even months. Then it begins resolutely to look for another. For the past four years, a large otter, who is working a watershed that covers fifty square miles, has been regularly visiting one of its favorite haunts within three miles of my cabin. It is alone. From its size and habits, it must be a male. Several times each winter, during a storm, he leaves the river to travel overland about a half-mile to a small pond. He does no fishing. He follows the west shore for a little way, then comes back. Sometimes, in the early spring, he disappears for as long as six weeks. I am sure he goes to another watershed, still searching for a mate. My alarm is justified. I have never before known an otter to live alone for more than a single year. Why has this one remained mateless for four? No otter is a hermit by choice.

  The crux of the problem lies in the fact that beaver ponds and otter go together. As long as beaver build ponds, otter will fish them. As long as it is legal, on the one hand, to trap otter throughout their rutting season, and also legal, on the other hand, to set traps on the spillways of beaver ponds, the future of the otter in New Hampshire remains in jeopardy.

  Neither the Fish and Game Department nor the Legislature understands what damage they have wrought and what inroads have been made on the already scant otter population. By extending the beaver season into the late spring and making the taking of otter pelts legal, the department, whose purpose is to conserve, is unwittingly destroying.

  If it would do any good, I would gladly go to the State House, and on my knees, plead, “For God’s sake, gentlemen, while there is still a little time left, save the river otter!”

  16. Home Is the Hunter

  I was nine years old the first time I went hunting. It was a bright, late October day when, with a fifteen-year-old companion who owned a single-barrel twelve-gauge shotgun, I hiked five miles through leaf-strewn woods, beyond the outskirts of the town where we both lived. In
his pocket, my comrade carried three shells. As we approached a tremendous oak tree, bristling with branches, and six feet through at the butt, partridges, startled by our appearance, began to whirr away from their roost. Seven birds had disappeared by the time my companion got his cumbrous weapon to his shoulder and pulled the trigger. The gun misfired. Four more grouse emerged. Cliff tried unsuccessfully to fire a half-dozen more times. He held out the shotgun. “You try it, John.”

  To me, the gun looked like the cannon in the town square. But, somehow, I hauled it up into firing position, closed my eyes, and pulled the trigger. Again, it misfired. I pulled the trigger a few more times before I began to count partridges. I do not know how many had flown while my eyes were squeezed shut, but twenty-seven more ruffed grouse, in addition to the first eleven, flew from the shelter of that huge oak.

  After my naive introduction to the art of grouse hunting, it took close to four years before enough muskrat had been trapped and their skins stretched and sold to an itinerant fur dealer, to buy a future dyed-in-the-wool bird hunter his first shotgun. Still young and a poor wing shot, my enthusiasm didn’t ebb; I could always bag my limit under old cider trees on the abandoned farms that dotted the local landscape. Invariably, my first wing shot would miss. But, too drunk on apple juice to fly high and straight, the inebriated grouse would crash into bushes, and while they were untangling their landing gear, a boy had time to reload.

  Today, a housing development stands where that great white oak harbored a host of grouse. The town is now a city that sprawls for miles beyond what was once forest, field, and marsh. And, far north, I can hunt all day in ideal cover, and never flush a single grouse. I haven’t seen a drunk partridge in years. I’d gladly settle for a shot at one grouse a week, a grouse that was stone-cold sober.

  Just as the frontiersman tamed the West, so the gasoline engine has tamed the East. It took the former blood, sweat, and a hundred years. The latter did it in less than twenty. Oil plus money is high-powered fuel. Ten years ago, armed into burgeoning battalions of motorboats, camper-trailers, airplanes, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and snow machines, the gasoline engine drove me out of the woods. The vast private kingdom I had once called my own was overrun. In today’s woods, a hunter on snowshoes is as out-of-date as a crossbow at a missile site. As gracefully as I could, I hung up my traps and my guns.

  Until it met its mechanical Waterloo, my domain had been the area’s last wilderness. For years, from the day after deer season ended, until the snow melted, I had run the remote ridges with a hound as my only companion. But we were never alone. Our realm had teemed with game: grouse, deer, mink, beaver, otter, and bobcats. Deer were everywhere. In fall and early winter, secluded river crossings looked like barnyards. A dozen winter yards, some harboring as many as twenty deer, were scattered throughout the area. Less than ten years ago, from a rocky pinnacle, through binoculars, I had watched thirty-two deer as, prodded by nature’s urgent elbow, they began to leave their separate yards. Weak from hunger, and feeling the cold more quickly each night, they were following the sun toward the southern slopes of the mountain. There, sunshine waxing warmer every hour would soon expose the top shelves of nature’s pantry.

  Today, when I strap on my snowshoes and head for the familiar ridges, it’s as though I were going to a wake. But I am drawn to the wooded mountains as though to a dying friend. As I climb, my best memories rise to greet me. But now I am alone. My woods are dead, overhunted, barren of game, with only snowmobile tracks where deer and bobcats once walked. There is often not a single deer track through eight miles of what many would still consider wilderness country. Huge choppings, an aftermath of recent logging operations, offer tender, juicy red maple shrubs. They stand unnibbled, while verdant ground hemlock remains untouched. Otter no longer explore the tributaries of a once isolated lake, or travel up to fish beaver ponds and to catch a few winks in beaver lodges. Few rutting mink race up and down the brooks and rivers. Wealth, progress, and high-octane gasoline have taken their toll.

  Once remote lakes and ponds, where only deer, ducks, otter, and I trespassed, are now surrounded by layers of summer camps, made accessible in winter by snow machines. Points of land, where generations of otter have disembarked since primeval times, now support camps with wharfs jutting far out over the water. Two-lane roads dissect filled-in swamps that less than a decade ago knew only muskrat houses.

  Lakes, once isolated by the north wind, are assaulted by a new breed of ice fishermen. One day, while crossing a thickly frozen, snow-covered cove in a lake that still harbors a handful of salmon and trout, I was dumbfounded to see a dozen holes with tackles, but with no men’s tracks leading to them. Near shore, the fishermen were playing poker in a heated camper. Whenever a flag unfurled, they shifted their private club into low and drove across the ice from hole to hole to check their catch. It has been rumored that the automobile industry is designing a special camper for future ice fishermen, so that never again will they have to leave the shelter of their vehicles. Still in pajamas, they will be able to drive out onto ice, press a button, and a hydraulically operated auger will drill their holes.

  With the ever burgeoning numbers of hunters in the woods, it is ironic that the greatest killer of them all, for whom there is open season on all species of wildlife anytime, anywhere, is the “owner” of most Americans, the automobile. In 1968 alone, according to a scientific tally taken on our national highways, over 1,200,000 wild creatures of every species died under the wheels of speeding cars. We can only speculate as to how many crawled away to die.

  The social revolution that has disrupted our affluent society during the last fifteen years, has spilled over into the woods. But when I try to explain what has happened to a frustrated youth in his twenties who can’t understand why there isn’t more game for him to shoot at with his custom-made rifle, I feel like a tired old fox hound trying to describe the good old days to a skeptical French poodle.

  For six years I have been the delighted owner of three hundred yards of a brook. Cold, clear, spring-fed, it has always hosted trout. Naturally, today, it needs supplementing by the state, and stocked trout are dumped into the stream from a narrow bridge near my cabin. I am extremely fond of “brookies,” even when they taste of hatchery liver. Summer evenings, I dash home, grab my fly rod, and sneak down to cast into likely looking pools. It is useless to cast downstream; a black gnat can’t penetrate the solid aluminum canopy of beer cans bobbing on the surface. But, upstream, where the current clears away the debris, I cast out hopefully. Perhaps I’ll get a strike from a squaretail lurking inside a submerged rubber tire.

  I take pride in my ability to hunt and to trap. I learned it long, hard, and well. I still prefer deer meat to beef, and partridge to chicken. I still revel in matching wits with the wild. The law tells me I may shoot one deer of either sex during a twenty-five-day season; that I may trap beaver, otter, and mink for five months of the year, and fisher for four; that I may continue to kill bobcats for a bounty. But, to me, to hunt is to pursue plentiful game in season. I do not want to shoot the last deer in the county, or to trap the last otter in the Contoocook watershed.

  My privilege to hunt comes loaded with responsibility. I owe the game I pursue a place to live, food to find, and ample cover to hide from me. Even more, as a man, I owe them an even break. A rifle or a shotgun and my own two legs are the only accessories my self-respect will allow. An animal’s built-in instincts, reflexes, and four-wheel drive balance the scales. For me to shoot from a car, a motorboat, an airplane, or a snowmobile would be to demean myself as a man.

  Hunting can never again be what it used to be, but it can be better than it is. If only I could persuade the powers that be to shorten seasons that are too long, to close seasons whenever breeding stock is threatened, to use a fluctuating buck law, to have the courage to manage their department at eye level with the needs of wild creatures, with never a downward glance at political toes being trampled. We can look to the men who first hunte
d these ridges and valleys for our answer.

  The American Indian was a true hunter-conservationist. For centuries, he cooperated with nature. He respected the creatures that fed and clothed him. In writing about the culture of the northeastern Indian hunter, J. M. Cooper tells us: “Their religious teachings permitted no wasteful or arbitrary destruction of life in any form. In taking animals for food and for skins, the survivors, as breeding resources, were constantly considered. . . . Ages of harmonious co-living with the life of the forest, swamps, and ravines of the Eastern woodland, left them the sense to accord to all forms of life the right to live, to propagate, and to fulfill their own destinies, as man himself claims it. This assertion is made with no degree of exaggeration. It is rather understated. . . . “

  The American Indian hunted these hills and trapped these rivers countless generations before me. According to our cultural standards, he was a savage. Yet, centuries ago, he learned to join hands with Mother Nature, and, as far as animals were concerned, to think like God.

  How can I do less?