That, my son, is genius.
His brother had it too. He had to have. With children at home and hardship in living where they did, he took on a man’s job along the Matapédia from the time he was ten. He guided fishermen up from New York or Rhode Island in the spring and summer and went to work for the lumber company when he was twelve.
Now he was going through the woods to find his father, with little idea of how to get exactly where he must, yet prodded forward by his mother’s words:
“Bring your father here, now.”
If at all possible he could do no less. The woods were dense, the rapids strong, the nights turning cool, and he was not more than a boy. The woods very often are more like a living, breathing obstacle course, where windfalls and intractable ground hamper your progress and make necessary so many detours that it is easy to confound your way.
He had never been that far into the real woods—the great woods, as Faulkner reminds us in “The Bear,” the deep woods that weave and knit against the hills of our rivers and swallow us whole. That is, at the time, ten yards from a beaten path and he would have remained unseen.
But he walked in the general direction, and forded small, swift streams alive with coloured rocks, and the first fallen leaves, in his heavy pants and corked boots. At noon hour he found himself in an apple orchard and shook the tree, and filled his pockets, and moved quickly off, for the apples were a treat for bear as well, and he knew bear were nearby (now, over his eighty years in the woods he must have met every bear in the neighbourhood at least twice). There were white-tailed deer he saw, just coming into the area and replacing the caribou, and after a time, about supper, he smelled some smoke, and made his way through a cedar swamp, where he noticed a bull moose in a little grove.
His father was in camp, as were the man and boy he was guiding. The “sports” had taken the train up from New York—my uncle had never been on a train. And to him they were people as exotic as from another world. He would not speak to them to interrupt his father or their supper. This was something much more subtle and complicated than “knowing your place.” From the time my uncle was a boy, he knew three times as much about the natural world as any man he guided, but he would be loath to say it, knowing they themselves knew things about the world he himself didn’t, and to have them here was to their, and not his, disadvantage. He would have expected the same consideration in their territory, one commensurate with the politeness he showed. I often wonder if he ever got it.
By the time he was fifteen he was relied upon by men who might in their world make millions of dollars but knew nothing outside their own offices or their function as businessmen. This is a fact absolute. And he was kindly toward those men. By the time he was twenty he spoke English, French, and Cree, and knew much about the history of all, and took men into the woods who knew nothing of their own history even as their policies tried to rewrite it. But I have more often than not felt sympathy for those men, who rode on trains, or flew in planes, to meet their destiny in the dark woods of New Brunswick.
Now, on this long-ago night my uncle sat on a windfall, drank some water, and ate a piece of bread with corned beef. Finally out of the fractured comments he discovered their situation. It was not an unusual one for sport hunters then or now. In fact, it is one of the things that happen that guides pray will not. In this way, the hunt, at its best, is as much about honour and duty as Achilles’s and Sarpedon’s position in the Trojan War.
They had brought a moose down, and hadn’t found it. The man had shot it just at dark, just after my grandfather had told him not to. (My grandfather could not make that a complaint now, however.) The moose blew wind and blood from his nose, staggered, but did not go down, and in the gloom and growing dark, my grandfather had searched over the terrain but had not come upon it. He had come back to camp and made supper in silence.
The man, who had won a sharp-shooting contest in New Jersey in 1911, was sure he had killed the animal—a fine animal it was, as well, with a massive hump and twenty-four-point rack. But they had not found it, and now the lanterns glowed and the night was growing dark. Small gusts of wind framed the stillness in cooling drifts of air down from Labrador. Snow in a month. The man would be gone in two days. My grandfather would break camp and go in to cut for one of the lumber companies. He would work through the winter in mind-numbing cold, from dawn until dark. Then in spring he would ride the logs on the spring flow, to the mills. But he was not thinking of that at the moment. The only thing he could think of was that he must find the animal, and make sure it was killed.
The man had a fine rifle my uncle had never seen before, with a custom-made engraved stock and a large telescopic sight—the first my Uncle Richard had seen as well. He stared at it a subtle moment without speaking. My grandfather, in his breeches and long-sleeved underwear, was solid muscle at five-foot-ten, and he could lift three times his body weight onto his back. But that did not help him out of this quandary. He did not want the animal to suffer—the situation was “not the best,” as he would say at times. He did not want to blame the hunter—especially in front of the man’s young son—but he had told him they had done calling and would come back in the morning, for though they had heard the moose approaching, the animal had not come into the clearing as they had wanted, and it was far too dark to be sure of the kill. “She be too late for the long shot,” as my grandfather had told him when they’d finally seen the huge creature against the gloom of far-off trees.
The man fired when my grandfather had his back turned, and was picking up his pack to head back to camp. Now he must make the best of the man’s bad decision. He had checked for signs in the darkening wood, had found red blood, and was convinced when the man told him the bull had spit blood and staggered that he must have hit it. “Well, we will find it then,” he said. But he had not found it. Just once the cow the bull was seeking had bawled, and then silence.
My grandfather had walked downwind to the stream and followed it for half an hour, trying to spot the animal in the growth above him. But it did not work. The trees became darker as silence muted the night. So now the best he could do was find it in the morning. He decided that it must have turned and gone to the cedar swamp. But he was unsure.
Now his son was here. And he was relieved. He was relieved for more than one reason. For my grandfather had learned quite early, at first with alarm and then with joy, that his son was a wondrously able child (although Hudson would never have thought of any of his boys or girls beyond the age of nine or ten as children—which shows the weight at times placed upon not only my uncles but my mother as well, to take care and do chores and help the family). This son could resolve many difficulties by his sheer persistence in deciding to do something about it—a characteristic that would be a benefit to my uncle and many people he had in his care over the next seventy years.
Richard knew three things. He knew that it was the man’s eagerness to prove his ability with his ornately crafted and well-scoped rifle, which now leaned against a timber block in the centre of the camp, that had caused him to fire, for a man so proud of his weapon would fire to justify his pride (and since we all carry weapons of various descriptions upon us, we must always realize this). That is, the weapon showed more about the man than the man himself knew. And Richard knew that the boy, who was about his age, was out of his element and upset about what had happened, and for some reason felt his father’s unbridled folly was his fault. Hudson would want Richard to speak kindly to him.
And he knew he couldn’t mention the reason he had come in until his father had done here what he must do—which was find the moose, kill it if it was not dead, and try to save the meat, for the meat was to be given over to poor families on the peninsula.
He knew all of this in a second, and realized his father was in a jam.
The man, for his part, was angry at the moose for not having dropped dead. As well, he was a little angry at Hudson for not having seen the moose hit. He had also decided that thi
s is how he would play it out. If his guide had been a better guide he would have done a better job. For he himself had done his part—the guide, however, had not realized how well he could shoot and had therefore botched a fine job. But if it had been so fine a job the moose would have gone down. If it had been a noble job the shot wouldn’t have been taken in the dark, to buoy hubris up.
These indications left the conversations muted and cold. And Richard understood this, too. There was no handshake or slap on the back, which is what usually happened with a kill. Now to get this handshake or slap on the back might be impossible, but Richard knew that they could get the moose, for he himself had seen it. And he wanted to help his father out of this predicament without letting the man know that he had. So he had to tell his father in quiet that he had seen the moose beyond the hemlock grove down in some cedar, and it was strange that it hadn’t moved and was therefore a sick animal.
Hudson immediately gave Richard the credit and told the man and his son to stay at camp and finish their supper and they would go in, he and his boy, with the pack mule and get the animal killed and up, so to save the meat. The man himself was sick of the whole thing and said “Fine,” as if to indicate that he was bothered by what his guide had done. Richard and Hudson left the camp with the man’s rifle, an axe, rope, a lantern, and Joey the mule, and they made it down into the swale beyond in the pitch-dark. Here, at about 9:30 on that late September night, far back in the time when my mother was a child, long before my wife’s own father and mother met, they found the bull, with its great rack of twenty-four points, tangled in the bushes where it had gone down. It had come to life in the Matapédia, with its vast pools of deep green water, in a place like Eden, and had fallen from a bullet that had hit it by chance, and died in the only area and world it ever knew, from a shot by a man who seemed at that instant to know nothing except his own vanity. Had it not been night there might have been a picture of it in some claustrophobic clearing, faded almost grey now with time. These pictures come to me at times through the years, taken by my wife’s great-uncles or my own from the 1920s until now. The picture secretly always gives the hunter away. That is, in a second you can tell what type of a hunt it was, if you have any experience with hunting.
It was hard to pack out a thousand-pound animal, and my uncle was just a boy—and he and Hudson worked far into the night to separate the tainted meat from the good for certain families. And the tainted meat was a powerful reminder of the kind of hunt it had become. Far from romantic now.
My uncle’s work is a constant reminder of how much boys did in the woods then. Did this boy of thirteen know more than the man who shot the animal? Of course—in almost every way. Did he know it was an unjust shot? A presumptuous one? A misguided one that would set the tempo for the relation between hunter and guide, man and beast? Of course. Did he know also that the descendants of this man might someday look at his own descendants with scorn for celebrating him, Richard, as a great guide, and that in a certain way it is always the descendants of men like this who, as a rule, rule and object to men like my grandfather? Or that the folly of one generation is often visited upon the next in another way—that those in power to hunt will give way to the same type of people in power to stop hunting?
These were questions for another night. This night was a night of working with the head and the hide of the animal. Care must be taken if the man wanted the head mounted. Often that was all they hunted for. The meat some of them couldn’t or didn’t taste. The tales of bravado were better. This is another kind of departure from what I have come to know hunting was for. When a friend of mine, a good hunter, once asked a great hunter, then in his nineties, if he wanted to be interviewed in the paper about all his exploits—seeing the last of the woodland caribou, being lost in the woods, falling between two bull moose whose racks were locked in battle, guiding men into wilderness for white-tailed deer, crawling deep into logs to finish bear that timid men did not shoot well—he gave a resounding and emphatic no.
“They will think I am bragging just like those hunters always brag,” he said.
His words are more important than they might at first seem. He was making a distinction between two kinds of hunters. It is an important distinction. It is the same one made in the movie The Deer Hunter, which so many of my university friends hate but which has at the core of its reason the at times unfashionable but still necessary resilient bravery of man. Like Robert De Niro’s character, the old man had done it well—why did he need to brag? In fact, bragging lessened it.
When they brought the head and rack out, the man changed his mind. Under the glaring lanterns he became more certain that he had done a wonderful job and had accomplished a successful hunt. In a way he had. He had, after all, shot an animal ten times his size with one bullet at a distance of over three hundred yards. But he had not been absorbed in finding it. In fact, the dereliction of his duty is paramount to the story. That was where his problem lay; someone else found it for him, and in fact he would give the boy a tip. He did not know that the boy had come in to relay to his father a terrible crisis in the family. The boy was too polite to say so until the work at hand was done. But he did mention it in the middle of their work with the bull. His mother and my grandmother were under siege at the house, facing people trying to take the farm, and she had them covered with a shotgun as they hid behind the barn.
Even then, they did not leave until the next morning, after they had fed the “sport” his breakfast. And when they did get out, the cousins who had come to claim my grandparents’ place were still cowering where they were, with my ninety-pound grandmother holding a twelve-gauge shotgun on them from the veranda, and the banker trying to reason with her. Saying that in these modern times there was no necessity to become violent when protecting your life’s blood.
And as the years passed along, the mighty head, given in its place of honour over the rock fireplace in the man’s cottage in Vermont, would become a symbol of the danger he had faced, and the truth would lessen and become unimportant. Over time the straw stuffing would come out; his glass eyes, like a doll’s, would seem offended. His son, however, might remember the night and, looking at those glass eyes, be unable to speak of the experience. He would remember the guide and the guide’s son, coming in late. He would also remember that his father was uninterested in helping the guide or his young boy find this majestic wounded animal—and that was the real story, that the boy and his father went into the pitch-dark with a lantern to find the downed bull moose. In fact, that was the only story that had a right to be told. But so often we tell the stories we want others to hear. These are the wiles of the human spirit that hunters must be on guard for. For the closer to the hunt we come, the more obligated we are to examine this spirit.
My Uncle Richard did not become famous as a hunting guide, but as time went on he became very famous as a fishing guide. He guided in the green waters of the Matapédia, where my mother had her childhood. And as a man in his old age, his face and reflection, cast in stone and bronze by admirers and artists, show the true spirit of the woodsman. He died a few years back.
3
There was a lack of discipline, by and large unexamined, when I was young. I began to hunt squirrels as a kid, back behind the pulp fields in the woods beyond home. I used a slingshot or a pellet gun. It is something young boys did that they shouldn’t do.
We took the tails, saying we were going to sell them for squirrel-tail flies, but at times we didn’t, and killing for a while became simply a luxury. I knew tough boys (tougher than most) who could shoot a bird out of the air with a pellet gun. And the first partridge I killed was with a pellet gun, and out of season, when I was fourteen. There were many partridge broods in the dark spruce groves in behind our little cottage along the Miramichi Bay. Most times, of course, we missed completely, which in hindsight is a good thing. In the woods you suddenly became the chief law-giver to yourself. And when you are a kid, certain things are very tempting to do.
This is an unconsidered factor in recent stricter laws. The laws have changed in relationship to gun ownership, and rifles have become much more numbingly sanctioned. So much so that law-abiding men and women have not only grumbled and complained but in a real way have faced down these laws, and on occasion have disobeyed them. “The hell with them—I’ll shoot everything if they tell me not to,” one man once said to me. Of course he did not want to shoot everything. He simply wanted to be able to hunt deer as he once had, and no longer could. Yet this was not such a blind statement—or at least, to be fair, it came from an actual philosophical point. The point was that the government, in its tedious resolution to stop gun crime, was now parenting people with gun laws and registration that were useless to stop anyone who disobeyed laws in the first place. The man’s philosophical point was that he would disobey the laws now, when he was law-abiding before, out of principle. He would not register his rifle.
His stance was the strange by-product of laws that are both insincere and useless. The government either does not feel this or know it, or is unconcerned about it. They do not know, or care to know, much about rural life, and they listen to urban concerns about kinds of guns the rural people themselves rarely own. That is not to say that deer rifles have not been used in crime. It is not to say that hunters are not at times willing to use rifles to commit crimes. But I am making a case that most hunters never use a rifle in this way.
The point is not that we shouldn’t have laws to regulate guns, the point is that these laws will not regulate in the way the law intends.
Facing the Hunter Page 3