Unlike the caribou, that moved out and were slaughtered away with the encroachment of man, moose show a familiarity with us that allows them a closer proximity.
My good friend Peter McGrath touched a cow moose with the tip of his rod to get it to move along out of a pool, and David Savage touched one with the butt of his gun, when hunting deer.
Although this is true, they are still a very dangerous animal during the rut, which starts at hunting season. My youngest brother, when he was about seventeen, was followed for two miles by a bull moose when he was hunting partridge. The moose stayed parallel to him, just off the woods road, snorting and tossing its head. Finally, as he got close to the camp, the moose broke off at a run, its huge rack tossing up as he crashed back into the woods.
Sometimes one thinks of them as almost human.
In Alden Nowlan’s poem “The Great Bull Moose,” the moose takes on the quality of humanity, or a Christ figure, or, as some say, Nowlan himself, who at times had a right to feel persecuted. The old bull moose comes down from “the purple mist of trees on the mountain” and is a gigantic solitary figure among the puny mortals who surround and eventually kill him. And although it verges on sentimentality it is a powerful poem, an indictment not so much of hunters as of those who would kill something because of fear. Those who would kill a moose for simple pleasure, or trap or net or snare one, or kill it to sell the meat for profit show the very worst of human nature.
When I was in my early twenties my brother and I went on a moose hunt far up the Little Souwest, into an area neither of us knew well but where we had heard there were great moose. This was the area I had heard about since I was a child. We were sure we would get our moose that long-ago year. It was an area of black spruce and cedar swamp, an area so thick with trees that daylight diminished twenty yards into the woods. Here big moose roamed, far away from man.
Each of us had grown up hunting, had some experience with bird and deer hunting, and my brother knew the woods as well as many his age. But we had not scouted, as we would in later years, and though we thought we did, we didn’t have the best rigging. As would be said of many inexperienced moose hunters: “We weren’t rigged out.” The largeness of the animal did not register, as it would in later hunts. In later hunts everything we didn’t do right on this hunt would be taken care of. So this was a learning trip. We carried .303 rifles with 180-grain bullets—bullets both fast and heavy-hitting.
We arrived on the evening before the hunt. The days were hot, which is an unfortunate condition of the time of year the moose hunt is held. We had a stand twenty feet up a bedraggled spruce, and we watched a lonely moose trail from dawn until dark that first day, now and again trying a call that wasn’t answered.
Our stand, such as it was, was dangerous—a few boards placed over some branches, with our heads poking through. Any slip from that would result in a fall and perhaps serious injury, or the rifle that we carried in our hands going off. As I said, the young have no special distinction, except being young.
I remember to this day: just after sunup, as we got into the stand, a particular grey, dried-out clump of grass far down the trail near a small shale bank made it look, when it moved in the slight breeze, as if a moose had just stepped onto the trail and was moving toward us. My brother raised his gun to fire—and then put it down, catching on to the illusion. This is far from being a rookie mistake or unusual. In the thick, overgrown trails, a change in the wind can at times make one think something is there that is not. It is, in fact, all a part of the hunt.
On the second day, our uncle (my father’s brother) arrived—and he had better knowledge of where to hunt and how to call. He told us to move our position a mile or so, in toward a swampy part of ground, and he began, at intervals of roughly ten minutes, to give the grunting call of a mature bull, which is not only different from the long trail of a cow moose but different, too, from the quick bleat of a young bull.
Late on the second day we had an answer far up the black spruce hill, a bawling of a cow moose, which is the eeriest sound in the forest and makes one think, in those black-shrouded pathways, of the ghosts of old lumbermen. Some say the cow’s call is what made our lumbermen believe in ghosts like “the Dungarvan Whooper.”
I have never heard anything remotely approaching it, and I cannot describe the chill it first gives you as it comes down to you, reverberating through the old growth of woods:
“Owwwwwwwwhooooooooooooummmph.”
Its reverberating quality is what a moose caller tries to produce, with as much authenticity as humanly possible. The reverberation of both the bull and the cow cry is what makes them striking, and it is the woods itself that becomes a part of the fascinating thrill of the call, for the sound echoes and bounces from tree to tree, causing a bellow. At dark, and alone, that bellow is something to hear.
“That’s the cow,” our uncle said. “The bull will be around tomorrow.” That is, we were calling a mature bull call that would attract the female and upset the male. The male would respond to the challenge and come out at us; young bulls might come into the area as well. We went back to the camp, and fried potatoes and bologna, ate back bacon and bread, and sat out on the porch.
But the third day was the hottest day of the hunt. Mosquitoes made their way back and forth from one ear to the other. The heavy jacket I had on, with high boots and Humphrey pants—I was dressed as I would be during late deer season—made me sweat all day. No call was answered, and at dinnertime, when we boiled up some water for tea and watched some spruce partridge walk in and out among some ferns, it looked as if we wouldn’t have any luck. My uncle began to tell us stories of other moose hunts he’d been on—how he was chased for a mile one day by a great bull who was in rut. As the day wore on our talk became sparser and more solemn.
At about three o’clock we started up the calls again. My uncle was a good caller. He mightn’t have been as grand a caller as the legendary Paul Kingston, or the Micmac who taught us the trick, but he was very fine, especially with the short huff of the bull.
But we didn’t get an answer—and three o’clock became four, and it seemed as if our preparedness and our strategy had not paid off. For at times those who are young have little strategy.
The old grown wood stretched out for miles above us, grey and solemn, where now and again in the far-off distance we would hear the sharp report of a .308 or the dull, heavy pack of a .306. This was the wood I had heard about all my life. It was older than I was by 2,000 years, and it looked upon me from its advantage as nothing more than a lonely passerby. It had heard Native boys as young as me 1,200 years before. It had heard the sounds of men in winter stalking game in the year 915.
And all the greatness of these men, and their deep understanding of this world, their songs, traditions, and those they had loved, had now passed away. The moss on the trees became shadowed, and ghostly curtains hung down, blowing a little in a nearly imperceptible breeze that told us we were in a living world, quite independent of who we were.
It was a solitary place, this woods, approaching evening, and we had a long way back to the camp, and then a longer way home.
That is what our minds were settled on ten minutes after our uncle’s last call, when suddenly, and seeming only a hundred yards or so away, came the mournful accepting call of the cow.
My brother turned, raised the old army-issue .303 British rifle, undid the safety, and right in front of us, no more than twenty yards away, came a 900-pound sixteen-point bull. He had not called at all. He’d come to the cow, had heard us, and was sure he had a rival. A rival he could make short work of. My brother fired quickly, and he needed to, or one of us might have been dead. What I think of, in retrospect, is Dolokhov’s comment on duelling in War and Peace. Duelling, he tells young Rostov, is like bear hunting. “Everyone fears a bear … but when you see one your fear’s all gone, and your only thought is not to let him get away.”
A friend related a story to us about a moose hunt back in
the early 1990s, when he was scout for a couple who hadn’t hunted moose before. They were far down in swamp land off Renous, “a bugger of a place to get a moose out,” he related. Finally a call brought out the cow. The cow went down, mortally wounded, and just then the large bull appeared, came out at them. Our friend said:
“We had our moose, and I didn’t want to kill him, but I had to ward him off. Sometimes he circled us no more than twenty yards away—blowing steam, his rack seeming to quiver with rage, the hump on his back as shiny as oil. We only had one bullet left. If I had to fire I wanted to make it count, because he’d certainly be able to kill one of us, if not more. I didn’t want to unless I had to—so it was a difficult thing. I was with a man and woman who had not been in the woods before—and I understood the bull’s rage and did not want to kill it, I felt for it and the cow—but still I had to keep my sports alive.”
Finally the bull moved off, and they spent the rest of the day getting their animal out.
You can lose a moose very easily. (By this I mean the meat will be no good.) It is warm and, unlike deer habitat, the moose are farther in, in deeper woods, wet woods as a rule, and harder to get at. Oh, I know many have got their moose on the road—one year my friend Peter shot an eighteen-point bull a mile from his camp. Still, more people have to go farther in than we normally do for deer. They are a much larger animal than deer, and it requires not only men but oftentimes machinery to get them out. (My Indian friend, Micmac hunter Paddy Ward, would sigh at that statement. He has always hunted moose entirely on his own.)
The time of year, late September, makes it imperative that you get them opened and up as soon as possible, to save the meat from being tainted and to ward off the blowflies. The idea, from certain older men, is that it was once much cooler in the late stages of September than it is today. Some days in late September are as warm as August, while in the last few years July has been a cool month. I am not certain how much of this is my imagination. However, I am certain many of my hunting friends complain about it, saying the hunt is set up to disappoint the hunter, and the moose season now starts before the rut—that it might have been good in Septembers in years gone by, but not now.
In earlier times, when there were British garrisons here, people hunted moose later into the year—and caribou, as well. The First Nations people hunted them into the winter months, and could track them down to exhaustion. All of this has changed under law, and in many respects the law’s job is to take the animal into consideration before the hunter. For there are cycles in the wilderness, and there have been times when the moose was hunted almost to extinction here—not by the First Nations people but by men in lumber camps a century ago, who used them to feed the lumber crews.
Autumn in Toronto is more mellow and long, and the trees’ leaves take their time turning colour and falling away. It is the season of “mellow fruitfulness,” as Keats said, and the lights of the houses along the many avenues bathe the sidewalks and alleyways and stores and fruit stands in gold. The pumpkins lie heavy on the steps and porches of mild-mannered people.
In some ways, in a few scattered ways, it is not a good place to be a boy. I suppose I have spurned discipline all my life—at least the kind that is imposed, the kind that says before you even begin a lesson that you are the one at fault. This has become more and more of a Canadian trend when it comes to instructing male children. At least, as I found out, when it comes to certain schoolyards.
In Toronto, I had two young sons going through elementary and middle school who had female teachers at least 80 percent of the time. At first I paid no attention when my older boy would sometimes say that the teacher was sexist. I suppose many people think men are more likely to be sexist, while women try to be fair. Of course in my own life, and in the books I have written, I have always shown that human beings, male or female, can make the exact same mistakes. I also understand the hideous stupidities women have been subjected to—not only my own grandmothers, as cases in point, but girls I grew up with. And, as far as my boys are concerned, I realize too that kids are kids, and will try to get away with what they can. So I discouraged confrontation with teachers, and still do.
My first boy told me at least four times that certain female teachers, in the way they viewed boys and men, and through the novels they demanded be read, were indeed sexist. “Everyone we know back east would be considered a chauvinist or a bigot,” he said to me one day, when he refused to write an essay on the radical position of a certain well-known book.
What he was telling me, in grade eleven, was that this attitude was seen as progressive and forward thinking, and young men should realize there was a price to pay.
So, after a time I realized that he, in some respects, was right. I told him to bear it, to get through high school.
He believed there was something terribly wrong in our “fair-minded country.”
He is very bright, and he graduated and moved back to the Maritimes before we did.
Once in the Maritimes, my wife and I noticed something. He became himself again. He was no longer in a city—he was no longer a rural child in an urban place. And I suppose that is when I began to realize how much of his young life was changed by our move, for he had a hard time in Toronto, and we probably made matters worse by not seeing what should have been seen—that he was not urban, and he needed the rural woods and rivers in order to belong. And once he came home, he belonged not just to the rural world, but to the world at large. If I caused him problems by moving to the city, I am sorry for them.
My second son, too, mentioned this to me, that some women teachers who had come of age in the 1970s were sexist. Or they treated the boys with more discerning condemnation than the girls. In some ways, there was no way to be a boy. And he began to be scrutinized for being a boy, and put into detention. So he was in detention many times, for many small things: building a snow fort, having a snowball fight, playing football at recess, sliding, and chewing an icicle. Now, it is not too difficult to just forgo all of this and to say that the school and the school board in some way must be right. But in another way, in some other way they are not right at all, and their methods are as puritanical and as draconian as a strap—for most of these activities are the ones boys do automatically and cannot stop.
The persistent idea in our culture was to quiet or expel these urges, because these urges were shocking—you know, wrestling and climbing trees. And how the elementary teachers—and yes, how two of the high school English teachers—taught reflected how they believed males should now act in our culture. And in all ways, as far as I could see, the intention of this was to dampen or redirect the force that pushes young boys to be boys. Because it was seen as not being “fair” to the girls, when 90 percent of the time it had nothing at all to do with the girls. And no girl was put into detention if she did the same thing.
I would not say this if it were not true, and, true or not, I would not mention it if I thought it was a positive thing. But I believe many female teachers in elementary grades are at times one-dimensional when it comes to thinking about children, and attitudes, and what children should think, for they have learned the methodology of equality and must prove it. It does not give boys who act like boys much hope. And my youngest acted like a boy.
This was not just a matter of taking on overt rough-housing and silliness, it was a systematic elimination of what boys need to be natural. I would kiss the book on this.
And so when my sons came home and told me that they had been told guns were bad and hunting was barbaric, and as they came into high school and were given books to study in which men were the only ones who were controlling—I realized we were in a place far, far away from where I had come from.
I realized that the main problem with the teachers was not that they had progressed but that they had never seen or known what they had been taught to hate. That their very categorization was not only wrong but ultimately deceitful. Did I tell my children this? No.
However, I me
ntioned to one teacher during a meeting that I would be willing to bring a licensed, empty shotgun and rifle to my son’s class. I would break them down and put them back together, to show how harmless guns, and most people who own them, are. I would talk about my uncles and show a picture of my aunt who hunted. I would show the articles written on my uncle, considered the greatest salmon guide in the world.
They declined my offer.
And I can say I do not blame anyone for this. But few were ever more certain that others were wrong, and they had the books and degrees in sociology and the right books in CanLit to prove it all.
I believe it was at this time I realized that my race of people, whoever and wherever they were, would become extinct.
A few years after I was with my brother hunting moose, I got my own moose licence in a draw, and called on David Savage, a friend of my fishing days, to come in with me. David has hunted the woods of the Miramichi region since he was a child, and is one of the finest woodsmen I know. He is a guide without being a guide. This is not at all unusual on the Miramichi. I know up to a dozen men who have a similar CV. Which means simply that more people rely upon David, phone him, ask him advice, secure his presence in the deep woods with them than they would almost anyone else, though he does not advertise or call it a business, and he makes no money (or very little) from the venture. In the woods, just as he does in fishing season, he will see that his “sports” (though he never calls them that) are comfortable and happy. And he will do everything he can (this side of the law) to make sure their hunt is a success. He himself, like many others, believes that a hunt can be a success even if one fails to get an animal.
Facing the Hunter Page 5