So I listened to the bay water lap up against the shore, while outside my window I could see the night stars—and count at least a billion of them—and I was content.
We were up before light and set out the second day after a cup of hot coffee. We walked into the same place at daylight, prepared to stay ten or eleven hours. It was a certain feeling I had, that I wouldn’t get a moose here. I do not know why I felt this, but I have taken enough fish and deer to know that if one has this feeling it almost always is proven out. I tried to quell it but couldn’t. We spoke of fishing—the first year I ran Green Brook with him, a fertile brook that flows well north of the Bathurst highway and runs into the main Bartibog about ten miles from the mouth, and how we lucked in to some very good trout—and how this day, a day we were hunting moose, seemed to be even warmer than those long-ago days in mid-July. We talked about Father Murdock, a famous local priest who lived as a recluse along the Bartibog after being shell-shocked in the Great War. He became a writer of some note, a writer who tried to put the finest spin on life that he could, because he had seen so much death. It was interesting for me to find out that David Savage had read some of these Father Murdock books as a boy, and learned secret spots on the rivers of his youth. David could disappear way up the Bartibog on those far-off July afternoons and return with five or six large sea trout. Some of the pools he relied upon he first learned about from reading Murdock.
Murdock died in 1971, and it was now the 1980s and the world was moving on, changing all things about us.
David spoke of his father, Percy (my wife’s uncle), and how adept he was at running Green Brook and Bartibog River, poling down in a canoe. I also knew that David did this, as a hunter, in the fall of the year—and far from the madding crowd, in the middle of nowhere, he would be able to take a buck. We talked about the olden times—which for us were just before and after the Second World War. The caribou had disappeared, even from the far-away places like Bald Mountain. Years ago the lumber camps had hunters who took too many moose and deer for the men who worked six months in the wilderness. But that was all gone, and so many of those people, and all that they seemed to have worked for, were as distant as ghosts. We were the offspring of those ghosts, still attempting to do the same things.
Many of the men I knew did the same work, essentially. One man I know well, at five-foot-seven and 150 pounds, carried a huge church organ on his back up the eighteen narrow steps of an apartment building without any help. His father and grandfather were even tougher. It was also strange to notice that day, for the hundredth time, that we wore essentially the same kinds of clothes as our forefathers, and if a picture were to be taken of us standing near them, it might be only our rifles that would be recognized as new. In fact, the guides in a picture of a caribou hunt my brother gave me some years back bear a striking resemblance to friends of mine, each of whom I hunted deer with when I was a young man. I will say that most of them would be as comfortable in that world as the guides themselves.
I told David of my brother’s moose some years before, which didn’t call but came right out at us. It was a strange enough occurrence, and might it happen again? David said that this happened only when the bull knew who was in the vicinity.
I thought of that place far up on the Souwest, and all that had passed since then, so it seemed an eternity away, the memories like the footprints from an old cork boot. Certain spots in the woods—like old trails half overgrown, bridges crossing a spruce barren half a century ago.
In the midst of these short conversations we continued calling. And at about five that afternoon in late September, we heard the short bleat (less than a huff) of a younger bull moose.
“EEEEEUH.”
It was some way away, in the large, thick spruce beyond us. I picked up the call and gave the cow call. There was silence, and then the bull answered again.
He called, and a little later we could hear him coming toward us. But the day was darkening. He had to come out soon if we were to get a shot. Our eyes were trained on a small opening between two spruce trees across the wet, dreary field. But he didn’t appear. Every now and again, though, we heard him, branches snapped off by his rack, as he came closer.
Crack, snap, and then crack, snap again. Then silence. Ten minutes would go by, and then snap, crack again. My heart was pounding, my finger on the safety, as we waited. I thought of the deer the year before, along the south branch of the Sovogle, who answered my little doe call but didn’t show himself.
This young bull did not come out, and we could only wait, hoping for a sight of him. Then suddenly he stopped, and it seemed as if he was moving away. Perhaps as a young bull he was intimidated, thinking a larger animal was around. Perhaps there was a large bull we didn’t hear (although I think this unlikely).
However it was, the young bull began to move away—and farther away. His sounds trailed off until they were almost inaudible, and then silence. Again, night was coming on in soft September, and after a time we could hear him no longer.
It was pitch-black by the time we reached the jeep.
“We’re going to change our place to Bartibog,” David said. “Two days here is enough. I don’t know why that bull didn’t come out—but what do you think? Think we should come back, or go across the river?”
I felt this road to be unlucky and so said we would change. Besides, Bartibog had always been lucky for me. We went back to the cottage on the shore. The idea of luck plays a very big part in the lives of hunters.
Early next morning we were up, and after some tea, put the rigging in the truck and headed out toward the Bartibog.
The Bartibog River where it flows into the Miramichi is spectacular in autumn, with the trees beginning to change and the water as calm as a mirror. On these late-September mornings men fall fishing for salmon could be seen across the river on the shoreline. We turned on the Gum Road and went back, with the river on our left, the road still dusty because of the long summer heat.
It is often an unwise thing to do—change your spot after two days. Especially if you have had some sign that moose were there, as we had.
Still, I could not think of hiking up that road again and waiting through the warmth of another September afternoon. So now it was Saturday morning, the last day of the hunt. That gave us a few good hours, early or late, for by mid-morning the moose would likely be done moving until sometime after three o’clock. As we drove up the Gum Road, it was already turning light. Everything pointed to us being out of luck—changing our spot, arriving after first light, and not knowing if other hunters had been here before us—which, in all probability, they had. We passed my wife’s grandparents’ land, where the Savages had lived for over a hundred years, coming as they did to New Brunswick from the Irish potato famine. Each one of the brothers was a hunter, a guide, and a woodsman.
We stopped a mile farther along. Here the tips of the trees were just turning orange. When we got out of the jeep, David asked me if I’d heard something. I hadn’t. He listened. I listened, and then shrugged. In fact I felt he was just saying this to keep my hopes alive. I didn’t mind it, but I was not that naïve, I believed, and felt we would have a long day.
We were going to walk up a narrow woods road to an old chop-down, and wait.
I loaded my clip into the heavy .303 and walked toward this chop-down hidden by a vale of black spruce trees, just as the pink was broadening in the sky. The day was somehow soundless as we took our place behind some small hedges and looked out over the bleak landscape—which was in a way, rooted up and tossed, still beautiful. The sun hit the old roots of torn up trees and gave a splendid panorama—at least to my way of thinking. Perhaps it is the same kind of thinking that allows one to look at a junkyard and find an essential beauty still there. Or see a battered, empty farmhouse as a thing of splendour. The trees in the distance, about six hundred yards away, shimmered in the early morning, and the clouds were turning from black to grey. Yes, it was beautiful. At any rate, it seemed so to me
at that moment.
We might have been there five or ten minutes when David, taking a turn looking through the scope, said, “Here’s yer moose.”
I raised the sight and looked—a cow, followed by a large bull, was walking about three quarters of the way across the chop-down. Neither of us would have seen them without the scope. And it was a long shot—over four hundred yards. Many hunters I know would have tried to sneak along the edge of the chop-down and try to get closer, or go through the woods. But I didn’t. If I had, the unevenness of the ground, and the change of finding myself hemmed in by windfalls and uprooted trees, might have ruined any shot. Besides, I was sure I didn’t have a lot of time.
So it was a long shot, but it would be the one chance I had, and I knew it.
I raised the rifle, aimed just over the hump of the bull, and fired. The bull reared, but I knew I had missed him. Both animals started running. I raised and fired again—higher, and missed again. The third shot I aimed a good two feet above the hump and fired. The bull fell forward, got up, and disappeared into the woods.
“I hit it,” I said.
“I think you might have,” David agreed, but he had no binoculars and wasn’t sure.
We went after it, along the chop-down, and searched for twenty minutes or so. We couldn’t find it. We came back to the chop-down to try and pick up the trail or some blood.
“Perhaps it just fell off balance,” David said.
“No—I hit it.”
“It was an awful long shot,” David said. And it struck me, how that phrase has been incorporated into our lexicon of slim chances.
“I hit it,” I said. But we couldn’t find it, and rain began to fall. I was obligated to find the animal if it was wounded. I knew I had to. We stood under some trees as the rain pelted down.
“Do you want to go back out, have a cup of tea—?” David suggested, for he was less certain that I’d hit it. But I knew what I had hit.
I looked over to the far quarter of the chop, where the moose had disappeared.
“I have to take another look. If it’s wounded I have to find it. Besides, I am sure I hit it—and I don’t want to lose it.”
“Then we’ll look again,” David said.
We went back to the far edge of the chop-down and walked in. Here we could see where the cow had gone down to the left.
Perhaps the bull had not travelled that way.
So as I went in toward where the cow had probably gone, David went in the opposite direction, and moved through an opening between two black spruce.
“Here it is,” he said.
It was a thousand-pound, twenty-one-point bull. I had hit it once, with that third shot. It was mortally wounded and could not have lived long. Though I had aimed a good two feet above the large hump on the shoulders, I had hit the animal through the rib cage and into the lungs. The shot was well over four hundred yards. When I was worried about hitting that test target, I never in my life thought I’d have a shot that long.
It took us the rest of the day to get it out. We had to gut it by almost crawling inside it and staking it open. We went out to the highway and got a friend with his skidder to come over the chop. Even then, it took four of us to move it along, where we lifted it onto the back of a half-ton truck. I believe it to have been one of the finest animals taken that year—but I am no Ernest Hemingway. Though I hunt, and enjoy it, and believe that if one eats meat they have a moral obligation to kill that which they eat at least once in their lifetime, I will not brag about killing.
Later that season I went deer hunting, and though I saw five or six deer I never had a good shot, or a real chance, and I decided that this was the way God intended it.
The next season David shot a moose almost at the same place. I was with him on that hunt, and the weather was as warm as I can ever remember. The moose travelled only early, very early in the morning. And again we hunted two hard, long days without seeing anything much. There was more chop-down than the previous year—the woods where my bull had been found wasn’t there any more—and we saw no sight or sign (except for a little bat that kept us company in the old box trailer we stayed in). Again we had brought in deer meat from an animal David had killed the year before. He had gotten this nine-point buck along the hills of the Restigouche in the late autumn with the snow down. The steaks were fine, fried over the Coleman stove that long-ago year. There is nothing better to remind you of previous hunts than a Coleman stove. It is a link not only to past hunts but to civilization—and therefore can become a very nostalgic piece of equipment.
At night I barbecued, with onion, a salmon I had taken at B&L Pool that July, and we sat under the stars, as we looked out over the Bartibog River. What did our ancestors think when they first arrived? Alexander MacDonald arrived to this region after the American Revolution. He fell in love with the great Bartibog, and hunted and fished, and farmed, and built himself a huge stone house from the ballast of trading ships. He was five feet, two inches tall, and his wife was four-foot-eleven. They were a small, indomitable couple who had many children, and whose descendants are part of the community still, and are relatives of my wife.
Early on Saturday morning, David shook me awake.
“Get up. I think I heard a moose out near the chop.”
It was just growing light but David had been awake awhile, chewing Red Man Plug.
We rose and got to the chop-down at first light. For a moment or two I was sure he was hearing things. When he pointed, I thought he was seeing things. Then it became clear.
Two moose moving off in front of us.
David aimed and fired, and was able to bag his moose, about five hundred yards from where I had shot mine. It was just at light, and I could not see it clearly. Twice David wondered whether he should take the shot, but he could see it through the scope. It, too, was a good-sized animal—and David was using my .303 for its hitting power.
A year later my brother-in-law Edward McIntyre got a twenty-point monstrous bull moose a few miles away, hunting from a tree stand.
The tree stands are usually built at the end of a chop-down or clear-cut—or a swampy hidden meadow. Usually they are fifteen or twenty feet from the ground, and they give a panoramic view. Men call the cow call, and will pour water to make the sound of urine. Some have actual cow moose urine with them. This will attract the bull. One can come from literally miles away, and it may take half the day waiting before it approaches, breaking the branches down as it comes.
In the late nineteenth century there was an actual cow moose, which John Connell had tamed, that was used to call the bull moose out in the fall. It worked nicely until some unknowing fellow, seeing the cow moose, took it to be wild and shot it.
I know three or four men who missed their moose at the chop, also. One person I know shot seven times at a moose standing 150 yards away, and missed it. Another fired at one across the river. Two others left their camp one morning, hungover and wearing sunglasses, carrying their rifles in one hand and bullets in their pocket. They walked toward their tree stand, thinking that no animal would be so impolite as to appear before they got there—and a bull moose stepped out in front of them before they got to it. As you may have guessed, they didn’t get it.
In Connell’s time, poachers probably decreased the population there by another dozen moose, and there seems no way to stop them. For a poacher to quit he must believe what he is doing is harmful to the animal. And very few poachers believe this. Yet it must be a sickening feeling at certain times for them. The idea of death, even in a legitimate hunt, can still a heart.
I know a man who took two bulls one year, and had one rot. If he cannot see himself that this is wrong, nothing you say will convince him. The more one tries to convince, the more one is turned away with an array of angry logic and stubborn fact—and the persistent implication that you are the one who is weak.
Never being weak is a big thing here. So people should make a concerted effort to understand what weakness is. To look on de
ath or injury without sadness is considered strong, many times by people who have never made a move in their lives without the approval of others. If they only knew what strength of character really means.
Many poachers have an age-old feud or a gripe against someone somewhere in authority. Therefore they are self-justified. Besides, they want to prove themselves to their buddies. That is the real reason for their truancy, and it makes them more dangerous to the moose than any legitimate hunter ever could be. It is a strange thing to say, an anomaly of conscience, but most hunters, most are conservationists. I will guarantee that I am. If not, I would long ago have shot deer from my back doorstep just because I could.
I have taken very few pictures of my moose hunts and have kept very few trophies. The moose horns off the bull I shot are at Peter McGrath’s camp up on the Norwest Miramichi. Someday when I am older, though I am no longer young, I will bring them back to this farmhouse where I now sit.
There is an old picture of a doe and fawn somewhere near Rocky Brook—taken perhaps seventy years ago, in shadow along a bar—near where the wind blows in midday, soft, and the ripples of water caress some small boulder. Sometimes I think of such a picture I saw as a boy—up along a river on a quiet day, where the windy green begins to stir just before fall, and the trees trade colour for the paramour they display before dark chill sets, and those quiet places begin to wail and toss in the squalls of winter. I wonder if in fact we ever find those places any more, what happens to them after—and where that picture is now, that once sat on a mantel in some house that is no longer there.
All or most of that life is perhaps now gone. But there came something from that life—an instinct about who can be trusted and who cannot be.
Years ago, Giles and I would borrow Peter Baker’s Suzuki 180 to visit our girlfriends downriver. It was as cold as hell, and often we would ride only a mile or so before having to switch to give the driver time to warm up as a passenger. This was in November of 1967. And each of us trusted the other to drive the bike until he was too frozen to bring the clutch in to shift.
Facing the Hunter Page 7