Facing the Hunter
Page 8
So trust came, because it had to be.
We went hunting that year, up to his camp, and then onward to Bald Mountain where his dad, Mike Kenny, shot a nine-point buck just at dusk that night.
That night on the ground we almost froze, the weather as still and as calm as something in the petrified forest, and far below us trees were stunted and bare, looking like the grey ghosts of the Confederacy, while above the stars were sharp as spikes. We had left wilderness at the Kenny camp and travelled to a greater wilderness, where men had hunted caribou a generation or two before, meat for the lumber camps in the woods beyond.
And one autumn day Giles and I took his dad’s International truck, and Giles decided to drive in through the woods, over the long wooded bank, to try and find an old road to the river. We had to cut trees and jack it up, moving it forward a foot at a time through most of the afternoon, but we got it down to the river and out to the bridge. When I read A River Runs Through It, I realized I had spent my childhood with the same type of men.
I now spend my summers in a farmhouse where two generations ago the road wasn’t ploughed in the winter. There are some mementoes of hunting and fishing, portraits of friends standing about a campfire in the snow, with a white-tailed deer up. Antlers from deer I have shot.
My neighbours do not understand me. That I am the fellow who has devoted his life to writing books—they cannot seem to get their head around it. But their hearts are very much the same, and their love extends to me because of my wife, who grew up beside them and is related to many. And I think of many of them like this:
“If people were actually paid for their value, these people of self-reliance would surely be living in the finest houses.”
A nice enough woman novelist once told me I shouldn’t give too much credit to the working class. I don’t—it’s just that I refuse to give them less credit than I give anyone else.
I keep waiting for the nights to come cold and bitter so I can go out deer hunting this year. I know there is a buck just beyond the field—I have seen its markings. You know at the very stillest of moments just before dark he will be there.
But now it is November and still warm. So my wife and I can go out on our bikes many nights—she taking the Sportster 883 and I on the Soft Tail. Often the November nights are warm enough to ride along the old Souwest road, or up toward the mines where I saw just last year a cow and beautiful twin calves in downy grey coats cross before me. I still search always for deer.
Most of the families along here have some association with us. They have hunted and fished most of their lives. Most of them I have known from my youth. There are very few of them I wouldn’t trust.
There are those I have learned not to trust—at least not to trust with my life. For that is what is at stake when you are in camp or alone.
The woods are like this too—you have to know this before you enter in. There is no way to leave your integrity at the door.
These things have a lot to do with hunting, for a man who is deceitful in small things will have no courage in big matters.
So late last week I sighted my rifle in at the gravel pit. I fired seven shots and hit the small target every time at over a hundred yards—however, the shots weren’t in the greatest concentration. Then my son John came home from Woodstock and we headed out toward the hills of the south. My son, whom I carried in my arms through the streets of Sydney, Australia, past ladies of the night who all patted his head for luck, and along the breakwater in Denia, Spain, during the turbot war in 1995, is now three inches taller than I am, broad-shouldered and fit, and at least as strong as his old man.
He is back where he belongs, in the province of his youth.
Two days ago we travelled south from Fredericton to look for deer. Here is the best deer country in the province.
Yesterday we saw four deer but none were bucks, and a large cow moose came out along the edge of a barren chop where an old moose stand rested against the winter sky. My son climbed it, to look across the barrens and take a look through the scope. (He can climb much better than I can—and used to scare me to death by climbing to the top of our house as a kid.) But he saw nothing as the day got shorter.
Then I walked down toward the stream. Snow had fallen along the hardwood ridge, and I saw a buck’s tracks slewed off in the snow. He had been there just a while before—perhaps when my son climbed the stand it had startled him. Who knows, anyway. And the bright day was falling away.
We started to head out, because I knew a road that intersected the stream, and thought that if I could get up on a ridge somewhere in the last hour of daylight he might stumble toward me with his nose to the ground, picking up doe scent—and I remembered the little buck I first shot years and years ago.
But as we drove slowly along toward the upper ridge we came across two First Nations Maliseet hunters, a father and son whose truck had broken down. They were trying to get it started and they were thirty miles from the nearest village. So my son and I were required to stop. We spent the rest of the daylight, or a good part of it, but we couldn’t get fire to the engine. So they locked the truck up, and we drove them back in. I suspected, and so did John, that they had a deer hanging—but they probably wouldn’t have left the deer, so perhaps a moose down, for as First Nations men they would be still allowed to hunt moose.
At any rate, our hunt was over for the day, but we were obligated to do what we did. And that’s all a person can do.
Here and there I still see houses that once belonged to some back-to-the-landers. Most have gone. Those who have stayed are indistinguishable, really, from most of the people they live beside. Others have gone back to where they originated from. And as my son falls asleep on the long drive home, I think of all the earnestness of those people who came here to start a new life, in a new world.
Many years ago I got to know a young woman. Her name was Stevie—she wore granny glasses, and knitted in Uncle Tate’s kitchen as the sunlight glanced over the chimes. She was from Toronto, and the man Darren, her mentor and the mentor of the group, came from New York, with four or five other city-dwellers. I have a memory of him looking like Jesus, leaning against Uncle Tate’s sink and pouring water out, as if at a baptismal font. From the first, Darren seemed to be the guru in this new paradise. At any rate he spoke of tolerance, while keeping the others in line, dividing up the chores.
They were back-to-the-landers in that age of unrest. They had bought an old house from the family of a man we called Uncle Tate, who had died of a heart attack pushing though a road when he was fifty-four. Uncle Tate had smashed a hospital window and was thrown in jail the night his wife died, because he had tried to pick her up and take her home, as he had promised her. That, too, was trust. And now he too was gone.
Neil Young sang about “a town in north Ontario,” and suddenly half my generation wanted to be old, or from a previous generation. A generation that lived off the land, never knowing that even the First Nations themselves wanted, at least in part, to escape from this.
So they came in the summer, this little band; they were going to make a canoe out of bark, fish in the traditional way, plant under the June moon. They had a pocketful of seeds, pocketful of dreams.
“Man, you don’t know what you got here—so you better take care of it,” Darren said to me the only time I ever spoke to him, pouring out his cup of pure well water. That is, he ordered me to take care of something his own urban culture had reduced to nothing.
They spent October in the yellow trees, cutting and limbing the wood they were to burn, but didn’t get it yarded until late and then left it where it was until well after the first storm. After a time they reminded me of a little band of orphans, with nowhere much to go. Stevie’s cheeks were often streaked, as if she had just cried. I wondered where she had come from. But she was here now, and in the power of a guru who probably gave orders as relentlessly as any daddy she had run from. I saw her trying to carry wood to the house and stumbling under the weight, a
s if she were carrying a cross she could neither bear nor understand. It might have been like forcing an Indian woman to go to church in the eighteenth century. The feeling of being displaced must have been almost as strong.
But she continued to carry her wood.
Watching her in those days, I thought of a thousand women who had done the same a century before. Of my mother-in-law, left a widow with nine children at the age of forty-two, a country girl. Of my mother, who grew up in the heart of what any one of these people would have considered the wilderness and did housework from the time she was four. Of my uncle, who, at thirteen, was sent through the woods to find my grandfather, while my grandmother, holding a doublebarrelled shotgun, held off a group that was trying to take the property. Of my paternal grandmother, who knocked a cow cold with one punch (a feat not to be equalled by any literary figure in Canada, save Malcolm Lowry).
When it became very cold, Stevie would sit in our corner store for hours, pretending to do crossword puzzles in the daily newspapers. She was hiding from the guru who intimidated her and intellectually bullied her, from the stillness and coldness of the house beyond.
I often saw a look of dull confusion, as if she were a lost Girl Scout. And where, I thought, could she ever go now? Nowhere. Not with winter setting in and no ticket home. Frost clung to the turned-down and twisted grasses; their wood lay yarded as haphazardly as fallen soldiers. There was no way to dispel the cold and no way to get rid of the smoke from their damp maple and birch. No way to make the light stay when it was getting dark, no way to make the chickens look happy, no way to make the barn stand straight again. No one had money for those things. And night—night came at six, at five, at four-thirty.
The locals became interested in helping out, for no better reason (and a damn good reason it was) than that these were people and it was Christmas. And many of my friends who were their age dropped in on them with presents.
They brought deer meat from a buck killed up at Mullin, and moose meat from the first moose we had taken, fifty pounds of potatoes, homemade wine, fresh-grown grass, and other forms of libation. But it became a strange celebration. It reminded me of Tolstoy’s quip that at least as much is known in the country as the city, and probably more.
When Darren spoke to us of wanting to build a geodesic dome, he was very surprised to find out that our friend Giles had quit school in grade ten and had built the first dome in New Brunswick, drawing on his own plans and intelligence and reading Buckminster Fuller. He, Darren, had not known that universal ideas were actually universal.
When Darren said he would fish for his food, it was Peter McGrath who brought smoked salmon. Yes, he told Darren, he had taken them on fly, running the river from Little River down to Miner’s Camp. He had taken them on butt bugs he had tied himself. No, it was not a big thing—here, take them all.
Yes, we will teach you to hunt and fish—it is no problem, don’t ever worry or be afraid to ask!
This was no one-upmanship. The little town was just the land extended. Until I was twenty-four, I could carry my rifle from my house into the woods for a deer hunt. It was not that Darren did not know the land—he did not know himself, and the land simply told him this. Sooner or later the land does.
Life went on. There were chores to be done, by people who had never done chores before. They spoke of sharing, but it was contractual, not emotional. It seemed to me there was more love in the place when Uncle Tate lived alone and fired off his shotgun at his visitors as a joke.
By January there were arguments. That month a young man got a job in town. Another went away—and then another.
I met Stevie coming out along the back road one day. She was carrying a saucepan, with nothing in it. Someone had told her there were winter berries to collect, but she had found none, for there were none. We stood and talked for a moment in the freezing gale of late afternoon.
“We are going to have a really fine farm,” she told me. I was so sorry for her at that moment. She had come to womanhood in what kind of city, to feel so left out, like so many of my generation? Cast out, of something. I’m not even sure what. All she had known was concrete. Why had this happened? What sad turning away from her family did she have, in what hot, vacant, urban apartment or house tucked between two asphalt roads? An argument over the war—or a parent trying too hard to buy her love, or loving her too little? Did they even know where she was any more? She was still a child, really.
“So you aren’t going home?” I said.
“Oh—no—no!” She smiled. “I’ll never go.”
It was a victory for her to say this. I might have told her that I knew a family who had arrived at this little place where she was now in 1840, and lived their first winter in a cave about a mile from where we were talking, losing three children. I might have told her that my relatives came over after the Battle of Culloden, and one walked from Pennsylvania in 1805 and settled up on the Norwest. To keep her chin up.
I discovered at that moment that there is something about the land—you look unnatural on it if you are unnatural, you look greedy on it if you are, lazy if you tend to be. If you are frightened of guns or wildlife, the land will inform you. Nervous on the water, the water will let you know. There is no escaping who you are once you are here, on the Miramichi—or anywhere else, for that matter. It is what the First Nations saw of us. It is what I saw of her—she with the saucepan with nothing in it.
In late January another one of them went and got a job. He worked at a garage in Barryville repairing snowmobiles and would come home every night late. He supported this little family of outcasts by doing a job hundreds of men did without complaint, simply because life required that he do it.
Then he found a girl in Neguac and moved out.
So there were only Stevie and her mentor, Darren, left. They were the last. And in that winter, living alone, they found that the dream had somehow disappeared. But what dream was it? I don’t think any of them, including Darren, really knew.
Darren left one afternoon, saying he would be back—that he was going into town for supplies. His poncho on a hook in the corner near his leather hat assured Stevie of his return. But he did not come back. She waited by the window, his supper in the warming oven. He had become safe again, when being unsafe was no longer a game.
Stevie stayed by herself, looking out those porch windows, waiting for her friend. She made it until March.
Sometime about St. Patrick’s Day I saw her doing her crossword in the corner store. There was a storm outside and everything in the world was white.
She was happy, she said. The wood was drier, and people had made her welcome. She was working two nights a week in this store, selling cigarettes and Tampax. But she needed to take a course, she thought, and come back next year. Next year would be better. The terrible things in the world would be gone. Suddenly she reached up and kissed my forehead and squeezed my hand. She walked on, and I watched her go out of my life. It’s been almost thirty years.
The house is gone, and no one waits, and none of them has ever been back. They didn’t have much luck. For a while many of us might have believed a new world would come. Perhaps that’s what we’ve all been watching for, whenever we look up at the sky.
I walked beyond Uncle Tate’s land late last autumn. There had been two days of snow. I walked toward the hundredth new chop-down that has come since the mill started its new process, and then shut its doors for good. I carried my little Winchester .32—but I have not fired a rifle at a deer in a few years now. I trick myself into hunting by not hunting now. Usually I find a tin can to fire at, sight the rifle in, for next year.
My family—here for over two and a half centuries—is gone from the river, and in the summer the brooks babble to tell me so. My mother died in 1978, my father died ten years ago, and all the children have left. We have gone away, but we do come back. In a sense, once a part of the land, we can never leave. We didn’t become peace lovers, but we do love, fiercely, I suppose.
I walked toward the high ground beyond his house, next to the power lines. The ground was dug up that day, with fresh tracks and scrapes. In one of those tricks of fate I saw the old saucepan Stevie had used to collect her winter berries. It had been tossed up out of the dirt that had buried it for years. I wondered how her life had gone, and if she had ever found the place she wanted.
Then turning toward the chop, I saw a little doe. As I approached she made a heroic attempt to stand. Her left hind leg was caught in a coyote snare, and she was hunkered down beneath the snow and thrashed trees. All around and everywhere I looked the snow and earth had been torn up, where a gigantic battle had raged above Uncle Tate’s old farmyard. The night before the buck had stayed, to protect the doe in the snare from the coyotes. And he must have fought like hell. The coyotes—here almost as big as wolves—hadn’t been able to get to her. I do not know if the buck lived, but he had done the job given him. Like Uncle Tate with his wife, he didn’t know why she was caught up in the way she was. The world had betrayed them both: the snare cynically said that neither of them mattered. Still, the buck fought like a bastard. Never left his poncho on a nail.
I managed to cut the snare. She stood and bolted, cracking the limbs of some birch trees, and was gone, gone into what was left of a world that didn’t exist any longer.
6
I know two men who were hunting with an older man up on the Mullin Stream Road a few years ago. The older man shot at a large moose that came into the open. Believing he had missed, and feeling foolish that he had shot at it from such a distance when he had been told to wait—certain that he had made a laughingstock of himself—he wanted to go home, not just back to the camp.