Facing the Hunter

by David Adams Richards

  He spent some time searching for the wounded duck until he found it, in some grasses, and calling it a day decided to go home. He walked back toward the centre of the island, an island still covered in spruce, with cold yellow sand driven up along the shore and deep withered grasses, an island that sits just at the mouth of the Miramichi Bay about a quarter mile from the mouth of the Bartibog River.

  It was getting past twilight, and he was alone, and, as sometimes happens, the wind from the east had picked up and made it almost unbearably cold. When he got back to where he had left his canoe it was no longer there. He kept moving along, thinking that he had left it some other place. But he finally realized that the tide must have ripped it away, and it was now loose. He began to run along the shore looking for it. Though certainly not in the predicament the poor people in “The Ledge” were, he was still in an awful bind. No one knew where he was, and with each passing moment he could envision himself stranded. In fact, his wife thought he had gone partridge hunting. Any search for him would have started upriver—not out toward the bay.

  Night, and no one at all on the opposite shore. He might fire shots all night and no one would hear him. In fact, my farm is only a mile or so up a laneway from this lonely island, but at that time there might have been no one walking that shore for days.

  Still, as luck would have it, he saw his canoe bobbing away from the land, with each outgoing wave, at the very tip of the island. He set his sights on it, figuratively speaking, and began to wade out into the swells, feeling the cold wind upon him. Each moment the canoe got farther, and the grey, seaweed-filled water got deeper. It was up to his knees, and then thighs, and then waist. He kept going, feeling the water lap higher up upon him, with his breath getting shorter because of the pressure of the water against his lungs.

  The only thing that saved him: he was on the inside of the island, where the water is not as deep as on the far side. He had to hurry, knowing that he did not have an unlimited amount of time, and he managed, and he did just manage to get a fingertip on his canoe, when he was almost up to his chest in water. He proceeded to get a hand on the stern, and hold it, and finally kick it back to shore, where he picked up his rifle and his birds and made his way back to the mainland, shore, and home.

  Sometimes deer will swim the river and out to that island. You might see deer signs there. Sheldrake Island is a place where, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they left sick and infested passengers from ships. Though it has a well and stakes of an old settlement, it is still wooded. (Since I wrote this a cottage has been built, and a family now summers there.)

  Along the opposite shore, down from the road to my own property, large buck can be seen walking. I realize that all the animals we hunt are in a general proximity to water—either a brook or a river. I hunted them along the Fundy coast and saw them in the same hidden places. In fact I took them from those places long ago.

  There are other islands that deer cross to. We have seen them on Beaubears Island upriver, and on many others. In the half summer light, fishing salmon, I saw a young mother doe and her fawn on the small, very small island beyond me up on the Norwest one night, grazing where low-growth alders and alder swale only hid them from view.

  I wondered if she knew that made them both vulnerable. Perhaps it would have at another time, but this was midsummer and she was more concerned, or most concerned, about protecting her fawn, not from coyotes or man but from the mosquitoes and blackflies that will drive them crazy on summer nights. The wind off the water must have helped this a little.

  Two years later, in the deep fall of the year, with just a presence of snow and the water cold on my waders, I made my way across to that island—again, with no one knowing where I was (irresponsible, I know, but many times we only get a real sense of where we must go when we start to go there).

  The water was not deep but the rocks were all sizes, and slippery—though my waders were padded at the bottom, I am not the most sure person on my feet. I was carrying a backpack, and my rifle over my shoulder. I made it onto the island sometime after two in the afternoon and sat at the edge of a deer trail that led up from the water into some distant overgrowth and forlorn naked bushes. I sat there camouflaged and hunkered down, with buck musk masking my scent, until almost dark, with my feet freezing in those fishing waders. Suddenly I realized that retracing my way back across the river, while unable to see into it, was going to be a difficult thing for me, so I startedback across with the twilight very red beneath the hilltop trees, and already the sound of coyotes yapping to each other along the ridge above. Halfway across that river, picking my way along, I look up to see a large—and I mean huge—buck simply watching me from the shore. He very well may have been on his way to that island—but here I was standing in the middle of the river. I had nowhere to put my backpack so I could sling my rifle around and raise it. Of course I attempted to do just that, and my backpack hit the water as I moved my rifle to my shoulder. The deer simply bounded away, tail in the air and a tree limb crashing. I turned and had to follow my backpack, up to my waist in water, and grabbed it—and made it across to the shore feeling as foolish as hell.

  I remember years ago Mike Kenny, one of the finest woodsmen I have had the privilege to know, shot two deer on an island on the Sovogle River, sometime in the late afternoon, after tracking them down the hills from his camp for hours. He knew they must have crossed, so he waited on the shore, hoping to catch a sight of them. Finally his patience was rewarded, and he saw them appear, just before dark, and was able to shoot both. Then by himself he had to construct a bridge across that water, walk over, gut and clean the deer, and carry them back one at a time over the swift rapids where his bridge was laid. The buck was over two hundred pounds, the doe a hundred and fifty.

  He finished doing this in the dark and made it back to camp that freezing night, sometime in the mid-1960s. These were just two of the many deer he would take up near his camp at Mile 6 of the Fraser Burchill Road. I hunted with him on one of those occasions, and realized this fellow could live in the woods by himself without any problem. These feats, accomplished by ordinary men I grew up beside, give credit to the people, as people who have retained their heritage because they take it seriously. A hunter the calibre of Mr. Kenny could tell a visitor from Ontario or New York about the world of New Brunswick a hundred times more significantly than the brochures at bed-and-breakfasts and historic King’s Landing.

  8

  In the seventeen and eighteen hundreds in Europe, people could get lost on major roads. Lord Macaulay writes that, setting aside the alphabet and the printing press, “those inventions which abridge distance have done most for the civilization of our species.” Road improvements were crucial in those days, as roads were difficult to distinguish and follow, and even Samuel Pepys and his wife lost their way more than once while travelling on a main road in their coach in England. This was also a common occurrence in France and the Netherlands.

  In the early days of our camp beyond Mile 17 of Mullin Stream Road, there were times when, setting out on the deer trails in early morning, I would be turned about by eleven o’clock. It was then that I would have to remind myself that I was between roads and a major stream, and though I thought I was in a difficult predicament it was just my imagination. This always worked. It made a world of difference to realize that any direction I took was the right one, unless I went in complete figure eights or circles.

  A friend of mine from Nova Scotia on a bird hunt with his dog was lost completely for hours in the middle of nowhere, one day outside of Amherst, because he had gone off the road to search for a wounded bird and had continued into a place he was less familiar with. Soon he found himself stumbling about, trying to backtrack, with no sense at all of what direction he had come, or what direction he was going. Looking up at the trees above his head only baffled him more. It was early in the season, the trees still had leaves, and the forest was dense. He had no idea after a while where to go. He finall
y decided, rightly, to sit where he was, and wait—at least until he calmed down. It was his dog that helped him find his way out, by running up to him, running away until he disappeared, and running back to him again. My friend realized that the dog was showing him the way back home.

  It was a long day, but he did make it back.

  When I brought Jeb Stuart, my little river water dog, with me on fishing journeys back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was never any worry about being lost, for all I had to do, no matter where I was, was say “Truck,” and Jeb would simply turn and start back to it, stopping at intervals to wait for me.

  People can bring matches and be dressed warmly and comfortably, but if they panic it doesn’t matter, even if the highway is three hundred yards away. I heard the story of a man years ago leaving a lake and taking the one direction that was wrong. That is, any other direction would have led him to civilization in a matter of an hour. But having lost the path, and after walking around the entire circumference of the lake two or three times trying to find it, he started through the woods in the one direction that took him farther and farther into the wilderness. He was lost for three days, and when they finally found him he was walking a road twenty miles from where the search party was, most of his clothes torn off. But he was alive.

  Many of the people who don’t live are children who get lost in the summer, down in a bog or cedar swamp, where they are far from earshot of their parents’ cries. Whole weeks are devoted to trying to find these children, and many are never found, or when they are they have already succumbed to thirst and terror. Since my boys live close to the woods in the summer I am as conscious of this as other fathers and worry about it as much. And though I am also conscious that as a child I roamed the woods with friends day in and day out, without concern, it is natural to worry. Yet all the worrying in the world doesn’t help. I remember, years back, going with a woman to check a farmhouse she wanted to buy. My oldest boy, who was four at the time, jumped from the car and, without knowing it, ran two feet by an open well that would have dropped him eighty feet in a second. None of us knew the well was there. How many nightmares I have had because I didn’t prevent him from running by what I wasn’t aware of, and yet how little I could have done!

  There are documented cases of children lost who say the fairies found and took care of them. One, a child lost for nine or ten days and given up for dead, said the fairies brought her food and helped keep her warm. I suppose everyone would take this as completely delusional, except for her parents.

  The most sensible suggestion to those who are mixed up in the woods is to stay put. This is the easiest advice to give and yet the hardest to follow, for a variety of reasons. Movement seems like action, action seems like advancement. So if I move I am helping myself advance. This is almost never the case if you are seriously lost. But so many people are determined, and panicked, and wish to find their way out as soon as possible. The heart rate goes up, the thinking gets blurred, and soon one is more lost than before.

  “They will find you” is actually true more often if you stay where you are. But it is easy to say and hard to do. The fact that you have to admit defeat and actually stay where the hell you are is hard to take. I’m playing the pragmatist here. I know what it is like to keep going when you feel you are lost, because I have done it, and have been lucky enough to stumble upon a road. I have also been turned around with others, who have known the woods better than I, and have taken heart in the fact that they did know. Though on occasion they too were as confused about direction as I was. Once, on a fishing trip with Peter McGrath, we were seriously mixed up, and finally had to rely on something neither of us believed was accurate: a compass.

  When I took my father’s car on those partridge outings years ago I couldn’t let him know where I was going because I was doing something he didn’t want me to do. But I did have the car. Other times I have found myself hunting deer and realizing late in the day that I have told no one I was doing this. Once I had a deer down and had to haul it half a mile. No one knew where I was. My wife Peg was at work in a city 104 miles away. She knew I was gone hunting on the Miramichi. My father, still alive at that time, had no idea where I was.

  That is foolish. But many people have no idea of their plans.

  One year, Peter McGrath was hunting up off the hardwood ridges along the Plaster Rock Highway. He had been advised by friends to take a compass with him, for the ridges looked dangerously alike, and he might find himself on a ridge far from the ridge he believed he was on. These ridges intersect one another at all angles and can leave the hunter confused within a half hour of walking into them. The hardwood birches and poplar trees go on for miles, so at times the land looks identical, and if you are not careful you can become seriously lost. But Peter was young then, and brash. He had walked rivers all day long, cut through as much woods as most woodsmen. He had hunted and fished alone far from civilization, and he believed in his own wits, and in no one else’s.

  “I started out fine,” he told me. “I came to a small brook running between two hardwood ridges and I followed it up a ways, and picked up a deer trail. I knew where the brook was, and therefore where I had left my truck, and was certain that I could follow this buck, no problem.” And that is what he did. He followed the buck until late in the day. He saw it, crossing the top of a ridge far ahead of him. He raised his rifle but couldn’t take the shot, and he knew it was getting late, and he would not have a chance at it again that afternoon. Still, he wanted to go to the top of that far-away ridge to see if he might spy it again.

  When he got there, somewhat winded, he saw the tracks of another hunter. But, to his surprise and consternation, he realized that these were his own tracks. That is, somewhere along his route he had travelled in a complete circle—and, what was more alarming, probably not once but twice. And in that case he wasn’t sure where to pick this circle up. He began following those tracks backwards, but felt that these would only take him to where he had spied that deer going over the ridge. And sure enough that is what happened. Now he was very confused, for his own tracks only took him in a circle—which meant he had crossed himself up on some ridge and had no way to determine where his truck was.

  He began to look through his field glasses to see if he could notice anything promisingly familiar, but unfortunately the strong birch trees stretched away up and down various ridges and at many angles. The day was growing later and the sun was fainting away among the hills of trees and snow. He started back to the ridge he believed the brook must run through. But when he got there it looked terribly unfamiliar, and there wasn’t a sign of his tracks or his buck’s tracks. But there were the tracks of a smaller buck. He realized he had to stay put for the night if he didn’t find his way back soon. Besides, everything looked the same. And he decided that his friends were right, he should have brought a compass. But then, just as twilight was coming, he decided he would follow those small buck tracks just to see where they went. As he did, he crossed between two ridges, and he noticed that this smaller buck had gone down to the one thing Peter was familiar with—the brook. Once at the brook he followed it down two hundred yards and came first to the big buck tracks he had spied that morning, and then to the tracks he had made when he’d first entered. He followed these for ten minutes and he was back at his truck, just as it was getting dark.

  I arrived at our camp on Mullin Stream Road on a cold November afternoon over twenty years ago now. I had come in to see my brother, who had gone hunting with a friend of his earlier that day. I got to the camp at about four o’clock and stoked the stove. I started to boil some water for a salmon I’d brought, which I had taken in late July from the south branch of the Sovogle at the Three Minute Pool, and I waited for them to return. It was after five, and dark, and still no sign of them. Cold rain, mixed with snow, started to fall out of a black sky. The night was soundless, and all the old spruce growth was grey as ash.

  John’s half-ton was parked at the camp, so I k
new they were on foot. And I thought there were only two or three places they would likely be. One was across the Mullin Stream, about a mile away, where my brother-in-law had just jumped a huge buck a few days before. Another was in toward the falls, where there was always a sign of deer. And the third was near Davy’s Lake. I waited, thinking that they would be along soon. They weren’t. Finally I took the water off the stove, took my jeep, and went out to Mile 17, where I sounded the horn.

  No response. It was now well after six o’clock. It was silent, and the rain had turned to snow. I drove the jeep up the side road, onto an old overgrown logging road that had not been used in thirty years or more. There I parked and, taking a flashlight, walked into the woods, along a deer trail that brought me out at the small hidden lake I hunted so much, that I had taken two deer from, but never the deer I wanted, the buck I believed was in there.

  I could see that they had been there, earlier—or at least someone had. But when I got to the lake, everything was silent and black. The trees there are black spruce, very close together. It is hard to see game, and you have to be silent and wait for the animals moving down their small trails to come to you. It would be very easy to lose an eye there, in the dark.

  I called—no answer. Finally I raised my rifle to the air and fired a shot. I waited. Far away, on the far side of the lake, a shot was fired from John’s twelve-gauge shotgun. I turned and went back to the jeep, drove out to 17 Mile Road again, and fired another.

  I was answered. They were about half a mile into the woods, between the lake and the road. Not so bad, except it was pitch-black and they probably had no real sense of direction. I followed the sound, halfway up the road, and, turning the small jeep on the road, pointed my lights directly into the woods and fired again, into the air. Soon I could hear them, and I answered back, and by my answers they made it out.