So my brother and I saw many deer there, and each of us took a buck on the same day, ten years ago now—perhaps the last time I seriously hunted. My brother took his four-point buck with a bow, which is what he hunts with now. It was a killing shot at forty yards, and the buck was dead within five minutes of being hit.
When we were there we saw old graveyards—one from the 1850s and another from the 1880s. The people buried there were part of a failed community, a place that didn’t make it—a people whose descendants moved on, and they were left to themselves in graves that were overgrown and forgotten under those turbulent Fundy skies. They were people from the 1850s, part of the Irish immigration to our land, part of my ancestry as much as any other.
Last year, when my brother was in the village registry office talking about land he once owned there, a person told him very excitedly that they had finally discovered the graves of those ancestors—that they had been hunting for them and hadn’t known where they were exactly. It was a strange thing for us to learn—that just by accident we could have helped them discover what they were searching for much sooner.
17
What Disney did—as many writers, naturalists, and biologists tell us—was humanize animals, make their environment a utopia, and criminalize anyone who would enter what essentially is portrayed as Eden.
In Disney’s Eden, the lions do lie down with the lambs. Deer play with wolves, and the trees and valleys are places of eternal bliss. Only when man enters is this bliss sadly disrupted. The idea that this bliss never was—that animals prey upon animals, that white-tailed deer take over moose habitat, and that all vie for life in a world of danger and death—is not conducive to the kind of propaganda that satisfies urban sentiment, and this is one of the falsehoods that anyone who lives near the woods understands.
That is not to say that those who recognize this error do not believe that the world of the woods is beautiful and aesthetic—it is, however, to say that things must be placed in perspective. Seeing Bambi as a child, and coming home to a father and uncles who hunted, was a clear disconnect with what the world wanted from me. For these movies and television plays want as much from their audience as they are ever prepared to give. What they demand is a kind of enlightenment about a world they have intentionally made false in order to achieve the result.
Besides, the woods are used in a multitude of ways by urban environments that are far more destructive to their inhabitants than hunting. This fact, if acknowledged at all, is simply written off as the price of urban living. But I will guarantee that many urbanites don’t think of it at all as their problem. They believe it is a rural problem, and consider blaming those closest to the woods, charging them with implementing solutions. But in spite of this, clear-cutting is not done primarily for rurals, papermaking is not done primarily for rurals, lake and river pollution is rarely seen in rural Canada—and deer are more plentiful now than they were a century ago in hundreds of places in North America.
When I was Writer in Residence at the university in Fredericton some years ago, I was the only one in the department who went hunting. It seemed a long-established point of view that those who were educated, men and women, did not do this, and found it beneath them.
This was so prevalent a “feeling” that one of the professors, who was born thirty miles from my river, used to talk about how nervous he was to go there, because “our car might slam into a moose.” He distanced himself from a place in his own province in order to coddle men who had never been there. This demeaning sleight of hand was considered, of course, progressive.
My Uncle Harry hunted for many years with just a twelve-gauge shotgun. I think it is a part of our blood, for this, somewhat like bow hunting, means a close hunt. One day, he told me, he stood on an old lumbering bridge that had not been used in years. It crossed a small rock-strewn stream somewhere on a side lumbering road up in the Norwest region of the Miramichi. His friends moved on, went to different parts of the area, but he decided to stay on the bridge. And he said:
“They moved off, and I was alone. It was a small, halfrotten bridge secluded in trees, and the woods had grown up about it again. I ended up standing there for hours watching the ripple in the water forty yards downstream, thinking to myself a deer had to come out sooner or later. It was just a feeling about how the little maples hung over the water and the space between them. It was just an instinct, a feeling I had. It was a pretty damn warm day, but I was confident, and never left my position. I know others would have given it just a look and kept going but I was sure, this is where deer were crossing. At about 4:35 in the afternoon, I saw something near the small maples that hadn’t been there before. It looked like a brown part of a tree. I watched it intently for a minute or two, and suddenly it disappeared. I waited, and it appeared again, and stepped out exactly where I thought it might. I raised my shotgun and took it with one shot—a six-point buck.”
That certain instinct, whatever it is and wherever it comes from, serves a good many hunters well. I know that Mike Kenny told me this the one day I hunted with him. He said to me, too, that sometimes you just “know” the deer is going to be there. I think when you hunt at close quarters this feeling can come over a hunter and benefit him greatly.
But the feeling comes at other times as well, when we are not at such close proximity. Peter McGrath and I were hunting one day up at Sheephouse, on the Norwest Miramichi, and had come back to the truck to have a cup of tea in the afternoon. It was strange, but at the exact same moment both of us looked down along the old lumber road and saw a deer crossing. Both of us saw it at the same moment, and both of us somehow knew we would. It was, however, too far away to get a good shot, and neither of us took a shot at it.
But at close quarters the feeling is more intense. One day down on the coast of New Brunswick, in among some swale, I stood, I swear, for five hours solid—remembering not only the story my uncle had told me, about the deer and the maple, but reminding myself that deer had to follow a certain ritual, and this would bring them out in my direction. Well, I was sure there were deer around me that day—I knew there were, but I didn’t see any. I went home, slept, and got up early the next morning. As soon as I stepped into the woods, I swear I could smell deer. However, most people would tell me that what I smelled was simply the musk of rotting leaves and dying grasses at the end of the year, and the stale waters of fallen snows. Still, just as I had when I was a boy hunting partridge, I smelled deer, and I found a comfortable spot, and leaned back in some grass and waited. I waited for one hour, two, three hours, four. I never moved except for breathing. Suddenly it simply came over me. There was a deer coming toward me. I couldn’t see him, but I sensed there had to be. I stood with my rifle at my shoulder, and was staring at a buck no more than twenty-five yards away.
I told this story about, and some people believed and agreed with me, and others said it was just luck, and I was not a good hunter, just a lucky one. Well, it was luck, but I knew I would have luck that day. A strange occurrence.
There is also the story that David Savage told me about being in close quarters when he shot the huge non-typical eighteen-point buck down in the Saint George area of the province. It was pouring rain, and early on they had seen some doe. But he and his friend were in among some alders and dead grasses and old-growth trees, and they could see very little. His scope, too, was continually fogging. That is the problem with scopes, especially in poor weather, and he was being rained on for over three hours. He said he finally told Jim Martin, his friend, that he was going back to the camp to get dry. He stood, and saw the eighteen-point non-typical, staring back at him about fifteen yards away. So he, who is one of the finest hunters I know, did not sense it. But I am sure in his life that he has sensed much else while hunting.
It brings me back to the rather ludicrous point that hunters sometimes “know” beforehand that they are going to see game. In fact, I’m willing to say that this sixth sense, on a few occasions, predicts the future. Oh,
I know I will be heckled by those who are stingily correct about everything and right about nothing. But there is this fleeting nanosecond moment that has come upon me, and others, when we know we will see a deer an instant before we do. What or who tells us this? What or who directs us to look up at that moment? I do not know. But it has happened. Once, in a lonely field far off the main highway going to Heath Steele Mines, I suddenly turned and knew I wasgoing to see a deer if I started to walk back. That was long ago—one of my first hunts—and I did see a deer but never got a shot.
It happened to my brother-in-law the first time he saw a deer in at the Mullin Stream camp. He told me, and I believe him, that he knew he was going to see it a second before it came out on the road. It was like predicting the future. But seeing it caused him to be too excited to take the shot—a case of “buck fever” that he has long since overcome.
I watched a program once in which people were involved in an experiment predicting the future. Now this was a very technical experiment. What they were asked to do was stare into an optometrist’s viewfinder in order to watch flashing lights that were directed first toward one eye, then the other, in a random pattern, so one never knew at which eye the flash would be directed. Yet at a certain point the subject was able to close the eye that was being targeted before the flash occurred, in essence predicting the future. A very humble predicting of the future, to be sure—but still, an example of the mind’s unknown abilities. Did our ancestors forty thousand years ago have this ability? Quite possibly, and maybe even to a greater extent.
I think it was a hunt about twenty years ago. I was still in Fredericton, and had just finished a novel, called Nights Below Station Street. What I remember about this book is that I wrote a section about hunting in it, as I did in its sequels, Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace and For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down.
In the days when these three books were written I was at my most dedicated as a hunter. I knew if I put my time in I would get deer. I was comfortable hunting alone, and I knew the woods well enough. I hunted with others as well. I suppose it was the same as some people getting together for a curling bonspiel once a year or so. I went hunting—a few days with Peter McGrath, a few days with David Savage, and a few days with my brother. With Peter I would hunt along the Norwest Miramichi, with David I would hunt the Sovogle area of the Miramichi, and with my brother I would hunt the southern part of the province along the Fundy coast. These were good times hunting—and usually on one of these hunts I would luck in, or one of my hunting friends would. To tell the truth, I was just as happy if they, not I, lucked in.
In fact I remember people at a camp getting very angry when a deer that had been there all summer was shot by someone from outside the area. No one at that camp would have hunted that deer.
Of all the places I hunted, I believe the Fundy coast was the best. The hunting ground ran for miles above the rugged coast of the Bay of Fundy, where my brother owned 140 acres of land. Deer were plentiful there, and coves and small hidden back fields offered seclusion for the game. My brother’s land ran to the bay through alder swales and hardwood and, in the middle, a grove of crabapple trees with small apples that became very sweet in the fall. There were both bear and deer there, and one had to be careful when coming upon those trees, which were surrounded by dense alder bushes, not to accidentally interrupt a feeding bear. I found the deer didn’t run as heavy as the deer on the Miramichi, but they were more plentiful. Perhaps the big buck on average weighed twenty pounds less, but I am only talking from personal experience and I could be wrong. Still, thinking of the great eighteen-point non-typical that David Savage took in the south of the province and comparing it to deer that Peter, Les, and others took in the north, the deer did seem somewhat smaller.
I went hunting there with my brother that year, long ago now. But I myself did not have my rifle with me. My brother had seen a lot of partridge down on his land, and one crisp November morning we decided that we would gather enough for a good stew, which we had not had in a while. So off we went in my truck, and with his twenty-gauge shotgun we managed to shoot five or six partridge along the side road that led from his property out to the bay.
I know I wasn’t dressed warmly enough for this excursion, but I am not sure if that was the reason. At any event, in the next few days I came down with a cold and flu that kept me down for the next week and a half. That meant I didn’t get out hunting with either David Savage, whom I had planned to hunt with, or my older brother, whom I had planned to meet up with at our camp on Mullin Stream. Perhaps it was fortuitous, perhaps not, but I missed, because of my illness, the storm that trapped hundreds of hunters in the woods—many of whom had had no idea the storm was about to descend, and just as many who had known but were unprepared for it.
David had wanted to come to our camp, and had planned his holidays around it. Like many avid hunters, he set aside at least a week of holidays for hunting. But when he phoned me, the night before I was supposed to drive up and meet him, I could hardly lift my head off the pillow.
“I can’t go,” I said. And to prove I wasn’t shirking, I sneezed a lot. “But,” I said, “you can go to my camp anyway. My brother might be in there tomorrow night, but he’ll be happy to see you.”
David said he would see, but I knew he wouldn’t want to go to a camp where he didn’t know anyone. And I felt bad, and apologized for letting him down. But there was little or nothing I could do about it.
That night he made his way up to the Mullin Stream area alone, past the bridge across the Narrows—one of the finest places on the entire south branch of the Sovogle. The area, though worked and clear-cut at places, is still a rugged and pristine land, filled with streams and heavy woods. It gets cold and snowy on the high ground earlier than in the valley, and one can feel the bitter air by mid-October. David travelled another sixteen miles from the bridge across Mullin Stream, at the Narrows. There he met a man he knew, who had his huge trailer parked at 2.2 Mile Road. That, to him, was the best of luck, for that was where he wanted to hunt anyway—it was an area, about five miles or so from our camp, that ran above the South Branch, proper, where David had taken two or three deer in the last few years, and he was a firm believer that he could luck in there.
“So I was set,” he told me. “Blair was there with his trailer—and although he hadn’t lucked in as yet, I was certain we would see something the next day. I was still thinking I might go into your camp for an afternoon if I had time, but I thought I would get a deer here. In fact, I was sure I would. There was some snow down, and I was hoping to get on some tracks in the morning. It was still light when I got there, and I took a short walk into the woods, toward the river. There I picked up a trail of a doe and fawn—and saw a buck track, too, but not a large buck. I came back into the trailer and cooked up some deer steak that night. We had a game of cards and got to sleep.”
At the same time, my brother had gone into our camp, and if he was still waiting for me or not I didn’t know. I had told people I would be in but, of course, circumstances were such that I couldn’t make it. He was there with a friend, Ken Francis, and they too had scouted the area where my younger brother John had taken the eight-point a few years before. They had seen many tracks, and were actually hoping for a new snowfall to help them along—I think perhaps everyone was, at that moment. In camps all over the Norwest, men were preparing for the hunt: oiling their rifles, checking their sights and scopes, making lastmoment decisions about what direction they would take. It cost a few their lives.
At that moment, across the province, somewhere north of the town of Plaster Rock, my friend Peter McGrath was staying at a camp with some people he had worked a motor plant shutdown with that summer. He was invited to the place, and if the people are convivial, and there is a place to hunt or fish, Peter will be there. I have often telephoned him only to find that he has been bass fishing here, or salmon fishing there, or duck hunting somewhere else, with a variety of people whose names I had no
t heard before. “I met a lad at work,” he would begin, and regale me with a story about a hunting or fishing trip that three days before he’d had no idea he would be on. In fact one year, a few weeks after he got to Toronto, where he was working a shutdown at Ford, he told me where deer were, and partridge, for he had been out scouting the land on the perimeter of the largest city in Canada. I am sure that this is how he was, is, and will be until the Lord takes him home. Now he was in a large hardwood ridge filled with brooks and streams that ran for miles down into the Saint John River, and he was preparing to hunt a section of wood he didn’t know.
The snow started early the next morning before light—before any of the hunters had woken—but by the time my brother and Ken were up, the day was already heavy with snow. After their breakfast of bread and tea, my brother took his twenty-gauge, and a couple of slugs, and started up the old road, toward the washed-out bridge, while Ken planned to hunt back behind the camp. By the time my brother got across the bridge, Mullin Stream had just made ice, the snow was about five inches deeper than the night before, and he soon picked up tracks that led up from the river into the old spruce and fir stands above the tractor road, which he decided to follow. He was sure the tracks belonged to a buck and doe, and he felt very confident he might luck in by noon hour.
The snow was at least as deep up in the Plaster Rock area, where Peter was, and he was out alone along the hardwood ridge, where the snow fell in large flakes all across the width and breadth of the giant birch stands. It made the day gloomy, and it was difficult to see far, and he was continually clearing his gun scope and trying to keep it clear. Here, Peter said, tracks were everywhere, and “as soon as I was on one I would see another more promising.” One year, sitting up on a hardwood ridge, Peter was scanning the side hills and distant spaces between the large trees for the sign of deer, when, looking straight out, he suddenly realized there was a buck standing fifteen feet away, staring straight at him. Though he was not as fortunate this day, and in no way was the visibility as pure, he did see many signs, he saw a few doe, and he was sure if he kept on his toes he would have a shot at a buck. The thing was, it kept snowing, and he kept travelling.
Facing the Hunter Page 15