Facing the Hunter Read online

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  NON-FICTION

  Hockey Dreams

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  God Is.

  FICTION

  The Coming of Winter

  Blood Ties

  Dancers at Night: Stories

  Road to the Stilt House

  Nights Below Station Street

  Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace

  For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down

  Hope in the Desperate Hour

  The Bay of Love and Sorrows

  Mercy Among the Children

  River of the Brokenhearted

  The Friends of Meager Fortune

  The Lost Highway

  Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul

  Copyright © 2011 Newmac Amusement Inc.

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  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Richards, David Adams, 1950-

  Facing the hunter / David Adams Richards.

  eISBN: 978-0-385-67613-7

  1. Hunting—Canada. 2. Richards, David Adams, 1950-. I. Title.

  SK151.R53 2011 799.2971 C2011-900124-1

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  Cover design and art: Andrew Roberts

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website: www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  For Giles Kenny, Gary Wood, Ed McIntyre

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  “Progressive” is such a damnable word. In the middle-class lexicon “progressive” now means that most of the people I have known and loved are somehow less than others, who think and rationalize about compassion and fairness.

  As a case in point, I grew up with boys from rural New Brunswick who would bring their guns to school, so they could hunt on the way back home. I know we cannot do this today—I am not saying we should. But rifles were not something naturally feared when I was a boy. They became a part of a society feared by whole sections of intellectuals, who tell us that it is only conservatives and right-wingers who are paranoid about the “other.” Most of the people determined to align rifles with murder and thugs have never handled rifles—and don’t know the differences between them. In our modern novels, most often the hunter is also the subhuman, not a man of any grace or courage—unless the hunter is a First Nations man. They cannot be seen to be the “other.” Of course I am not saying they should ever be—but in a strange paradox, First Nations people are actually recognized as “other” by many academics now, because of a kind of moral favouritism.

  But there is little favouritism shown to those who wish to stop the gun registry. Those who want that are, well, conservative, and less compassionate. And they do not think like us, the fair-minded ones.

  A few years back I was in a house in Edmonton, Alberta, overhearing how deplorable it was for men to work in the oil patch, to hunt with weapons, to kill the ecology we all must share. It was as if I was listening to a lecture directed at me by a neophyte poet across the room. The poet who was deploring all of this was warmed by oil and well fed by buffet and had a captive audience everywhere about him that night, as he sipped a Chardonnay. Of course I suspect in his whole life he had never gotten truly drunk, or at least never gone on one. And he lived in a society every bit as closeted and insulated as did those tenured clerics in the time of Old John of Gaunt. Perhaps he never considered this.

  I suppose I have always disliked men like this, clever enough to have expensive cloth covering their arses, and pleased to carry with them a register of human complaint and a suspicion of certain jobs and of so, so many people. Their ideals are those of a subversion to a tradition that, so often, they have never themselves encountered. They are the transgressionalists who have chosen their targets very carefully, so as never to be alone. It is a very strange way to show liberal empathy. Which, of course, is what they promote among themselves. Or at least what that poet promoted that evening.

  Still, my ideas wouldn’t be readily accepted that night.

  If rifles fit in with his admonishing, so hunting must as well. And it is not in any way my policy to convince anyone that hunting is noble, or that hunting cannot be wilfully cruel. My only suggestion to the world is that those who eat meat should be morally obligated to kill at least once in their lives that which they eat. After two months without oil, as ill conceived as the oil patch is and as ill fated as our time-honoured traditions seem to be, that generous poet would no longer be sipping his wine at the buffet deploring those without his intellectual and sarcastic capacity. And those women who surrounded him, nodding their heads at those terrible people he got to skewer, all of them I am sure would be somewhere else.

  I have not hunted seriously in a long time. Friends have stopped phoning me to go out. I do not know at this moment when or how much I will hunt again.

  This is some of my story about how and why I hunted, long ago.

  1

  I suppose the very first animal I saw killed and in the back of a truck was a bull moose, sometime in the early 1950s. The blacksmith who lived next door to us on Blanche Street shot it. My father at that time went hunting every year—and it caused much excitement when he left, and came back. I remember seeing his rifle standing in the hallway between the kitchen and living room. The fact that you needed to be strong to carry it around gave it credibility. And we knew instinctively that it was his rifle and not ours to touch.

  He was a deer hunter mainly (he shot a deer on the day I was born, October 17, 1950). After a time, as it does with most people, hunting became a thing of his youth, and he put his rifle away, about the time I shot my first deer.

  The men next door to us hunted until they were much older. A woman we knew, up near the first house I lived at, was a very great hunter. I remember the eight-point buck she shot. They took a picture of it for the paper with her standing alongside it. She went hunting mainly with her brother. Sometimes her brother went into the camp by himself for a week with no transportation. She was an unmarried lady, and of course much talking there was about her. But she was a good fisherman and a fine shot with a rifle. My aunt, my mother’s youngest sister, hunted birds in the fall. She too was an unmarried woman who lived up on a stretch of the Matapédia. She was away fishing in the spring of the year, and she could tie her own flies. She was not the fisher-person her brothers were, but then again she didn’t have to be. She could cast a good line and work a pool well, and she took her own rifle to hunt her own game in the fall, mainly partri
dge up on the ridges above her house.

  All of these people were people of my youth whom I respected a good deal. The woods had secret places that laid the framework of the template of my life. There were here many famous New Brunswick guides, and a grand amount of wisdom about the hunt. But there was, still and all, a good deal of wisdom from those who did not guide, as well. When I was a child, the caribou were a distant memory, a grand animal of the barrens, drifting away like an image in an old photo. Or their racks were in houses I sometimes visited. Distant themselves now.

  When I was a child, moose were scarce as well. There was a moratorium on the moose hunt for a number of years, and cow moose were not allowed to be taken. The moose population has grown again, after the 1950s, and they are now hunted on a draw. Most of my friends have been in on a draw at some time or another, and I too have hunted and killed moose. Moose is the extravagant hunt here. You need equipment to hunt, and a crew. It is hard hunting moose on your own. But in many respects it might be the greatest hunting there is on this land.

  We now have white-tailed deer, game fowl, moose, and bear. There are also coyotes, lynx, bobcat, and another two animals—though no one lets on either exists—the eastern panther and the eastern cougar. Some see the tawny orange cougar, as I did in Gagetown in 1990, and others see the proud, black, slender panther, as my brother did when fishing with Ken Francis at the Stony Brook stretch a few years ago. Some say they are two different kinds of cats, and others say they are different colours of the same species. I think they are two different cats—a cougar and a panther.

  What separates them both from the bobcat or the lynx are their tails, which forestry officials go to extraordinary lengths to deny they have. Because if they do exist it becomes our obligation to protect them. (It is a simple and collective stupidity to deny the obvious.)

  The one that ran in front of my truck on a road in the hot July of 1990 was a tawny cat with a long enough tail to separate it from all the bobcat and lynx that made their domiciles here. The pure black cat is, for the old-timers, the true eastern panther, the mythical, wondrous animal that is seen almost as a vision of time gone by, usually by people alone. Peter Baker, a friend of mine, saw one when he was sixteen, standing behind his camp on the Norwest Miramichi. Another hunting acquaintance saw one across the main Miramichi River. My son John saw one last year.

  When I was little we could get partridge behind a friend’s house, and at times deer could be seen in the ball field just above us. Now, as I write this in my farm house in Bartibog, a big buck comes to my apple tree in the front yard while a doe and her fawn are seen grazing. At night, just outside the window beside me, I hear a bear as it meanders up to the fallen apples, filling itself for winter. In the spring here, even now, bears can be trouble. Though few here want to shoot them, there are small children and hidden pathways that run to the river, so early on in spring it is sometimes safer to carry a gun down to the frozen beach.

  Bears are to me the most problematic species. There is no reason to hunt them unless they are a bother to people. In the spring of this year—right on my lane, which I can see from my window—a huge she-bear with two small cubs meandered day in and day out. The fellow below me, nearer the water, was frightened for his dogs and thought of shooting them. But the bears won’t bother the dogs unless provoked.

  Usually when I saw bears when I was young they had already met their demise at the hands of a hunter. I have a picture of a bear and three cubs taken in the early 1960s, and for some reason I never agree to it. If we needed or had a taste for bear meat it would be different. But I am not so certain that many of us have a taste for bear.

  The main hunt here is deer, and deer brought the tick that almost took care of the moose. It is a way for the smaller animal to survive. But now the moose population is relatively healthy, and so too is the white-tailed deer. The white-tailed deer have been here a comparatively short time. The first one shot in New Brunswick was taken, I think, in 1884—mistaken for a caribou. This is the northern extreme of the white-tail range—their numbers are far greater farther south, but the deer here tend to be bigger and probably tougher than their brothers and sisters in Pennsylvania or Virginia.

  I was sixteen and in the woods on a logging road. It was the fall of 1966. The twilight had come, a flush of scattered red over the trees on my left; trees naked and subdued by approaching night, and the smell of snow clouds from the northeast. There was the smell of deer here, too—not an exceptional claim made by anyone who has spent some time in the wild.

  I had borrowed my father’s car, ostensibly to visit a friend, and had come to hunt partridge in the place I knew. I had snuck rifles into the woods from the time I was fourteen. I couldn’t help myself. It was here where I felt most alive, and for years this feeling complemented every trip into the woods I took.

  The fields, with their pit props and eight-foot or four-foot-length pulp, stretching for acres, and then the woods itself, with trails leading to brooks and brooks leading on down to rivers. The smell of deer on fallen leaves that came to you in the cooling wind of autumn—the greatest of Canadian seasons.

  That day, I had a peep-sight single-shot .22, which my father had bought when he was sixteen, carried in my right hand with the barrel down. It was a nice little rifle, with the sights so refined that just the glint of the front sight at the bottom of the peep could take a bird’s head off at fifty yards. I was using .22 long shells, which my father insisted, and rightly so, was a waste of money for partridge.

  Over on my right beyond the darker spruce I could hear the water, succumbing to the night itself. I knew there was an island in the middle of that water, for I had been here a number of times fishing trout in the summer. Since the early summer I had wanted to hunt here, because of the gravel along the roads and the stands of birch trees. I soon spotted the partridge I was after, in a tree some distance away. I left the road, got as close to it as I dared, and, raising my rifle, I fired, and it plummeted to the ground without a sound.

  I listened for a moment to the approaching night, and the sound of the shot. Smelled the powder fading away into the twilight. The air had a sweet scent to it, of musk and rut trials, and there was a loneliness to it; and in all the world there is nothing that can measure the kind of solitude one feels from this peculiar scent in the woods at twilight—it is sanctifying, and no matter how deep the woods, it is never savage, but primal. Even then I knew that “savage” is a name applied in principle by those who believe they are not—that is, the word “savage” never seems to apply to oneself, unless in some kind of mockery. I knew this before I was sixteen, and though it was a peculiar kind of knowledge to have, it would, in years to come, measure my acceptance by and tolerance for others. It was the beginning, even though I did not know this, of a lifelong balancing act and debate, between those who dictate what nature holds for us, and those who know what nature is.

  Rousseau used the phrase “Noble Savage” to imply a grace that his own class of men did not need. At least in Paris, before the revolution. But it was not used by Rousseau as a compliment (even if he, and others, thought so). It was, in all its grandiose urbanity, an assumption that lesser men were worthy of the application.

  The First Nations could be savage, then, but in a way Rousseau felt they were not, as he was, human beings.

  My ideas of the savage land have led to this conclusion. Still, it implies one truism: the natural world is a world populated with danger, and a struggle for life and death. That does not mean we should exclude any other “type of life” in this assessment. Here the struggle is more marked. If you break an ankle in here, or down in there—or up on the Souwest, or on the north branch of the Sovogle—and if you are alone, and if no one knows that you have come into this wild place, you are almost certainly in a bad spot. Hunters know this. So do fishermen.

  That twilight day years ago when I was still in school, I looked into the birch stands for the partridge that had lifted themselves from the ground at
twilight and I soon had two birds.

  The partridge were both birch partridge, not the coarser and less appetizing and ganglier spruce. Their feathers were soft, their heads graceful. Those little places of sanctuary did not afford them protection, and I always felt bad about that.

  I was off the road about seventy yards when I shot them, and came back out to find that I was at a fork in the muddy, silent road.

  The logging road was filled with dark ruts and stilled autumn water. The coming of winter, all right. I did not know the woods as my ancestors had, nor would I. Hell, half my uncles spent the first part of their lives in woods that most people would consider complete wilderness, and were sent on missions when thirteen or fourteen that perhaps one boy in five hundred could accomplish today. Some would think a house five miles away was a community. I am not diminishing the boys of today for not being able to do this—but I refuse to diminish my uncles for the prowess they possessed.

  I carried the birds by the feet, quite content in my accomplishment but also realizing that I was here through half-forgotten instinct more than need—the instinct that drove me into the woods (and still does) once the air freshened and the cool nights came. That is, each year the pilgrimage I make to hunt is one I take very seriously. It is not a game, or a sport, really. It is more than either if done right. It is a way of life.

  So there is only one way to do it right and a thousand ways to do it wrong. You might start by knowing something about the land and the animals you are hunting.

  The first of my ancestors arrived here in 1705, and I have an ancestor who was the first white woman born on the Gaspé at that same time. The links to this world, on both sides of my family, are long. A little later on, in 1746, relatives of that woman born on the Gaspé came over after the Battle of Culloden, and in 1847 other ancestors, my Irish ones, came drifting up the river during the potato famine. My wife’s family came perhaps on the very same vessel that brought my Irish ancestors. Her great-greatgrandfather lived in a cave up along the Bartibog that first winter, and made do with hunting.