Facing the Hunter Read Online Free PDF Page A

Small gusts of wind framed the stillness in cooling drifts of air down from Labrador. Snow in a month. The man would be gone in two days. My grandfather would break camp and go in to cut for one of the lumber companies. He would work through the winter in mind-numbing cold, from dawn until dark. Then in spring he would ride the logs on the spring flow, to the mills. But he was not thinking of that at the moment. The only thing he could think of was that he must find the animal, and make sure it was killed.
    The man had a fine rifle my uncle had never seen before, with a custom-made engraved stock and a large telescopic sight—the first my Uncle Richard had seen as well. He stared at it a subtle moment without speaking. My grandfather, in his breeches and long-sleeved underwear, was solid muscle at five-foot-ten, and he could lift three times his body weight onto his back. But that did not help him out of this quandary. He did not want the animal to suffer—the situation was “not the best,” as he would say at times. He did not want to blame the hunter—especially in front of the man’s young son—but he had told him they had done calling and would come back in the morning, for though they had heard the moose approaching, the animal had not come into the clearing as they had wanted, and it was far too dark to be sure of the kill. “She be too late for the long shot,” as my grandfather had told him when they’d finally seen the huge creature against the gloom of far-off trees.
    The man fired when my grandfather had his back turned, and was picking up his pack to head back to camp. Now hemust make the best of the man’s bad decision. He had checked for signs in the darkening wood, had found red blood, and was convinced when the man told him the bull had spit blood and staggered that he must have hit it. “Well, we will find it then,” he said. But he had not found it. Just once the cow the bull was seeking had bawled, and then silence.
    My grandfather had walked downwind to the stream and followed it for half an hour, trying to spot the animal in the growth above him. But it did not work. The trees became darker as silence muted the night. So now the best he could do was find it in the morning. He decided that it must have turned and gone to the cedar swamp. But he was unsure.
    Now his son was here. And he was relieved. He was relieved for more than one reason. For my grandfather had learned quite early, at first with alarm and then with joy, that his son was a wondrously able child (although Hudson would never have thought of any of his boys or girls beyond the age of nine or ten as children—which shows the weight at times placed upon not only my uncles but my mother as well, to take care and do chores and help the family). This son could resolve many difficulties by his sheer persistence in deciding to do something about it—a characteristic that would be a benefit to my uncle and many people he had in his care over the next seventy years.
    Richard knew three things. He knew that it was the man’s eagerness to prove his ability with his ornately crafted and well-scoped rifle, which now leaned against a timber block in the centre of the camp, that had caused him to fire, for a man so proud of his weapon would fire to justifyhis pride (and since we all carry weapons of various descriptions upon us, we must always realize this). That is, the weapon showed more about the man than the man himself knew. And Richard knew that the boy, who was about his age, was out of his element and upset about what had happened, and for some reason felt his father’s unbridled folly was his fault. Hudson would want Richard to speak kindly to him.
    And he knew he couldn’t mention the reason he had come in until his father had done here what he must do—which was find the moose, kill it if it was not dead, and try to save the meat, for the meat was to be given over to poor families on the peninsula.
    He knew all of this in a