Facing the Hunter Read Online Free PDF Page B

they hunted for. The meat some of them couldn’t or didn’t taste. The tales of bravado were better. This is another kind of departure from what I have come to know hunting was for. When a friend of mine, a good hunter, once asked a great hunter, then in his nineties, if he wanted to be interviewed in the paper about all his exploits—seeing the last of the woodland caribou, being lost in the woods, falling between two bull moose whose racks were locked inbattle, guiding men into wilderness for white-tailed deer, crawling deep into logs to finish bear that timid men did not shoot well—he gave a resounding and emphatic no.
    “They will think I am bragging just like those hunters always brag,” he said.
    His words are more important than they might at first seem. He was making a distinction between two kinds of hunters. It is an important distinction. It is the same one made in the movie
The Deer Hunter
, which so many of my university friends hate but which has at the core of its reason the at times unfashionable but still necessary resilient bravery of man. Like Robert De Niro’s character, the old man had done it well—why did he need to brag? In fact, bragging lessened it.
    When they brought the head and rack out, the man changed his mind. Under the glaring lanterns he became more certain that he had done a wonderful job and had accomplished a successful hunt. In a way he had. He had, after all, shot an animal ten times his size with one bullet at a distance of over three hundred yards. But he had not been absorbed in finding it. In fact, the dereliction of his duty is paramount to the story. That was where his problem lay; someone else found it for him, and in fact he would give the boy a tip. He did not know that the boy had come in to relay to his father a terrible crisis in the family. The boy was too polite to say so until the work at hand was done. But he did mention it in the middle of their work with the bull. His mother and my grandmother were under siege at the house, facing people trying to take the farm, and she had them covered with a shotgun as they hid behind the barn.
    Even then, they did not leave until the next morning, after they had fed the “sport” his breakfast. And when they did get out, the cousins who had come to claim my grandparents’ place were still cowering where they were, with my ninety-pound grandmother holding a twelve-gauge shotgun on them from the veranda, and the banker trying to reason with her. Saying that in these modern times there was no necessity to become violent when protecting your life’s blood.
    And as the years passed along, the mighty head, given in its place of honour over the rock fireplace in the man’s cottage in Vermont, would become a symbol of the danger he had faced, and the truth would lessen and become unimportant. Over time the straw stuffing would come out; his glass eyes, like a doll’s, would seem offended. His son, however, might remember the night and, looking at those glass eyes, be unable to speak of the experience. He would remember the guide and the guide’s son, coming in late. He would also remember that his father was uninterested in helping the guide or his young boy find this majestic wounded animal—and that was the real story, that the boy and his father went into the pitch-dark with a lantern to find the downed bull moose. In fact, that was the only story that had a right to be told. But so often we tell the stories we want others to hear. These are the wiles of the human spirit that hunters must be on guard for. For the closer to the hunt we come, the more obligated we are to examine this spirit.
    My Uncle Richard did not become famous as a hunting guide, but as time went on he became very famous as a fishing guide. He guided in the green waters of the Matapédia,where my mother had her childhood. And as a man in his old age, his face and reflection, cast in stone and bronze by admirers and artists, show the true spirit of the