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Authors: David Adams Richards
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would be willing to bring a licensed, empty shotgun and rifle to my son’s class. I would break them down and put them back together, to show how harmless guns, and most people who own them, are. I would talk about my uncles and show a picture of my aunt who hunted. I would show the articles written on my uncle, considered the greatest salmon guide in the world.
They declined my offer.
And I can say I do not blame anyone for this. But few were ever more certain that others were wrong, and they had the books and degrees in sociology and the right books in CanLit to prove it all.
I believe it was at this time I realized that my race of people, whoever and wherever they were, would become extinct.
A few years after I was with my brother hunting moose, I got my own moose licence in a draw, and called on David Savage, a friend of my fishing days, to come in with me. David has hunted the woods of the Miramichi region since he was a child, and is one of the finest woodsmen I know. He is a guide without being a guide. This is not at all unusual on the Miramichi. I know up to a dozen men who have a similar CV. Which means simply that more people rely upon David, phone him, ask him advice, secure his presence in the deep woods with them than they would almost anyone else, though he does not advertise or call ita business, and he makes no money (or very little) from the venture. In the woods, just as he does in fishing season, he will see that his “sports” (though he never calls them that) are comfortable and happy. And he will do everything he can (this side of the law) to make sure their hunt is a success. He himself, like many others, believes that a hunt can be a success even if one fails to get an animal.
“How can you say you failed? You can reason it out this way,” he tells me. “To get into the wood, to have your adrenaline flowing—to have a chance, to be free of the usual structure about your life—that makes it a success. For the three days of a moose hunt, or the week in November you take off to go deer hunting, you have to become someone else—that is, you must rely upon yourself like you have not done before, in an environment that is different from your usual one. Everything you do in the woods that complements this enriches you, and is a success. At any rate, that’s the way I look at it.”
As I mentioned in my fishing book a few years ago, camps are places that allow for this reacquaintance with our essential nature. They are places that allow one to think of humanity in all its great and tragic character. It is where I first thought of the MacDurmot family in my novel
Blood Ties
, where I first thought of writing the novel about Jerry Bines. And why is this? What is in these woods, along these ancient roads, that allows it? Well, for one thing, we are. We travel roads and old trails that have not seen commerce in a century, and yet we can still see signs, in the overgrown remnants, of our forefathers’ hardships—my uncles as young boys working fourteen hours a day, my wife’s grandfather guiding hunters up along the old Bartibog in the1930s. Pictures of bear and deer being taken in the bygone era by men hunting to feed the lumber camps. We treasure it because it is gone now, but its foundation was laid down for us, and wisdom is everywhere.
Of course, there are better hunters than me, and the greatest of the guides—those who lived in the bygone times and guided men like Babe Ruth—may have disappeared. I would never need a guide now—and never did for deer. But few, the Micmac Paddy Ward being one, hunt on their own for moose.
However, there are still great guides. In point of fact, it might not be that the skill of the guides has diminished at all; it might just be that the guiding industry, which flourished back at the beginning of the twentieth century, has gone out of fashion, and famous men and women no longer require the service. Famous men and women no longer make a point of telling
They declined my offer.
And I can say I do not blame anyone for this. But few were ever more certain that others were wrong, and they had the books and degrees in sociology and the right books in CanLit to prove it all.
I believe it was at this time I realized that my race of people, whoever and wherever they were, would become extinct.
A few years after I was with my brother hunting moose, I got my own moose licence in a draw, and called on David Savage, a friend of my fishing days, to come in with me. David has hunted the woods of the Miramichi region since he was a child, and is one of the finest woodsmen I know. He is a guide without being a guide. This is not at all unusual on the Miramichi. I know up to a dozen men who have a similar CV. Which means simply that more people rely upon David, phone him, ask him advice, secure his presence in the deep woods with them than they would almost anyone else, though he does not advertise or call ita business, and he makes no money (or very little) from the venture. In the woods, just as he does in fishing season, he will see that his “sports” (though he never calls them that) are comfortable and happy. And he will do everything he can (this side of the law) to make sure their hunt is a success. He himself, like many others, believes that a hunt can be a success even if one fails to get an animal.
“How can you say you failed? You can reason it out this way,” he tells me. “To get into the wood, to have your adrenaline flowing—to have a chance, to be free of the usual structure about your life—that makes it a success. For the three days of a moose hunt, or the week in November you take off to go deer hunting, you have to become someone else—that is, you must rely upon yourself like you have not done before, in an environment that is different from your usual one. Everything you do in the woods that complements this enriches you, and is a success. At any rate, that’s the way I look at it.”
As I mentioned in my fishing book a few years ago, camps are places that allow for this reacquaintance with our essential nature. They are places that allow one to think of humanity in all its great and tragic character. It is where I first thought of the MacDurmot family in my novel
Blood Ties
, where I first thought of writing the novel about Jerry Bines. And why is this? What is in these woods, along these ancient roads, that allows it? Well, for one thing, we are. We travel roads and old trails that have not seen commerce in a century, and yet we can still see signs, in the overgrown remnants, of our forefathers’ hardships—my uncles as young boys working fourteen hours a day, my wife’s grandfather guiding hunters up along the old Bartibog in the1930s. Pictures of bear and deer being taken in the bygone era by men hunting to feed the lumber camps. We treasure it because it is gone now, but its foundation was laid down for us, and wisdom is everywhere.
Of course, there are better hunters than me, and the greatest of the guides—those who lived in the bygone times and guided men like Babe Ruth—may have disappeared. I would never need a guide now—and never did for deer. But few, the Micmac Paddy Ward being one, hunt on their own for moose.
However, there are still great guides. In point of fact, it might not be that the skill of the guides has diminished at all; it might just be that the guiding industry, which flourished back at the beginning of the twentieth century, has gone out of fashion, and famous men and women no longer require the service. Famous men and women no longer make a point of telling
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