By Gregory Clark , November 15, 1919.
Of the false joys of deer hunting, several hundred Toronto men are by this time wholly aware.
As far as one can make out, deer hunters are like drink addicts or dope fiends. After each hunting trip, they swear off. Never again for them. Nevermore will they desert the comforts of a large city for two November weeks spent amid slush, sleet, and vast uncultivated areas of fallen timber and prickly underbrush.
But when the first hint of sleet is in the air, the confirmed deer hunter seizes his rifle, some old clothes and a dunnage bag, and jumps the first train north.
To-day and for the next few days, however, they are returning with the “never again” expression on their faces, tired, starved, weak and unshaven. However, they try to disguise their real feelings, they are as fed-up as troops coming out of the line after a twenty-one day tour.
Jimmy and I know, for we have just returned from our first hunting trip.
Back in September, egged on by the boasting of certain confirmed deer hunters around the office, we started to make plans. We invited half a dozen others to join our party, and all these gave a delighted acceptance. But on the eve of November fifth, the opening of the deer season, to our astonishment, they all advised us in regretful accents, of their inability to come with us. It isn’t our astonishment now.
Alone and full of high hopes, Jimmy and I set off for our summer cottage for the hunt.
Passing over as immaterial our arrival at a Georgian Bay town, our wrestling with dunnage bags, rifles, and those odd articles of baggage that always seem to get themselves carried at the last moment, our early rising in a frost-bitten hotel and our journey by gasoline launch (at twelve dollars1), over the Arctic expanses of the lower Georgian Bay, we arrived about noon, at our summer cottage. Gone were all the balmy green trees, the warm rocks, the soft blue waters. Our summer cottage was a draughty, bleak little building standing forth naked amid a few bare trees, with frost on its roof. There was ice along the beach where, four short months ago, I was wont to paddle my feet.
After a short inspection of the inside of the cottage, inhospitably packed up for the winter, we decided to shift a couple of camp stretchers into the kitchen and there to cook, eat, live and sleep.
We carried a half-ton rowboat out of the dining room to the water and rowed down to the farm of a French family, about a mile away, to arrange about going after deer. After due consideration, the French family agreed to quit work on the stone foundations of a new house and come hunting with us.
Jimmy and I had vague notions that in hunting deer, we walked through a pleasant autumn forest, with hounds stepping gracefully in front of us, ever and anon scaring up startled deer, which ran in terror from us like young cows, while we stood back and fired carefully aimed shots after them, killing them in their tracks.
What deer hunting really is comes as follows:
Three hours before dawn, the kitchen fire having been out some hours, the frigid breezes blowing through the cracks of the cottage wake us from our fitful slumber. We rise in very grumpy spirits, put on a fire, sit disconsolately around while we prepare a breakfast of canned beans, brittle bacon and tea. Then we array ourselves for action, go down to the rowboat and crack the ice in the bottom of it and row, on chilly seats, down to our guides just as dawn pales the east.
At our guides’ they remove our dashing khaki hunting coats and give us old blue coats several sizes too large.
“No good being mistook for a fawn,” we are told.
Then we commence to walk. Up hill down dale, over rocks, through swamps and impenetrable forests we go. And although it is a bitter November day, with sleet biting us, we perspire richly.
After tramping for an hour and a half, till our fine new hunting boots are scraping the flesh off our heels, we are halted on a high, open stretch of rock, where the wind howls in freedom, and the fine sleet spins and eddies past us. We are told to stand very still and watch up this stretch of rock. Jimmy is placed across a gully on a similar ridge
The hound has meanwhile been taken in a long detour away off in the distance.
We stand in a position of readiness, our rifle at the alert. The perspiration soon freezes to our skin. Our fingers grasping the metal of the rifle grows numb and senseless. Our feet feel like blocks of ice. But we Keep a stern eye up the ridge.
Quarter hours pass that seem like hours. An hour passes that seems like a day. We commence to shiver quite violently, and stamp our feet on the rocks, while our attention wavers.
Suddenly, far in the distance, we hear the baying of a hound.
Our shivering turns to a regular shaking. It is uncontrollable. Our hands seem like feet. We make a pitiful attempt to come into a position of readiness. The hounds’ barking grows, nearer and nearer.
Then, with no sound and with no movement of the bushes a greyish brown form trimmed with white appears ahead of us.
It moves like a wind-blown leaf. It does not seem to touch the ground. Nothing on earth moves so swiftly or so gracefully or so silently.
Like a streak of lightning it passes us within twenty-five feet, a great white tail waving bravely.
The howling dog appearing at the far end of the ridge wakes us from our trance. A fine big buck has passed!
We are still shivering violently and in a mental daze when our guide dashes up out of the underbrush and yells–
“Why didn’t you shoot! Why didn’t you shoot!”
“Shoot what?” you ask weakly.
“That deer! It went within a few feet of you!”
“Shoot that!” you cry indignantly. “Say, what do you think. I am? An aviator?”
Well, after four or five repetitions of this tramping through wildernesses designed for mountain goats and cringing on bleak Alaskan plateaux till our bodies feel about to fall to pieces and a warm fireside seems the furthest thing in the universe; and after four or five deer have gone past us or over us before our feeble minds could grasp their presence, we finally control our mechanism sufficiently to pull the trigger viciously just at that furious moment the great, soaring buck sails past. And by some miracle, he leaps fair in front of your bullet and crumples pitifully and tragically into a slim little brown heap on the ground.
A live deer is a big, splendid, graceful, beautiful creature. A dead deer is as pitiful a little thing as a dead rabbit.
But when you tie his four knees together and lift him up on a pole to carry him two miles to the nearest water, he is neither little nor pitiful. He weighs over two hundred pounds. He sways and swings on the pole as you walk. The first fifty yards is the dickens. The second fifty yards is an inferno. After that you lose consciousness of all human feelings and just struggle along. Where the rocks and bush were rough before, they are mountainous when carrying out your deer. Where there were open spaces to pick your way before, these all magically close up into jumbled ravines and frozen wet swamps, as if in protest against the killing of a king of the forest.
Scarce remembering our names or standing, we at last reach the river and a motorboat. In it we sit and freeze on the journey back to the summer cottage. How warmly we pictured this return with the venison! How cold the actual performance left us!
Ah, well, it may have cost us something in pride to find what deer shooting was. But we didn’t do as badly as the three American hunters, who came up to these parts to shoot moose. No silly little deer for them! Moose or nothing. And hardly had they entered the bush when they saw three large dark brown animals on the shore of a lake. With deadly aim, all three hunters fired, and killed our French settler’s three horses. To avoid aspersions on their reputations as hunters rather than to account for the damage to the Frenchman’s property, these three New Yorkers paid five hundred dollars each2.
As for Jimmie and I, we will go deer hunting never again.
But when we do, we are going to take valets along to carry fur lined garments for us; and a larger party, to help bring in the meat.
Editor’s Notes:
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