By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, November 10, 1945.
I’m a realist,” asserted Jimmie Frise tartly.
“With a gun,” I sneered.
“There is enough meat on a deer,” declared Jim, “if properly butchered and stored in one of these cold storage lockers, to last an average family for three months.”
“Yah,” I said, “but how many families would eat venison every day for three months?”
“Our pioneer ancestors,” stated Jim, “lived on it every winter, year after year.”
“One of the reasons our pioneer ancestors worked so hard,” I explained, “was to get away from venison. When you travel around these older provinces and see the work those pioneers did – the fences made of gigantic tree stumps or of massive boulders weighing hundreds of pounds – you often wonder what incentive there was in those days for men to work the way they did. Uprooting colossal pines and dragging the roots over rough ground to make a fence. Patiently digging out boulders and transporting them on stoneboats1 hauled by slow oxen to erect a barrier around their poor fields.”
“They wanted land,” said Jim.
“On which,” I cried, “to pasture cows and sheep and hogs in order to escape from the terrible venison, venison, venison.”
“And porcupines,” added Jim, “and partridge and groundhogs, et cetera.”
“They cleared their fields,” I pursued, “to grow hay to feed the cows to eat the beef to get enough strength to uproot another 10 acres of pine stumps to enclose another field to grow hay to feed the cows…”
“Since when,” interrupted Jim, “have you turned against venison?”
“I haven’t turned against it, Jim,” “I assured him. “All I am pointing out is that venison is a novelty, something you like once or twice in the fall. But as a steady diet it would never do. The average hunter, when he comes home from the hunt, takes his deer to the family butcher, who cuts it up into 20 or 30 parcels, filling two big butcher baskets. The hunter then puts the baskets in his car and drives around in the evening, calling on all his friends and giving them each a present – maybe a roast, a steak, a few chops. To try to justify deer hunting on the ground that it is a big important factor in the meat situation is ridiculous.”
“But all that meat introduced into the domestic economy of the country,” protested Jim, “must have some effect.”
“Unless,” I suggested, “half the people who receive that nice little gift of venison throw it in the garbage or bury it under a rambler rose bush.”
Jim was scandalized.
“A roast of venison, properly cooked,” he declaimed, “is the most heavenly feed a man can eat.”
“How can you properly cook,” I demanded, “a roast of venison that has been abused and kicked around the way the average hunter treats his deer? Amateur butchers, to begin with. They kill their deer and then bleed it, take out its entrails and hang it up in the woods. They are too busy hunting to take proper care of it. The gang they are with are all jealous of the guy who got the deer, so they don’t want to quit hunting and help carry it safe back to camp. No. Hurry up and gut it and hang it in a tree, and come on, let’s get another.”
“That’s true,” recollected Jim.
“So, the deer is left hanging in a tree,” I pursued, “for several days. You get some very mild days in November. Most hunters don’t open their deer up enough to let it cool quickly. So, between body heat held in and a mild spell of weather, the meat sours.”
“You have to hang meat,” protested Jim.”
“But cold,” I insisted. “Then, on the journey home, where do most hunters carry their deer? On the front bumper or the side mud guards! Right up against the hot engine. Or else, on the back bumper, against the exhaust.”
Bird Watchers Increasing
“Where else can you carry a deer?” inquired Jim indignantly.
“The chief function of a deceased buck,” I asserted, “is to decorate a hunter’s car on the trip home, so he can brag and show off before all the citizenry. The fact that he is ruining the meat makes no difference to a sportsman who wants to tie his buck up on the hood of his car.”
“Aw, it isn’t that!” cried Jim.
“What,” I questioned, “after all, is the chief function of the dead buck? Its horns to decorate the sportsman’s den. Its meat to be distributed around among the neighbors as a testimony to the sportsmanship and woodcraft of the hunter.”
“You forget,” said Jim bitterly, “the sport itself. Any man with enough gumption to go into the woods in the late fall of the year and pit his strength and wits against the native wit and strength of a wild denizen of the woods deserves some credit when he gets a fine big buck. Or are you changing?”
“Changing?” I queried.
“Maybe you are turning into one of those sentimental people,” suggested Jimmie, “who can’t understand how men can still be so brutal, in this enlightened age, as to go out and slaughter innocent wild animals.”
“The world,” I warned, “is getting more and more people like that.”
“And nobody,” insinuated Jim, “is likely to be more sentimental than an old hunter who reforms.”
“The day is coming, Jim,” I presented, “when the number of nature lovers is going to exceed the hunters by so much that they are going to put the law on us.”
“There have never been so many gun licenses in history,” countered Jim, “as there are now. In the United States over 11,000,000 gun licenses sold this year.”
“And naturally.” I submitted, “the game is getting scarcer all the time. In the central and southern states, where all the larger game has already been killed off, they make a great sport out of squirrel shooting! Imagine guys by the hundred in some of those central states making a big sporting hobby out of going out squirrel shooting!”
“The great out-of-doors,” propounded Jim, “is something that I sincerely trust will never lose its appeal to the common man. There is nothing so good for the public health as outdoor sport. Instead of making it less attractive for men to go out into the woods and fields whenever possible, the government should make it more attractive by every known means. And a rod or a gun is the most persuasive means of all.”
“Mister,” I said, “maybe you don’t know it, but the number of bird watchers in this country alone has increased 1,000 per cent. in the past 10 years.”
“Bird watchers!” exclaimed Jim disgustedly.
“Yes sir,” I asserted. “People dedicated to going out into the woods and fields with nothing but a pair of field-glasses.”
“Puh,” said Jim.
“They join field naturalist clubs,” I explained. “And they go out, mostly in pairs or small gangs of friends, and tramp the woods and fields at all seasons of the year. They make a game of listing the birds they see. Each member keeps a score. In the spring they have a marvellous time, welcoming back the migrants. In the summer nesting season, they satisfy every craving a man or woman feels for the open air by going out with their check lists and seeing how many birds they can add to their score for the year. In the dead of winter they still go out, on skis, on snow-shoes, on foot; and perhaps the highest peak of their hobby is in the winter. Because the birds that remain are few and very hard to see. But bird watching is one of the most fascinating outdoor sports of all.”
“When I get too old to aim a gun,” growled Jim, “I might take up field-glasses.”
“You miss the point,” I insisted. “All over America the number of people who love the out-of-doors only for the wild things they can see in it is increasing by leaps and bounds. Don’t you see? One of these fine days they are going to resent people killing the wild things they wish merely to look at!”
“I tell you hunting,” cried Jim, “was never more popular.”
“All the more reason,” I assured him, “for an early showdown. As soon as the number of hunters grows big enough to be a menace to the already vanishing wild life, the nature lovers are going to rise up in their might.”
Jim brooded out the window.
“Then,” he said explosively, “what are we waiting for? Maybe we’ve only got a couple more deer seasons left. Maybe this sentimental uprising is already under way. The way the world is now anything can happen. A great religious revival… anything.”
“Jim,” I submitted slowly, “I’m not sure I care about any more deer hunts. Not with a gang, anyway. It’s too troublesome. A big gang. All the cooking and dish-washing. All the bickering over where we’ll hunt today.
“Just let’s you and me go,” wheedled Jim. “I’m not much inclined towards those old hunting gangs myself.”
“It’s a long, weary trip, Jim,” I complained. “A lot of hard work for just the two of us. Suppose we get a deer away back by Crooked lake, for instance? Three miles in from the river, over rocks and muskegs. Imagine us two, at our age, wrastling with a 200-pound buck…”
“I’ve had an idea simmering in the back of my head,” cut in Jim, “for the past couple of years. How about us hunting down here the settled part of the province? I’m told there are more deer in the farming country than there are in the bush north of it. The deer have invaded, the settled areas, living in the bush lots and the odd swamp. They’ve become a positive nuisance to the farmers.”
“They open the season,” I admitted, “in at lot of these southern counties, just to keep the deer population in check.”
“I know any number of people,” cried Jim, “who get their buck every year. And they don’t have to go into the bush at all. They don’t have to travel long distances and live in uncomfortable camps. They don’t have to tramp miles over rock and through tag alders2.”
Farmland Hunters
“How about the risk of getting plinked in a country full of people shooting at their ease?” I questioned.
“Not as risky,” said Jim, “as being plinked by some guy who shoots at anything he sees moving, up in the wilds.”
“Aw, it’s the feel of being in the wilds that attracts me,” I complained. “This deer hunting over farm lands doesn’t appeal to me.”
“But think,” pleaded Jim. “Driving in your car to a farmhouse. Walking over a field to the corner of a woodlot. Sitting down, in full sight of comfortable human habitations, and waiting for a deer to come out!”
“No carrying,” I agreed.
“Heck, cried Jim, “we could simply drive over the field and load the deer into the car.”
“But the tameness of it, Jim,” I muttered. “Like shooting a sheep.”
“I tell you what we could do,” said Jim eagerly. “We don’t have to hunt in the actually settled counties. We could go up to the edge of the farm country. Right on the edge of the woods belt. Lots of farms. Lots of good roads. Plenty of conveniences and comfort. We could sort of compromise between the wilderness and the civilized farming country.”
“Do you know of such a place?” I inquired. “Dozens of them,” assured Jim, “in Muskoka. All over Haliburton. The summer resort country is full of roads and farms. We don’t have to go into the unexplored wilderness to find deer.”
“But,” I sighed, “I’m not sure if it is deer I want. Maybe that’s just the excuse for getting into the wilderness.”
“Aw, try it,” urged Jim. “Let’s try it this once. Let’s agree that if we can get good, fresh meat to add to the national food supply this year, we’ll get it where we can immediately take care of it, with good roads handy to it straight to cold storage…”
“Jim,” I protested, “nothing good ever comes of framing up a lot of false motives. Let’s face the facts. Are we going deer hunting for the sake of the national meat shortage? Or because we’re just a couple of tough old sports who want to shoot off guns at running targets?”
“Both,” declared Jim.
So we pooled ideas over a road map of Ontario and decided on a country not 100 miles from Toronto, but which is still in the northern area open during the normal deer season.
It was, in fact, one of the most settled districts in all that northern fringe of farming country. But we could tell, by the bare spots on the road map, without paved highways and with sparse villages, that there were plenty of swamps, woodlots and wilderness areas close to the farming districts. And plenty of streams.
“I never heard of anybody ever doing any deer hunting there,” said Jim. “And obviously it’s a good deer country.”
There is something about arming for a deer hunt that must waken deep, subconscious memories in all men. Even though he is taking a modern high-power rifle into the woods to shoot at a perfectly innocent and beautiful animal, a man always feels more manly when he loads up his car with supplies and equipment for a journey into the woods.
If the morals of it are to be debated, I can always quote the innocent lambs and calves that we raise up in all tenderness, only to knock them on the head with a mallet or cut their throats. Some people can detect a clear distinction between a lamb deliberately raised for slaughter and a deer that comes to its death by a bullet. But I can’t. In fact, my sympathy goes to the lamb. Because the deer is a pretty clever, gifted and resourceful animal who at least has a run for his money. Whereas a lamb is taught to come when called.
With a fairly large percentage of the old familiar feelings of going on the annual November warpath, Jim and I set forth on our three-day deer hunt. We made it that short because we were pretty sure of our deer. We dressed in the old familiar wilderness clothes, though we were going to sleep in a good town hotel each night. We wore our hunting boots, though oxfords would have done for walking over stubble fields. We donned our heavy woollen underwear, because sitting on a rail fence in the corner of a farm pasture was likely to be just as chilly as sitting on a runway in some far northern wilderness.
We drove on good concrete highways through factory towns and prosperous villages, gazing fondly on them as we passed, with that sweet hunters’ feeling of leaving all this behind, and joy before.
We came almost imperceptibly into the country where cultivation starts to decline and the wilderness to linger. The woodlots to grow wilder and larger. We reached the town which was to be our base, and there spent the night. It was the kind of hotel where they still give you pie for breakfast.
Before daybreak we were disturbing the frosty silence of the town by taking our car out of the barn at the back. Before the first streak of day we were speaking to a farmer with a lantern at his pump, asking permission to walk across his fields and take up our stand at the corner of his woodlot. Our map had shown this to be a corner of a swampy tract of forest that stretched for several miles north into the real woods. At crack of day were hidden behind a snake fence and heard far off the first race of hounds. And the first shots.
There were many other hunters out. Far to the north, a pack of hounds, larger than the law allows, gave tongue for half an hour before their voices grew so faint they vanished into silence.
More than three hounds there,” whispered Jim, as we watched across the dawning meadows and along the frost-wet, colored brushwood of the forest.
“You can’t prevent,” I explained, “two or three different parties of hounds ganging up when one of them raises a deer.”
To the west, a lone hound gave tongue and brought something down through our woodlot to within a few hundred yards of us, and Jim and I sat with rifles ready and safety catches off. But it
was a fox that broke cover and went, with lazy waving brush, out over the pastures, while 200 yards behind him, never looking up from the earth, but yodelling mournfully with his nose enjoying the hot tracks of the fox, came an old fat hound.
Before day was fully broken we heard many shots, far and near. And we knew fellow hunters were trying for something, whether deer or otherwise could not be said: because a man with a gun is tempted.
Then, about 8 o’clock, from the misty north, came faintly back that lovely music of the pack of hounds. There is no music like it, unless it is the first wild geese coming from the south in spring, or that passage in Sir Edward Elgar’s “Enigma Variations,” which he portrays the running of hounds3.
“They’re coming this way,” hissed Jim.
“They’re miles away,” I retorted.”
“They’re in this very woods,” insisted Jim through his teeth. “At the far end of it. About two miles.”
“The bush is full of hunters,” I assured softly. “It’ll never come this far.”
Music of the Hounds
But as we harked, the melody of the hounds was increasing in volume every instant. You could make out the high bugles of some of them and the deep, belling sounds of others with fuller voice.
They would fade away, as the pack ran behind a hill or into a swamp. Then the music would rise, as the hounds came round the hill or got on to higher ground.
“Just in case, Jim,” I suggested, “let’s stand there in the open where we can get a fair shot, if it should come this way. It might break out across any of the fields…”
We took our stand facing both sides of this tag end of the long belt of woods.
“It’ll be a buck,” shivered Jim, who always gets the shakes when this moment comes.
“The way it twists,” I agreed, hoarsely. I always get choked up at this moment.
Faded went the tumult. Up it rose again, very near, as the hounds breasted a ridge in the woods. We prayed that no other shot would interrupt this dream. You could hear the yammer of hounds squealing with the heat of the scent and, tangled in the clamor, the deep tolling sound of glorious old hounds of the joyous type that date their ancestry back to the time of Richard the Lion Heart.
We both began to shake. It is buck fever, the best fever there is. Our hands were numb. Our hearts thudding in our ears.
But even so, we heard the crack and crash of some mighty animal going high and wide in the woods to our left. We raised our rifles. We extended our trigger fingers ready to close. The hounds were babbling so near and so frantic we knew now that this was our hour.
Amid the colored mystery of the brush something swift, gray, fawn and with a fleeting sparkle of white flashed. It was coming straight out to us. Our trigger fingers began to close.
With a tremendous, soaring, joyous sail, the buck leaped into the open, trailing from its neck the wide bright scarlet ribbons of a bow, 10 inches wide, tied fetchingly under its chin.
As it passed it flashed us a wide, genial glance; its mouth seemed parted in a grin – the friendliest expression imaginable.
After a short loop out into the pasture, where it paused an instant and listened, with pricked ears, to the oncoming hounds, with all the airs of somebody playing a game – it bounded silently, in those indescribable floating movements of a deer, back into the woods.
The hounds came boiling out on the scent, frantic, heedless of us, their tongues flapping, their voices strident.
Before we could catch our breath they were already fading away back up the way they had come.
“One of those sentimentalists,” said Jim, unloading his rifle. “Probably the pet of some joker…”
So we sat and listened for the rest of the morning to the distant, mysterious sounds of others.
Editor’s Notes:
- A stone boat a type of sled for moving heavy objects such as stones or hay bales. ↩︎
- A tag alder is a shrubby tree that can be a common sight in swamps and wetlands ↩︎
- Which variation? He probably means variation XI “G.R.S.” ↩︎
