It’s the last day of hunting season here on South Ridge. Jeb’s last chance to get that buck. He’s been out there every day since we first saw those tracks by the side of the road, those deep crescents in the mud so big that he almost mistook them for moose sign; a deer that size would keep us fed for months, he says. He’s not the only one after it, either. Danny stopped on the road the yesterday morning while we were walking the dogs, and said he saw it chasing down the cut line the other day. “Either Danny gets it, or I get it, or it lives another year at least,” says Jeb. Part of me is rooting for the buck.
It’s my first autumn on South Ridge, and a bad year for hunting. Not much snow; Jeb says it’s harder to track without it. Walking around on dry, crackling leaves isn’t exactly a recipe for stealth, either. “A lot of guys just load their guns into the truck and drive up and down logging roads hoping a deer will stroll up and commit suicide,” says Jeb. “But a buck doesn’t get that big by being stupid. Around here, you can drive a lot of miles before you ever see a deer, and you probably won’t see one at all. They hang around in the deep brush down by the creeks and rivers, or in the saddles between the ridges, in the dirtiest country they can find.” If you want to take a deer in the Appalachians, your best bet is to go stalking through the woods like Elmer Fudd - and be vewy, vewy quiet.
Jeb just likes being out there, whether he gets anything or not. He’s fussy about what he shoots, too. Before deer season, he came across a big snowshoe hare while he was out hunting partridge. “He was just sitting there under a tree, enjoying the afternoon,” he said. “Would have made a nice stew, but I just let him be.” A few days later, he jumped a four-pointer and a couple of doe in their beds, but figured the buck deserved a few more summers to fill out. It was early in the season, and he wanted to keep hunting.
I wasn’t sure he was going to hunt at all until a month ago, when he pulled his guns out of the closet, laid them on the kitchen table and started cleaning them. He used to run a guide service, and fed his family trapping and hunting, but after they moved out, he didn’t have the heart for it anymore. And he’d had enough of babysitting trophy hunters by then, too. “These guys want you to bait a tree stand for them, so they can shoot a bear, get their picture taken, and take the hide home,” he said. “It made me sick.” It’s been six years since he last hunted; won’t buy meat from the supermarket, so just went without. I understand that completely; by the time Jeb and I reconnected, I’d been eating vegetarian for quite a while myself.
We both come from small-town Alberta – cow country. It was nice, growing up surrounded by green fields speckled with munching cows. We never connected them with the red stuff our Moms brought home from the store, under plastic. But when Jeb came out to visit me last fall, he was horrified. The neighborhood had changed. Today, there’s a feedlot to the west of town and a meat-packing plant to the north. When the wind is blowing, the smell of manure and offal wafts in like a dark cloud, enveloping everything in an ominous pall of doom. People call it the smell of money; to me, it smelled like death.
The Cargill plant: a big white box with no windows, bigger than a football field, with 4000 creatures a day funneled through there on their way to becoming hamburger, workers coming and going in three eight-hour shifts, production must never stop. It looks so clean on the outside, but the place is full of blood.
The cattle liners were the worst. There was always a long slow line of traffic on the road past the plant; on a hot day, you’d get stuck behind these great cages on wheels stuffed with miserable victims on their way to the slaughter, wild-eyed and stomping, sick with fear and thirst.
“Poor little ones,” Jeb said as we drove past, his eyes clouding over and his face setting into a wooden, pained mask. It’s funny to think of a 1000 pound steer, raised on the best antibiotics and hormones money can buy, as a “little one;” but those are the words he uses to describe any creature in mortal hurt.
I worried about him while he was in town. It’s not his natural habitat. Sometimes, he’d pace around my place like a caged animal, but he never complained. My neighbours stared when they got a good look at him – bushy beard, wild hair, woollen plaid, and Maine hunting cap atop his 6”3 frame. But Jeb puts out an air of quiet competence and old-fashioned courtesy, and charmed them all.
He’d planned to stay for two weeks and wound up hanging around for five months. That’s how long it took for us to pack up my stuff and sell the condo. He kept asking if I was sure I wanted to make such a big change, to quit my job and leave my family and friends. I was sure. With the crazy way the world is going these days, I knew I was in good hands.
“We’ll be getting stuck behind logging trucks in New Brunswick,” he said. “But there’s not much else for traffic. South Ridge is as far off the beaten track as you can get without moving to the Yukon.” He’s been living here for almost twenty years, in this century-old hunting camp at the headwaters of Miramichi River, surrounded by thousands of acres of forested Crown land. Moose and bear traipsing across the yard. A fox living underneath the cabin. Raccoons in the compost bin. Marten in the henhouse. It’s a place where humans still share the land with wildlife, he told me. I couldn’t pack up fast enough.
*
It’s been six months since I began to call South Ridge my home. Long enough to notice that I didn’t need to bring my high heels, that I’ve started waking up and going to sleep with the sun, and no longer dread the sound of leaf-blowers, lawn mowers and garbage trucks. Long enough to watch the tail end of spring turn into summer, and summer to fall. You don’t count the seasons by calendar here; Mother Nature tells you what time it is. My first night, I mistook the sound of spring peepers for birds; but no, they were little frogs, Jeb said, millions of them, singing in the wetlands around the river. I hadn’t heard frogs since I was a kid.
By the time the hummingbirds arrived in mid-June, I was pretty well settled in. We’d sit on the porch with our morning coffee, watching them flash around the feeders in twinkling clouds. They thinned out when the wildflowers reached their peak: didn’t need extra food then, Jeb said, since the blossoms they like to feed on were everywhere: orange jewelweed, golden evening primrose, scarlet beebalm, and purple lupine.
Then came firefly season, when on a hot summer night you could see their multitudes blinking Morse code out in the spruces - the closest thing to neon I’ve seen since I got here. The raspberry patch exploded. Every morning, I went out with my basket, pulling crimson jewels from their canes, filling the freezer, imagining some snowy day far into the future when I’d make jam. We put in a garden together: potatoes, carrots, greens and tomatoes, all bursting with goodness undiluted by miles of semi-truck transport and produce racks. It felt good to sweat with an honest day’s work.
We were stacking wood for winter when the leaves began to turn. The extravagant riot of color bursting across the ridges took me by surprise, even though Jeb had warned me; it was a kaleidoscope of flaming saffron, copper, and russet to which no camera can ever do justice. That didn’t stop us from trying. Every morning, we bolted our breakfasts and headed to the woods, walking in silence, stopping periodically just to snap pictures and gape. But it wasn’t only foliage Jeb was looking at.
He showed me marks on the trees where bucks had rubbed the bark off, leaving their scent; snapped branches through the brush where they’d been browsing. Browsing. That’s what you do in a store, right? Well to the deer, to all the creatures out here, the landscape is the store. It is for humans, too; Jeb showed me how to find Jerusalem artichokes in the yard, lobster mushrooms and chanterelles in the woods, wild blueberries down by the river. The earth’s bounty provides everything you need, he said; but the knowledge of how to get it and preserve it is a dying art. I’m learning.
*
Everything in the woods has a purpose, Jeb would say. And everything tells a story. He could find a faint mark in the leaves and discern a track in it; he showed me that if you can find a second track, you can find the next one, and the next, because you can estimate where to look by the distance between them. It was like an optical illusion: one minute, the forest floor was just a mess of leaves, and then suddenly I could see a trail through it as clear as day. It was like getting a new pair of eyes. “Wait ‘til the snow falls,” said Jeb. “Then it’ll be easy to see what species it is and how big, what direction it’s going and how fast.”
But the snow didn’t fall, and there was very little deer sign to be found. Every day, we wandered further; over the sun-striped ridges, through shadowy spruce and fir forests, along muddy creek beds through dense brush. As the leaves drifted from the trees, the shape of the land began to reveal itself. Distances that had seemed so mysterious in summer became navigable. Occasionally, the forest opened to reveal a patch of ground raped by the loggers; sad sticks of birch poking up out of the wreckage like flags of surrender. Then, Jeb’s face would take on that same grim mask he used to wear when we were driving past Cargill.
“The land was different in the old days,” he said. “I used to come through here with the sled dogs, and the trees were 100 feet high.” Once we came across the stump of a massive cedar, its body lying forgotten beside it, rotting. He counted the rings; it was at least 125 years old, and they didn’t even bother to remove it. “And they’re logging too close to the wetland,” he said, pointing down towards the creek. “They’re not supposed to do that. The trees store moisture in their root systems, and without the trees, the water dries up. I used to fish down there, but the water has gotten so low it freezes solid in winter, and the fish can’t survive.”
It’s not that he’s against forestry. People need fiber, he said, and forests are a renewable resource. But they have to be managed. If the logging companies don’t replant, the space is taken over by opportunistic species like alder, poplar and dogwood, quick to grow and die. When they do replant the clearcuts, it’s usually with only one type of tree, creating a monoculture that doesn’t support the insects and wildlife. He pointed to a “forest” on the opposite ridge – a smooth, uniform green, each tree perfect and unnatural. The original Acadian Forest and all its varied species is being crowded out, and the animals that depend on them are also withering. “How can you justify hunting, then?” I asked.
“Look, the land has a carrying capacity,” he said. “It can sustain only so many creatures before some start dying of starvation and disease. Think about that fox we saw the other day; did you notice how skinny and small it was, and how its coat was all mottled? It was dying of mange.”
I still wasn’t convinced. “Believe, me, most hunters care about the environment as much as activists do – maybe more,” Jeb continued. “There’s a logic to hunting and trapping regulations: the number of tags that hunters can purchase are based on estimates of what the population can bear in order to stay healthy. When the habitat shrinks, animals are crowded together; the ticks and fleas on them pass from critter to critter, making them all sick. The competition for resources is fierce. Would you rather die of starvation, or with a clean shot you didn’t even know was coming? Even in a perfect world, most of these animals would die early deaths - they get eaten alive. Not a nice way to go.” Nature is cruel, I thought – especially human nature. We damage the environment, which damages the wildlife populations, which then need to be culled by hunters. That’s irony.
By then, we were wearing bright orange hats and vests on our walks. I was under strict orders not to go wandering without them. Hunters in the woods: you could hear them popping shots off out there a few times a day. Jeb even bought me a little shotgun and taught me to use it. It’s a skill I’ve always thought I should have in case I ever needed to hunt for food. But I still don’t know if I could kill an animal. And despite what he’d told me, it was hard to imagine Jeb doing it either.
*
One morning he peeled a frozen bumblebee off the window screen. He brought it into the house, laid it on a tea towel, and placed it in a warm spot in the sun. “Poor little one,” he said. He offered it a little sugar water on a cotton ball and watched it carefully until it was ready to go outside. And yet every day, he packs his bag and his gun and roams the woods for hours. “The thrill of the chase,” I said. Some ancient impulse to hunt and kill.
“It’s more than that,” said Jeb. “Being in the woods with a purpose makes me feel more connected to it. You pick up a trail and start following it, and you start to understand the animal. Male or female? Healthy or lame? Where is it feeding, where is it sleeping? You look at maps, you look at the terrain, you try to think like it thinks. All the puzzle pieces finally come together, and there it is, in my sights. There’s a surge of adrenaline, and maybe a moment of hesitation – ‘Do I really want to do this?’ and I pull the trigger."
I shuddered. "How does it make you feel?" I asked. I've always thought that if I'm going to eat meat, then I should be willing to do the killing myself. Hence, the vegetarianism.
"Afterwards, there’s always a sense of remorse," he said. "Here’s this 200 pound buck that was right before me, living and breathing, and now it’s lying on the ground, dead. Because of me. But this animal is going to feed me. It’s going to fill our freezer and feed us all winter. Then comes this sense of gratitude, of reverence. I never take a life without thinking of how that animal lived, where it lived, and what is happening to that ecosystem,” he said. “It’s humbling. I don’t know how anybody could take a moment like that and turn it into a trophy.”
*
Well, that’s how I feel about my raspberries. I picked every one of them with my own hands. Today is a perfect day for making jam; maybe a little less perfect for hunting. The snow is finally falling, but at such a rate that it will cover any tracks out there in a hurry. But Jeb has his hunting orange on before he’s even finished his first cup of coffee. “What do you think my chances are of getting that buck on the last day of hunting season?” he asks, grinning.
“Look, it's practically blizzarding out there,” I say. The wind is picking up, whistling around the walls; the fire in the woodstove is blazing. “Wouldn’t you rather just stay inside today? What is it with this buck, anyway?”
He stands there for a moment, looking at me. “Part of it might be ego,” he says slowly. “I’d be proud to bring an animal home to you. To butcher it up ourselves, to make sure we don’t waste any of it, to take the hide and tan it, so we could make moccasins out of it. To know we put the work in, that we understand how it lived, that it lived a good life, and that it can sustain us. That’s self-sufficiency.”
I thought of the satisfaction I felt pulling those raspberries from their canes. I understand.
“My chances of getting it are 100 percent better if I try,” he says. “If I don’t get it today, nobody will. Who else is going to be hunting in this weather?”
Nobody. He packs up his gear and heads out, promising to be careful. In solidarity, I put on my winter coat and take the dogs for a walk through the blowing snow. The ridges are dark and ghostly, and my fingers tingle in my gloves; I picture Jeb out there, slogging through the cold in dogged pursuit. I know he wants to show me that he can take care of us by bringing the buck home; the least I can do is make enough jam to get us through until next year. What Jeb doesn’t know is, I’m about as confident about my potential for success as he is about his own. But my chances are 100 percent better if I try.
When I get back to the cabin, I get out the recipe and read it from top to bottom. I am warned to follow each step exactly, or the jam will be runny. No problem. I can follow directions, I think. An hour later, the kitchen is littered with jars and canning tools and sugar and specks of bubbling hot raspberries everywhere; I’m sweating, flummoxed, and panicking. What a shame it would be to waste these raspberries by making jam that doesn’t jell. I’m stirring furiously, trying not to burn the mixture and trying to decide what a “rolling boil” is . . .
When all the lights on the stove go off.
What the hell? Power outage? But the kitchen lights are still on. A breaker, maybe? But if it’s a breaker, wouldn’t everything else in the kitchen be off, too? I don’t know about this stuff. Why didn’t I bother to learn?
My jam stops rolling. My water bath slows to a standstill. The jars and lids are as sterile as they are going to get. I look at the stove dumbly as if it can tell me what’s wrong with it. I’ll try the fusebox, I think. But I have no idea where it is. I’ve been here for six months and I’ve never bothered to ask! I start rummaging through closets, with no luck. The clock is ticking and my jam is cooling. Will it still jell if I reheat it? Dammit! I wish Jeb were here.
I probably shouldn’t call him. I never have, while he’s out in the woods – I might be interrupting a shot. But what are the chances he has that buck in his sights, at this moment, on the last day of hunting season, in a snowstorm? Anyway, he probably has his phone on vibrate. And there’s a precious batch of jam at stake.
I pick up the phone and dial.
He gets back to me by text. Immediately.
“DON’T PHONE! I’M GOING IN TO GET HIM!”
Oops.
At that moment, I find the breaker box behind a loose panel in the office closet. Sure enough, there’s a breaker in it in labelled “stove,” and it’s switched off. I flick it, and the stove lights all come back on. Simple. Maybe my jam will turn out after all, but if I want to claim self-sufficiency, I’ll need to try a little harder next time. As for the buck, I’m guessing his luck his holding.
Jeb found the tracks a couple of hours after he set out, he told me later. The buck was following a pair of does, who were leading it on a merry chase. At first, the tracks were just faint dents buried in snow; he followed them over a ridge, up and down a creek bed, and through a swamp trying to catch up. When the tracks became clearer, he knew he was beating the snow, and had to be getting close.
He finally caught up to the three of them in a thick stand of fir. He circled the copse, stealthy as Elmer; three sets of tracks going in, and none coming out. They were in there, all right. He waited patiently, until one of the does came wandering out of the brush, backtracking. Jeb knew the buck would be close on her tail, intent on rutting; he finally had his chance to catch it unawares. He was getting ready to go after it when the silence of the forest was broken by the unnatural chime of his phone. The does took off in one direction, and the buck in another. By then, the sun was going down over the ridge. Hunting season was over.
“Why didn’t you have my ring on vibrate?” I ask, embarrassed.
“I have your number set to ring through all the time, in case there’s an emergency,” he says. “Like, um, a power outage. Never mind. I like to think about that buck getting another year. I hope he got those does, too. Maybe he’ll have a son.”
It takes patience to be a hunter. Jeb stalked that deer for weeks, came up empty because of me, and offered not a single word of reproach. But that’s the kind of man he is. We were in our twenties when we first spoke of growing old together; he never forgot the one that got away, and decades later, his aim is still true.
“I’m sorry, Jeb,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it,” he replied. “There’s always next year.”
Until there isn’t.
Time will eventually run out for us as it does for every creature. Some hummingbirds don’t survive the journey south, and every firefly eventually blinks it’s last. By the harvest and the hunt, we are immersed in both life and death, participating fully in the preciousness of the present moment. There are some things you can’t buy at a supermarket; the only guarantee we have is that someday, we too will pass away like the leaves beneath the snow, feeding the soil into which we all are planted.
As for my jam, I’ve got 24 jars cooling on the counter, their lids popping, and they all jelled perfectly. Jeb is delighted for me.
And I’m delighted for the buck.
"To hunt or not to hunt, that is the question. What do you think?"
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