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Authors: David Adams Richards
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their interviewers in New York that “hunting moose in the wilds of Canada was every bit as thrilling as when Bunty and I bagged a rhino in the last true game reserve in South Africa.”
The topography of the land changes now in the relative blink of an eye. Places we might once have been able to hunt as familiar territory are no longer there for us in the same way. For our pathways are always being rerouted.
“The road to the river is a mighty long way,” as Willie Nelson sings, but many have been bulldozed back, and old-growth forest of mossy black spruce have been lost to the tree harvester. Now three years makes a big difference in the woods of New Brunswick. We cannot be certain—any more than that little buck I met forty years ago—what awaits the woods today. Our companies do not come fromhere—they come from places as far away as Finland. They couldn’t care less for one deer on the upper stretch of the Sovogle. In fact, they know nothing of it. They have never been here. And the Dutch and German families that have moved here for space and adventure have at times, in their singular dismissive nature, cut us off from places we once considered homestead. The Dutch and Germans are the new Euros, and we are like First Nations.
Now there are orange and yellow and red circles painted on trees, to ward off hunters. Just as so much of the fishing has become private, will hunting go this road as well?
In late August of that long-ago year, I came back up to the river (I was living in Fredericton then) and went with David Savage to scout out a place along the main Bartibog River, thirteen miles down the Miramichi from the town of Newcastle. I arrived at my mother-in-law’s house on the main Bartibog and met with David the next morning. The region behind my mother-in-law’s house is filled with old-growth spruce and wetlands that run all the way down to the Oyster River and beyond. It is a veritable sanctuary for moose. All summer they can be spied from the roadway, at the back of Oyster River in the swampy water. They move off in the fall, into deeper woods behind the Gum Road.
There had been a lot of moose signs that spring and through the summer, and David mentioned that he had seen two young bulls and twin calves and a cow, which generally meant that the moose herd was healthy. He had seen them in the spring of the year just after ice breakup,when he had taken some men far up the Bartibog River in his twenty-two-foot Restigouche canoe to fish for black salmon. There in the haggard trees of spring the young moulting eagle sat perched, a wingspan already longer than its mother’s, who glided in the air above almost to those wisping clouds.
Far up on the river, as the ice went out, he often had his first sighting of moose or deer that had wintered in yards beyond us.
“There is a fair population, so we might luck out. When do you take your shooting test?”
“Next week,” I said. (
Don’t remind me
, I thought.) In years gone by, a shooting test was not required, but because of the moose draw—and because many people who had not used a rifle before applied for the chance—a test was compulsory now. (This test has since been given up because of other qualifying exams, hunter safety courses, and the like.)
We went down toward the river from the Bathurst highway, and came at midmorning to a giant clearout. David told me:
“Just happened—I was up here hunting deer last year and came back this way toward the road, on what I thought was a dirt road all the way, and just at twilight came out on this. So, they have done us in up here a bit. It is like an industry unto itself—a part of mankind hidden from view.”
Yes, and in that way something like a crime.
The chop-down was now miles long, and at the edges of the old road there were some signs of moose, but not as much as we’d hoped, and it was also a hard walk to the river. At noon we stopped for lunch, had some chickensandwiches and some tea, and
The topography of the land changes now in the relative blink of an eye. Places we might once have been able to hunt as familiar territory are no longer there for us in the same way. For our pathways are always being rerouted.
“The road to the river is a mighty long way,” as Willie Nelson sings, but many have been bulldozed back, and old-growth forest of mossy black spruce have been lost to the tree harvester. Now three years makes a big difference in the woods of New Brunswick. We cannot be certain—any more than that little buck I met forty years ago—what awaits the woods today. Our companies do not come fromhere—they come from places as far away as Finland. They couldn’t care less for one deer on the upper stretch of the Sovogle. In fact, they know nothing of it. They have never been here. And the Dutch and German families that have moved here for space and adventure have at times, in their singular dismissive nature, cut us off from places we once considered homestead. The Dutch and Germans are the new Euros, and we are like First Nations.
Now there are orange and yellow and red circles painted on trees, to ward off hunters. Just as so much of the fishing has become private, will hunting go this road as well?
In late August of that long-ago year, I came back up to the river (I was living in Fredericton then) and went with David Savage to scout out a place along the main Bartibog River, thirteen miles down the Miramichi from the town of Newcastle. I arrived at my mother-in-law’s house on the main Bartibog and met with David the next morning. The region behind my mother-in-law’s house is filled with old-growth spruce and wetlands that run all the way down to the Oyster River and beyond. It is a veritable sanctuary for moose. All summer they can be spied from the roadway, at the back of Oyster River in the swampy water. They move off in the fall, into deeper woods behind the Gum Road.
There had been a lot of moose signs that spring and through the summer, and David mentioned that he had seen two young bulls and twin calves and a cow, which generally meant that the moose herd was healthy. He had seen them in the spring of the year just after ice breakup,when he had taken some men far up the Bartibog River in his twenty-two-foot Restigouche canoe to fish for black salmon. There in the haggard trees of spring the young moulting eagle sat perched, a wingspan already longer than its mother’s, who glided in the air above almost to those wisping clouds.
Far up on the river, as the ice went out, he often had his first sighting of moose or deer that had wintered in yards beyond us.
“There is a fair population, so we might luck out. When do you take your shooting test?”
“Next week,” I said. (
Don’t remind me
, I thought.) In years gone by, a shooting test was not required, but because of the moose draw—and because many people who had not used a rifle before applied for the chance—a test was compulsory now. (This test has since been given up because of other qualifying exams, hunter safety courses, and the like.)
We went down toward the river from the Bathurst highway, and came at midmorning to a giant clearout. David told me:
“Just happened—I was up here hunting deer last year and came back this way toward the road, on what I thought was a dirt road all the way, and just at twilight came out on this. So, they have done us in up here a bit. It is like an industry unto itself—a part of mankind hidden from view.”
Yes, and in that way something like a crime.
The chop-down was now miles long, and at the edges of the old road there were some signs of moose, but not as much as we’d hoped, and it was also a hard walk to the river. At noon we stopped for lunch, had some chickensandwiches and some tea, and
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