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HUNTING IN A HARD LAND by
David E. Petzal
Twenty-five thousand years ago, moving at the rate of a few inches
a year, a wall of ice well over 15 000 feet high crushed its way across
what is now northern Quebec, grinding the rock beneath it under the
weight of unimaginable tons of frozen water. Then, as the earth warmed,
the glacier retreated, leaving the land beneath leveled. Over more
thousands of years, wind and unceasing rain scored furrows in the
rock, and filled the furrows with water.
It is now a part of the planet where few things can live. Moss and
lichens grow there, lending their greens and reds and oranges to the
gray of rock and sky. There are cranberries and blueberries, and in
the hollows where the wind is not so fierce, clumps of spruces huddle.
The hollows are marshy, and there are grass bogs that quake at a footstep;
the roots grow in the water beneath them, not in soil.
The animals who call this land home have adapted to some of the worst
weather in the world. It changes over minutes, not hours, and can
go from bright sunlight to rain to blinding sleet and back to sunlight
in 5 minutes. In winter, the cold is appalling; it is enough to freeze
rapids to a depth of 7 feet.
The list of creatures who can live here year-round is short : Canada
jays (called whiskey jacks), martens, black bears, wolves -- and the
animal that brings thousands of hunters to this desolation each fall,
the caribou.
Caribou are circumpolar. In this hemisphere they inhabit Greenland,
the islands of the Arctic Ocean, Alaska, and almost all of Canada.
There are five species : the Barren Ground, the Woodland, the Mountain,
and the Central Canada Barren Ground, and Quebec-Labrador. The variety
that trots over the broken rock and bogs of northern Quebec, ankle
bones clicking, is the Quebec-Labrador.
It is a stocky beast that stands about 50 inches at the shoulder (sizes
vary considerably by species) and weighs 250 to 300 pounds for a good-sized
bull. The long, loose body hair is hollow and brittle, and provides
both superb insulation and buoyancy. A caribou is hot in cold wind
that makes your eyes tear, and can outswim, I am told, a good man
in a canoe.
The coats range in color from near-black to gray, and the big bulls
have a pronounced white mane. Both sexes have antlers, and those of
the bulls can be spectacular, high and wide, with shovels (palmations)
and points.
The caribou's main predator is the wolf, and after a slump, the wolf
is doing quite nicely in Quebec. Le Loup is a formidable predator,
but the caribou is formidable prey. It can run at 30 mph for short
distances, but its most effective means of covering ground is a trot
that eats up miles and which the caribou can maintain hour after hour.
Wolves constantly shadow the herds and bands of caribou, looking for
the lame, the young, and the sick. No wolf is going to run its paws
off without the guarantee of a meal at the end of the chase, and so
they watch and appraise with the eyes of a track coach.
Caribou season starts at the beginning of August and stops - for all
practical purposes - at the end of September. It's not so much a question
of season length as of weather; by the time October comes, you can
find yourself stranded on the tundra, your plane unable to penetrate
the snow, rain, and fog.
There are at present perhaps half a dozen well-established outfitters
taking clients up to caribou country, and they have the operation
running with military precision. Each year, the outfitters' association
selects a motel near the Montreal airport. From there, they send hunters,
guns, duffels, and archery tackle on a 2 ½ hour plane ride
to Schefferville, which is the northernmost Quebec town to have an
airport of any size. From Schefferville, the hunters break down into
groups of six to eight and fly to their outfitters' camps in floatplanes
for hunts that last five or six days. Then they reverse the process
and return to Montreal laden - hopefully - with meat and antlers.
The process goes on virtually nonstop for eight weeks.
Typically, you'll live in a four-man a wall tent with a heater and
gas lantern. The tents are solid; they have to be, or the wind would
tear them to rags in a day. Your day starts at a civilized hour with
breakfast at 6:30 and a leisurely process of making your way to the
hunting ground, either by foot or, more commonly, by boat. Two hunters
go with a guide who is intimately familiar with the ground he hunts
and the habits of the caribou passing through. He will take you to
a high spot, and there you will sit, and look. Eventually you'll see
a promising bull, and the guide will conduct you on a merry trot over
the broken rock, the moss-and-slime-covered boulders, and through
mud and bog, so that you may intercept the caribou.
It sounds simple, and it is, until you consider that you may sit for
3 or 4 hours in a slashing 30-mile-per-hour wind, and that you will
be pelted with freezing rain every 10 minutes or so, and that the
caribou may get your wind and trot off before you're set to shoot,
and that your heart may explode while you are extracting your boots
from knee-deep muck.
There is a prevailing myth that caribou are dumb, and that shooting
one is a questions of sitting on the nearest rock while the migration
pours by, picking the Boone and Crockett head of your choice out of
the mob, and squeezing the trigger. This may happen. However, it is
far more likely that you will see the creatures in twos or threes,
or in herds of a dozen, and that you will have to stalk them for some
very tough miles, all the while being careful of the wind, and being
careful that they do not see you - they have excellent eyesight. Then
you may get a shot, or you may not.
The guides themselves are worth a trip to Canada because they are
consummate woodsmen, and watching them at work is a privilege. The
guide with whom I hunted this part September is named Maurice Boivin.
He is a forty-eight-year-old Montagnais Indian who began hunting on
his own as a ten-year-old. "My father showed me how to do it,
and then said, "Now you do it'. I was scared to death, but I
learned." Maurice speaks the Quebec version of French and pretty
decent English.
Each morning, we'd leave camp and travel for half an hour by Zodiac
boat, and after disembarking, we would have a brisk uphill march o'er
bog and boulder to the top of what was called "Maurice's Mountain,"
a 500-foot-high rise that gave an excellent view of the surrounding
tundra. Maurice would go off on one side and I on the other, where
I would glass for caribou, recite Milton's Paradise Lost, and think
about Carol Alt.
As I was muttering Milton into my beard, I looked to my left and saw
Maurice trotting toward me with a look on his face that I have seen
mirrored by many guides. The look says something like this : Oh, this
is a big one and I know where he's going if we can just get there
ahead of him and I hope the wind doesn't shift and this character
doesn't fall on his face in the muskeg.
And so I bade adieu to Milton and Carol Alt, put on my pack, and trotted
after Maurice, down off the mountain and into a spruce-infested bog.
As we came up the far side of the bog, onto what passes for dry land,
Maurice slowed to a walk. His hands were in constant motion, fluttering
in a kind of sigh language directed at me, at the caribou, at Fate,
and at who knows who else. We eased up out of the draw and Maurice
pointed west. The big caribou and a lady friend were about 250 yards
in that direction, but we were unable to see them, or they us.
Moving a half-step at a time, I saw a patch of white 200 yards away.
It was the shoulder mane of a big, iron-gray bull. His head was down,
browsing, and the wind was in my face. I needed to move another 6
feet to get a shot. Whatever forces Maurice had invoked were on my
side. I fired, offhand, and he went down.
If you're hunting with a rifle, you don't need to bring a cannon.
I had a 7mm Weatherby magnum, and it was too much gun. A .270 would
have been more like it. The average shot was on the order of 200-300
yards, so you do need something flat-shooting, but you don't need
ton upon ton of muzzle energy. You may use whatever scope you like,
but it must have caps for the lenses.
Bowhunters headed for the tundra have my deepest sympathy. Launching
an arrow in constant high wind is something I was glad I was not faced
with. If you do not use plastic vanes, you'll have to dope your feathers
so they don't wilt.
It's hard for me to overdo this business of wind and water. From the
moment we hit camp, we were told : "Don't walk out of your tent
without your rainsuit," and it was good advice. I found it was
best to put the rainpants on in the morning and never take them off,
and keep the jacket in the top of my daypack. Not only does raingear
keep the water off, but it helps to break the force of the wind, and
it is much better to sit down on a clump of wet moss with rainpants
on than without. Do not bring your leather boots, and I'm not even
crazy about rubber-bottom pacs for this country. The proper footwear
is 10-inch-high all-rubber boots.
This is not easy country. It is not the stuff of which picture postcards
are made. It is somber, harsh, and uninhabitable by man. It will make
you feel small and insignificant, and it will be there, unchanged
and unspoiled, until the next ice wall looms out of the Arctic and
begins its ages-long advance to the south.
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