CHAPTER 5: THROWBACKS

Nimrod... was the first on earth to be a mighty man. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord. Genesis 10, verses 8–9

The promoter of the colossal task [building the Tower of Babel, which would reach up into the heavens] was Noah’s grandson Nimrod, whose mad ambition was to invade the Kingdom of God. Alberto Manguel, The City of Words

Hunting in the late sixties and early seventies, for me, was somehow different from my earlier excursions. It was like the switch from slow dance and jive to detached, free-form rock ’n roll. In the fifties we held our partner or our partner’s hands; we tried to learn the moves and so did they. But with sixties rock ’n roll, all conventions went out the door as we gyrated our bodies farther and farther away from our partners and from what our parents thought we should do. Hunting in my youth derived entirely from what my dad and his generation of hunters taught me. There were truths that boys and men tended to accept, especially that hunting was far and away the best thing a dad could do with his kid.

Around the time I was stalked by the cougar in Jasper Park, however, something had begun to change. Hunting had become such a suspect form of recreation that people all around me seemed to pretend it didn’t exist. Leaf through a thousand magazines of general interest (Maclean’s, Time, Life, People, the Atlantic Monthly, etc.) during the mid-sixties to the early seventies, the chronicles of urban and rural life, you might look in vain for a single item on hunting. Hunting, from the dawning of the age of Aquarius to the last toke of exhausted hippydom, was considered more anachronistic than girdles, hula hoops, and Guy Lombardo. Who knows? If you pursued this passion for guns and shooting, you might end up like Hemingway did.

My awareness of this cultural shift came slowly. It started when I moved to the United States to pursue a master’s degree. I went off to Eugene, Oregon, in 1965 and eventually came to live in a ramshackle house with a fellow from Belfast named Jack Foster. Our landlord and lady were Bill and Peggy Roecker, a welcoming young couple who often invited us to join them in Thanksgiving dinners or parties downstairs or outings of all kinds. Bill Roecker (pronounced “wrecker”) was a young writer who had just returned from his military service when the war in Vietnam was really heating up. He seemed very glad to be out of the army and back hitting the books. He was a promising writer and poet, a profane, burly fellow with a voice like an avalanche. “Carpenter, ya gotta see this! I just shot the shit outta this duck!” If Walt Whitman hadn’t first conceived of the barbaric yawp, Roecker would have invented it. He would roar these words as a goad to my restrained Canadian ways. He took Jack and me hunting and fishing a number of times along the creeks and ridges of the Willamette Valley.

Bill had an ex-army buddy named Johnny Merwin who never seemed at home in the postmilitary world, except when he was hunting or fishing somewhere back in the hills. He was a wild man in every possible way. Wild when drunk, wild on the hunt, wild in courtship, wild as the animals. He could mimic the calls of geese, crows, herons, and songbirds or the snarls of cougars and bears. With his gangly body he could even mimic the movements of these critters. As we bounced along the trails in Roecker’s camper, without warning, Johnny would start braying or squawking to a chorus of belly laughs. He seemed to prefer this exotic version of hee-haw to talking with us.

Roecker and Merwin. These were our hunting buddies, circa 1966, when that good old time became something else entirely. They were mighty and mad like Nimrod.

On campus, Hemingway’s stock was falling. Our professor seemed compelled to defend his life and his work and his suicide to classrooms of skeptical readers. The bombing escalations in Vietnam had become increasingly unpopular. Anything to do with guns, in this nation stacked high with guns, became suspect. Guns were what the National Guard and the police carried in their attempts to restrain protesters, evil phallic emblems of oppression, their barrels fit for the insertion of flowers during times of protest.

I continued to venture outdoors with Roecker and Johnny Merwin and Jack Foster, but I learned quickly not to talk to others about it. The good old party was over. Not in rural America, not in the Texas of President Lyndon Johnson, the Wyoming of Dick Cheney, the Arkansas of future Governor Huckabee or the Alaska of Sarah Palin. But in the cities and college towns all over America, the common assumption of the essential goodness of boys and men hunting together came under serious revision.

Ah, well, I used to think. Where I come from, hunting is eternally normal. And so I returned to Alberta expecting to revert to my old ways and escape the moral strictures of this strange new age. I also expected to return to hunting as soon as October arrived. But by this time, all of my regular nimrod buddies were either married and less available or off to live in other cities or both.

I got a job as a schoolteacher to pay off my student debts but foundered in the turbulent seas of hippydom, a stranger to his own world, with one foot in that good old time, when guys hunted with their buddies, and one foot in the bewilderingly hip present, where the remnants of my old friends were sharing joints at parties as though nothing new had happened in my absence.

In the fall of 1969, I fell into an extended funk that lasted seven months. These bouts with melancholia are the writer’s equivalent of an undergraduate degree. If nothing else, a good long depression serves to excise the perkiness from a young writer’s prose. I’m not entirely comfortable with happiness, the emotion most frequently dramatized on television ads, but melancholia is okay with me, perhaps merely the downside of joy.

But in the fall of 1969, when I began my PhD, melancholia wasn’t quite so innocuous. I would be struck dumb at gatherings and sleepwalk into the corners of rooms, and friends had to call me back from a long way off just to get a few words out of me. Every day at noon, I would wander into the student cafeteria and drink down a strawberry milkshake, and that was pretty much my sustenance for the day. I lost a lot of weight that year. Every once in a while, I managed to pull myself out of it and get a glimpse of what life could be like on the other side of the river.

Stoicism, like stubbornness, runs deep in the Carpenters. I should have been on Valium or something. I should have been seeing a counselor. I should have had the courage and good sense to know that when I was this bummed out, I needed to ask for help. But it fell on a handful of friends to keep me plugging along, and Al Purkess was among the best of these. Honest Al, we called him. He might have wondered if I was certifiable, but he never said so. I had met Honest Al in grade three, and there was scarcely ever a time that we weren’t friends.

We both hated graduate school and liked the out-of-doors, so during that dismal time, Al managed to convince me to come out now and then and do a little weekend hunting. That year we had some early snow in October, and the ruffed grouse were at the peak of their cycle. After every snowfall there would be a melt, and the grouse would venture out of the bush to peck at the gravel and what was left of the clover that grew, still green, at the side of the trails and side roads. In those days I drove a beige Volkswagen Beetle, and it took a lot of abuse in the cause of hunting for sanity.

“Carp, see those trees on the left? Why don’t you drop me off up there and drive back here, and I’ll walk back toward you. Probably meet you at that old barn, eh?”

“Huh?”

“The barn. That old thing up there.”

“Oh, right, the barn.”

“Drive me up there, see? We can walk toward each other.”

“Oh. Right.”

In your urban existence you might well be a disenchanted grad student clad in regulation U.S. Army parka and sporting a scruffy beard. You might be overwhelmed by your own insignificance and harboring a mighty despair over the war in Vietnam, the state of your love life, the loss of some of your buddies to marriage, or the fallen world in general. You might have lost any reason whatsoever for getting out of bed in the morning, and you feel utterly alone in a world that feels less real with every day. You project this despair upon the entire world. But when you’re carrying a loaded shotgun, there are many reasons for this gun not to go off and only one reason to fire it. For these few hours, you cannot afford the luxury of solipsism.

Al would be up there crashing through that grove of willows. He needs you to head upwind and stay alert for that first bird to flush. You have to know where he is. You have to stop and listen for the sound of large birds pattering through the leaves. You have to scan the tracks ahead of you in the melting snow. A magpie’s tracks are long and thin, but a grouse’s tracks are shaped like stars. You have to peer into the underbrush for anything that looks out of place, any movement, the smallest anomaly. You have to watch where you step and keep your index finger on the safety. As you get caught up in these hunters’ imperatives, graduate student Weltschmerz drifts away like the smoke from your last joint. Somehow, for a few hours, life can be a simple proposition. Hunting with Al did not feel like therapy, but it was strangely therapeutic every time out.

With the help of a few friends like Honest Al, I stumbled out of the Stupid Zone and back into the grind. A few months later I was still a graduate student, still studying for my comprehensive exams, still hitting the books for my French qualifying exam, my German exam, still writing term papers that only a few people would ever read, still searching for a dissertation topic. But I was no longer quite certifiable.

I began looking around at other graduate students to detect signs of the same malaise from which I was just recovering. One fellow sufferer was Lennie Hollander, a dyed-in-the-wool bohemian from southern California. Since his arrival in Canada and his escape from the draft, Lennie had been a free spirit, a guitar picker, poet, and potter. But as the grind of grad school began to wear him down, he seemed to morph into an angry revolutionary. He saw conspiracies all over the place. His draft board in California was out to get him, the cia was out to get him, his PhD advisory committee was out to get him, the campus cops, his landlord.

For many bright and bookish students back in the late sixties, graduate school was a kind of limbo. You didn’t have a real job. If you were lucky, you could teach a first-year class for a pittance. You read stacks of books and enough interpretations of these books to fill a compost bin, and then you wrote papers and exams that testified to your growing erudition. Many of us came to graduate school at this time seeking a community of scholars, perhaps a literary salon where we could debate the virtues of Proust until the bars closed.

Hunting?

Who among us would even admit that he had ever held a gun or shot at a deer? One gloomy night at the bar, under the influence of some weed Lennie had acquired, I admitted to him that I was a hunter. I tried to cast this confession in terms that Lennie might appreciate. I told him that up here, in the bush, you needed a gun for your own safety. A gross exaggeration, but in Lennie’s presence I felt a need to justify my hunting habit. I told him about my encounter with the cougar in Jasper and threw in a few bear stories for good measure.

“I could get into that,” said Lennie.

He was an admirer of Sam Shephard, the American playwright and actor who was living in Eastern Canada at the time and who had publicly extolled the virtues of hunting in the Maritimes. Our admiration for Sam Shephard was almost the only thing we had in common, except for our loathing of graduate school.

I had a hunch that a bit of hunting would be what the doctor ordered for my paranoid friend.

“Could you get me a gat?” he said.

A gat. Yes, I said, I could get him a gat. I managed to borrow an old twelve-gauge pump, and by Saturday morning we were headed north to find some ducks. I wore my brown canvas pants, matching hat, and canvas jacket with the red lining, the one that always seemed to have wheat chaff in the pockets. Lennie wore an army greatcoat that came down to his ankles and a Nazi helmet. He looked pretty bizarre for a guy on a hunting trip, especially a Jewish guy. But according to his wife, Martie, this coat was Lennie’s only warm outerwear. And the helmet, Lennie claimed, would be good camouflage. But he was eager to cast his (clearly aberrant) decision to go hunting in some kind of acceptable political context. A campy parody of suburban manhood? A parody of militarism? A way of connecting him to the long-coated and misunderstood outlaws of the old west?

Lennie had his doubts. When we drove into a grove of trees, brought out the binocs and glassed our first slough, he must have realized that he was a long way from Los Angeles. When we clambered out of my Beetle and loaded our guns, he must have wondered if he was just having a bad dream or perhaps an acid flash. When a pair of mallards swung past us, however, he raised his gun well before I could get mine to my shoulder and fired, and down came his very first duck.

Lennie began to roar with laughter. I had heard him laugh sardonically before. I had heard him laugh in what seemed to me an imitation of a movie villain’s cackle. I had heard Lennie laugh ironically, derisively, maniacally, and joylessly. But until the duck fell at our feet, I don’t think that I had ever heard Lennie laugh joyfully. It was the laugh of a kid running through a sprinkler on a hot afternoon.

Lennie Hollander, my friend the fierce revolutionary, had become hooked on hunting. He was never entirely reconciled to it, never entirely comfortable with his role as slayer of ducks and pheasants. Still, when the grad student blues brought out Lennie’s demons each autumn, he and I would head for the countryside with our guns and vent our despair, side by side, two neurotics on a country stroll. He never managed to bring capitalism to its knees, but he did keep a few demons at bay.

Lennie was not always available for hunting trips, and Honest Al had gone back into the world to become a teacher. So on the day I delivered my oral defense of my thesis topic, I was without a hunting buddy. Mort Ross, my thesis supervisor, urged me to take a few days off from grad studies and have some fun. I received this kindly advice in an old building known as Assiniboia Hall, just outside the main office of the English department. I’d had a haircut, I was clean shaven, and I was wearing a tie and tweed jacket and polished shoes with leather soles. That’s what we looked like in those days when facing a roomful of scholars we needed to impress.

Take off for a few days and have some fun.

It was early November, pheasant season. There is an old hotel near the Badlands in Patricia, Alberta. It has a bar and a nice little restaurant. The proprietor in those days was Frenchie LaRue, a fine host and raconteur, and he barbecued the best steaks in the valley. His bar had a rancher motif, and all the ranchers in the area had burnt their brand into Frenchie’s walls and tables. This cozy little hotel is just a short drive from the Red Deer River valley and Dinosaur Park, and it was home to some of the best pheasant hunting in Canada.

All I had time for was to throw my hunting equipment into my Beetle. If I hurried down there, I could arrive before dark. So I drove all the way to Patricia dressed in my academic finery. What would I look like to the men in Frenchie’s bar? A member of the English gentry? A Bible salesman? I drove as fast as I could, and by the time I had driven all the way down to Highway 36 and hit the gravel road to Patricia, the sun was still hovering over the southwest horizon, giving the leafless hawthorn bushes a tangerine glow. I slowed down and began to enjoy the scenery, the sagebrush, cottonwoods, and cactus in the coulees. My frenzy of unpreparedness had dissipated, and I knew that I would be sipping a beer in Frenchie’s hotel within the hour. I was at last relaxed.

And then a cock pheasant trotted across the gravel road in front of me.

When you load up a shotgun and you’re wearing a shirt, tie, and jacket, you can’t avoid looking like a cop, and perhaps also a real crazy. I walked over to the ditch at the side of the road. There was a nice accommodating skim of snow on the ground. I spotted the big three-pronged tracks of my rooster. He was heading for some cattails up the road. If I could head him off before he reached the heavy cover of the cattails, I had a chance of putting him up. I began to hoof it. Just before I arrived at the cattails, he flew up in front of me. I slid to a stop, clicked off the safety, aimed, and fired. My pheasant hit the ground, winged and running. Damn.

Scrambling and sliding in my polished shoes, I gave chase along the road. The rooster disappeared into the cattails, but his blood trail came out the other side and continued as far as a culvert. Instead of running down the culvert under the road, however, my wounded pheasant tried to hide under a brush pile. Some flecks of blood in the snow betrayed this last turn he had taken. Spotting the last few inches of his long tail, I leapt into the pile of brush, grabbed him by the legs, and hauled him out. I wrung his neck and bagged him, my first pheasant of the year.

Just as I was placing my empty gun back into the car, I caught a glimpse of myself in the side mirror. My shirt and tie were flecked with blood, and my slacks were newly studded with brambles and seeds and God only knows what kind of fluff. Pheasant hackles were clinging to my nice tweed jacket. Lennie Hollander would have been amused. Bill Roecker and Johnny Merwin would have laughed themselves into exhaustion. And my dad would surely have wondered where he and Mum had gone wrong.

What sort of a grotesque had I become? As the days passed down in Patricia, I hunted alone and supped with other hunters who had come down there with their buddies. I envied them their camaraderie. I realized that I needed a new hunting buddy.

If the term extreme hunting had been current in the late sixties and early seventies, its greatest practitioner would have been Mosey Walcott from somewhere up in northern Michigan. Like Lennie Hollander and me, he was a real malcontent as a graduate student. Perhaps the burden of so many exams in so many languages, with such a wide array of literature to master, was beginning to try him. I know it got to me, and if the burden of graduate studies brought out the neurotic in me, it brought out a persona in Mo that was half bear and half Boon Hogganbeck. He was crazy for hunting and fishing and a real jock to boot, a competitive swimmer, built like a wrestler. And oddly enough, a literary scholar. But it was his ursine ways that I found most fascinating.

During a prolonged stretch of grad student malaise and domestic unease, Mo accompanied his wife to a company picnic in the country. It took place at a campground surrounded by spruce trees near the North Saskatchewan River somewhere southwest of Edmonton. Dozens of Mo’s wife’s colleagues and their families had descended upon this lovely spot, and they were all roasting wieners and having a merry time.

In his depressed state, Mo should never have come. His wife should have left him at home with the kids. But he came, and they all roasted wieners and marshmallows and drank beer, and at a certain moment in the evening as the darkness descended on the happy campers, Mo rose up, grabbed a very large jug of wine, and lumbered into the woods to drink and ponder.

I like to imagine this scene happening beneath a full and raging moon. Mo was lurching through the trees, stopping to gulp his wine, and reflecting upon life, when he became possessed by a new identity. Perhaps a frontier version of Mr. Hyde. He heard some grunting in the bush and a prolonged, high-pitched growl, so he crawled into a thicket and drank and listened some more. At last he realized that the grunting and growling were coming from his own throat.

Indeed, he had become a bear. And not just any bear but the very essence and spirit of bear, universally known and feared throughout the world. Armed with this knowledge—I am Bear—he arose from the thicket, hurled his empty jug into the moonlight, and lumbered back toward the campground, where, from the top of someone’s station wagon, he beheld the great tribe of hairless ones with whom he had so recently been picnicking.

He needed to proclaim himself to this tribe as a newly born bear. He needed them to know that he was no longer of their blood and their ways. I like to imagine him as divesting himself of all but his running shoes, a youthful Lear on the heath, filled with mischief and confusion and predatory power. Well, anyway, filled with an awful lot of cheap wine.

He noticed that some women were giggling at him. “Oh, he’s just a teddy bear!” one of them tittered. He rushed them on all fours and they fled, screaming, back to the party. Galloping behind them among the parked cars, still on all fours, Mo emerged into the light of the campfire. He leapt onto a picnic table surrounded by joyous members of his former species and roared at the top of his lungs.

His memory of this scene is not sharp. But one detail of his oft-repeated account always caught my attention. The people gathered around the picnic table were so unnerved by his presence that they kept on talking, pretending that what they saw was not really there. Or if there, it was just this big man’s little joke. Ha ha ha. But the nervous laughter died down, and they backed away from the table, and that was the end of the evening for all of them.

After this episode, Mo’s wife suggested he find a hobby. So Mo bought a shotgun.

In the fall of 1971, he too needed a hunting buddy, and as a fellow malcontent in the same department and with an office near his, I was the natural choice. We had been working out a bit together, so we were beginning to get to know each other. Working out with weights and running was all new to me, but Mo seemed to know everything there was to know about fitness.

I never hunted with Mo Walcott, Lennie Hollander, and Honest Al all together—never even introduced them to one another. My friendships with all three were kept discrete and compartmentalized. There’s nothing much wrong with potassium nitrate or sulfur or charcoal, but I wouldn’t mix them together unless I wanted a big blowup. I guess what I’m talking about here is political dissonance.

Anyway, Mo Walcott was my last sporting life buddy before I left Alberta in 1973. He and I hunted and fished many times together before the fates took us in opposite directions, and I lost track of him. We had great success on these trips, and our last hunt was almost the only one in which the quarry eluded us.

We had thrown up a tent in the ranching country west of Rocky Mountain House and east of the Rockies, good terrain back then for ambushing mallards and putting up ruffed grouse. But during our first night in the tent, a weather system moved in and we woke up on the day of our hunt to below-zero temperatures and a skim of new snow. This weather system had sent all the mallards south for the winter.

Our only option was to drive to the Upper Stoney Creek valley and walk the cut lines. Back then this area was good moose-hunting territory. If one looked hard enough, a fair number of black bears and even the occasional grizzly could be found ambling through these woods. If I remember correctly, several hours of walking produced only one grouse, which for Mo and me was unusual. We had lunch in the bush and continued to walk the cut lines, but by about four thirty the sun was sinking, and so were our prospects. I was aching to get back to the car, and I told this to Mo.

“C’mon, Carp,” he said, “don’t jam out on me.”

There is an impulse among the keenest of hunters when they are young—an impulse that Roderick Haig-Brown came to deplore. It is the urge simply to kill something and to do it even if they have to hunt from dusk on to midnight. I knew that urge, and perhaps I was trying to leave it behind. But the urge was upon my buddy Mo. He ambled farther into the bush, and so, reluctantly, I followed. There was not enough snow among the trees to spot the silhouettes of grouse, and as the light faded into a gray dusk that matched the heavy clouds above us and the heavy shadows in the woods and the mist rising from the nearby creek, Mo became more and more determined.

“Carp,” he said to me, “you go that way and turn left up by that marshy shit and then walk back toward me. Okay?”

I was bone weary and still aching for the warmth of the car, but arguing with Mo was futile. How do you stop a force of nature from doing what comes naturally?

I didn’t grasp the answer to this question until I reached the marsh and spotted some animal tracks in the snow. The tracks got me thinking. They were everywhere, and they were surprisingly visible in the faded light. Deer tracks, moose tracks, rabbit tracks, and some small delicate pawprints that might have been made by a fox. Thank God there were no bear tracks.

Bear tracks. Hmm.

Maybe I had something there. I got down on my knees, pulled out my jackknife, tore off my gloves, and began to muck around with the heels of my hands until I had my creation pretty much on the money: a set of fake grizzly tracks that seemed to dissolve at the edge of the marsh. Front paws abbreviated like the feet of a giant walking on tiptoes, back paws massive rounded triangles with five toes. My knife was just the right tool to create the clawmarks. They were quite inspired, if I do say so myself. To get a bear to back down, you see, you need an even bigger bear.

“Mo!” I hollered. “You better see this!”

He came tromping through the bush, his gun at the ready.

“Whatcha got there, Carp?”

I pointed to the tracks.

Mo released a long string of words so profane they were almost lyrical.

Warily, I looked his way, because I thought he was onto my con and swearing at me. But instead of anger and suspicion on his face, there was fascination, there was awe—as though he had seen the lair of the dark gods. He got down on his knees and stared.

Then he got up.

“Carp, this bastard must weigh a friggin ton!”

He said that more than once.

“Carp, I think we had better get the hell outta here.”

I bowed to his wisdom, and we retraced our footsteps all the way back to the car.

And that was that. My last act as a hunter before I left Alberta forever was to counterfeit the tracks of a grizzly. Johnny Merwin would have enjoyed the joke. He would have been proud of me.

I don’t miss the sixties: the graduate student melancholia, the futility, the politics, the craziness of that time. But I do miss the way I coped with that time, which amounted to tromping through the fields and woods with a gun and a buddy. Honest Al and I live in different cities. We stay in touch, but we don’t hunt together anymore. I don’t know where Mo and Lennie have gone. After I left Oregon and returned to Canada, I learned that Johnny Merwin’s wife had shot and killed him in a domestic dispute. He’s been dead for almost forty years. I heard a rumor in the 1980s that Bill Roecker had moved to California. Once, at a fishing resort, I saw his name on the register and the following notation: Had a great time. I lost Larry Lunker just north of the beaver house. See you again.

I am talking about hunting during a specific time in North America when assumptions about life were changing irrevocably. And since the late 1960s these changes have solidified into something like an orthodoxy. As the American writer Matthew Teague says in his essay “A More Dangerous Game,” attitudes “have shifted and hardened, and the very idea of hunting as ‘sport’ has come to imply something cavalier. Among animal rights advocates it indicated indifference to wildlife. In two generations the lone hunter—once exemplified by Teddy Roosevelt—found himself accused of enmity toward nature. Hunting [has] become a question of morality.”

These American friends of mine in the late 1960s and early 1970s have lumbered off into the mists. But for a brief and difficult time in our lives, we were throwbacks together, and for the sanity that craziness brought me I will always be grateful. We all thought that hunting was strictly a guy thing, and in this belief we were (I blush to admit) singleminded. But our little orthodoxy was about to be reformed.