Things Worth Burying by Matt Mayr

Author:Matt Mayr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Baraka Books

20

In the dead of winter, the bush slows to a standstill. Black trees and white snow and a deathly quiet except the howl of the wind, the grains of snow blowing across the hardened snowpack. In places it was a metre deep with a four-inch crust, and with a pair of snowshoes I could fly across the top like a rabbit. When I was a kid, I’d hunt them with a twenty-two. I’d head out on a cold Saturday and follow their tracks through the black spruce and leafless alder, watching for their outline, the white on white. There’s something about the winter hunt. Maybe it’s the stillness, the quiet. In the winter bush you can feel like the only living thing, and to come across another living thing is invigorating. But I never really liked the taste of rabbit, so I gave up hunting them. Because, if you don’t respect the land, it will eventually turn on you.

The Laurie Lake cut was rolling. Haul trucks were pushing deep on a winter road that would be impossible to cross once the spring melt began. It was a race against the changing of the seasons. Paul had trucks coming in from Marathon and Dubreuilville and another skidder and feller-buncher. We were operating two shifts, and I needed to be in the field for part of both to make sure the boys were keeping pace. We had contracts to fill and Paul was on the road again, selling. The shop was mine to run and the men looked to me for direction. I didn’t want to let them down.

I drove to the end of the winter road to scout the remaining trees. The forest of black spruce gave way to a stand of huge poplar, and on the far side was a sheer rock face that the machines couldn’t negotiate. A natural boundary, like everything in the north.

In the fall those poplar, ripe with leaves, would sway like blades of tall grass on a windy day. It would be a great spot for a tree stand—where two stands of forest and a cliff came together. This was the way my grandfather taught my father to hunt, the way my father taught me. You look for places of intersection: where a creek meets a lake, where a stand of trees opens into a bowl, where a road ends. Places of transition, because you will catch them in transit. A smart moose won’t show itself unless it has to. It will walk along the periphery, dart across an opening, make itself scarce.

My grandfather, Lucas Adler only hunted in places that other people couldn’t find, or didn’t know existed. He would sit for hours in a spot, emerging after dark with his faded orange hunting hat cocked to the side and his rifle cradled in his arms. He knew the bush better than anyone. He said that Northern Ontario was built for solitary animals. The true hunter, he said, isn’t afraid either. He pushed himself

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