Primer on hunting

by Murray Lackie
For those of you new to this area you will likely have seasonally seen men and women with firearms traipsing across an open field or off into a bush. They are not robbing a bank or storming a meth lab. They are hunters. I am a hunter. Many of you who don’t know me well find this hard to believe and this has always been an advantage to me in the wild. Deer look at me and think: ‘He’s not a hunter.’ They are dead wrong. 
Very few people enjoy sitting quietly all day in the forest. Hunters do this. In fact, hunting is an activity which demands this. It also demands knowing the biology of your prey, planning, tracking, patience, vigilance and stealth. Developing these traits is key to success in the wild. The experience also channels some prehistoric instinct that urges me seasonally to go on my own, or with a like-minded group, to procure food for myself, my family and my friends. Shopping the meat department at Costco does not satisfy this urge. The end result is the same, but that journey is freeze-dried and disconnected from living.
Vegans in synthetic clothing and with cloth seats in their car may judge me harshly, and I agree that hunting seems barbaric. It is not my fault that I am not as highly evolved and cannot resist the call. Non hunters should understand that most hunters are not bloodthirsty savages. (Animal rights activists are as guilty of propaganda and rhetoric as Donald Trump.) Are there hunters who think that scrambling around the forest on ATVs with assault rifles until they almost run over their prey are hunting? Of course. What special interest group hasn’t a small percentage of their members who’ve obscured the original plot in favour of the equipment and apparel? The majority of successful hunters haven’t advanced the methodology more than chucking the spears and adopting firearms. Many still use bows, and almost all abide by the regulations, wait their turn for the elusive tags and then infrequently fill that tag and have an animal to share with the hunting party. We aren’t trophy hunting. We don’t cut off the head for a wall mount and leave the carcass to rot. We save every bit of the animal we can, and we enjoy using the lean and delicious natural meat in our favourite recipes. Most of us donate the hides to the Hats for Hides Program who will then distribute these hides to First Nations groups who use them for the handcrafted goods we can all buy at Native craft stores.
And, in the end, we have the stories and memories. I started small game hunting with my grandfather at an early age. He died when I was 16 and I never got the chance to join him and his peers for a deer hunt at his camp near Parry Sound. I did however soon get invited to join a hunt camp near Espanola where I enjoyed being included in the circle and hearing the memories of the older men while being part of the new adventures that are the memories I share now. Most of those men are gone, but I felt privileged to have shared this most ancient of human experience with them. I have my own camp now and in the past 28 years we have lost a few of our older members, but they are part of the tapestry that we have woven over many years of success and failures. Every year, whether we procure game or not, we spawn new laughs and yarns and we are paying this forward by including our sons and their friends and hoping that we too will one day be part of the camp narrative. And when we are long gone our stories will be told around the evening meal to liven the hearts of other hunters.