Curly is unlucky. He just happens to be the closest to you. Your Bushnell Broadhead range finder says 30 feet, give or take. No problem, the Vector can take down a moose at 60 yards. Curly is a heavyset male – maybe 300 pounds – with an antler set that consists off two large multi-pointed antlers on either side and and two smaller frontal 6-8 point antlers. Your TenPoint Vector© crossbow gets its brand name from them.
The more the number of branches (points) that an antler has the more alpha the male is.
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Your bow string, made of a composite fibre, is taut and quivering, held back by the latch, the butt of the Carbon Express bolt nestled in the front of it. Drawing the string and cocking it is difficult in the cold, but your TenPoint comes with an AcuDraw cocking device that works somewhat like a fisherman’s reel. A concept in physics called “moment” makes it easier to reel the string back until the latch catches it.
Curly is sniffing a doe’s butt, relaxed, ambling along. “How about it, Tina? Huh? It’s mating season for C’s sakes,” he seems to be mumbling to her. Remember Tina from Part-2 and how Curly was looking for her to give?
Well, tonight, Tina won’t have to give – Curly won’t be living that long. You look through the scope at a point slightly above Curly’s shoulders and hold your breath as your index finger feels for the SafeGrip trigger guard and snakes its way in and around the trigger. Never tarry at that point – take in a deep breath, two seconds and then, let go.
‘Thungggg!’ – the arrow shoots out in a blur. You strain to hear the sound of the hit and sure enough, you hear the ‘thokk!’ as the titanium of the broad head meets tissue.
The first reaction of a caribou, hit by an arrow or a bullet, is a startled leap into the air, followed by a crazed scramble as it tries to figure out just what the hell happened. That’s exactly what Curly does and in the twilight as he leaps up, you can clearly discern the broad head sticking out from slightly above his shoulder blades, buried right up to the fletch (the fins).
You must have hit a vein – blood is spurting out in gushing pulses, no doubt keeping pace with his dying heart. As his hooves hit the ground, Curly breaks away from the herd and takes off into the wilderness, in the general direction of a small snowbound copse of pines on a knoll around a mile from where you are.
Funny how quickly life returns back to normal in the animal world. Animals are nature’s ultimate fatalists. They know their time on earth is fleeting. They don’t hurry, plan, hoard, trick, deceive, conspire, nope, they don’t. Perhaps they are way above us, spiritually, more ‘with it’, more accepting and more virtuous than us. They are God’s so-called chosen ones maybe? Yes, perhaps they are the ones who eventually have the last laugh.
Not a tear is shed for a downed compatriot, there is not even a pause. The herd is already moving away, unaware of the sudden intrusion and consequent assassination.
It usually takes a while to find the stricken caribou – sometimes maybe even a couple of hours. You pray it will collapse somewhere you can access with your ski-doo or ATV, so you can rig it and tow it back to the shack. You can’t sling a 250lb caribou over your shoulder and walk back with it, no.
If Curly tripped over the edge of a ravine, you just lost your kill. You will have to grit your teeth and go back to the shack and maybe try again tomorrow, though it might be difficult if the herd has moved on by then. There was a guy, over at the inn at Whapmagoostui, who had offered his drone at a hundred bucks an hour, but caribou had seemed so plenty, you had declined. You might need him, in case Curly can’t be traced.
Meanwhile Curly just keeps on going, disappearing in the snow weighted pines, the grey-white of his pelt the perfect camouflage in the mud and snow. Fortunately, the crimson of his blood stands out on the snow and you go after him. You track him for an hour and you finally find him lying on his side, still alive, chest heaving, his eyes wide open, as plumes of mist escape his flared nostrils.
There is no indignation, no reprehension, no accusation, in those beautiful, guileless eyes. His eyes don’t say, ‘Hey what the f–k did I do to you?’ There is just acceptance – a simple innocent understanding, something that strikes you that only Hindu sages are known to have. The SlickTrick Magnum broad head is sticking out between his shoulder blades, its gleam dulled by blood and tissue, but otherwise undamaged. Broad heads are expensive but unless they have hit rock, they can be used multiple times.
As you sit on your haunches and watch the life ebb out of Curly, you note that the spurts of blood have waned to just a trickle now – he does not have much time left, maybe seconds. You will be able to extricate the arrow only after you have cut Curly open later on. You are filled with a strange melancholy as you regard Curly silently. You don’t enjoy the sight of a living being dying right in front of your eyes, especially when you are the one that despatched that being.
“I’m sorry it had to end this way, Curly,” your voice is a muted whisper as you reach out to touch the fine silky down on his heaving chest,” I hunt for food. In my place, you would too. “ You immediately start feeling better.
That’s of course a lie. You hunt for pleasure, for the thrill. But you are you, corrupted by the world you live in.
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Suddenly you sense that you are not alone and you stiffen. Your time at the SOAS has given you, not just a sixth, but a seventh, eighth and a ninth sense. There is a shuffle in the snow behind you and at the same instant, your SOAS training kicks in, suppressing the impulse to immediately turn and look. In the world of carnivores, sudden turns can be fatal.
You gradually swivel your eyes and now you can see them clearly. Coyotes – you let out a sigh of relief, in the form of a blast of steam from your nostrils. Coyotes are cowardly, not known to kill unless they are certain the prey is incapacitated.
A pack of arctic coyotes have formed a U-shaped half ring behind you, low growls and snivels coming out of their bared teeth, along with clouds of steam from flared nostrils. Arctic coyotes are like their cousins, the wolves – cute, but cold and emotion-free. You could literally die trying to cuddle one, trust me.
Remember the road runner cartoon that has a scrawny, dumb coyote called Wile-e-Coyote who gets outwitted by the road runner every time? Well, coyotes aren’t dumb at all. They are just dirty sons of bitches. They kill caribou but they don’t like the taste of venison. They find some sort of macabre pleasure in transforming the poor deer into chunks of flesh and leaving those chunks there. Coyotes are crazy about fowl, like partridge, grouse and wild turkey, not deer.
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The coyotes had been there first actually and they were on the verge of tearing Curly apart, when they sensed your approach. Oh yeah, that is another lesson you have learned early in your life – always remain downwind.
But this time, Curly had been downwind and you had no choice. The coyotes caught your scent and retreated behind some shrubs at the periphery of your vision. You know they are still there somewhere, just not exactly where.
You remove the outer glove from your right hand and ease the Glock out of your jacket pocket. In slow motion, you swing it up in the air and fire a round. Startled by the shot and dazzled by the gaudy orange and yellow hunting vest that you have on, the coyotes quickly melt into the snow.
The vest is important. You don’t want a Dick Cheney clone mistaking you for a caribou and drawing a bead on you inadvertently. There are assholes like Dick Cheney everywhere. In Quebec, fatal hunting gun accidents aren’t prosecuted. They figure that if you believe that the caribou had it coming, then your accidental victim had it coming too.
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I’ll switch to first person now. I can do dat. It’s my fookin blog, remember? It’s about me anyway.
My encounter with the coyotes was the last day of the season. It’s over now. Hunting season has shut down for the year.
Of course, I can still go out and get some coyotes or rabbits. For coyotes, there are no stipulated bag limits in the Montérégie where I live and so, a couple of years back when I came up empty handed at the end of the season with no kills, I went on a rampage.
I offed at least 20 coyotes that December. I didn’t eat ‘em of course. Interestingly, we kill coyotes but never think of eating ‘em. Sure, coyote meat is kinda rubbery, like horse meat or bear meat, but we eat bears and horses. Then how come we wrinkle our noses when it comes to the coyotes?
Simon, next door, tells me this is one of those conundrums, but I think it’s the stigma attached to coyotes – bullies in a pack but wimpy cowards when alone, streaked with dirt, fur always messed up with flecks of blood from the numerous daily skirmishes over scraps of kill left over by hunters – that scavenging, sniveling persona that has grown round them.
The last coyote I killed was a female, a magnificent specimen the size of a full grown German Shepherd, encased in long, thick, fluffy, dirty grey fur. She was barely breathing when I came upon her, the round having passed right through her chest. Startling blue eyes stared up at me, unwavering and cold, the acceptance of the suddenness of life’s twists and turns writ large in them.
At some other time and setting, I might have hugged her, but after you are out hunting a while, you learn not to get carried away with wild animals if you want ta stay alive. Coyotes are dogs without the love gene.
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In Canada, all farm-owners are hunters and trappers too, since their farms invariably teem with wildlife of all sorts, throughout the year. If you own a medium sized farm in Canada of say twennie acres, you’ll never have to buy even a single pound of meat at the grocery store as long as you live. You’ll be dining on fresh venison, turkey, partridge, duck, rabbit – all year long.
I hunt at Cedric’s 100-acre spread that abuts a massive wild life reserve known as Parc Omega, in Montebello, just over an hour from where I live. Cedric and I have known each ever since, one stormy February night in 2010, I had stopped on the 20-East and pulled out his unconscious wife from a Jeep Cherokee that had skidded into a ditch and was about to be completely swallowed up by snow. I had dragged Gina’s limp body across 100 feet of asphalt and laid her across the back seat and covered her with my jacket and driven her to the Valleyfield Emergency, calling 911 ahead so they’d be ready for her.
They are very different – the Provenchers. Barely literate deep rust belt, 200% Trump constituency, living practically cut off from the outside world. Historically these folks are virulently bigoted and if you stop at a village for a coffee and gas, they’ll be nice if you don’t stay too long.
But me – I am family now. Nothing happens at the Provencher household that they don’t make sure I am a part of. When he found out I was an avid hunter, he took me out and swept his arms over the dense forest land that I could make out over the horizon and said, ‘From now, this is your land to hunt, come and go as you like.’
As word of Gina’s miraculous escape spread through neighboring farms, a little old brown Bengali from a hick town named Durgapur in Eastern India became one of the most beloved human beings in the region.
Christmas now is at the Provencher spread every year. Gina’s twin, Sophia, a spinster who has a kind of ethereal beauty, has learned how ta make tandoori chicken and its funny how Gina finds ways for Sophia and me to end up sitting side by side at the dinner table every time.
Of course, the secret of a friendship is give and take. I never fail to share my kills with Cedric. This time too, I let him have the coyotes. He in turn would probably sell the fur to Canada Goose, Kanuk or other high end parka places at around eighty quid a piece. You buy that same parka for upwards of $1000 a piece.
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But killing coyotes is not my style. Large game hunting (bear, deer, moose) is and that’s off limits by the end of November.
Funny, but the large game (especially the whitetail) somehow sense that the hunting season has ended and that it is okay now to be swaggering around, with not a care in the world, with no need to wait until dark. Post-season, if the whitetail could use their hooves to thumb their nostrils at you, they would.
There is a small town of four hundred souls on the Quebec-Ontario border named Duhamel, a stone’s throw from the Provencher spread – as pretty a town as you can ever find anywhere on God’s earth. Local farmers like Cedric ride into town on their pick-up trucks once a month and stock up on non-perishables like toilet paper and shampoo – anything that they are unable ta grow.
When the hunting season draws to a close, Duhamel begins ta look like Times Square for whitetail. There are more deer than humans in that town then. The town folk are okay with it. You keep your kitchen door ajar in Duhamel and go take a shower and when you come back down, there might be a whitetail taking a peek inside your fridge for yummy stuff.
Post-season, everybody in Duhamel makes nice. Almost every home in Duhamel acquires a pet whitetail and every home has mountain-sized sacks of carrots and apples to feed them. Off season, like Robert DeNiro’s Don Lino in ‘Shark Tale’ every Duhamel citizen says ‘deer are our friends, we shouldn’t eat deer’.
Until the next hunting season – when those very same Don Linos turn blood thirsty just like in the movie and all those pet whitetails that had been prancing around town disappear from view. They are now looked at as juicy venison cuts and steaks.
Cool.
I am not finished yet. Watch out for Part-4.
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