Above – A cool day at pigland, on Squirrel Eating Jon’s place
In the old days, people just quietly raised pigs and got on with it. The interesting stuff – feuding, bootlegging, playing the banjo, whittling a possum figurine from basswood, beating-up their cousin.
Today, people can’t just raise pigs quietly. It’s all this, “Look at MEEEEEEE raising these P-I-I-I-I-I-GS!!!!!” It becomes their entire identity.
It’s just pigs.
It’s the whole point of raising a pig. To get on with other things. Not to make one more fetish of it like you do with waxing your body hair and detailing your truck and putting on all that lycra just to ride your bicycle. Autoclaving your armpits, taking your third shower of the day, making a chair that isn’t even a rocking chair and then rocking rocking rocking rocking rocking…
Walk through old cemeteries, like this one above in the kinlands of Squirrel-Eating Jon. See whole families that died of cholera or a flu of some kind. Imagine the mothers lying under those headstones who would have loved for plumbing and vaccines and antibiotics. Be happy for these things too, and keep in mind on the other hand how we overdo and overuse it all. Think about the negative effects from the overuse of antibiotics. Children being felled by a peanut. Think about all the negative effects of today’s versions of those people not dying, as well. Utopia ever a fiction.
Who would be just as happy without plumbing? If you think going without plumbing is hard, have you ever tried it? Do you know what hard even is? Which is dirtier, an outhouse backfilled when necessary and moved over another pit or today’s sewage situation? Plumbing becoming important mostly in situations of crowding. Nomadic peoples in crowded villages dealt with the ill-effects of overcrowding by moving camp. In short order nature cleaned things up, benefitted from them having been there.
So much of our modern story we realize, going back even 400 years, is the story of overcrowding. Of moving camp. It’s what drove us to this continent. Time to move camp. And in very short order, we became overcrowded here, too. The game was all but gone before 1900. We got lucky (or so it seemed) with oil. Harnessed oil to make it all keep working, our ever-escalating numbers. The game returned, significantly, cos now we turned oil into food. We all started eating oil. Our numbers exploded like never before. Now that equation is souring too, the oil equation. We have burned through our endowment like locusts burning through an alfalfa field, and it will soon be too expensive to burn what we can still produce.
There is nowhere to move camp to now. What will make it all work next? Nothing, the math suggests. We’re finally, definitively both out of space and out of tricks. Look at covid, how it became a pandemic literally overnight. How? Overcrowding as it’s never been before. The entire world now one colossal, contiguous population.
We will live out our days as The Great Exploiters and then we will go down the drain summarized Farley Mowat.
Those few who remain will witness this planet exploding back to life. Back to normal, back to her glory. And over the centuries we will rise again, embedded-in and subject-to the closest thing to utopia we have known and ever will know. We will know it again, a fortunate few.
Above we see one of the bucks he was hoping to best this season.
Elk season opened a week before the season for whitetailed deer. Squirrel-Eating Jon (SEJ) hunted parcels of private land close to home for these big, tough deer, the New World counterpart of the Red Stag back in his ancestral lands. He was joined by a friend from back east for one of these hunts. This was on a quarter section back of Jon’s hayfield known as Little Alaska for the varied scraggly bush conditions there that host all manner of beasts, from skunk and marten to whitetail, moose, elk, black bear and plentiful grizzlies. There had been a modest fall of soft snow in fact and the number of fresh grizzly trackways boggled the mind of Squirrel’s friend and even The Squirrel-Eater himself. They packed the .375 H&H on this hunt loaded with copper rounds just in case and managed not to get et. They did not manage to kill an elk. Elk are always on the move in these parts, a chancey prospect when you don’t much focus on them and even if you do, and while they had been on this patch the night before, they had exited by daylight.
Fresh grizzly tracks on Little Alaska.
The night of the season-opener for whitetail eight-to-ten inches of snow fell. This was a mixed blessing. There is nothing a deer-tracker gets more excited about than a fresh snow, but on the other hand, given that you will in all likelihood be covering many miles in the tracks of bucks, it is difficult to say the exact increase in energy expenditure a snowfall of this extent has on the hunter, but it’s easy to say it’s multiples. Jon tried not to let this set him back too far, but the truth is he was also convalescing from the global bat-plague he’d contracted the month previous. The main event of which was over in a week or so, the aftereffects however being tenacious, mostly a baseline respiratory congestion and somewhat reduced vigor.
The snow conditions on opening day close to home. It was deeper further into the hills. This picture was taken on opening day just before Jon topped the gentle rise here and had a chance at the big-bodied young buck in the next picture. The rifle is his 1956 Remington 760 ADL in .300 Savage outfitted with a peep-sight by Skinner of Montana.
Jon hunted another bush-and-meadow quarter on the coulee abutting his and A.D.’s farm on the southwest, on the big coulee. 20 minutes into this hunt he stalked up a rise and peeking over and letting his eyes scan was rewarded with the sight of a young, big-bodied buck he recognized from trail-camera photos. It was moving through open mature aspen about sixty yards away broadside, stopping here and there to nibble some dried forage. Jon could have picked his shot and filled his buck tag right there but he was after older deer and let this fella walk. Let him enjoy some more trips around the sun. By the time SEJ deemed him shootable he’d probably be too smart to get shot by SEJ. It being axiomatic at any rate that if you want to shoot big ol’ bucks, you have to stop shooting the young ones.
The young buck Squirrel-Eating Jon could have killed twnety minutes into opening-day, this picture from the day before. He passed him up this day and on hunts later in the season as well for larger, more challenging fare. Look at the frame on this deer. This is going to be a big buck. Some them in the region dressing-out at over 300 pounds. A 200-pounder dressed is considered a real biggee in general.
Jon had several more chances at this same buck, still-hunting up to where he was bedded on a couple later occasions and calling him in once with a grunt-tube. He is still out there.
Most of the season Jon took to the big woods on the far side of town. Here you could get onto the track of a big buck and stay on him all day without having to worry about your movements being stunted by someone’s fence. You are in the meantime gratified by the presence of every creature that lived here when the whiteman first saw it save the bison. You may not see them, but they are there.
A big woods scene from SEJ’s hunting territory. A person could track a deer as far as the eye can see with nothing save thier own endurance limitng their travels.
Out in the big woods this year the going was tough on account of the snow-depth. Jon nonetheless covered many miles and was taken to many amazing hidden corners a person would not venture into without being lead into them by a wild animal. These are the areas he will focus on next season, should he have the good fortune to still be walking the earth and not turning into earth. He passed up six bucks for the bigger, older ones he knew were out there, and ended up this year never pulling the trigger. Nor did he fill his doe tags, something he sets to doing only once he’s bagged his buck. That’s the nature of the game, and it’s always an adventure hunting in this fashion. Until there isn’t, there’s always next season, and every year it seems to come around again a little sooner.
The buck stops here… This is the view from the bed of one big buck Jon was tracking for a day later in the season when the snow had melted off south slopes. This hilltop was lousy with deer-sign, and he’d never have enjoyed this scene had the buck not taken him here. Rest assured, “Stag Hill” and environs will be a go-to spot on future hunts.
Deer season 2022 is entering its fourth day this morning. Squirrel-Eating Jon – the man whom eating nothing but squirrels matured to a full-mediocrity – has been out every day. Conditions for hunting deer were superb the first two days, snowing, blowing, the thermometer dropping. He stuck closer to home cos the roads were treacherous and at least two trophy bucks and some other perfectly acceptable specimens are about. This includes the great bullbuck with the vaguely asymetrical cast to his antlers that made it through last year, pictured above. As you can see, he’s now sporting a drop-tine and his brow tines may be a little shorter than last year (see last year’s post.) Like the man tracking him, he may have entered his decline now. Nostrils recognizing the scent of the earth rising to claim him.
On Day One Eating got into some big does, and while he is carrying two doe tags, he doesn’t shoot them close to home out of some doomed sentimentality. The second day similarly he could have filled his doe tags, as well as still-hunting to within 60 yards of this big-bodied young buck pictured here less than a week previous:
Let him grow.
The young feller was mosying along through an open hardwood ridge when Jon peeked over a rise, broadside at 60 yards. Some does up ahead of him. He was let walk, soon breaking into a frolic in pursuit of the doe-group, across a meadow and out of sight.
Down in the coulee bottom were the partially-filled tracks of the season’s last active grizzly from the night before. Or at least, it is hoped it is the season’s last. Eating has swapped his big .375 for his preferred deer rifle, a light and fast 1956 vintage Remington ADL pump in .300 Savage. Not a gun to be used protecting yourself against grizzlies on the unlikely chance you might need to. For which he is still carrying his mace.
Day Three dawned frigid, -22 C/4 below zero. Ridiculous given a mere week and a half previous it was 75 F and he could feel his neck turning into bacon. How do you acclimatize? Baptism by frost is how. The Squirrel-Eater put on his layers and hit the big woods, the public lands to the west. He cruised some considerable miles parsing the plethora of lesser deer tracks before he came upon the track of The World’s Biggest Buck in a region known for dakotensis whitetails that can field dress at over 300 pounds. Look at that stride, he thought, not noting in his initial flush that the straddle did not match:
It was the track of a lone wolf. Nice to see, but nothing he ever wanted to hunt. On he went, going about another mile before coming upon the track of an actual big buck crossing the road. Not the biggest, but big enough for Day Three. He got on trail. The ol’ boy took him through some heavily regrown young cutblocks interspersed with mature blocks of lodgepole, hellacious with blowdown. By now it was 0 degrees C/32 F. He was building a film of sweat, a stupid thing to do in the winter woods, but how do you dress for such outrageous fluctuations? You strip off is how, but he had been too eager to get on it. In a bit over a half mile he came upon the deer’s first bed. It was clear now the track was not quite as fresh as it had seemed on the cold road surface and in the powder. Furthermore, he had not jumped the buck. It was in all likelihood not just up ahead, so given the late start on this one and his sweated condition, he turned back. He would check this area again at intervals. One day the circumstances might fall together just-so, and the season was still wide-open. Aside from The Bullbuck, other bucks back home were waiting, including this ten (eleven?) pointer, poised to take Bullbuck’s crown if Jon didn’t:
It’s a region known for dakotensis whitetails that can field dress at over 300 pounds.
Doing the usual rounds post early-season snow, Squirrel Eating Jon noted the local grizzlies being quite particular about where they crossed the barbed-wire fences that truss our rural world up like a holiday roast.
This fella approached the usual fence-crossing point, stopped and had a look, then turned off and followed south to a place where the gap was more spacious (the smaller tracks are coyote):
This one did the same thing this A:M. Made an approach, did an appraisal, followed the fence some and crossed here. It was still a tight squeeze, mind-you, and it lost some hair, now in Squirrel-Eating’s annual midden of hair samples to be sent for DNA testing:
Then the great beast continued east towards the river, photo below. Jon wonders, are they following our example and getting too fat for their own good? No. Quite unlike us, there is no such thing as too-fat for a bear. Not this time of year.
Take measure of the landscape in the photo meanwhile – does it look like “grizzly country” in your mind’s eye? Not in ours. Like the thriving of the Amish a century and more into the catastrophe that the techno-industrial era has proven to be by the metrics that matter most to us longer-term, it is nothing short of a miracle that we still have grizzly bears walking the earth at all. Let alone in landscapes like this one. Make no mistake, they are only here because we allow it. Given that the goal in the county where this scene was to be observed this A:M, in keeping with the goal of humanity the world-over, is to keep on with the Growth TM fetish at all and any cost, keep cramming-in the human numbers, keep inflating the taxbase by piling-on evermore of our busy little money-beaver bodies, given this and nevermind our capricious consumer natures, we better enjoy the situation whilst it lasts. The conflict of interests between those who think they want bears and those who want the status-quo to an ever increasing exponent (not infrequently the same people) is immense. Only a fatally infantilized culture could believe this set of values can be made compatible for any real duration. Either we collapse first, all growth halting, reversing – and that process is well underway for us now – or the bears will. Any progress they’ve made recovering lost ground will be erased.
These cubs (or is that Mom at bottom-right?) are of the set of three belonging to a gorgeous coffee-dark sow Squirrel-Eating Jon encountered one fairly recent morning (Mom made a brief feint in his direction upon spotting him, before moving on) that were trapped shortly thereafter and packed-off to points unknown for the crime of killing a single steer at a local feedlot that serves-up a 24/7, 365 day-a-year open-air bear smorgasbord with legal impunity in a zone that purports to be bear-friendly. Nonetheless, it’s one strike and you are out for these bears. Such relocations rarely work out for them. At least we have learned that a single steer is worth not one, but FOUR grizzly bears to our culture. What with we human beings and our livestock now accounting for an estimated 96% of global mammalian biomass.
With elk season just a week away and whitetail season following a week after that and black bear season already well underway, Squirrel-Eating Jon has been roving the high west like a Plotthound on the trail of a catamount. Hunting, scouting, expectorating the remnants of the covid plague he had picked-up on a rare trip to that great incubator of disease, the city.
The other day on the return-phase of a local outing and about a mile from home, he came upon the ribcage of an elk. This was along a well-used game trail up a side-gully of a main coulee that is a tremendous local wildlife corridor. Up this gully, the evergreens close and there are stretches of perpetual twilight. Along one such stretch he often finds remains, as though animals come there to die, like Jaques Cousteau’s elephant-seal graveyard, there on its special patch of the seafloor. (Remember that?)
It was on this same stretch that Eating came upon the ribcage. Examining it, it became clear that the animal that draped this rack had been breathing not much more than a month previous. Came to mind a story recently relayed by Little Ted Ambino, owner of an adjacent half-section, on which a bow hunter recently speared a bull elk with one of his arrows only to have it leave. The hunter unable or unwilling to do what was necessary to follow where it had gone. Jon’s eyes now scoured the scene and came to rest just upslope on a fine skull-and-rack in the perfect stage of being cleaned by the natural crews and forces, antlers pristine and yet to be gnawed by rodents.
Reckoning this to be the hunter’s lost elk, he thought – Your Loss is Now My Gain. He retrieved the fine pre-season trophy to horde for his own scrawny self. Determined to tell no-one besides all the people he knew to whom he would immediately brag about finding it. Imagining the increasingly elaborate lies that would flow from his lips as years unfurled.
He searched the area thoroughly now for the arrow he was sure he would find, but found no arrow. This was despite finding where the carcass had originally lain, upslope again from where the skull had come to rest on the end of it’s hanger of cervical vertebrae. Here, a grizzly or grizzlies had buried the windfall with duff for leisurely consumption. He imagined the great rough beast draped over the covered meat, gazing out at the world with small burning eyes. It would have been a very bad place to stumble into four or six weeks previous.
The rifle points to a small cluster of young spruce encircling where the carcass orignally lay. The duff the bear(s) turned up to cover it visible in the circle. (Is the arrow somewhere under the duff? Or was this a different bull?) The grass and small trees laid-over downslope as though by a heavy flow of water indicate how the thing had been dragged downslope to where Squirrel-Eating found the remnants.
Above: “Wolverine Number Two” captured by a remote camera at a cache site, with his travel-cover in the background. This is one of the study wolverines Squirrel-Eating Jon tracked over numerous consecutive winter seasons, identifying him by throat and chest markings as unique to each wolverine as a fingerprint. Jon pioneered the use of remote cameras for the purpose of identifying and keeping tabs on individual wolverines, a technique he introduced to other wolverine researchers from around the globe who then adopted the technology for themselves.The picture here is a bit blurry, the technology then was not what it is now.
The wolverine has the lowest per-square-centimeter foot-loading of any animal out there. That is, when they put the weight down on a foot, that weight is diffused over an area large enough that the pressure exerted on the ground is the lowest possible for the size of the animal concerned, and lowest of any creature. This is achieved because the wolverine, an animal about the size and weight of a cocker spaniel, has feet the size of a good-sized wolf – an animal four or five times its size.
A person would expect that spending life traveling about on such permanent snowshoes could be awkward at times. The wolverine didn’t evolve such paddles casually. Nature might produce such prototypes at random, but for them to become the standard, the experiment has to be a success.
So in the case of the wolverine, why was the experiement even attempted? Why did nature equip this animal so?
Squirrel-Eating Jon got some first-hand insights into the answer to this question during ten consecutive winters tracking this legendary beast in one of the world’s last great wilderness areas – the border country of northwest Alberta and northeast British Columbia. Passing back and forth across that imaginary boundary daily and not infrequently traveling up and down it. One province to one side, one to the other. Nothing to distunguish them on-the-ground.
A photo Jon took of the front track of a wolverine designating where the animal had travelled on a wilderness road recently cleared of most snow. That is one big foot for an animal the size of a spaniel.
One of the first things Jon noticed with regards to wolverine in this landscape under the conditions of midwinter snow is they showed up in the uplands mostly, in precisely the sort of continuous conifer cover in fact where their small relative the marten was most abundant. If the crust was really heavy at some point in the winter, you might find their tracks in the lowland muskeg-and-bush mosaic where the wolves killed many moose which the wolverines could potentially take advantage of the leavings of, or in the desolate spruce fens where caribou secluded themselves. But overwhelmingly, they were an upland animal. The next thing Eating noticed in tracking them (or backtracking them for not wanting to stress them if the trail was particularly fresh) is that not only were they travelling under the spruce canopy, they had a penchant for picking the absolute densest stands to do so in. They would eat and cache food in more open stands where they could watch for approaching danger, but for travel nothing was more appealing to them than almost impenetrable stands of doghair spruce or, in a more impacted landscape such as a forest cutblock, a certain stage of pine regrowth that formed a solid-looking wall of young trees. The sort of growth where a human tracker often as not had to pass through sideways-on to get between the boles. The animals would skirt more open stretches if they had denser options – he picked up on this too. If they came to a broad open, you could see where they had climbed a tree to about man’s head-height, before coming down and taking a detour. You could absolutely imagine them up there scanning for cover, for the best route. And sure enough, when they came back down the tree they chose the option of densest cover. When they came to an open industrial cutline that ran east-west, they would travel just inside the edge of the dense growth on the sunny side, where the sun had further thinned the snow out, sometimes to just a few centimeters depth where the depth on the middle of the line might be to a person’s knee or more. If it was a north-south oriented line catching no signficant sun at either edge they would cross directly. Unless there were a compacted snowmobile trail on it, in which case they would take advantage of this wilderness sidewalk in 100% of instances observed, sometimes for several kilometers before regaining the bush. And in 100% of the instances observed, when they took once more to the woods, they did so where the cover was the absolute thickest.
The picture that emerged was of an animal on a very strict energy budget doing everything it could not to tip the balance into the red. And this is why the wolverine evolved such huge feet – as an aid in meeting that budget. Jon then considered yes, but then they are also found all winter on the wide-open tundra, how can this correlate? Well, the tundra is a semi-desert of low precipitation. The snow that is there is wind-packed. You don’t have the conditions of deep, low-flotations powder you have in the boreal forest, out there. Then he considered the other carnivores that shared the wolverine’s home in his study area. Particularly the coyote and the lynx, animals of similar size, and both prone to going pretty much anywhere, open or not. The lynx even having its own snowshoe feet. How did this compute? Well, the coyote and the lynx are not wolverine is how. Their energetic needs were more easily met in that landscape. The coyote could subsist on voles even, something the wolverine could not. The wolverine couldn’t even subsist on the hares that supported the lynx, even though the lynx too was on a constrained budget as evidenced by its own outsized feet. But the lynx could subsist on hares, and many years the hares were abundant. When they were not, many lynx starved, and this is likely why their feet were also so large. To help arm them for those years. But in years of abundance, the lynx needn’t limit their travels to a particular woodland cover type cos they could be pretty sure of an imminent meal that would sustain them. The wolverine meanwhile travelled vast distances, something the lynx and coyote did not do. Catching the odd hare after a chase here and there, yes, and maybe even bringing down the odd caribou or even moose as some did. They liked to catch and eat beaver as well (the Ojibwe name for them is “beaver eater”) but beaver of course were inacessible in winter. Mostly they relied on carrion to keep them going, the kills of wolves primarily. A random resource of low incidence spread over the vast distances the animal necessarily travelled. This was why the the wolverine needed to restrict travel under winter conditions of deep powder snow to the densest winter stands where the snow depth was heavily buffered and greatly reduced underfoot by the boughs and much easier to travel through. This is why in the landscape Jon studied them in they mostly limited themselves to the uplands where the option of densest contiguous cover existed.
And this is how the wolverine got such outlandishly large feet.
Above – a selection of fine vintage Rigby magazine rifles.
This one will appeal to fans of fine arms who like to be prepared. The boyscout in you. As well perhaps to handipeople who like to fashion things with fine wood.
Experts will tell you that if you spend time skulking about in grizzly country as Squirrel-Eating Jon does daily, you need to be prepared. They also agree that preparations go beyond carrying bear spray or a rifle alone, but rather carrying both and being skilled in their deployment.
Another thing they will relay is that not just any ol’ hunting rifle will do as a bear safety rifle. The same rifle you may use to hunt grizzlies in places where this is legal and you get to carefully pick your shots/scenarios, say the much beloved .30-06 or .308 or winmag etcetera, is not something you want to be unloading into a bear that is bent on attack and incoming. Assuming your first shot hits a vital mark, you need a calibre that will stop the bear, right now. Not kill it five minutes after it’s killed you.
Incoming. Back of the hayfield.
The list of recommended calibres for the job which may still function as reasonable or even excellent hunting arms on the continent is not long. Two of the time-honored ones are the .45-70 and the .375 Holland & Holland. Of the two, the latter is far and away the most capable as well as the most versatile. It is, in fact, considered by many most in the know to be the most versatile all-round hunting calibre ever devised.
So, when it came to a choice of which rifle to carry, Jon of course chose the .45-70, and after a number of underwhelming performances from the thing in necessarily dispatching very large farm-animals, he sold it and invested the funds in a .375. He chose the CZ model, a Czech-made German Mauser of long history dating back to The Treaty of Versailles and of long-celebrated excellence. The most-carried backup rifle amongst Professional Hunters in Africa. You don’t get a better recommendation for an arm than that.
He bought the base “field-grade” model for around $1400. It was superbly accurate right out of the box and he practised with it and carried it for years on treks long and short over varied terrains. Being the base-model, while the action was flawless, the stock was rather crudely shaped and finished, with too many angles, a utilitarian treatment to the Turkish walnut at best, and a surplus of wood everywhere other than the forend, which came nicely tapered forward of the magazine. Being competent and patient enough with tools and overconfident in most things (not always to his benefit,) Jon began a series of reshapings and refinishings to suit both his aesthetic and utilitarian purposes. Carrying it for an additional span of seasons and having another go. A gunsmith chopping a couple of inches from the overlong barrel.
He’s pretty happy with the results of the latest refinement. His goal was to shape the thing as much as possible like a vintage British rifle, a John Rigby & Co., say. (The action on this CZ model having been used in fact by Rigby for some of its own rifles, such is the quality.) First thing he did was beef-up the bolt-knob with steel epoxy for better, more failsafe palming under pressure. Deployment of a medium contour plane and the appropriate files and rasps resulted in a more slender, shapely verion of the CZ stock, comfortable to carry and with a stylish Prince of Wales (or “pommel”) shaped grip seen mostly on English guns and very good for shoulder-carries on longer treks in the field. (His first attempt at this was more of a blob than rounded, but now it’s what it should be.) Quality time spent with a sanding block, the application of a single thin layer of water-based stain and multiple coats of Tru-Oil later hand-rubbed to a “London Polish” achieved the result he was looking for. (The trick with getting a glass-smooth finish with this oil even prior to hand-rubbing being to apply multiple thin, undiluted coats with your fingers, allowing to dry in-between, sanding imperfections out of the last full-coat wth fine paper once dry, and then wiping-on a final thin coat heavily diluted with mineral oil with a clean lint-free cloth.) Applications of Renaissance Wax to both visible and hidden components with further polishing further enhanced the result as well as the weatherproofing. He’s learned plenty of things about finishing stocks along the way.
Here’s the latest result being used for scale on a recent hunt, next to fresh spoor a big griz had left in a flattened anthill. (It is a rare outing, even the most minor one anymore, where Jon does not encounter grizzly sign in short order. It is his sincere wish never to have to shoot one, he is a much bigger fan of them in life.) For a base model, that was a pretty decent piece of walnut under there. Not fancy by any means, but not entirely plain, either:
This past July 7 sometime not long after midday, Squirrel-Eating Jon went upstairs for nap, belly full of a nice dinner of squirrels. He had only just laid down on the ancient lumpy mattress when there came the rumble of thunder. That’s odd, he thought, he had not noticed clouds. The day nonetheless – the first truly hot one in a notably reluctant year – had had a strange feel to it. Dead still, uncommonly sultry for the foothills, and velvety soft of the air.
He stood up and took a look out the bedroom window. Trees were swaying wildly and there was a strange sound, like surf. He proceeded to the bedroom door and it was all he could do to open it – the inside of the house had become somehow pressurized. He managed nonetheless and went downstairs and out the back to take a gander at the sky.
The atmosphere was a chaos of boiling cloud and the sky seemed to be filled with thousands of medium-sized birds. There was a freight-train sound. Where on earth did all those birds from, he wondered, until he realized it wasn’t birds filling the sky but rather forest debris. He went around the corner of the house and looked to the south. There was no detail to the scene, just a chaotic grey mass. Something big was happening. Out in the pasture and over the hayfield, small tornados were snaking down like anteater tongues, touching down two or three at a time, sucking up a pack of crap from the ground and recoiling back into the inverted cauldron that spawned them. The horses were bolting into the paddock for cover. Just to the south where the bulk of the mass seemed to be passing eastwards, there was still no detail, just a deep gray wall of chaotic sky. “This is fantastic!” Jon thought, spellbound by the scene.
Only when it was all about a mile past to the due east did he discern a great black wedge, an inverted triangle on the horizon. And then it was done. The horses were already filtering back out to feed, this being the thing that most occupies their minds at all times besides when there is a puma on their back. Jon went up and had his nap. Midday in summer not being his favorite part of the circadian spectrum.
When he woke up a half hour or a few days later he could hear chainsaws already. People in the country in this disintegrated era can be starved for relevance, and waste no time getting on the scene of even a minor disaster, which Eating assumed this had been. He envisaged a tree or two down in the road and that was about it. Despite what he had seemed to have witnessed, big tornados are very rare in the foothills.
A few hours later he needed to go to town. His jaw dropped slack like the old men you see in rural places through the windshields of their oncoming old Buicks doing their best impersonations of Basking sharks. A large block of his deer-woods had been sheared-off about 20 feet up. Looking to the east, the thing had similarly flattened entire woodlots.
Things that occured to him upon witnessing the awesome scale of destruction: 1) Next time the sky is full of boiling debris, head to the root-cellar; 2) What sorts of varmints might benefit from situations where all the woods is lying on the ground? Voles, hares, weasels, martens doubtless. Smaller stuff. But some big stuff, too. Great day-bed cover for grizzlies and denning opportunities for black bear. Good escape cover for mule deer perhaps, their “stotting” gait having evolved to negotiate deadfall; 3) Did it suck up any cows?
He had always wanted to see a flying cow.
What the storm looked like through some guy’s camera from 20 miles to the east, looking across the plains to the west.
The one neighbor’s woods.This doe and yearling were confused over their territory’s new look. They came right past Jon, who was standing in plain view. It’s a good thing his stomach was full of squirrels.
Memory conspires against nature. The forgetting can begin in the instant that a change takes place…
– J.B. MacKinnon
It was now the 1980’s. Educators were giving us a more sober, and more realistic message. Towards the end of high school we were told we would be the first generation that, on average, would not do as well as our parents’ had. That we were now noticeably into our decline and fall as a civilization, although of course they didn’t synthesize nor recognize this information as such, for what it was. It was just another soundbite to most. And it was also sometime in the early ’80’s, that Seasons magazine released a special issue about a special place in the world. The place was called “Long Point” – the longest freshwater sandspit on earth – and it was one of a handful of places in the Southern Ontario of those days that remained somewhat frozen, or at least significantly impeded in time, to the extent that while Niagara was succumbing to the blitzkrieg war on life that is modernity, Long Point and region, the last frontier of the area, was still a natural stronghold. Relative at least to the most of the rest of the south. The magazine appeared on the rack of the library at Beamsville District Secondary School, Squirrel Eating Jon’s incarcerating institution, and was one of those little rays of light that shone on an otherwise dark place helping to make the hard time served there endurable.
Long Point. The deepest waters of Erie are just off this tip. God knows what is down there.
Long Point was spared the axe in large part when on May 4, 1866, just after the end of the American Civil War, a total of 14,934 acres of former public land was sold for a total of $8,540 to John Brown, George Hamilton Gillespie, Thomas Cockburn Kerr, William Little, David Tisdale, Laughlin McCallum, and Samuel DeVoe Woodruff. These purchasers, businessmen and sportsmen who had cottages at the point, immediately petitioned the government for a charter of incorporation as “The Long Point Company” for those lands which they now owned, being “desirous of promoting for fishing and hunting and otherwise to manage and make the land available for the purposes of the Company incorporated by this Act.” The Company managed the area better than any government agency could have, as they were not crippled by the burden of attempting to please an electorate.
Company men. Long Point Company men, that is. Not your current brand o’ twitchers.
Many of the earliest settlers to the Long Point region came from Niagara, including Squirrel’s home county of Lincoln. Seems the place has long been a draw for the daughters and sons of Lincoln County. The Long Point of today is most notable as a refuge for birds, reptiles and amphibians. One can only imagine what it must have been like in the early days of settlement, to have remained relatively rich until the present time. To Jon’s way of thinking, it is the herpetological element that is of most important note, nationally. This opinion is not entirely subjective. As the entirety of Canada hosts birds, there are plenty of places that are important for avian life. There are far, far fewer places in Canada that are important for reptiles.
As fortune would have it, Eating didn’t have to wait until he was able to drive to get my first taste of the region. He was privy to a trip to the Backus Woods, just north of the Point, at 14. Backus Woods was named for an immigrant from Yorkshire, England, another place Squirrel Eating claims in his own ancestry, his people settling there for a span during their migration from the Scotch Highlands. John Backhouse came to the environs of Jon’s home in Lincoln County, Ontario around 1791, after a brief stint in the United States. He was not there long before he heard Norfolk beckoning. Backhouse had three wives, though not all at once. His union with his first wife, Margaret Longbottom, proved especially fecund and produced from seven to ten progeny depending on who was counting (children rarely sit still.) She too was from Yorkshire, and all her children, most of whom ended up in Ontario, were as well. Margaret died in 1791 in St. Catharines, Ontario, where she and John initially lived after leaving the States. Age: thirty-six. His second wife was a dairymaid and acquaintance he went back to England to marry. Jane Moore White bore him three more children. She died in 1809 at the almost equally discouraging age of thirty-nine, and was buried at Backus. John Backhouse’s third wife, Hannah Haines, whom he married around 1814, bore him no children at all and lived to be 80.
The remnant forest named after this man is one of the highest quality old growth hardwood forests in Ontario and the best remaining example in the Carolinian Life Zone, which encompasses the Niagara Peninsula and Eating Jon’s home town of Vineland as well as the north shore of Lake Erie. An understanding of just how marginal the situation has become for nature in southern Ontario can be gained by contemplating the fact that this greatest expanse of woods in the southernmost forest region of the province is but 875 acres in extent – a minuscule pittance for a vast country that is mostly forest. For perspective, consider that this same country’s boreal forest region, a place attracting much environmental concern in recent years, is 1.4 billion acres in extent. Here you begin to get a picture of how things are in southern Ontario. To be fair, the discrepancy in these numbers is partially because the Carolinian Life Zone comprises less than a quarter of one per cent of the Canada’s landmass, but it is also because this life zone falls entirely within that tiny sliver of the country – the deciduous forest zone – that hosts 50% of our human population. We here have long considered this appalling statistic the strongest case for annexation with the United States. “The acquisition of Canada,” said Thomas Jefferson in the days leading up to the War of 1812, in which John Backhouse served in the 1st Norfolk Militia, “will be a mere matter of marching.” Had he not turned out to be mistaken, I imagine this would have been a great mercy to the land, flora, fauna, and people of southern Canada in her entirety, and southern Ontario in particular, as the pressure to settle this strip would have been greatly relieved were there no international boundary. The region would not be so grossly overpopulated as it has become as the result of being one of the very few sections of the nation with conditions of climate and soil fully supportive of settlement in what is otherwise primarily a boreal wasteland. Nonetheless, the midget relict patches of woods of Carolinian Canada are still home to 25% of Canada’s species at risk, a number of which occur in Backhouse’s Woods. Prothonotary warblers nest in deep wooded swamps, Jefferson’s own Salamanders breed in vernal pools, and woodland voles forage in runways beneath the litter. In addition, some of the oldest living trees in Ontario are found here, including Black Gums that were seedlings when Jacques Cartier sailed into the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1534. Tulip trees, the tallest growing trees east of the Rocky Mountains, shoot 35 metres straight up and through the canopy of maple, oak, pine and hickory. And of course, there are the snakes.
Backus Woods at dogwood flowering time.
During his first trip to the region, Jon received a guided tour of the inside of Backhouse’s mill. The first artifact he spotted, right there in the anteroom, was an old taxidermy mount of a very large Eastern foxsnake, twining up about a piece of driftwood, if you can trust his memory. He remembers being in awe of the size of this reptile. Certainly it was larger than any snake he had found to date. He asked the guide, (now probably a crone) if they were still around, as this was obviously a specimen of considerable vintage, and she said yes they were, in fact, the place was lousy with ’em.
John Backhouse’s gristmill in 1998.
Squirrel Eating Jon did not return to the place until he was sixteen, driving a borrowed car. It was a fine, early June Saturday, sunny, warm and clear. He was accompanied by his friend, Voice of the Mantis. (“The Voice” in some circles.) They took to the tobacco country, a romantic region-apart, more like Dixie in aura than like anywhere in Canada. Flatlands, mostly, but sometimes rolling over old dunes of sand, mostly covered now by growth; pine and sassafras and flowering dogwood: the Norfolk Sand Plain. Modest farm houses and rows of old tobacco kilns covered in green tarpaper and with red shutters that could be closed to control the climate within. Billboards advertising peanut plantations. Almost as soon as they crossed the boundary into this subtle yet romantic land, they began seeing their first reptiles. Hard at the side of Highway 24, up on a small sandbank, Blanding’s turtles for instance, nesting. Other turtles.
Their plan was to proceed down the fifty-nine highway to the Point proper, snake hunt where it seemed right, and then head on up to the Backus Woods and the environs of John Backhouse’s mill. Eating just couldn’t get the image of that great stuffed foxsnake from the mill out of his head. It was more compelling to him than the appearance of the world’s largest squirrel on a morning of sharpest hunger, maybe. He was looking forward to hunting the very different scenery of the Backus Woods and environs as much or more than the exotic marshes and dunelands of the Point. Perhaps this was because the landscape inland was more like that of home. Hunting it would be not at all unlike hunting the quieter corners of his squirrel-grounds, with the significant difference that the snake fauna was still significantly intact, not yet having met their version of the Seneca Cliff as had the large herpetofauna of Lincoln County during the 1970’s. But they stuck to their plan and forged first to the Point.
A few miles before you got there, the lands flattened out entirely to give the impression of a sort of Delta landscape. There was a belt of soil here, dark rich rural blood, not sand, and there was no tobacco being grown on this narrow belt. Houses passed were modest and thankfully few and mostly it was billiard-table-level fields, quite expansive near the lake. Then the highway dipped a little and we were on the causeway across the great marsh. The nimrods were on high-alert, yet they passed over the causeway – legendary scene of reptile carnage at the tires of the automobile – without seeing much more than a few painted turtles and one big snapping turtle. They began their search of the point, soon venturing like poachers onto prohibited conservation lands, the nearest thing we have in a ‘classless’ society to the Royal Woods, set aside for elites like card-carrying biologists and other notebook carrying scriblers. A smart move, denying access, given our unwarshed hordes in general, ever ballooning, seem unable to refrain from destroying that which they claim to be seeking, usually and mostly by their sheer, mindless numbers, but also on account of machines and of course, stupidity. Not that biologists aren’t self-serving also and prone at times to doing damage, just that there are far less of them, typically – although this seems to be changing too, at Long Point. But more on that in a future post.
The hunters were contented by numbers of black gartersnakes, their first such, and the abundance of these reptiles buoyed them on, hoping the locale would offer up a foxsnake or a hognose snake. It did not. They kept to the lee-side of the dunes, where there was more concealment for fugitives. They ventured down the point until they came to a place where the lake had breached-though, a narrow but deep channel resulting. This is a normal process on the point. Cuts appear and are healed over, a landscape carved in sand being plastic as compared to one carved in stone. They hadn’t long turned back when they heard a vehicle approaching down the beach. They hid in behind the dunes where a giant cottonwood lay prone, silently, like leverets in a form. The vehicle, which they could not see, stopped adjacent them, but on the other side of the dunes. They could hear the chattering of apes piloting the conveyance – doubtless old today, probably dead – giving tongue on two-way radio, without being able to hear the details, assuming there were any. Whether this meant they were being hunted or was just coincidence, they did not know. It was not long before the vehicle turned around and made its way back towards the nearer reaches of the Point. The strange pair rose and continued back themselves, leisurely, hunting as they went. It was time to head to the Backus Woods.
The Backus Conservation Area of which these buildings so far described were now a part, had yet to be a manicured as you will find it today. In its more natural state it offered the perfect set of the conditions to conserve both human and reptile heritage. Anyone who has been on a working farmscape as this once was can report that such a place can be rather cluttered, especially at its margins, with the all the leavings and after-effects of the previous genrations, decades and centuries, depending on the age of the farm. Artifacts from the golden age of the horse are often in evidence, as are older tractors, unused cars of every vintage from the Model T on up, as well as scrap lumber, entire sides of old buildings lying in the grass, still-standing outbuildings no longer in use, and scattered sheets of roofing metal and plywood. All this rubbish, most of it coming from the era before plastic, and unlike this latter substance which lends a cheap trashiness a place even when still in use, becomes rather part of the charm of the place, the romance, the aesthetic. It is something conservation authorities rarely seem to understand, insisting on cleaning such scenes up and manicuring the lawns, stripping the character and rendering the place sterile and unlike anything it likely ever was in life. Making these places more like a Country Club, a catering to the dull edge of the human blade. Aside from the negative effect this has on rural authenticity, it also has an effect on wildlife. On snakes, and on snake hunters. Snakes love these littered old farmyards, as they offer great opportunities for a cold blooded creature to regulate its body temperature at the same time as remaining out of sight. A snake that must resort to a natural feature such as a woodchuck burrow or rock crevice for shelter must necessarily reveal itself to get warm, to thermoregulate as they say, but it may not be in evidence for long, and when it is in its recesses for lengthy spans of snaketime, it is inaccessible, unknowable. A snake that is lucky enough to have one of these old farmyards as part of its territory, can conversely crawl under a thin old board, remain hidden, and yet the heat still radiates through and warms it. Not only that, but very often it can find a meal of rodents under there as well. Even better for this purpose on cooler yet sunny days is old roofing metal, and other types of thin metal cladding, when it falls into disuse and lies about on the ground. Here is a material that warms up very quickly in the sun. On warm sunny days, it becomes too hot in a hurry, and by then the warmed-up reptile either begins foraging or perhaps retreats into a rodent burrow which may itself be a feature of the landscape under the tin. If the day is just a little cooler than ideal temperature for the reptile, it may return underneath the tin again and again during the day, and certainly it will benefit from returning – hopefully with a full stomach – as dusk comes down. And here it can be readily known to the snake hunter.
They went now to the old Backhouse homestead. They spied the sheets of rusty tin in the long grass out behind Backhouse Junior’s old home as the day was coming onto one-thirty or two-o’clock. Almost as soon as they spied it they understood the error they had committed in their hunting strategy for the area. They realized they should have been focusing their time looking for more of this sort of old structure around these heritage buildings – perhaps the barn that they had passed near the south entrance to the conservation area, other such relics of a former time, the people gone, with the snakes perhaps housing their souls? Instead the hunters, young and still a bit stupid, had wandered about over the land hoping to randomly come upon their quarry. But here was a scene they knew might be relied upon to draw their game. The day was warm, but not so warm that it was inconceivable that a snake might not be coming and going from underneath a metal artifact, as described. They honed in.
Home of John H. Backhouse, descendent.
Luck was on their side. As they leaned down to turn the first sheet of corrugated metal, there right under Squirrel Eating Jon’s gaze and close-up was the unmistakable spotted rear third of a foxsnake that was just then taking shelter beneath the cover. It was immediately clear before even turning the artifact that this was the largest snake either of the youths had found to date. The Voice of the Mantis sounded in approbation. And when they did turn the metal, it was equally clear that it was one of the most beautiful snakes they had ever found, one of the more beautiful sights in all of the wild. Closer to five than to four feet, average for this snake, hefty and with the beautiful rich brown blotches on subtle straw grading to a burnt orange that is typical of specimens this reptile, and of course the exquisite, copper-coloured newpenny head.
What Rough Beast 