Free Facing the Hunter by David Adams Richards Page A

Fredericton, across the Saint John River and behind the forestry building. Now, I knew I was a good shot when alone. With people standing around watching me, that was another matter. Besides, I was certain I had knocked my gun while putting it in the car.
    When I arrived there were three people ahead of me, a woman and two men. The target was in fact quite large: four feet by four feet. It was only forty yards away. You had three shots and had to hit it twice. It should have been no problem for anyone familiar with guns. I knew this just by looking at it. Yet people, because they got overexcited or too worked up about hitting it, did miss. In fact, the man who fired before me did. He fired in the kneeling position, two rapid shots from his .308. (How else, I thought, does anyone ever fire a .308 semi-automatic but rapidly?) Looking through the telescope, the forest ranger told him he had missed on the second shot. The man lay down in the prone position and, aiming carefully, fired again. He missed, and therefore wasn’t able to hunt moose that year.
    I had seen the barrel wobble as he aimed the third time. He tried to make a joke of it but it was devastating for him. The woman came after, with a Browning .308. She made the cut by hitting the target on the second and third shots. The man after her did as well. All these people either kneeled or lay down, for steadiness.
    The ranger looked at me and asked if I was ready. I nodded, stepped up to the line with my .303, put a bullet from the clip into the chamber, and fired in the standing position. I brought the bolt-action back, ejected the shell, brought another bullet up, and fired again.
    “There you go,” the ranger said. “One bull’s eye, one on the upper right.”
    Though I was happy enough to be able to phone David and tell him to get ready, the shot to the upper right bothered me, because I shouldn’t have been that far off on back-to-back shots. But I was. The target is essentially set up for a rifle sighted in at a hundred yards; if you can hit a bull’s eye at forty-five yards, the sights allow you to hit the same target at a hundred. The trajectory of the bullet leaving the rifle allows this.
    At any rate, I had passed. I picked up my moose licence and prepared to go hunting on September 27. I lived in Fredericton at that time, and was Writer in Residence at the university—in fact, it would be my last year in that position. I received about one-eighth the salary of a professor who would teach my work to students.
    My wife and I didn’t have much money, so a moose would be a good thing for the winter months. I had shot a deer the fall before, and it had kept us in good stead, but the meat of a white-tail is not as good as that of a moose,even though a friend from Newfoundland who had not tasted white-tailed deer before said they gave the finest chops he had ever tasted.
    I thought over my hunts in the past. When hunting deer I was becoming familiar with how they moved, and I liked to be alone in the woods—for everyone hunts differently. Moose hunting was in some ways the same, but in certain respects vastly different.
    I remembered seeing old pictures of British officers attached to the garrison here hunting in the wilds of New Brunswick in the nineteenth century, with their Mausers and Enfields. There is a cairn here to those boys of the regiments of foot who died and were buried four thousand miles from home. Most of them, the regular soldiers, were very likely akin to the Cockney boys I met when travelling some years ago, with their wobbly smiles and tender hearts. In 1971 a young man named Dennis and I went through a hurricane off the coast of Africa and were the only two on the old ship not to get seasick.
    Dennis was much like those ordinary soldiers. They wouldn’t have been like the officers I spoke about, who headed into the wilds with baggage and staff. They would have been the youngsters carrying heavy packs who dealt with the First Nations one