From One Raven's Eye

Page 7

Ahneen, hello. How are you at finding stuff? Are you the hunter, gatherer type yet, or has agriculture and Safeway got you as their grocery hostage, too? Every year around this time with the leaves just off the trees, snow smattered on the ground, I get

the urge to find some bushy place to do some personal skulking around.

My style of hunting has a certain ritual involved. For the first half hour or so I'm sniffing after whatever will fit in a freezer or a frying pan. The next part usually takes longer than that. That's when I end up hunting for the truck, the boat, friends, anything

to get me home again.

Times like that remind me that my hunting apprenticeship years were spent in a non-Native farmyard. Lost pigs and stray turkeys have no chance whatsoever to escape from me. Bear and beaver, however, seem to know how to take advantage of my inexperience every time.

Actually, it's been a while since these citified feet went tripping along a moss green trail. That's no excuse, though. My friend Alvin has live at an urban address for years. Every so often, though, he shows up with twigs tangled in his braids and fresh cooked venison on his breath.

A few years ago, California Bob, Gordie and me set out from Saskatoon to see what variety of meat existed out past the lights of McDonalds and A and W. We drove six hours to find some bush. Out on the prairie, you walk five steps into a patch of trees and already can see out the other side. Us bush Indians need more cover to operate in than that.

Three mooselike objects flitted past our rifle sights before Bob plugged one to a stop. It took us awhile to cut the thing up. Some guys on our reserve would have had three in the truck by the time we got done. They do it so fast you figure the critter has a built in zipper.

To kill some time before evening, we decide to take a drive around. Well what do you know. We spot the king of the taiga forest standing like a royal monument of itself on a snowy river right beside the road. Screech. We jump out of the truck. Moose wheels for the far shore.

Now that swampy place across there is packed with willow and green scrub pine. A person has to slide sideways, duck and dodge to get through. Now Moose with those five foot wide antlers just glides along like a shadow.

We all just set foot into that part of the chase when another vehicle skids to a stop. Turns out these guys are hunters, too. Ones with green uniforms hunting for people like us.

After lifting the tarp in the truck box and discovering an ex-moose hiding under these, one asks, "Where did you boys get this?"

Now sometimes because certain people figure all of us to be dumb, it pays to play along with them a little.

The three of us take turns rubbing our chin, sniffing our nose and counting our feet. After a minute or two of this roadside drama, the other one drags out a map. "Show me," he snarls.

We look and see the reason there were so many moose that morning, so friendly and trusting, too, almost even tame. The ground we are stand on is a game preserve. This is marked on that map.

"He must've fell right over that line," Gordie says as we drive out of their sight, laughing and talking in our best English.

Hunting is more part of us than boot, brass, shells and early mornings and evenings out amongst the rivers and hills. Partly because we have always done it, but more because like everything else in this life it fits into our beliefs; how we see ourselves as human beings in this world.

Even though there is an excitement to it, a quickening of the breath and blood in cold air, it is not a sport. The winged, furred or finned being has more meaning than as a bloodless target.

Still, wildlife protection groups point to us and our hunting rights as the cause of their hunting-as-a-hobby decline. The fact that their society has most destroyed the living space and caused the extinction of certain of this earth's creatures never crosses their minds.

Their counterpart in the uniforms are into stewardship, natural resource manage-ment in other words. They still haven't solved the basic problem of balancing their society's needs within the existing natural world. Still they say that they know more how to go about all this than anyone, including us.

This is not to say there aren't abuses on our side. There are Indians in the city who go out, shoot five or six deer, then turn around and sell the meat the next day. They have lost the balance between need and want, the harmony necessary between use and respect. Maybe they need that money, but for some things, money is never reason enough.

People like Bill, Mitchell, Isaac and others, all experts at their craft have my admiration and respect. The natural life has given them strength and independence of

body and mind. The reassurance gained from the trapline and hunting ground has seen them through some tough times. Even though those specific skills aren't always enough to live as independently with these days, something of it makes me wish to be just like them. There aren't many things I still regret, growing up as I did, but this part of Anishanbe life is one I always wish would have worked out different.

It is however, never too late learn. Me and Joe are planing a trip this fall. I figure I've got three chances to improve on my meat on the table record. Maybe by next week I'll stumble upon a tasty critter that's asleep, severely depressed or like a partridge in the area of mental quickness. See you then.