Are Hunters White Trash?

Hunting is a matter of survival in places like Africa and large parts of Asia. In Europe it is an activity reserved for the elites and those who want to be. In North America, and Australia for that matter, hunters are thought of as rednecks by the urban elite, as blood-thirsty Bambi-killers or, as the anointed liberal fringe sees it, “white trash, who cling to their guns and religion.” I take exception to that. I like to hunt and I may be white trash, though I’ve never lived in a trailer, took the wife and kids to the Redneck Riviera and trashed the beach nor do I go to family reunions to pick up dates and I’ve not seen the inside of a church in years. Yes, I feel comfortable with guns. I was taught to treat your rifle like you would your bride. Yes, I believe beer is one of the basic food groups. No, I’m not a registered Republican and no, my wife’s hairdo does not get tangled in the ceiling fan nor do I have an old Chevy engine suspended from a tree in my front yard.

I believe real hunters are true keepers of the environment and in tune with nature. The problem is that some who call themselves hunters would be better off if they stayed out of the bush. They think it’s macho to go into the woods and blast away at anything that moves. Armed and dangerous. They ignore the rules and ethics of hunting. They are not the norm. My experience has been that sooner or later these guys get what they deserve. I’ve known all kinds and I’d like to introduce you to a few who stand out, my version of the good, the bad and the ugly.

My first exposure to hunting came when I was a child. My father was a professional hunter and he loved the chase. He managed the game and forests of a baron, who owned all the land where we lived in southern Germany. I was six years old, when I first started to accompany him on his hunting excursions.

His hunting parties usually consisted of his employer and several of his blue-blooded friends, plus a number of doctors, lawyers, judges, senior bureaucrats and hangers-on from the surrounding towns and villages, and three or four American Army officers from the nearby garrison. One of the hunters was a fellow named Kramer. He was the baron’s butler. Herr Kramer was from deepest Silesia and his heavy regional accent sounded hilarious to our Franconian ears. I had an ear for languages and could imitate his accent rather well. My father used to call on me to entertain his hunting buddies, pretending being Herr Kramer in his function as the baron’s butler. My father didn’t like him.

Herr Kramer had tried desperately to get a hunting license. To him, this was the ultimate status symbol. To get a hunting license to this day is an expensive and difficult undertaking there. In those days, the cost of a license was the equivalent of a new car and to get one could take up to a year. You needed to take extensive classes and pass written and oral exams on hunting rules, applicable statutes, regulations and rites, game identification, which included every possible mammal or bird from squirrels to seals, from doves and upland birds to the many types of ducks and geese, most of which you’d never encounter in the wild in Germany, plus gun safety and weapon and ammunition identification. The idea was – and still is – to keep the number of hunters to a minimum, namely the upper classes.

My father was the senior hunting examiner for our region. He didn’t believe a butler should be licensed to hunt. He flunked Herr Kramer three times for cause. This meant Herr Kramer had to go through the whole circus and expense three times. But he was nothing if not persistent. He finally complained to the baron, who suggested to my father that he pass him, since Herr Kramer was sure not to hit anything anyway and, what’s more, he was tired of his constant whining. So Herr Kramer became a licensed hunter. He promptly bought himself a chic green hunting uniform, complete with a hat sporting a “Saubart” - the neck hair of a wild boar - and a brand new semi-automatic hunting rifle, and was front and center at every hunt thereafter.

The baron proved to be right. Herr Kramer never downed anything, but he kept coming. To him the most important thing was to be seen as part of the hunting party. Killing anything was totally immaterial. No one wanted to hunt near him, because no sooner had the signal to start the hunt been given, he would let loose with his repeating rifle and wouldn’t stop until he ran out of bullets. He seldom ran out. He always claimed that numerous bucks and wild boar tried to sneak by his stand. He was always sure to have hit something and insisted the dogs look for his downed game. The dogs never found anything. The other hunters called him “full clip.” My father, whose job it was to allocate the hunting stands, usually put him on the one farthest away from any possible action and out of harm’s way. He called him the “Schlesische Hanswurst” - the Silesian buffoon. The pushers made a wide circle around his stand.

Another nimrod was the baron’s estate manager, Friedebald Baerwolf. He had been a professional soldier, what they called a 12-pointer in Germany. After 12 years service, a soldier in the German Army was entitled to a full pension. Herr Baerwolf had been a supply master sergeant who possessed great organizational skills. He could get you anything, if the price was right. The Baerwolfs were refugees from the city of Plauen, in the Soviet Zone of Occupation, not too far from our village, on the other side of the Iron Curtain. He was a stout fellow and had trouble walking for any length of time. He always parked himself on a stand close to the road. As an ex-soldier, he was an excellent shot and rarely missed. He could also drink most men under the table and was the life of the obligatory post-hunt parties, held at the pub on the evening of the hunt.

He acted as the master of ceremonies and usually started off the festivities with a toast to Herr Kramer and his hunting prowess with a pint crock of potato schnapps. That was the end of Herr Kramer, who felt obliged to empty his stein in response to this salute. Then he sat down and slowly slid from his chair under the table, accompanied by the cheers from around the room. At the end of the evening, a couple of my father’s pushers would toss him into a wheelbarrow, push him home and dump him and his rifle at his doorstep. The Americans loved these quaint rituals, even though they didn’t understand a word that was said. The Germans liked their company, because they always insisted on paying everyone’s tab. These parties were the highlight of the village social scene. The food was good. The beer flowed. Everybody was happy. And that was the point of the exercise.

My father was the only one who didn’t drink on those or any other occasions. He’d sworn off booze as part of his compact with his Lutheran God to get his eldest son, my brother, home safe from the war. He believed in keeping his word.

I have hunted on both sides of the pond. On this side, in Canada, I met a man named Danny Buhl, who ran a rustic lodge in the Haliburton Highlands, north of Toronto. I owned a cottage on the same lake and went on some of his moose hunts over the years. He was originally from eastern Germany and he gave himself the title of master of the hunt. He told everyone that he had been an interpreter for General Vlasov, whose Cossacks fought on the side of the Germans against the Bolsheviks during the war. That probably was unlikely, since he was only 14 years old in 1945. Besides, I don’t think he spoke Russian, at least not the Russian I learned in high school. He had an Ontario outfitter’s license, which allowed him to guide hunts in a 5,000 acre area adjacent to Algonquin Park – prime moose country. He liked to boast of his many hunting successes. Some of his German friends who came to hunt with him, called him “Buhl-shitter” behind his back. His moose-kill rate was zero.

There were maybe ten guys in this hunting party, mostly older Germans. None of them would have been allowed to hunt in Germany. Everybody was ready to go before daylight, except for the Master of the Hunt. Herr Buhl preferred to take his breakfast at 9:00 a.m. No amount of persuasion could change his mind. While we all milled around in the yard eager to get going, he’d be at the breakfast table in his pajamas, savoring his eggs and sausages. No one dared to leave without him. I guess that was a German thing.

Of course, by the time we got into the bush, the moose had settled down for the day and had stopped moving. Herr Buhl’s preferred mode of hunting moose was to assign everyone a stand and then he would ride around in his truck on the various logging trails and look for tracks and chat with hunters from other camps, who were on the move in the bush and who were laughing at him behind his back. They tried to acquaint him with the old Ojibwa saying: “Tracks - moose gone, no tracks – moose come.” He laughed and took them all for rubes. But at the end of the day, they usually had several moose hanging in their camp and we did not.

One of the Germans in that hunting party was named Guenther. I have forgotten his last name. He was a short man, with a big head, a full beard, no neck and a sizeable beer belly hanging over short and very spindly legs. His legs were totally out of proportion to the rest of his body. He always wore pants that buckled below the knees and knee socks. He invariably carried a walking stick that converted into a one-legged leather seat.

One evening we were sitting around in camp talking about hunting raccoon. Guenther let on that he trapped them at his house in the city, then put them in an air-tight box, specially designed and constructed by himself so that it could be hooked to his car’s exhaust pipe, and gassed them. He was proud of his invention and, as a German in particular, didn’t see anything bizarre or unfortunate with this method of killing. The Canadians present shook their head in disbelief, when they heard this German talking proudly about his gas chamber. But he didn’t stop there, but told us he also ate the meat of those gassed raccoons and had the skins tanned and then sewed them into a cozy quilt for his bed.

Another in this hunting party was a German fellow we called “Wolf Lake Willi,” because he rented a trailer on Wolf Lake in our hunting area. His trailer stood next to a groomed bike trail. He had a problem with sharing. To discourage anyone stopping at his place and asking for water or directions, he had mounted a wrecked bicycle over his “No Trespassing” sign. He never had more than one bottle of beer in his fridge, so he didn’t have to offer you one as a courtesy.

One year during our hunt, he lucked into three moose, which made the mistake of passing by his stand. He promptly shot all three, even though he only had a tag for one. This happened around 11 o’clock in the morning. They found two of the moose right away, but the third, a calf, proved elusive, since Willi pointed the search party in the wrong direction. He himself didn’t bother to look for his kill. We came upon the remains accidentally the next day, but by then the wolves had eaten most of it.

Traditionally, the shooter takes care of the basic chores of field dressing the game he kills. Willi, however, was averse to blood and decided instead to go back to the lodge and have lunch. All the Germans decided to vamoose with him and left the two carcasses lying untended in the sun. When my Canadian hunting buddy and one of the less squeamish Germans came upon the dead moose, they were bloated with gas and ready to blow. They gutted and quartered them before the meat spoiled in the heat and got them ready for transport out of the bush. Willi and his pals showed up later in the afternoon in high spirits. He didn’t bother to thank anybody for doing his job for him. Nor did he show any concern about leaving the moose unattended in the field. Needless to say, my friends and I stopped hunting with these clowns.

For nearly twenty years, I have hunted with a group of guys from the Windsor area, in southwestern Ontario. Most of them worked on the line at the Chrysler plant there. You could call them rednecks. We hunted in an area about two hours northwest of Toronto near Walkerton in the Greenock Swamp, one of the last and largest undrained swamps in Ontario. It wasn’t unusual to spot a 10- or 12-point swamp-buck in there. The hunters in this group were mainly Franco-Ontarians, who spoke English with a French syntax, but none of them could speak French anymore. One of them was a fellow named Bobby Lapierre. Bobby was a dry-waller by trade and didn’t think anything of draining a 2/4 of Labatt Blue in an evening. He was an excellent hunter and shot. He lived near the swamp and spent every free hour in the summer scouting for deer and their patterns, building tree-stands and clearing shooting lanes in preparation for opening day on the first Monday in November. He was very proprietary about our hunting area and did not suffer trespassers lightly.

Opening day comes around and Bobby is headed for his favorite deer stand well before daybreak. When he gets there, he finds a fellow from a nearby camp of Portuguese guys from Toronto sitting in his stand. The Portuguese pretended ignorance and refused to leave. Bobby didn’t want to spook the deer unnecessarily and moved on to another stand. That evening, as we were getting ready to head back to camp, Bobby was nowhere to be seen. We waited around ‘til well after dark when he finally appeared. He was limping a bit and explained that he had lost one of his socks in the bush and his boot was chafing his foot. We didn’t ask what had happened to his sock and headed home.

The next day we heard that one of the Portuguese hunters had returned to his stand before daybreak and had settled into his seat, only to find that he had sat in a pile of excrement that someone had thoughtfully left there for him, accompanied by a wool sock in lieu of toilet paper. Needless to say no one thought of trespassing on Bobby’s stand again.

Finally, I want to tell you about a guy from Saturna Island, where I live now. His name is John and he has lived on this island all his life. He invited me to go white tail hunting in the interior of British Columbia, up near the headwaters of the Fraser and Columbia rivers. Beautiful country. We were driving up and down logging roads winding their way along the mountainsides glassing the countryside for deer, when we spotted some grouse working the sides of the road ahead. John stopped the truck, grabbed his .22 rifle and prepared to get out of the cab when his cell phone started ringing. It was his wife. John never lost a beat. He stepped down onto the road and started walking toward the grouse, held the phone to his ear with his left hand and while talking on the telephone, he aimed his rifle with his right hand and shot the grouse. Head shot, of course, because he didn’t want to spoil the edible meat. I was impressed. To him, it was nothing special. Try that trick some time, if you think that’s easy. You’d have to be a multi-tasker extraordinaire.

During the war in Germany, people used to say: “Watch out for those crazy colonials from Canada.” I say, by all means watch them, you might learn something. Hunters are like everyone else. Some are bad, some are good and some are indifferent. To paint them all with the same brush only highlights one’s ignorance and, of course, one’s political leanings. Here’s a question: Is there “black trash”? I’ve not seen it written anywhere. Perhaps that term is too politically incorrect or maybe black guys don’t hunt. But they sure do own guns and they have religion. It’s an enigma.