The Guide - Hunter Relationship: A Partnership

I joined Lark's camp the week before the hunt and began to help with camp chores and attend to the baits and blinds. My intention was to work one week and hunt the second. I wasn't ready to give up hunting at this point. I still wanted to take a bear.

But as the week progressed, I began to feel a proprietorship over the 15 or so baits and stands I had been working. The bears were coming in regularly and their personality traits began to become evident to me.

Lark taught me how to read the signs the bear would leave, and gradually I was beginning to learn to make the important distinctions as to the performance of each bear. I began to tell a shy bear from and aggressive bear, a pattern of feeding, and a pattern of approach. I began to know the bears and how to get a shot at them.

I worked the baits with Dave Marsh and Lark, then by myself. Each day I felt I was more in control of what was happening and more inclined to want to see it through. Towards the end of the week, I decided to drop out of the hunt and simply guide.

Lark had told me that once the hunters arrived, the hard and at times gruelling work of tending baits and blinds would become exciting. We would begin to share in the excitement of the hunt as a guide. So it was. I recall the first evening. It was a miserable day; rain, with a forecast for snow. Our baits were hot I recall having 8 or 10 baits being hit every day, and some even twice a day. The other baits tended by the others were doing the same. But the weather had abruptly changed. What would happen? Would the bears stop feeding? I was assigned five hunters. Lark asked me which baits to use. That was the the most responsibility I've ever felt in a hunting situation. I knew these men had paid big money to get a shot at a bear. Now, my judgement as to the better of the baits would impact on their hopes for success. I went over it with Lark and he went with my choices. I recall the adrenaline pumping in me as I brought the men to their baits. I knew, if the weather didn't change things, they were going to score.

That night, three of my five did. Lark assigned me two more hunters, and both were sucessful. In the end, six of my seven hunters got their bears.; all had shots, and the seventh took a bear on one of the other stands. As each day's hunt took place, I felt a tranquil satisfaction. I felt like each kill was in part mine. I knew I helped get the kill, I was a part of each man's hunt, each man's success. I felt we were partners in the complex task of hunting a bear in Northern Ontario.

The partnership between hunter and guide is real. The guide does one thing, the hunter, another. The guide is not more important than the hunter, nor the hunter more important than the guide. Both need each other. The guide converts a bear habitat into a huntable zone. He converts random bear activity into reasonably predictable activity. He cuts the percentages to the hunter's favour.

But the hunter does the hunting. The hunter spends the many hours in the bush. The hunter endures the flies and the mosquitoes, the aching backs, the self doubt, and all that goes with the the mental and emotional strain of bear hunting from a blind. S/He is the one who makes the final, decisive, and lethal judgement. S/He sizes up the bear, waits him out, looks into the kill zone and squeezes off the shot, or releases the arrow. His or her control, discipline, nerve, and skill translate into the kill. She or he is far more than a trigger. S/He performs the consumate act of taking the game. The guide guides, sets up the possibility; the hunter actuates it, one way or another.

Hunter and guide both share in the taking of the bear's life with the responsibilities and debts, its joys and lasting remembrances.

The Philosophy Department of the College of Arts and Sciences, with two endowed chairs and 14 full-time faculty, offers degrees at all levels. Its strengths lie in history of philosophy, philosophy of religion, ethics, and social and political philosophy. Three Jesuits (Michael Barber, John Kavanaugh, and William Rehg) teach full-time in the department and three teach part-time (Garth Hallett, George Kennard, and Harry Klocker). The chairman of the department is Rev. Theodore Vitali, C.P.