It happened in Blanc-Sablon, in the old days. The daughter-in-law of the inhabitant whose house I had ended up on disembarking from Fort Mingan was shopping for a shotgun in a catalog, seated at the kitchen table. It was the birthday present she wanted to give her husband, and she talked about it the way one praises the merits of an electric drill or a set steak knives.
From time to time, blocks of ice drifting in the strait or steep ridges of rock to which the houses clung, the strings of detonations hailing the spring return of the common eiders, the “moyacs”, which the locals hunted right into the village. In the cauldron placed on a round of the stove, simmered the white partridge soup for dinner. And me, I could already see it, this rifle, passing from hand to hand in the kitchen, then finding itself leaning against the wall near the front door, as everyday as a utensil, part of life.
I thought about it this week when two well-known Canadians used the same word, “tool”, to describe firearms. “Hunting tools,” said pro hockey’s most expensive puck-stopping goaltender; then Pierre Poilievre, referring to the Christmas turkey hunt, came to the defense of the citizen who “uses his tools to feed his family”. With such a defender, here is the most famous member of the Ulkatcho nation associated with the fights of the deep right, in accordance with the reassuring simplicity of the following equation: you are leftist and progressive, you favor gun control ; if not, you’re ripe for the Donald-Trump patriotic militia which, somewhere north of Saskatoon, is preparing for the spread of the next American Civil War to the neighboring savannah.
Unlike a surprising number of people—including a few translators of novels—I can tell the rifle from the shotgun, and I understand the more subtle difference between an automatic and a semi-automatic. However, I took a look at the list of weapons that Bill C-21 wants to prohibit and a cat would not find her young there, or a cat her levrauts. You probably need to be a gunsmith or a collector to see clearly.
And it’s a question of culture, but here it is: we live in the era of culture wars, and the total bad taste of the campaign of the CCFR (Canadian Coalition for the Rights of Firearms) in this week of commemoration of the femicide massacre of December 6 recalls another provocation: the infamous NRA congress held in Houston last spring, three days after, in a small town in the same Texas, a shooter equipped with an assault rifle shot down 19 children like rabbits.
Weapons can be part of my culture, and they are. It’s when they themselves become a culture that we have a problem. If it’s a rifle with a look worthy of the tactical squad that makes you happy, maybe you have more the soul of a paramilitary militiaman than that of a trapper.
Hunting is steeped in a fundamental ambiguity, which could be translated into an oxymoron: a subsistence sport… In fishing, the distinction between the sportsman and the gourmet is clearer, because the former can always put a fish back in the water. that he imagines himself to be in good condition. As the hunter aims to kill. And if the precision of a shot and the satisfaction of an instinct of atavistic predation can provide pleasure, killing only ever generates an onslaught of complex emotions, unless you are a sadist.
The sensation one experiences with a loaded gun in one’s hands, that serious business, that lethal ability on the bowstring or at the end of the barrel, is the capital experience of hunting. And on the other hand, the counterpart of the taboo that surrounds all mortality today is the reduction of lethal violence to the disembodied aesthetics of a video game.
I don’t like all hunters. Here as elsewhere, the performance obsessed tend to hit me on the kidneys. Like this magazine contributor Quebec hunting and fishing which, at one time, gave the impression of confusing hunting table and statistics table. In October, he told us, his small game hunting trips brought him 2.7 partridges and 3.4 hares a day! We see the genre.
In fact, hunters who kill to eat interest me more than so-called sportsmen. Me, it’s not a twelve-caliber Benelli brand with a non-detachable magazine that I’m dreaming of at the moment, but the silent and surgical weapon that will allow me to gently collect the deer that comes to nibble the seeds of the birds. in my backyard, located in the middle of a residential area of a “normal” (so to speak) size town.
While elsewhere in Quebec, cows roam the woods, in Estrie, deer show up at feeders like pets. To save the planet, I am being asked to deprive myself of beef and soon adopt synthetic proteins, while all this beautiful wild meat in a situation of obvious overpopulation walks under my window. How not to think of a Chinese fondue?
The same goes for the excess bustards whistling in our ears. Local food is fashionable, we see chicken coops growing in the heart of cities. When will urban hunting be used to manage biodiversity?