Ontario 5

Listen to Ontario 5, a 37-year-old man from Sturgeon Falls, West Nipising, Ontario, Canada. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 37

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1970

PLACE OF BIRTH: Sturgeon Falls, Ontario, five hours north of Toronto

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: French Canadian

OCCUPATION: electrician and owner-operator of a mining contracting company

EDUCATION: high school

AREA(S) OF RESIDENCE OUTSIDE REPRESENTATIVE REGION FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS:  N/A

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH: N/A

The text used in our recordings of scripted speech can be found by clicking here.

RECORDED BY: Mark Ingram

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 2007

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

Uh, ‘K, I’m a 37-year-old man. I’m a French-Canadian. I was born and raised in a small farming community uh, about five hours north of Toronto. I have a Grade 12 Education Diploma, and I also attended trade school. I am an electrician by trade, and I’m also an owner and operator of a mining contracting company. Jeff asked me to do this interview, and also asked me to tell a bit of a story, and uh, the story I decided to talk about was my hunting trip this year and maybe a few years, but if I take too much time then I’m gonna run out of minutes.  So this hunting thing started for me about eight years ago. I have a friend that approached me, see if I wanted to go moose hunting with him, so, uh, I was kind of reluctant because I had just started the business and I didn’t have too much time to go hunting, but I decided that maybe I could just to please him, and decided to go with him.  So, anyway, to make a long story short, we’ve been hunting together for the last eight years, and we’ve been moose hunting.  So, this year moose-hunting season was pretty well the same thing; it’s, uh, we have a big motor home, and our wives come with us. There’s three couples, and, uh, we have, uh, three stands in the bush.  We have a campsite where we park the motor home and a little tarp shed that we use for a sauna bath; we have a wood stove in there.  Well the tree-stand, it’s um, it’s a, it’s a tree stand; that’s exactly what it is. It’s built in the trees we have. In the area where we hunt we have three of those, and, uh, we have, uh, we have to go down on water. We go six miles on water with the boats and the canoes. There’s a couple of portages we have to do. We have to go over the beaver dams with the boats and the canoes.  So the tree stand is about, uh, 20 feet up in the air.  It’s basically just a wooden platform with the railing around it.  We usually go there during the week before the moose season opens up, and this year it was October the 8th. So we go there and put some plastic around the, uh, what we call our tree stand; we put a tarp on the roof.  We go there; we bring our sleeping bags; we bring a lunch; moose seasons opens up on the Saturday, so usually on the Friday night what we’ll do is sleep in our tree stand.  Uh, there’s no stove and um, there’s no heaters.  All we have is our sleeping bags, and we have a little butane stove to warm up the soup, and that’s about it.  So the first night we sleep in the tree stand and hopefully it’s gonna be nice and crispy and cold cause that’s when the moose starts to move.  So on the first day this year we did exactly that. We went down the river, and we set ourselves up in our tree stands.  At, uh, 7 o’clock, 7:30 in the morning, my buddy Leo, the moose-caller, started to call the moose, and, uh, we got some answers; the moose answered back, and we’re not sure if it was a moose because of the way it answered; it almost answered like a howling, like a wolf that was answering.  And, uh, all the year that I have been hunting, and Leo has been hunting longer than me, he’s been hunting for about 20 years or 25 years, and he never heard something answer that way.  So, uh, soon as he stopped calling, then the howling stopped.  He started calling again about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and the howling started again, and he started calling again at 6:30 in the afternoon, and the howling started again.  So at 9 o’clock at night we walked over to the next tree stand where we have another couple over there to have supper with them.  Coming back from our tree stand at 9 o’clock at night, it’s dark, a flashlight, and, uh, we could hear the howling again.  So we went to bed and, uh, rolled ourselves up in our sleeping bags.  And guess what? The next morning we get up, and sure enough it’s crispy and it’s cold.  There’s a frost all around the tree stand; there’s ice in the boat; there’s a little crust of ice around the swamp where we’re parked, and my buddy Leo, we started calling about 7:30 in the morning, and about 8 o’clock, 8:30, he yelled at me – or you don’t yell because you’re gonna scare the moose away – he tapped me on the shoulder and pointed with his finger; he says, the moose was out on the water, so I took my gun and my scope, and I looked, and I couldn’t see what it was, if it was a bull or if it was a cow. Now what we were hunting for was a bull because you have to have a bull tag or a cow tag and you can’t shoot anything you see, gotta shoot what the tag you got for.  So I looked in my scope, and I couldn’t see what it was, so I told my friend Leo I’m gonna go down the tree stand and take the bush cross-country and run to the canoe and take the boat down the river and try to get that moose.  So that’s exactly what I did, I went down the river with the canoe and, or the boat, and very slowly parked myself where I thought he was, and we couldn’t see anything.  But I heard some noise in the bush. I knew he was still there, but I though he was going away.  I heard some, I guess he was rocking his horns against the trees going, “dok, dok,” so then all of a sudden, uh, about 20 minutes later, I said, well, I’m kind of pissed off at myself because I said, well, I probably scared him away with all the noise I made going in the bush, so I took the paddle and I paddled up the river very slowly, and I went and set up in my tree stand, which is across the river from Leo, and the way we have our tree stands set up like I said before, we have three tree stands and the guy in the center sees both sides, so he sees one tree stand and he sees the other tree stand and he’s the one that does the calling. So roughly about an hour and a half later, I guess, I’m in the tree stand, and I got my head kinda down because I figured that we really screwed up; we made too much noise and that moose took off on us, and we couldn’t really see what it was, but I thought I heard some noise like a little grunt.  Now when the moose grunt it’s like, uh, he’s telling the cow that he’s on his way, and my buddy Leo when he calls that’s what he does; he imitates the cow, so the bull is coming to the cow.  So all of a sudden I thought I had heard some noise, so I start looking in the swamp there where I was, and I couldn’t see anything, and there was a bunch of small trees that were pretty high.  And about uh, oh, I would say about 500 yards I guess from my tree stand I thought I saw what looked like a moose horn sticking out of the, uh, of the trees, so I’m keeping an eye on that, and all of a sudden they start to move, so then I knew it was a moose, and it started to grunt again, and the grunt is different because he’s getting closer, so I waved to my chum or my calling partner, which is in the other tree stand, with my hands, because you can’t talk cause you’ll scare that thing away. So I’m just waving at him; so he sees me and I’m pointing towards the swamp, and I’m showing my hands up in the air, and I’m asking him to call with my hands; so sure enough he got the hint, so he started to call, and that moose started grunting again, so he’s moving, so he’s going, “oof, aah, oof, aah, oof, aah, oof, oof.” And then all of a sudden he stopped.  Then I could hear the trees being breaking, “pash, crash, baff, grash, baff, grash.” So again I waved at my buddy Leo on the other side with my hands, because you can’t yell at him to start calling again, so he did, so that moose started to move again, so all I could see is the antlers or the horns, just a little bit of them.  And as he’s walking, he’s walking, I could see more horns and more horns and more horns and I said to myself holy geez, that’s a big one, and sure enough it was a big one that came across so he came out in the opening roughly about 300, not 300 feet, so it’d be about 100 yards and I got a clear shot at him, so I put my rifle up and I took the shot, and down he went.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Faith Harvey

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 19/07/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY: N/A

COMMENTARY BY: N/A

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

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