“There we go into detail, I don’t know if you want to go there,” says Olivier Lussier, bewildered at having to explain to a cultural journalist, in this case the antithesis of a wooden guy , the subtleties of the different types of rifle shooting, allowing you to kill a deer. “What you want is a heart shot or a lung shot. »
But one fine day, about fifteen years ago, a young Olivier, while trying to reach the heart of a deer, only left it paralyzed, slumped in all its fragility and in a pile of carrots.
“I had just severed his spine, he was still alive, but in distress,” recalls the 31-year-old hunter, still moved by this event which occurred when he was 16 or 17 years old. “It took three bullets before he was dead and right away I knew I was stopping the chase. I thought it made no sense to have made an animal suffer. »
“Shooting a deer is a lot easier in books than in real life,” he writes today in Cariacou, his “hunting manual for poets,” one of the most beautiful surprises in this literary return, both thanks to its fascinating subject and thanks to its form engaging on several paths, not to say trails.
An account of the author’s relationship with the age-old act of hunting, Cariacou also contains a recipe for venison Burgundy, childhood memories, historical chapters featuring Theodore Roosevelt, real hunting tips, and excerpts of The Laurentian Wildlife and its Economic Implications, the book by a certain J. P. André Pelletier, published in 1968.
Cariacou also contains – above all – poems, written on his phone with the tips of his frozen thumbs, by a guy who, while waiting for the little miracle of a game to manifest, documents everything that crosses his mind: “the depression that sets in quietly, hope, the loves that await us at home, the loves that we have lost, old brush stories and beautiful stories of little guys,” he lists.
“Poetry occupies the same place in the book as in my life: it is sometimes omnipresent, and sometimes completely absent,” continues the man who earns his living as an engineer and who came to writing late in life (even if he is never too late), being caught up in the impetuosity of the stage performances he attended in Sherbrooke, where he has lived since leaving his native town of Maricourt.
After taking time off from hunting for several seasons, following this tormenting teenage misadventure, Olivier Lussier reconnects with the woods by hearing about a disturbing experience from a lover. “She had gone hunting with Big Dave, a guy who is the stereotype of the hunter with the knife between his teeth and the big vein in his neck,” he remembers. He had killed a calf and it really bothered me. »
The poet then begins to reflect on the possibility of ethical hunting and swaps the rifle for the bow, “because it gives the deer a chance, because proximity to the beast increases the level of difficulty and because to have a projectile propelled by the force of my body, it made more sense.”
He thus develops his own code of honor, by combining his values with certain values inherited from his father, his grandfather and his uncles, men of whom he paints a rich and touching portrait, the antipodes of the boorish characters who have the hard life in the collective unconscious. A care corresponding to Lussier’s conviction that “people are always more complex than they seem”. It even happens that engineers become poets.
Honor Code? There is no question for Lussier, for example, of killing a mother deer, even if the law allows him to do so. Because in Cariacou, thinking about how we kill is above all thinking about how we live.
And although it would have been “easy to fall into the trap of idealizing the experience of the forest, the communion with nature”, Olivier Lussier gives an account, with much self-deprecation, of everything that hunting has to offer. boring (“We often get bored waiting in the fret,” he says) and “esoteric”, when the time to go home approaches and the harvest is late, “when the guys suddenly become very sensitive and begin to believe the influence of lunar cycles and atmospheric pressure.”
“Do you want me to give you something that’s not in the book? », asks the author with a little teasing smile. Um yes. “The important thing, if you want to shoot a deer, is to be sitting in the woods, not in your living room. The more time you spend sitting in the woods, the more likely you are to bag a deer. »
