TOUT LE MONDE À TABLE
Welcome to the Quinan Wild Game Evening and Auction, an annual Nova Scotian tradition celebrating local Acadian and Indigenous connections to the land
Welcome to the Quinan Wild Game Evening and Auction, an annual Nova Scotian tradition celebrating local Acadian and Indigenous connections to the land
IF THE BLACK BEAR had killed his grandfather, George Doucette might not have learned how to hunt. As family legend goes, Alfred “Alphée” Meuse, a licensed professional hunter and fishing guide in southwestern Nova Scotia, was checking his traps in the early 1960s. Meuse wasn’t expecting quarry or carrying his gun, so was startled to discover a black bear caught in one heavy iron claw trap. Meuse swung at it with his axe but the bear lunged. The hunter stumbled backward as a giant paw swept toward him — the trap’s heavy chain held at the last second. “My grandfather escaped a close call,” says Doucette. “The bear had actually ripped his shirt.” Over the following decades, Meuse taught his grandsons how to hunt, fish and trap, training that would shape the future of their tiny hometown of Quinan, N.S. In this remote, rocky region, an intimate relationship with nature and centuries of wild food traditions have produced one of the hottest tickets in Atlantic Canada: the Wild Game Evening and Auction. And I scored one. DRIVING TOWARD QUINAN on a twolane highway leading westward along Nova Scotia’s sparsely populated southern shore, I whip past a crow perched on a porcupine carcass, a spooky glimpse from the corner of my eye. Green moss blows sideways off skinny trees clinging to rocks as I pass chilly lakes and southrunning rivers, creeks and sluices pockmarking this serrated coastline, its stony fingers of land reaching down into the Atlantic Ocean. This annual dinner has been held every year on the first Saturday in March for the past decade, run as an auctionplus-potluck to navigate strict provincial regulations against buying and selling wild meat. Back in the 1970s, a local schoolteacher named Ulysses Muise dreamed of building a community hall for Quinan. Some villagers called him crazy, but after three years of construction costing around $60,000, Club des Audacieux, or Club of the Daring Ones, opened in 1977. It hosted bingo and babysitting, weddings and funerals, as well as a popular summer picnic, but by the early 2000s, as young people moved away and businesses closed, it was falling apart. After a concert fundraiser ended in debt, a group at George Doucette’s family hunting camp came up with the idea of throwing a dinner featuring wild meat. “People like wild food and wild meats here,” says Doucette, 68. “So we started with that and it sold out in no time.” Doucette recruited all his brothers and sisters to help with the event, eventually bringing in one of his own sons, Ben, a 36-yearold professional cook, to help safely reheat the 40 or 50 pans of donated hot food in the building’s crammed ovens. Here, the region’s cultural mix of Acadians and First Nations, British and more recent émigrés is reflected in mounded dishes of grated-potato rappie pie, barbecue deer ribs, thinly sliced Canada goose with pineapple sauce and prehistoric-looking moose bones in giant stewing pots. From hunting and trapping traditions of the Mi’kmaq to cabin and lodge culture embraced by more recent arrivals, the geography of southwestern
Nova Scotia shapes the wild food available here, and shapes a relationship with nature — and neighbours — at risk of being lost in urban Canada.
THE WEATHER MIGHT be grey and chilly but the mood in this hall is bright, as are volunteers’ highlighter-yellow T-shirts. The room echoes with fiddle music, shouting and laughter, and smells like roasting meat and freshly baked bread. A majestic buck strides out of the mist on my paper ticket, one of only 325 printed, and one of the hardestwon in the region. The chance to attend hinges on prospective diners’ willingness to donate — either wild meat or items for the silent auction — or a personal connection to a donor: they snap up nearly 90 per cent of tickets before the remainder go on sale. Despite organizers increasing the number of tickets and the price from $10 to $25, the event has sold out every year since it started in 2006. “Food was a fundamental foundation used for fundraising by our ancestors, and remains so in many Canadian communities today,” wrote historian Dorothy Duncan in her book Canadians at Table. Primarily based around local food or well-loved foods available in large quantities, many rural Canadian suppers of baked beans, turkey, lobster, ham and chicken remain common, while some — such as Ontario oyster suppers, which enjoyed a boom in the late 1800s — have disappeared. In Canada, most non-indigenous settlers have likely hunted or trapped for only a handful of generations. Legal hunting, after all, requires legal access to land, which working-class Europeans likely didn’t have access to before arriving here. Yet these traditions are now profoundly intertwined with identity in many rural communities. Often seen as primarily male activities, passed down from father to son or uncle to nephew, the hunting for and cooking of wild game provides a sense of legacy, says Thomas Dunk, a sociology professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont. He worked in a paper mill and grain elevator i n Ontario and British Columbia before attending university and turning his research interests toward masculinity, environment and social class. It doesn’t matter, he says, that it’s possible — not to mention cheaper — to get meat at the grocery store and that subsistence traditions are unfamiliar for most non-indigenous Canadians. The meaning is largely in the ritual: overnights at hunting cabins, days spent walking slowly through the forest and community-bonding culinary feasts such as this supper. The downstairs bar opens at 2:30 p.m., although the lineup starts well before. Throughout the morning and early afternoon, huge volumes of food are delivered
The hunting for and cooking of wild game provides a sense of legacy.
and reheated. Two volunteers lug 20 kilograms of potato salad alongside 10 moosemeat meatloaves in aluminum trays; they’ve been cooking since early this morning. Club president Edmond Dulong presides over a table of water bottles. How much? “A smile,” says Dulong, grinning. As jangling, swooping Acadian folk songs echo throughout the hall, the tableau of the silent auction unfolds downstairs. “We have a generator, a power saw, a quilt,” says Dulong. Men with camo baseball caps sip light beer and spear homemade deer pepperoni and pieces of fast-fry moose steak with wooden toothpicks, browsing items. Most avoid the $50 sex shop gift certificate. Also up for grabs is five litres of local maple syrup, a handmade paddle with the image of a duck wood-burned on it, a drum and a small oil painting. Jeff Purdy is a Mi’kmaq band councillor from nearby Acadia First Nation. This is his first year attending the game supper; he bought tickets through a friend. Like generations before him, Purdy hunts moose, deer and bear, and has trapped for “just about every fur-bearing animal out there,” including beavers, otters, bobcats and coyotes. He says this meal is a good example of the community-building needed to keep the region vibrant. Seeing young people in this crowd, Purdy, who leads Mi’kmaq youth hunting trips to Cape Breton, says the passing-on of traditions, including hunting and fishing, is something he finds intensely hopeful. “Anything that gets our next generation away from their cell phones and computers,” he says, “teaching them how to call a moose, take them fishing, is good.” As diners are called upstairs 50 at a time, platters, identified by bright signs, are piled high with meats of varying brown and reddish hues. A vivid orange lobster claw floats on the surface of the most beautiful, brimming seafood chowder I’ve ever seen. “If you take a little bit of everything, you won’t have room on your plate,” warns Dulong, yet I accept big scoops of three varieties of glutinous rappie pie: pheasant, rabbit and quahog clam. The bear ribs are sublime, while porcupine and muskrat (labelled “marsh rabbit”) are an acquired taste I do not acquire. The evening draws to a close with the announcement of the winner of the 50-50 draw — nearly $700 — as serving platters and tables start to empty.
The event’s volunteers seem wilted but satisfied. Once the receipts are tallied, Doucette says the meal raised more than $13,000, which will help keep this hall and event alive. “People keep telling me, ‘If it wasn’t for you, this wouldn’t be happening,’ ” he says. “And I say, ‘No. We’re a committee. This is not a one-man show. It can’t be, never will be.’ But I’m not going to do it in my 90s.” As long as he’s able to rally enough help, he says, the dinner will go on.
The orange sun plummets toward the ocean as I drive home, away from the village back along the coast. As the sky dims to purple, two ducks rocket off the water and careen into the distance. Just before they drop behind the treeline, it’s easy to imagine the echoing blast of a successful shot.