Mitten Lake Hunt Camp 25^th Anniversary 

By LW Oakley

When William Faulkner was told he had won the Nobel Prize his response carried in newspapers across the land: “I can’t get away. I’m going deer hunting.” From Where Men Hide by James B. Twitchell

In 1986 three friends pooled their money and went looking for a hunting camp. Their first stop was a run down one room old abandoned house near Kaladar.

Gerry Moore from Centreville walked in, turned around and asked Jack McNamee from Napanee, “Which of the other two camps do you want to see next?”

When Jack replied, ‘Let’s buy this one,” the Mitten Lake Hunt Camp began.

Since that moment 25 five years ago generations of big bucks have come and gone from the woods beyond Mitten Lake but those two original members still hunt from the ‘old camp’ standing along highway 41 about five miles south of Kaladar.

They shot one deer that first year and at least one every year since. The members are proud of their history of successful hunts since not all camps can say “we’ve never been skunked.” Each year the name of the member or guest who shoots the biggest deer is engraved on the Glenn McNamee Memorial Trophy which leaves the camp only to be engraved.  

In the early years there were no four-wheelers, walkie-talkies or Global Positioning Systems to help them find runways, watches and the way back to camp. They learned the woods the hard way – by walking and looking and getting turned around, and walking and looking again and getting lost, and walking and looking some more until they remembered and connected it all in their minds and found their way through the woods and back to camp.

While learning the woods they gradually made the camp bigger and better. They added bunk rooms, out houses, dog kennels, wood sheds, bike sheds, a shower shed and a meat pole where the best but not last ritual of a successful hunt is performed.

Like other hunting camps the center of the Mitten Lake Hunt Camp is the kitchen table. Since I joined in 1999 we usually sit around that table when we’re not hunting, working or sleeping. We  sit on an assortment of chairs around a big wooden table scarred with cigarette burns and play cards, plan hunts, hold meetings, eat meals, drink whiskey and most important of all tell stories.

Hunters are the greatest story tellers of all time because we where the first story tellers around fires inside caves and are among the last since story telling has become a lost art.

Our stories have been passed down around that table to a younger generation who sit and listen in awe and silence. Each of them will return from the woods one day in blood stained boots and sit at that table and tell a story of their own. This occasion is a hunting camp rite of passage comparable to baptism but much older. From that day on the storyteller will also be called a hunter.

In our hunting camp at night after everyone climbs in their bunks and the lights are turned off, something very unusual occurs--something that I believe never happens in any other hunting camp in Canada. I read a bedtime story by flashlight to grown men until everyone falls asleep.

The favourite camp bedtime stories are by two famous American writers, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Not because they both won the Nobel Prize for literature, but because they wrote true stories about hunting and wild animals.

But stories don’t make a hunting camp successful or keep it together especially for a quarter century. Even a shared passion for hunting is no guarantee that a camp will last.   

Putting the camp first over any one person has been a key to our survival all these years. Whenever we have a problem the solution becomes obvious when someone asks, “What’s best for the camp?”

But the bond that holds the ten of us together now is hard work. We work together like a team and a family with everyone contributing in some way. We work hard because we want to belong to a hunting camp. We have found a second home at the camp and a way of life in the woods beyond.

It gives us a place to go. It gives us a place to look forward to going to. And most important of all it gives us a place to remember and be remembered when we’re gone.

As I grew older belonging to a hunting camp gradually became a more important part of my life. Then one day I said something to myself that my friends and family probably had known for a long time, “It’s who I am.” 

And I know it will stay that way until I disappear like the big bucks that have come and gone before me in the woods beyond the Mitten Lake Hunt Camp.