Game wardens in Gaspe carrying out a routine random check of a hunter along Mercier Road, within the town limits of New Richmond, about six kilometres north of the town's business area.
Armed gangs defending their turf. Death threats and torched property. Victims too fearful to go to police.
Sounds like another organized-crime offensive on the streets of Montreal. But the action is playing out in a more improbable setting: the backwoods wilderness of Quebec during hunting season.
Generations of hunters have turned to the rugged forest of the Gaspé Peninsula each fall to bag a moose, but an explosive growth in the number of animals, coupled with growing competition for hunting spots, has turned nature's idyll into a battleground.
Although Quebec sets aside vast swaths of Crown land for hunting, territory that in theory belongs to everybody, some take matters into their own hands to protect what they regard as their personal hunting spots.
The problem has come to a head on the Gaspé, where some 25,000 permit-holders descend in the forest in a nine-day firearm hunt lasting to late October. During that time, according to several officials and witnesses, a supposedly public playground gives way to roadblocks, armed patrols and less-than-subtle warnings by rival hunting gangs to keep out.
Some hunters are tasting the woods' frontier justice firsthand. Michel Guénette is a 54-year-old truck driver who has been hunting in the Gaspé since he was a boy. Last year he discovered his family's six trailers incinerated, with empty canisters of propane lying amid the rubble. When he showed up for the hunt this year, his tree blind was trashed.
"Things have gone too far. It's gotten to the point where you're being threatened with rifles," Mr. Guénette said this week from his home in Granby, Que. One of his brothers stayed away from the family's annual hunting party this year, prompted by his anxious wife who fears it has become too dangerous.
"There are places where you can't go any more because there will be 10 guys who consider it theirs and they're telling you you're entering at your own risk," Mr. Guénette said. "It's no fun. Something's gone wrong."
Mr. Guénette is an exception – he went to police, and the matter is now before the courts. Most victims are more discreet, worried about the possibility of retribution by fellow hunters who are, after all, armed, cloaked in camouflage and often fortified by alcohol.
"People have managed to impose a code of silence. It's practically like the Mafia in the woods," said Serge Le Roy Audy, president of the Quebec hunters' federation in the lower St. Lawrence region, which adjoins the Gaspé and where the problem also exists.
"I'd say 95 per cent of people won't complain. They're too afraid to have their tires slashed or their trailers burned," Mr. Le Roy Audy said. "When you've got guys doing their own patrols so no one enters their territory, it's just intimidation. They're laying down the law."
Tensions have ratcheted up to the point that the Quebec provincial police have stepped in, staging operations that have uncovered unlawful firearm possession and making eight arrests since October for intimidation, death threats and weapons violations; one involved a hunter who allegedly threatened a woman with a pellet gun because she came too close to his hunting spot. The Sûreté du Québec was back in the Gaspé woods on Thursday afternoon, carrying out car inspections and trying to make its presence felt.
"There are more and more hunters so we had to be more visible," police spokesman Claude Ross said. "There are tensions. We can't hide our head in the sand."
The problem is acute in the Gaspé because the promise of bagging a prized moose burns brightest there. The number of moose has grown sixfold in the region in the past 20 years, the result of ideal forest conditions and deliberate wildlife management policies by Quebec. The public forests of the region have the highest density of moose in the province – nearly one per square kilometre – a seductive lure for hunters seeking a prized catch (things calm down considerably with the arrival of deer hunting in late October).
Some hunters are starting to speak out, and the Quebec newsmagazine L'actualite recently wrote an exposé on the local "antler wars." Tensions are not limited to the region, however. Quebec game wardens report a proliferation of menacing Keep Out signs on public lands during the moose hunt elsewhere – including one with a skull-and-crossbones around Baie Comeau. Meanwhile, in Quebec's Lac St. Jean, two game wardens wearing raingear that covered their uniforms were unceremoniously warned by a group of hunters to get lost or else.
Not for nothing are game wardens in Quebec armed with 9 mm handguns and pepper spray – it's not to subdue the rabbits.
"You get people who have a drink, and they have a firearm. They can get aggressive. That's what starts to get dangerous, "said Paul Legault, a veteran Quebec game warden who heads the provincial group's union.
Quebec law says no one can impede a person trying to hunt legally, but simple math means it's highly unlikely scofflaws will get caught: The Gaspé has 26 to 45 game wardens, depending on who's counting, to patrol an area the size of Massachusetts.
But as the big-game hunt shut down in the Gaspé on Friday, hunting federations are trying to get a handle on the problem with a campaign politely inviting users to "share the forest." Hunters insist the vast majority of sportsmen and women in Quebec's forests are courteous and law-abiding. But the renegades are disturbing the peace in a place that, by its remote nature, depends on a measure of self-governance.
"When someone threatens to slit your throat, it's become serious," said Serge Bélanger, who is Mr. Guénette's brother-in-law and is a lifelong hunter. "Hunting was always a leisure activity, but now I'm not so sure any more."