by Shawn Blore photos by Robert Karpa and Fred Webb The Legend's Last Stand Gruff, opinionated and unapologetic, Fred Webb has been guiding hunters in the Arctic for 17 years now, and he’s not about to leave any time soon. Even if it means doing business with those flippin’ treehuggers Fred Webb likes to tell a story about the only time a gun ever failed him. He was guiding a pair of delicate New England girls through the backwoods of New Brunswick after feasting on a lunch of homemade beans and baking-powder biscuits. Combined with a case of extra yeasty home brew he had polished off the night before, the result was a truly prodigious quantity of gas. And stuck as he was in a canoe in the middle of a river, there was nowhere to discreetly make like a bear in the woods. But a true outdoorsman can always improvise. Webb decided to use the excuse of a bit of hunting to provide covering fire for a planned burst of flatulence, and then let the upstream wind take care of any fallout. He picked up his Remington, pumped in a shell, raised the gun at a pair of startled mergansers and, in his own words, “pulled the trigger and released the sphincter. Click. Ka-roar!” The gun misfired. The only sound was a full-bore blast from Webb’s nether regions, quickly followed by the girls’ peals of laughter.      The tale is vintage Webb: earthy, plausible (just) and with Webb himself the butt of the joke. His two published memoirs are full of such yarns (see “The essential Fred Webb”): the time he got stuck chipping a load of frozen pig carcasses out of the back of a camper van; the night he and his guiding crew shut up a know-it-all client—and self-proclaimed whisky expert—by pissing in his scotch; the war of practical jokes at a hunting trade show that escalated until a rival exhibitor’s slide projector was flashing up pornographic pictures. In his own stories, Webb comes off like a character from the John Steinbeck novella Cannery Row—the unrepentant, happy-go-lucky redneck, damn sure not going to bow to anyone.      Ask around hunting circles, though, and you hear about another Fred Webb. There they talk of Webb the perfectionist, Webb the detail man, safety-conscious to a fault, Webb who in five decades of guiding has led clients to grouse and salmon and deer, black and grizzly and polar bear, walrus, wolf, muskox, moose and caribou, and produced a slew of entries in the various hunting record books. “Fred’s a legend,” says fellow outfitter and record-holder Jim Shockey, “just an absolute legend.”      Long-time client Bill Cox has gone on numerous Webb hunts and even bagged a record-breaking muskox in 1998. What he emphasizes, though, is not Webb’s record for trophies, but his record for safety. “Fred hunts in such a hostile environment,” says Cox, pointing to a hunt in the Barrens when an unexpected gale collapsed their tent as they slept. “This is the Far North. These sorts of things happen. Make a mistake at the wrong time and you die. You can’t cheat it so you have to have people who understand that you have to prepare for problems and have the equipment there. These are the kinds of things that Fred, in my estimation, does better than any other outfitter. He gives you the opportunity to stay alive where other people would not.”      A visit with Webb at his home near Chase in the B.C. Interior reveals there’s at least one thing the safety nut, the legend and the redneck all have in common: a facility for plain speech. Not only does Webb indulge in the most politically incorrect language (in the quotes that follow, his use of a certain four-letter, Anglo-Saxon expletive has been substituted with the word “flip”), but he’s got an opinion on next to everything: on gun control (“This goddamn gun-control bullshit got in because most of Canada lives in six goddamn cities and no one gives a flip about the rural people who built this country”); on the threatened European ban on trophy imports (“The European Union? Who’s full of what? At the best a bunch of goddamn dumb Englishmen, and at worst all them flippers across the channel”); on kayaking, canoeing and other forms of ecotourism (“It’s recreation, it’s whatever the hell, but it flippin’ well isn’t tourism. Unless it’s a tourist who comes to town, hires your local people and spends goddamn money, that ain’t tourism”).      Of course, the fact that Webb’s language is profane doesn’t mean his opinions are easily dismissed (much less that he’s flipped in the head). Most of what he says is based on long experience. Ecotourism is a particular sore point. For 30 odd years he’s been trying to get at least one foot into the ecotourism game—trying and failing.   Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4