Webb was
born in 1935 on a hardscrabble farm in northern New Brunswick,
where his father and grandfather guided. Most of the good salmon
rivers at the time were leased through game clubs to wealthy
Americans. Guides spent the summer on the rivers with anglers,
the fall hunting black bear and the winter and spring cutting
and hauling logs in the lumber camps. “It was a subsistence
living, but a pretty good living,” recalls Webb. “Anybody
unemployed was too goddamn lazy to work.”
What brought him out of that world
was the army. Enlisting at age 17, Webb trained as a paratrooper,
married while on leave and just missed getting sent to Korea.
Shortly after his discharge, he trained as a radio officer and,
starting in 1956, spent much of the next 10 years travelling
to the Arctic to map routes for submarines and conduct scientific
research.
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| One
tough guide: Webb on a 1974 hunt |
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It
was his wife, Irene, who got him back to guiding. Webb had been
doing a bit of guide work in between expeditions, yammering
to her as men will about his dream of working for himself. Irene
finally told him to put up or shut up. Webb wavered. The radio
work was interesting and offered a steady paycheque. But being
a full-time guide offered freedom, although that included the
freedom to starve.
His sons finally tipped the scales.
Webb’s first two children had been daughters, but in the
mid-1960s a pair of boys came along. “I wanted the boys
to be brought up hillbillies rather than city slickers,”
he says. So they sold their little house in Moncton and moved
to the Tobique River in the west of the province, settling on
a 100-acre stump farm that had been in the Webb family for generations.
“There’s a helluva lot of drawbacks to having your
kids go 70 miles a day on a school bus,” says Webb, “but
when they did come home they’d go in the house to change
their clothes and head up over the hill to their trapline.”
His youngest son, Martin, eventually
joined the family business, much to Webb’s gratification.
But that lay far in the future. Back in the 1960s, Webb was
just trying to keep the wolf from the door. He guided for other
outfitters, ran a trapline, hustled for customers for his own
small outfit and still had to spend a couple of winters doing
radio officer work. Slowly throughout the 1970s, his own business
grew. Webb got more salmon-fishing and bear-hunting clients.
He branched out into deer and grouse hunts and bobcat hunts
in the winter. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, he was running
camps all over New Brunswick.
It was about this time that Webb
first tried to branch out into tourism, making his services
available to the canoeists and cross-country skiers then venturing
for the first time into New Brunswick’s backwoods. He
wasn’t abandoning hunting (two decades later he’s
still got a grudge against the unfortunate writer from “some
goddamned birdwatching magazine” who mistakenly referred
to him as a “reformed hunter”). Tourism was intended
solely as a backup. 
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