Up until that nasty business from the Arctic slid down into the Northern Rockies last week, I was getting lots of time in the field. The birds are plentiful on the hillsides near town.
But that doesn’t mean the hunting was easy.
That’s the thing. Hunting, serious hunting in pursuit of tough, cagey animals that make every moment in the field a challenge, induces in me and many others an almost narcotic, trance-like state. When I’m on the chase I’m different than the person who shows up for my day job in the classroom. Not a different person, just the same old dude delivered by experience to a different state of mind.
I’m referring to that state of bliss that comes from being in the moment. That’s not always an easy place to be in the modern world. Most of us work in jobs that are removed from the basic functions of survival by two or three degrees or more. For instance, we rarely gather our own food anymore. Today we garden or hunt, and those old jobs are categorized as recreation.
Modernity has its benefits. For one, good, salt-packed Sicilian anchovies are just a touchscreen (and credit card number) away no matter how remote your little cabin in the woods. Then there’s healthcare and cars that surround passengers with life-saving air bags and the amazingly light, yet powerful fly rods that make the stuff I learned to cast with in the 1980s feel like broom handles.
I’m all in on modernity, but that doesn’t mean it’s nirvana. We’ve created a busy, distracting world, one that can be tough to turn off. Hunting is the doorway I use to enter the other, the place where I reconnect with the natural world. And yes, that doorway involves pursuing wild animals and sometimes killing them. I know that bothers some who wonder why I can’t just commune with nature by taking a hike.
Or put another way, “Why does some poor critter have to pay a price for my existential angst?”
It’s a fair question, one that I haven’t developed a glib quip to brush aside. And that’s because it’s a question that shouldn’t be brushed aside. It’s a question that gets to the heart of hunting. Why do some of us step outside with the intention of killing our food as a way to reconnect with the natural world?
For me the answer is clear. Hunting, though modernity characterizes it as recreation, is really a form of work. In this case the work is food gathering. I’m sure our ancestors who first took up pointed sticks against wild beasts gained immense satisfaction from killing their first wooly mammoth or Irish elk. Still, that hunting wasn’t recreation, it was the most basic kind of work. And this kind of work, providing the basic necessities for survival, is about as intense as human experience gets.
For the modern hunter, basic survival usually isn’t on the line when we step out into the field. The unsuccessful hunter may drive past restaurants and grocery stores on the way home where there’s probably a fully stocked pantry. Modern hunting isn’t an act of survival, it’s a simulation of that act.
But what a simulation it is. In the field we reengage that part of us that we share with our hunter-gatherer ancestors. That hunter’s instinct is still buried in all our DNA, from the Safari Club trophy hunter to the most fervent anti-hunting, vegan eating, PETA endorsing activist. We are a species of hunters, and the act of hunting, of doing the work of meat gathering for ourselves, allows the expression of instincts and buried talents. Hunters read the land and smells and the wind. We do for “recreation” what we were once required to do to live. In this process of killing our own food we confront the essential reality of humanity: In order for us to survive, other life is sacrificed.
Modernity doesn’t make this not so, it just requires us to adopt a code of ethics and responsibility to guide each step of the hunt.