by Jim Harrison
The climate of inquiry was pleasanter in Leningrad, where a black market is active and there are more creature pleasures. I found a sporting goods store on the Nevsky Prospect where the clerks were affable. An electrical engineer I met there joined me for a number of drinks and explained that fishing in Siberia would be difficult. Permissions were necessary. Bird hunting would be difficult but not impossible. Since I find even mild queues a torment, I checked Russia off my list. It was sad, as I had visions of sitting at the edge of a swale taking a break from grouse with a chilled bottle of Stolichnaya and some blinis on which I would spread large amounts of beluga caviar, rolling them up like miraculous tacos.
I had another interesting failure down in Killarney, with wet May weather, on the banks of not even a secondary Atlantic salmon river, with a gillie whose language, ostensibly English, I couldn't understand. In the ceaseless rain I became convinced that he had been invented by someone who taught Irish literature. I admit I was dizzy from the dehydration brought on by a raging case of turista, an infirmity I pick up on the road, even in Tucson, Arizona. On one of my frequent trips to the bushes a lovely lady rode by on a horse, but in my position I didn't feel up to greeting her. So the gillie and I sat under a tree, mumbling and watching the rain. Then a hotel waiter appeared in a parka and asked what I wanted for lunch. The shock was so sweet that I ordered a six-pack of Guiness Stout and a bottle of Jameson. And watercress sandwiches in honor of the water. Booze is a sure tonic for any colitic problem. You can always get well when you get home and don't have anything else to do. Anyway, the language barrier dropped and the gillie invited me to go fox hunting with clubs. But I got up too late the next morning and missed the show. I could imagine them out there on a rainy hillside, a hundred fictional characters trying to club a real fox to death in the mud.
Outdoor sport has proven fatally susceptible to vulgarization based mostly on our acquisitiveness. Fishing becomes the mechanics of acquiring fish, bird hunting a process of “bagging a limit.” Most sportsmen have become mad Germans with closets full of arcane death equipment. To some, an ultimate sport would be chasing coyotes with a 650cc snowmobile armed with an M-16. And some have found that baseball bats work as well, as a coyote can't run more than twenty miles and a snowmobile has a superior range.
You suspect that the further hunting and fishing get away from our ancient heritage of hunting and gathering, the better. And I don't mean the Native Americans, the Indians, who had the mother wit to understand that “the predator husbands his prey.” Hunger causes the purest form of acquisitiveness, but our tradition always overstepped hunger into the fields of hoarding and unmitigated slaughter. The saddest book printed in our time is Peter Matthiessen's Wildlife in America, where the diminishing and disappearance of many species are minutely traced to our greed and game hoggery. Sporting magazines still publish those obscene photos of piles of trout, though there does seem to be a change in the air. The dolt who stands smiling before the 100 crows he shot should be forced at gunpoint to eat them, feathers, beaks, feet and offal. The excuse is that crows eat duck eggs, as if crows were supposed to abandon a million-year food source because some clown has taken Saturday morning off for a duck hunt.
Any sense of refinement steps slowly into the mind of the sportsman, and every advance made to improve the ethics of sport by organizations such as Trout Unlimited or the Grouse Society is countered by thousands of examples of boobery, murder and exploitation. Each state has a professional natural resource staff, but so often their efforts are countered by what are called the beer-bottle biologists in the legislatures, who think of hunting and fishing as some sort of patriotic birthright, something they know intimately by osmosis. You see the same thing out west with townspeople who've never been on a horse assuming they are all-knowing because they arc Westerners.
I know a plain of about 500 acres near the Manistee River. We often begin a day's hunt there, and my image of grouse and woodcock shooting is inextricably tied up with this great, flat pasture, cut near the river by a half-dozen gullies choked with thorn apple and cedar trees. On our long walk to the grouse cover near the river, we hunt a small marsh that invariably yields a few woodcock and snipe. You are lucky if you connect with one shot out of five. It is always early in the morning: cold, often wet, with the shotgun barrels icy to the fingers. The same location means nothing to me in the summer before the frost has muted the boring greenness.
Part of the pleasure of bird hunting is that it comes after the torpor of summer: beaches, the continuous sound of motorboats, the bleached air of August, a tendency to go to too many parties and to experiment with drinks an honest bourbon addict finds abominable in the winter. (A drink of my own devising I call the Hunter Thompson Special: take juice left over from stewed figs, add ground lime rind, a jigger of bitters and eight ounces of cheap tequila, one gram of hash, powder from three Dexamyl spansules and a cherry bomb for decoration to an iced mug; stir vigorously with either end of a cue stick. This is the only aphrodisiac I've ever discovered. It will also remove warts and give you an interior suntan.)
And there is the color, the hardwoods sinking their juices into the ground before the horror of a Michigan winter. This stunning transformation of leaves creates colors that would look vulgar on a woman. It looks good on trees, and with the first cool days of autumn you find yourself hunting grouse and woodcock. You have given up duck hunting as too sedentary. Besides, you have to get up at dawn, while mid-morning is plenty early for grouse. So you walk around in the woods for a month and a half. Unfortunately, the steelhead fishing is good during the same period, but you can't afford to divide your attention. An obvious boon in a writer's life is that he can concentrate his work into the months when no suitable sport is available. Surely it is a dream world; the nearly thundering flush and the always difficult shot. Grouse are very fast and the cover is heavy. If your shooting isn't trained as a gut reaction you simply miss, and when you miss a grouse you lose a very good meal. I suppose I especially value this form of shooting because I lost an eye in an accident and it has taken me years to reach even average competence.
The symptoms of all the vaunted instabilities of artists tend to occur in interim periods. It is the mental exhaustion of having just finished a work, and the even more exhausting time of waiting for another set of ideas to take shape. Poetry and the literary novel are a desperate profession nowadays—they probably always were—and any satisfying release seems to be desperately energetic. You tend to look for something as intricately demanding as your calling so you can forget yourself and let it rest.
Fly-fishing for trout offers an ideal match of the exacting and the aesthetically pleasant: to sit by a stream during the evening hatch and watch what trout are feeding on, then to draw from the hundreds of variations in your fly boxes a close approximation and catch a few trout. It's easily the most hypnotic of the outdoor sports. Once we began fishing in the Middle Branch of the Ontanagon at dawn. I was numbly depressed from having finished my second book of poems and had been sleepwalking and drinking for weeks. My friend, who is equally maniacal and has no pain threshold that is noticeable, insisted we eat a pound of bacon, refried beans and a dozen eggs for strength. We fished nonstop then from dawn to dark at ten in the evening. It was a fine day, cool with intermittent light rains and enough breeze to keep the mosquitoes away. I remember catching and releasing a half-dozen good brook trout from a pool where a small creek entered the river. We saw deer and many conical piles of bear shit that gave us pause, but then our local bears are harmless. We watched the rare and overwhelming sight of two adult bald eagles flying down the river course just above our heads, shrieking that we didn't belong there.
To perhaps lessen the purity of the day, I admit at nightfall we drove 100 miles to a whorehouse across the Wisconsin border. The next night a local bumpkin of the Deliverance sort was waving an axe around at the edge of our fire, warning us not to steal any of his logs. We felt at ease—rather than a bow and arrows, we had a
rifle along.
This is a peculiarity of trout fishing—you can lose yourself completely for days at a time. If you feel your interest in women and the not-so-ordinary simplicities of sex waning, try getting on a horse and spending a week or two fishing up in the Absaroka Mountains of Montana. There are no women up there. Not even a little one. When you get back down to Livingston, a barroom tart invariably reminds you of the Queen of Sheba or Lauren Hutton. Unless you're careful, you can manage to get into a lot of pointless trouble. Of course, the same conditions can be imitated by going off to war, but it's not as much fun.
There is something about eating game that resists the homogeneity of taste found in even the best of our restaurants. A few years back when we were quite poor, lower-class by all the charts, we had a game dinner at our house. There were about twelve people contributing food, and with a check for a long poem I bought two cases of a white bordeaux. We ate, fixed in a number of ways, venison, duck, trout, woodcock, snipe, grouse, rabbit, and drank both cases of wine. I doubt you could buy the meal on earth.
The French, however, are marvelous at game cookery. Two years ago I spent a week up in Normandy covering a stag hunt at the invitation of a friend, Guy de la Valdène. His family has a chateau near St. George and a breeding farm for racehorses. You do not go to Russia to eat, and I had just returned from a hungry trip to Moscow and Leningrad. Other than the notion that stag hunting seemed to me the pinnacle of stylishness in mammal hunting, the memorable part of the week was the eating, a vulgar word for what took place nightly in a local auberge. Despite my humble background I found I enjoyed saddle of wild boar, or a 1928 Anjou with fresh pâté de foie gras in slabs, trout laced with truffles, côtelettes of loin from a small forest deer called a chevreuil, pheasant baked under clay with wild mushrooms. It all reminded me of the bust of Balzac by Rodin at the Metropolitan in New York, the evidence in his immense, bulbous face of his legendary interest in food and wine. But moderation only makes sense to those whom such food is continually available. The stag hunt itself began after dawn, and the animal was brought to bay by the hounds at twilight, when the master of the hunt dispatched the stag with a silver dagger after the manner of some six centuries. All day we had been sipping Château Margaux straight from the bottle and not feeling even vaguely boorish.
I suspect that many of the misunderstandings of sport are caused by those who write for the outdoor magazines, not the best of the writers, but by the generally venal texture of the majority of the work. Most of it is simply dead, full of fibs and outright lies repeated in hundreds of variations of the same story. There is the usual tale of the grizzly hunt where we are led to assume that the bear had spent its entire life hell-bent on murdering the author, rather than merely walking around in the woods looking for lunch. And no matter that the animal is shot at 200 yards, before it can see the hunter. I can remember an account when the grizzly was asleep, something to the effect that “I poured hot lead into Mister Dozin’ Bruin. It was the surprise of his life!” Certain macho aspects can be funny—a story titled “Bulls of the Midnight Pond” conceals an inflated account of an ordinary frog hunt.
The best outdoor writing is on the periphery of sport, in such writers as Edward Abbey, Peter Matthiessen, Ed Hoagland, John McPhee and a very few others. These writers are first of all artists and they deliberately avoid even a tinge of fakery. You learn slowly that to the extent that there is any pretension of expertise you don't own, or willful snobbishness, you lose it all and are simply another of millions of incompetents whose outdoor activities are very probably an extension of their sexual neuroses. It seems odd, but I know only one good writer who is truly a first-rate angler and wing shot, Tom McGuane. I hear Vance Bourjaily is good but have never met him.
After I'd read about African hunting for twenty years, it took a trip to Kenya and Tanzania to cure me permanently of any notion that I might hunt there except for duck and grouse. And it's not that a great deal of the hunting there by outsiders lacks validity, excepting the endangered and diminishing species.
It's simply that my time there more closely resembled a religious rather than a travel experience. In the Serengeti you get an eerie conviction of what the American West was like before we got off the boat. Perhaps I could have hunted there in the twenties or thirties, before it became apparent that the natural world was shrinking in direct proportion to our insults against it; almost as if this world were a great beast herself and she had demonstrably passed the midpoint of her life and needed the most extreme and intense care not to further accelerate her doom.
The problems of East Africa have been talked about and publicized to the saturation point, which has not in the least slowed the unnatural predation of new farms, overgrazing, poaching for skins, the tide of population, ivory smuggling for jewelers and to the Orientals who have the silly notion that ground ivory gives them hard-ons. Think of the boggling sexual vanity involved in killing a seven-ton beast for hard-ons. And it is not at all sure how long we can expect native populations who smarted under colonization to maintain game parks for wealthy Westerners, no matter how beneficial.
I came to the point rather early when I realized I was not much interested in shooting mammals. This does not mean I disapprove of others doing so. Maybe it's my squeamishness over gutting and cleaning a large animal, though I suspect my qualms would disappear if I needed the animal to feed my family. And deer hunting as opposed to bird hunting is difficult to do cleanly. We mammals are more sturdy than we assume. While a single pellet can bring a grouse tumbling down, both man and deer can crawl on for hours after Claymore mines, .357s, a half-dozen badly placed rifle shots. When they were butchering, it took seven unlucky shots for my neighbors to bring down their Holstein cow.
Last Thanksgiving Day during deer season we heard loud bleating, then barking, from up behind our barn. Our horses were frantic and stared in the direction of the woodlot like pointing dogs. The bleating was from a deer dragging itself through the snow by its forelegs. The deer had been wounded in the spine and a hind leg had been shot nearly off, barely hanging by a tendon. A large collie had been harrying the deer and had torn much of the deer's ass off. It was red as a baboon's. The game warden came and put it away. The deer was a young buck and lacked legal horns. Someone had shot the deer, then discovered it lacked legal horns. Before the game warden dispatched it, the deer in deep shock stared at us, seemingly well past caring, some kind of runaway slave that had fallen victim to our fatal hobbies.
It is finally a mystery what keeps you so profoundly interested over so many years. The sum is far more than simply adding those separate parts. In the restorative quality there is the idea that as humans we get our power from the beauty we love most. And the sheer, unremittent physicality makes you lose for a while those fuzzy interior quarrels your head is addicted to, sitting as it does on the top of a Western man. It is also the degree of difficulty: to outwit a good brown trout with a lure less than the size and weight of a housefly or mosquito, to boat and release a 100-pound tarpon on a twelve-pound test leader, to hit a grouse on that long shot between the poplar trees. It could be very sporting to hunt a lion if you had the balls to do it as the Masai do—with a spear.
The beauty and sensuosity of the natural world is so direct and open you often forget it: the tactility of standing in the river in your waders with the rush of water around your legs, whether deep in a cedar swamp in Michigan, or in Montana where you have the mountains to look at when the fishing is slow. With all of the senses at full play and the delicious absence of thought, each occasion recalls others in the past. It is a continuous present. You began at seven rowing your father around the lake at night, hearing in the dark the whirr of his reel as he cast for bass, the creak and dip of the oars and the whine of clouds of mosquitoes around your head. You might have been lucky enough to hear a loon, surely the most unique birdcall on earth, and see heat lightning silhouette the tips of the white pines and birch.
You think of this thirty year
s later in Anconcito, a small, shabby village on the coast of Ecuador. You're taking the day off from fishing, with heat weakness, vertigo, sore hands and the fear of death that being sick in a foreign country brings. You are sitting on a cliff next to a pile of refuse and a small goat. The goat is pure black and when it stumbles close you see that it can't be more than a few days old. The goat nuzzles you. Not thirty feet away a very large vulture sits and stares at you both. You stare back, idly listening to the Latin music from the tin-shed café in the background. A piglet scurries by. You, the goat and the vulture watch the piglet, and the goat takes chase. Far below you, so far that they are toys, there are fishing boats in the harbor powered anciently by sail. It is the hottest day you can remember. Beyond the harbor is ail the vast, cool, deep-blue plenitude of the Pacific.
1976
The Last Good Country
It all began quite accidentally. I wanted to go farther north than my northern Michigan home for a few days of rest from nothing, a condition of torpor that is the most exhausting of all human activities. So I loaded my old yellow Chevy pickup with gear and headed out for the Straits of Mackinac, deciding at the last moment to avoid the freeway by passing through Charlevoix and Petoskey. Just beyond Charlevoix I swerved by impulse onto a side road to drive over to Horton's Bay and Walloon Lake.
These place names are particularly resonant to anyone who cares about Ernest Hemingway because they are the locus for most of the Nick Adams stories, the author having spent the summers of his youth vacationing in the area. Despite the closeness I have only been in the locale once before in my adult life.