Ill Nature

by Joy Williams

  Carnage and waste are the rules in bird hunting, even during legal seasons and open hours. Thousands of wounded ducks and geese are not retrieved, left to rot in the marshes and fields. . . . When I asked Wanda where hers had fallen, she wasn’t sure. Cripples, and many cripples are made in this pastime, are still able to run and hide, eluding the hunter even if he’s willing to spend time searching for them, which he usually isn’t. . . . It’s one thing to run down a cripple in a picked bean field or a pasture, and quite another to watch a wing-tipped bird drop into a huge block of switchgrass. Oh nasty, nasty switchgrass. A downed bird becomes invisible on the ground and is practically unfindable without a good dog, and few “waterfowlers” have them these days. They’re hard to train—usually a professional has to do it—and most hunters can’t be bothered. Birds are easy to tumble. . . . Canada geese—blues and snows—can all take a good amount of shot. Brant are easily called and decoyed and come down easily. Ruffed grouse are hard to hit but easy to kill. Sharptails are harder to kill but easier to hit. . . . It’s just a nuisance to recover them. But it’s fun, fun, fun swatting them down. . . . There’s distinct pleasure in watching a flock work to a good friend’s gun. . . .

  Teal, the smallest of common ducks, are really easy to kill. Hunters in the South used to practice on teal in September, prior to the “serious” waterfowl season. But the birds were so diminutive and the limit so low (four a day) that many hunters felt it hardly worth going out and getting bit by mosquitoes to kill them. Enough did, however, brave the bugs and manage to “harvest” 165,000 of the little migrating birds in Louisiana alone. Shooting is usually best on opening day. By the second day you can sometimes detect a decline in local teal numbers. Areas may deteriorate to virtually no action by the third day. . . . The area deteriorates. When a flock is wiped out, the skies are empty. No action. Teal have declined more sharply than any duck species except mallard; this baffles hunters. Hunters and their procurers—wildlife agencies—will never admit that hunting is responsible for the decimation of a species; instead they will deliver these familiar and litanic lines: Hunting is not the problem. Pollution is the problem. Pesticides, urbanization, deforestation, and wetlands destruction is the problem. And drought! There’s been a big drought! Antis should devote their energies to solving these problems if they care about wildlife, and leave the hunters alone. While the Fish and Wildlife Service is busily conducting experiments in cause and effect, like releasing mallard ducklings on a wetland sprayed with the insecticide ethyl parathion (they died—it was known they would, but you can never have enough studies that show guns aren’t a duck’s only problem), hunters are killing some two hundred million birds and animals each year. But these deaths are considered incidental to the problem. A factor, perhaps, but a minor one. Ducks Unlimited says the problem isn’t hunting, it’s low recruitment on the part of the birds. To the hunter, birth in the animal kingdom is recruitment. They wouldn’t want to use an emotional, sentimental word like birth. The black duck, a “popular” duck in the Northeast, so popular that game agencies felt that hunters couldn’t be asked to refrain from shooting it, is scarce and getting scarcer. Nevertheless, it’s still being hunted. A number of studies are currently under way in an attempt to discover why black ducks are disappearing, Sports Afield reports. Black ducks are disappearing because they’ve been shot out, their elimination being a dreadful example of game management and managers who are loath to “displease” hunters. The skies— flyways—of America have been divided into four administrative regions, and the states, advised by a federal government coordinator, have to agree on policies. A lot of squabbling always goes on in flyway meetings—lots of complaints about short-stopping, for example. Short-stopping is the deliberate holding of birds in a state, often by feeding them in wildlife refuges, so that their southern migration is slowed or stopped. Hunters in the North get to kill more than hunters in the South. This isn’t fair. Hunters demand equity in opportunities to kill.

  Wildlife managers hate closing the season on anything. Closing the season on a species would indicate a certain amount of mismanagement and misjudgment at the very least—a certain reliance on overly optimistic winter counts, a certain overappeasement of hunters who would be “upset” if they couldn’t kill their favorite thing. And worse, closing a season would be considered victory for the antis. Bird hunting “rules” are very complicated, but they all encourage killing. There are shortened seasons and split seasons and special seasons for “underutilized” birds. (Teal were recently considered underutilized.) The limit on coots is fifteen a day—shooting them, it’s easy! They don’t fly high—knocking them down gives the hunter something to do while he waits in the blind for something better to come along. Some species are “protected,” but bear in mind that hunters begin blasting away one half hour before sunrise and that most hunters can’t identify a bird in the air even in broad daylight. Some of them can’t identify birds in hand either, and even if they can (#%’! I got me a canvasback, that duck’s frigging protected . . .), they are likely to bury unpopular or “trash” ducks so that they can continue to hunt the ones they “love.”

  Game “professionals,” in thrall to hunters’ “needs,” will not stop managing bird populations until they’ve doled out the final duck (I didn’t get my limit, but I bagged the last one, by golly . . .). The Fish and Wildlife Service services legal hunters as busily as any madam, but it is powerless in tempering the lusts of the illegal ones. Illegal kill is a monumental problem in the not-so-wonderful world of waterfowl. Excesses have always pervaded the “sport,” and bird shooters have historically been the slobs and profligates of hunting. Doing away with hunting would do away with a vital cultural and historical aspect of American life, apologists claim. So, do away with it. Do away with those who have already done away with so much. Do away with them before the birds they have pursued so relentlessly and for so long drop into extinction, sink, in the poet Wallace Stevens’s words, “downward to darkness on extended wings.”

  “Quality” hunting is as rare as the Florida panther. What you’ve got is a bunch of guys driving over the plains, up the mountains, and through the woods with their stupid license that cost them a couple of bucks and immense coolers full of beer and body parts. There’s a price tag on the right to destroy living creatures for play, but it’s not much. A big-game hunting license is the greatest deal going since the Homestead Act, Ted Kerasote writes in Sports Afield. In many states residents can hunt big game for more than a month for about $20. It’s cheaper than taking the little woman out to lunch. It’s cheap all right, and it’s because killing animals is considered recreation and is underwritten by state and federal funds. In Florida, state moneys are routinely spent on “youth hunts,” in which kids are guided to shoot deer from stands in wildlife management areas. The organizers of such events say that these staged hunts help youth to understand man’s role in the ecosystem. (Drop a doe and take your place in the ecological community, son. . . .)

  Hunters claim (they don’t actually believe it, but they’ve learned to say it) that they’re doing nonhunters a favor—for if they didn’t use wild animals, wild animals would be useless. They believe that they’re just helping Mother Nature control populations (you wouldn’t want those deer to die of starvation, would you . . .). They claim that their tiny fees provide all Americans with wild lands and animals. (People who don’t hunt get to enjoy animals all year round, while hunters get to enjoy them only during hunting season. . . .) Ducks Unlimited feels that it, in particular, is a selfless provider and environmental champion. Although members spend most of their money lobbying for hunters and raising ducks in pens to release later over shooting fields, they do save some wetlands, mostly by persuading farmers not to fill them in. See that little pothole there the ducks like? Well, I’m gonna plant more soybeans there if you don’t pay me not to. . . . Hunters claim many nonsensical things, but the most nonsensical of all is that they pay their own way. They do not pay their own way. They do pa
y into a perverse wildlife management system that manipulates “stocks” and “herds” and “flocks” for hunters’ killing pleasure, but these fees in no way cover the cost of highly questionable ecological practices. For some spare change . . . the greatest deal going. . . hunters can hunt on public lands—national parks, state forests—preserves for hunters!—which the nonhunting and antihunting public pay for. (Access to private lands is becoming increasingly difficult, as experience has taught people that hunters are obnoxious.) Hunters kill on millions of acres of land all over America that is maintained with general taxpayer revenue, but the most shocking, really twisted subsidization takes place on national wildlife refuges. Nowhere is the arrogance and the insidiousness of this small, aggressive minority more clearly demonstrated. Nowhere is the murder of animals, the manipulation of language, and the distortion of public intent more flagrant. The public perceives national wildlife refuges as safe havens, as sanctuaries for animals. And why wouldn’t they? The word refuge means shelter from danger and distress. But the foolish nonhunting public—they tend to be so literal. The word has been reinterpreted by management over time, and now hunters are invited into more than half of the country’s more than 440 wildlife “sanctuaries” each year to bang them up and kill more than half a million animals. This is called wildlife-oriented recreation. Hunters think of this as being no less than their due, claiming that refuge lands were purchased with duck stamps (. . . our duck stamps paid for it . . . our duck stamps paid for it). Hunters equate those stupid stamps with the mystic, multiplying power of the Lord’s loaves and fishes, but of ninety million acres in the Wildlife Refuge System, only three million were bought with hunting-stamp revenue. Most wildlife “restoration” programs in the states are translated into clearing land to increase deer habitats (so that too many deer will require hunting . . . you wouldn’t want them to die of starvation, would you?) and trapping animals for restocking and redistribution (so more hunters can shoot closer to home). Fish and game agencies hustle hunting. It’s time for them to get into the business of protecting and preserving wildlife and creating balanced ecological systems instead of pimping for hunters who want their deer/duck/pheasant/turkey—animals stocked to be shot.

  Hunters’ self-serving arguments and lies are becoming more preposterous as nonhunters awake from their long, albeit troubled sleep. Sport hunting is immoral; it should be made illegal. Hunters are persecutors of nature who should be prosecuted. They wield a disruptive power out of all proportion to their numbers, and pandering to their interests—the special interests of a group that just wants to kill things—is mad. It’s grotesque that every year less than 7 percent of the population turns the skies into shooting galleries and the woods and fields into abattoirs. It’s time to stop actively supporting and passively allowing hunting, and time to stigmatize it. It’s time to stop being conned and cowed by hunters, time to stop pampering and coddling them, time to get them off the government’s duck-and-deer dole, time to stop allowing hunting to be creditable by calling it “sport” and “recreation.” Hunters make wildlife dead, dead, dead. It’s time to wake up to this indisputable fact. As for the hunters, it’s long past checkout time.

  Cabin Cabin

  TED’S CABIN WAS 10 X 12. HE BUILT IT HIMSELF. WHEN HE wanted to go to town, which was Lincoln, Montana, which was five miles away, he pedaled there on an old bicycle. For errands farther away, as we know, he relied on public transportation. Ted’s cabin is intriguing. Plucked from its beautiful forested site near Montana’s Scapegoat Wilderness, which is near the Bob Marshall Wilderness, which is near nothing, it was taken to reside in a stark hangar at a former Air Force base in Sacramento, California. What do you think it’s thinking there, stored. It’s thinking, Where is he, where’s all my stuff, the 232 books, those typewriters, that manuscript, those little devices he was always fiddling with? It’s thinking, I harbored a fugitive. I’m an enabler, I’m an accomplice. I’m going to be sentenced and reduced to kindling, packed in little boxes and sacks and sold, the proceeds going to the victims’ families. The cabin’s thinking, I’m going to burn!

  The cabin, all wrapped like a Christo and transported to Sacramento on a flatbed truck, was to be used by the Unabomber defense in the case before the jurors. The argument would be that no one but a lunatic could live in such a primitive dwelling for so many years. Eighteen years! A 10 x 12 shack! Two little windows. No plumbing or electricity.

  Cozy, the cabin thinks. And it was lovely outside. Anyway, I never asked to be built.

  But the jurors never saw the cabin; they scarcely saw Ted. For Ted never got his day in court. He pleaded guilty in exchange for a life sentence because he did not want to go through a trial where his defense team would argue that he was insane, a “sickie” in Ted’s word.

  The victims’ families said they wanted Ted to rot in hell, the cabin thinks. Mean.

  The only place in Lincoln that is still selling Unabomber T-shirts is a boutique attached to the town’s Exxon station. Now, some people, oh just call us loony, never patronize Exxon stations because of Alaska’s Prince William Sound. One of the Unabomber’s targets was the ad company that managed to sanitize the corporation’s image after the disaster of a decade ago when the tanker, the Exxon Valdez, spilled eleven million gallons of crude that fouled thirteen hundred miles of shoreline and killed a quarter of a million birds and twenty-eight hundred sea otters.

  They still haven’t paid the five billion dollars they were supposed to, the cabin muses. They said paying it would send a “perverse message.”

  So this is a dilemma if you really want a Unabomber T-shirt but you’ve got principles too. The T-shirt has a black drawing of the cabin on it and says “Mountain Cabin Hideout of the Unabomber.”

  Not a hideout, a home, the cabin thinks.

  There’s a splotch of red, denoting Ted’s bicycle leaning against the cabin, which is a nice touch. Where’s that silly bicycle now? the cabin thinks. The library, which Ted frequented to read Omni and Scientific American, never sold T-shirts. If they had, they’d have a new research wing by now. He read Thackeray and Shakespeare too. The cabin remembers “The friend hath lost his friend.” That’s from King Lear.

  The cabin thinks, I agree with the Unabrother. Ted is a complex man.

  Ted never claimed to be a great writer, but at least he didn’t giddily anthropomorphize WILD Nature, which he loved and considered the corrective to technology’s horrid habits. “Nature, that which is outside the power of the system, is the opposite of technology which seeks to expand indefinitely the power of the system” (The Manifesto, paragraph 184). The Manifesto was 35,000 words long when it ran in the Washington Post in 1995 and was described by an editor there as a “romantic, turgid, disturbing document.” But it wasn’t all that bad to read. Ted thought he had to be reasonable in his writing, unemotional and precise. That other famous American cabin builder, Henry David Thoreau, thought he could get away with anything in his prose. “I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bedfellow in that part of Concord, as if it were . . . troubled with flatulence and bad dreams. . . .” He wrote that in Walden. Henry could be silly. Too, Nature was a business for Henry, an occupation, and his cabin-in-the-woods experiment has become one of the most overinflated of American myths. Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, was a simulated wilderness even back in 1845. The cabin was in view of the public road and its scribbling occupant had a constant stream of visitors. It wasn’t as though he had nothing but a farting pond for company. And he lived there for only two years before returning to the gabby salons of town. Henry estimated the cost of his cabin at $28.12 and went into great detail about its construction in his tiresome way so that there are hundreds, perhaps even thousands of clone cabins around today exactly like his, exactly 15 x 10 with brick fireplace, shingled roof and sides, wide board doors, and root cellar.

  No no no no, the cabin thinks. No clone we. We were unique.

  Massachusetts cabin. The term has no cachet.
It conjures a blank. Massachusetts cabin. Nothing. Now, a Maine cabin. People in and around a Maine cabin have cocktails by the flagpole, varnish the twig furniture, and bake blueberry muffins by the canoe load. Occupants of Alaska cabins carve fetishes out of moose droppings, listen to the permafrost melt, and dream about what they’re going to do with the money the state pays them each year just to live in Alaska. Idaho cabin . . . Now, this may not be fair, but I think of people just succumbing in Idaho cabins. I think of unpleasant accommodations being made. Remember the Hemingway story—it was one of the Nick Adams stories—where the peasant’s wife dies in the middle of winter and he props her up in the woodshed because the ground’s too frozen to bury her and he uses her open mouth to hang his lantern from every time he goes out to gather wood? That didn’t happen in Idaho, admittedly. It happened in the Italian Alps. And not only did it not happen in Idaho, it happened fictionally. But the story still possesses what Idaho cabin suggests. A glumness. (There is, of course, Papa’s final irrefutable association with Idaho.) I see all those Idaho cabins packed with potatoes and ready to serve shotguns and ennui. An Idaho cabin is just slightly off cabinwise, as is an Ozark cabin. But a Montana cabin . . . that is something other, way other. A Montana cabin gives shelter and substance to wild thought.

  I always thought I was his muse, but he’s still writing. Writing without me. Five hundred and forty-eight pages to be exact. In a prison cell yet.

  In May of 1998 Theodore Kaczynski was sentenced to four life sentences. (Don’t you ever wonder how that kind of immortality conferred works?) He had wanted to present a defense based on his views about technology and the environment, but his efforts to represent himself or be represented by a lawyer who would argue his chosen defense were rejected by the judge. In the fall of 1999, however, a federal appeals court agreed to hear his request to withdraw his guilty plea and receive a juried trial, even though this might very well result in a death sentence.