Tales Of Lonely Trails (1996)

by Grey, Zane

  When lads grow up they become hunters, almost without exception, at least in spirit if not in deed. Early days and environment decide whether or not a man becomes a hunter. In all my life I have met only two grown men who did not care to go prowling and hunting in the woods with a gun. An exception proves a great deal, but all the same most men, whether they have a chance or not, love to hunt. Hunters, therefore, there are of many degrees. Hunters of the lowly cotton-tail and the woodland squirrel; hunters of quail, woodcock, and grouse; hunters of wild ducks and geese; hunters of foxes--the red-coated English and the homespun clad American; hunters--which is a kinder name for trappers--of beaver, marten, otter, mink, all the furred animals; hunters of deer, cat, wolf, bear, antelope, elk, moose, caribou; hunters of the barren lands where the ice is king and where there are polar bears, white foxes, musk-ox, walrus. Hunters of different animals of different countries. African hunters for lion, rhinoceros, elephant, buffalo, eland, hartebeest, giraffe, and a hundred species made known to all the world by such classical sportsmen as Selous, Roosevelt, Stewart Edward White.

  But they are all hunters and their game is the deadly chase in the open or the wild. There are hunters who hate action, who hate to walk and climb and toil and wear themselves out to get a shot. Such men are hunters still, but still not men! There are hunters who have game driven up to them. I heard a story told by an officer whom I believe. In the early days of the war he found himself somewhere on the border between Austria and Germany. He was invited to a hunt by personages of high degree. They motored to a sequestered palace in the forest, and next day motored to a shooting-lodge. At daylight he was called, and taken to the edge of a forest and stationed in an open glade. His stand was an upholstered divan placed high in the forks of a tree. His guide told him that pretty soon a doe would come out of the forest. But he was not to shoot it. In fifteen minutes a lame buck would come out. But he was not to shoot that one either. In ten more minutes another buck would come out, and this third deer he was to kill. My informant told me this was all very seriously meant. The gun given him was large enough in calibre to kill an elephant. He walked up the steps to the comfortable divan and settled himself to await events. The doe trotted out exactly on schedule time. So did the lame buck. They came from the woods and were not frightened. The third deer, a large buck, was a few moments late--three minutes to be exact. According to instructions the American killed this buck--a matter that took some nerve he said, for the buck walked out like a cow. That night a big supper was given in the guest's honor. He had to eat certain parts of the buck he had killed, and drink flagons of wine. This kind of hunting must be peculiarly German or Austrian, and illustrates the peculiar hunting ways of men.

  A celebrated bear hunter and guide of the northwest told me that for twenty years he had been taking eastern ministers--preachers of the gospel--on hunting trips into the wild. He assured me that of all the bloody murderers--waders in gore, as he expressed it--these teachers of the gospel were the worst. The moment they got out into the wild they wanted to kill, kill, kill. He averred their natures seemed utterly to change.

  In reading the books of hunters and in listening to their talks at Camp-fire Club dinners I have always been struck with the expression of what these hunters felt, what they thought they got out of hunting. The change from city to the open wilderness; the difference between noise, tumult, dirt, foul air, and the silence, the quiet, the cleanness and purity; the sweet breath of God's country as so many called it; the beauty of forest and mountain; the wildness of ridge and valley; the wonder of wild animals in their native haunts; and the zest, the joy, the excitement, the magnificent thrill of the stalk and the chase. No one of them ever dwelt upon the kill! It was mentioned, as a result, an end, a consummation. How strange that hunters believed these were the attractions of the chase! They felt them, to be sure, in some degree, or they would not remember them. But they never realized that these sensations were only incidental to hunting.

  Men take long rides, hundreds and thousands of miles, to hunt. They endure hardships, live in camps with absolute joy. They stalk through the forest, climb the craggy peaks, labor as giants in the building of the pyramids, all with a tight clutch on a deadly rifle. They are keen, intent, strained, quiveringly eager all with a tight clutch on a deadly rifle. If hunters think while on a stalk--which matter I doubt considerably--they think about the lay of the land, or the aspect of it, of the habits and possibilities of their quarry, of their labor and chances, and particularly of the vague unrealized sense of comfort, pleasure, satisfaction in the moment. Tight muscles, alert eyes, stealthy steps, stalk and run and crawl and climb, breathlessness, a hot close-pressed chest, thrill on thrill, and sheer bursting riot of nerve and vein--these are the ordinary sensations and actions of a hunter. No ascent too lofty--no descent too perilous for him then, if he is a man as well as a hunter!

  Take the Brazilian hunter of the jungle. He is solitary. He is sufficient to himself. He is a survival of the fittest. The number of his tribe are few. Nature sees to that. But he must eat, and therefore he hunts. He spears fish and he kills birds and beasts with a blow-gun.

  He hunts to live. But the manner of his action, though more skilful, is the same as any hunter's. Likewise his sensations, perhaps more vivid because hunting for him is a matter of life or death. Take the Gaucho of Patagonia--the silent lonely Indian hunter of the Pampas. He hunts with a _bola_, a thin thong or string at each end of which is a heavy leather-covered ball of stone or iron. This the Gaucho hurls through the air at the neck or legs of his quarry. The balls fly round--the thong binds tight--it is a deadly weapon. The user of it rides and stalks and sees and throws and feels the same as any other hunter. Time and place, weapon and game have little to do with any differences in hunters.

  Up to this 1919 hunting trip in the wilds I had always marveled at the fact that naturalists and biologists hate sportsmen. Not hunters like the Yellow Knife Indians, or the snake-eating Bushmen of Australia, or the Terra-del-Fuegians, or even the native country rabbit-hunters--but the so-called sportsmen. Naturalists and biologists have simply learned the truth why men hunt, and that when it is done in the name of sport, or for sensation, it is a degenerate business. Stevenson wrote beautiful words about "the hunter home from the hill," but so far as I can find out he never killed anything himself. He was concerned with the romance of the thought, with alliteration, and the singular charm of the truth--sunset and the end of the day, the hunter's plod down the hill to the cottage, to the home where wife and children awaited him. Indeed it is a beautiful truth, and not altogether in the past, for there are still farmers and pioneers.

  Hunting is a savage primordial instinct inherited from our ancestors.

  It goes back through all the ages of man, and farther still--to the age when man was not man, but hairy ape, or some other beast from which we are descended. To kill is in the very marrow of our bones. If man after he developed into human state had taken to vegetable diet--which he never did take--he yet would have inherited the flesh-eating instincts of his animal forebears. And no instinct is ever wholly eradicated. But man was a meat eater. By brute strength, by sagacity, by endurance he killed in order to get the means of subsistence. If he did not kill he starved. And it is a matter of record, even down to modern times, that man has existed by cannibalism.

  The cave-man stalked from his hole under a cliff, boldly forth with his huge club or stone mace. Perhaps he stole his neighbor's woman, but if so he had more reason to hunt than before--he had to feed her as well as himself. This cave-man, savagely descended, savagely surrounded, must have had to hunt all the daylight hours and surely had to fight to kill his food, or to keep it after he killed it. Long, long ages was the being called cave-man in developing; more long ages he lived on the earth, in that dim dark mystic past; and just as long were his descendants growing into another and higher type of barbarian. But they and their children and grandchildren, and all their successive, innumerable, and varying descendants had t
o hunt meat and eat meat to live.

  The brain of barbarian man was small, as shown by the size and shape of his skull, but there is no reason to believe its construction and use were any different from the use of other organs--the eye to see with--the ear to hear with--the palate to taste with. Whatever the brain of primitive man was it held at birth unlimited and innumerable instincts like those of its progenitors; and round and smooth in babyhood, as it was, it surely gathered its sensations, one after another in separate and habitual channels, until when manhood arrived it had its convolutions, its folds and wrinkles. And if instinct and tendency were born in the brain how truly must they be a part of bone, tissue, blood.

  We cannot escape our inheritance. Civilization is merely a veneer, a thin-skinned polish over the savage and crude nature. Fear, anger, lust, the three great primal instincts are restrained, but they live powerfully in the breast of man. Self preservation is the first law of human life, and is included in fear. Fear of death is the first instinct. Then if for thousands, perhaps millions of years, man had to hunt because of his fear of death, had to kill meat to survive--consider the ineradicable and permanent nature of the instinct.

  The secret now of the instinctive joy and thrill and wildness of the chase lies clear.

  Stealing through the forest or along the mountain slope, eyes roving, ears sensitive to all vibrations of the air, nose as keen as that of a hound, hands tight on a deadly rifle, we unconsciously go back. We go back to the primitive, to the savage state of man. Therein lies the joy.

  How sweet, vague, unreal those sensations of strange familiarity with wild places we know we never saw before! But a million years before that hour a hairy ancestor of ours felt the same way in the same kind of a place, and in us that instinct survives. That is the secret of the wonderful strange charm of wild places, of the barren rocks of the desert wilderness, of the great-walled lonely canyons. Something now in our blood, in our bones once danced in men who lived then in similar places. And lived by hunting!

  The child is father to the man. In the light of this instinct how easy to understand his boyish cruelty. He is true to nature. Unlimited and infinite in his imagination when he hunts--whether with his toys or with real weapons. If he flings a stone and kills a toad he is instinctively killing meat for his home in the cave. How little difference between the lad and the man! For a man the most poignantly exciting, the most thrillingly wild is the chase when he is weaponless, when he runs and kills his quarry with a club. Here we have the essence of the matter. The hunter is proudest of his achievement in which he has not had the help of deadly weapons. Unconsciously he will brag and glow over that conquest wherein lay greatest peril to him--when he had nothing but his naked hands. What a hot gush of blood bursts over him!

  He goes back to his barbarian state when a man only felt. The savage lived in his sensations. He saw, heard, smelled, tasted, touched, but seldom thought. The earthy, the elemental of eye and ear and skin surrounded him. When the man goes into the wilderness to change into a hunter that surviving kinship with the savage revives in his being, and all unconsciously dominates him with driving passion. Passion it is because for long he has been restrained in the public haunts of men. His real nature has been hidden. The hunting of game inhibits his thoughts.

  He feels only. He forgets himself. He sees the track, he hears the stealthy step, he smells the wild scent; and his blood dances with the dance of the ages. Then he is a killer. Then the ages roll back. Then he is brother to the savage. Then all unconsciously he lives the chase, the fight, the death-dealing moment as they were lived by all his ancestors down through the misty past.

  What then should be the attitude of a thoughtful man toward this liberation of an instinct--that is to say, toward the game or sport or habit of hunting to kill? Not easily could I decide this for myself.

  After all life is a battle. Eternally we are compelled to fight. If we do not fight, if we do not keep our bodies strong, supple, healthy, soon we succumb to some germ or other that gets a hold in our blood or lungs and fights for its life, its species, until it kills us. Fight therefore is absolutely necessary to long life, and Alas! eventually that fight must be lost. The savages, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks all worshipped physical prowess in man. Manhood, strength--the symbols of fight! To be physically strong and well a man must work hard, with frequent intervals of change of exercise, and he must eat meat. I am not a great meat eater, but I doubt if I could do much physical labor or any brain work on a vegetable diet. Therefore I hold it fair and manly to go once a year to the wilderness to hunt. Let that hunt be clean hard toil, as hard as I can stand! Perhaps nature created the lower animals for the use of man. If I had been the creator I think I would have made it possible for the so-called higher animal man to live on air.

  Somewhere I read a strange remarkable story about monkeys and priests in the jungle of India. An old order of priests had from time out of mind sent two of their comrades into the jungle to live with the monkeys, to tame them, feed them, study them, love them. And these priests told an incredible story, yet one that haunted with its possibilities of truth.

  After a long term of years in which one certain priest had lived with the monkeys and they had learned truly he meant them no harm and only loved them, at rare moments an old monkey would come to him and weep and weep in the most terrible and tragic manner. This monkey wanted to tell something, but could not speak. But the priest knew that the monkey was trying to tell him how once the monkey people had been human like him.

  Only they had retrograded in the strange scale of evolution. And the terrible weeping was for loss--loss of physical stature, of speech, perhaps of soul.

  What a profound and stunning idea! Does evolution work backward? Could nature in its relentless inscrutable design for the unattainable perfection have developed man only to start him backward toward the dim ages whence he sprang? Who knows! But every man can love wild animals.

  Every man can study and try to understand the intelligence of his horse, the loyalty of his dog. And every hunter can hunt less with his instinct, and more with an understanding of his needs, and a consideration for the beasts only the creator knows.

  X

  The last day of everything always comes. Time, like the tide, waits for no man. Anticipation is beautiful, but it is best and happiest to enjoy the present. Live while we may!

  On this last day of my hunt we were up almost before it was light enough to see. The morning star shone radiant in the dark gray sky. All the other stars seemed dimmed by its glory. Silent as a grave was the forest. I started a fire, chopped wood so vigorously that I awakened Nielsen who came forth like a burly cave-man; and I washed hands and face in the icy cold brook. By the time breakfast was over the gold of the rising sun was tipping the highest pines on the ridges.

  We started on foot, leaving the horses hobbled near camp. All the hounds appeared fit. Even Old Dan trotted along friskily. Pyle, a neighbor of Haught's, had come to take a hunt with us, bringing two dogs with him.

  For this last day I had formulated a plan. Edd and one of the boys were to take the hounds down on the east side of the great ridge that made the eastern wall of Dude Canyon. R. C. was to climb out on this ridge, and take his position at the most advantageous point. We had already chased half a dozen bears over this saddle, one of which was the big frosty-coated grizzly that Edd and Nielsen had shot at. The rest of us hurried to the head of Dude Canyon. Copple and I were to go down to the first promontories under the rim. The others were to await developments and go where Haught thought best to send them.

  Copple and I started down over and around the crags, going carefully until we reached the open slope under the rim-rock. It seemed this morning that I was fresh, eager, agile like a goat on my feet. In my consciousness of this I boasted to Copple that I would dislodge fewer stones and so make less noise than he. The canyon sloped at an angle of about forty-five degrees, and we slid, stepped, jumped and ran down without starting an avalan
che.

  When we descended to the first bare cape of projecting rock the hour was the earliest in which I had been down under the rim. All the canyon and the great green gulf below were unusually fresh and beautiful. I heard the lonely call of strange birds and the low murmur of running water. An eagle soared in the sunlight. High above us to the east rose the magnificent slope of Dude Canyon. I gazed up to the black and green and silver ascent, up to the gold-tipped craggy crest where R. C. had his stand. I knew he could see me, but I could not see him. Afterward he told me that my red cap shone clearly out of green and gray, so he had no difficulty in keeping track of my whereabouts. The thickets of aspens and oaks seemed now to stand on end. How dark in the shade and steely and cold they looked! That giant ridge still obstructed the sun, and all on this side of it, under its frowning crest and slope was dark and fresh and cool in shadow. The ravines were choked black with spruce trees. Here along this gray shady slant of wall, in niches and cracks, and under ledges, and on benches, were the beds of the bears. Even as I gazed momentarily I expected to see a bear. It looked two hundred yards across the canyon from where we stood, but Copple declared it was a thousand. On our other side capes and benches and groves were bright in sunshine, clear across the rough breaks to the west wall of Dude Canyon.

  I saw a flock of wild pigeons below. Way out and beyond rolled the floor of the basin, green and vast, like a ridged sea of pines, to the bold black Mazatzals so hauntingly beckoning from the distance. Copple spoke now and then, but I wanted to be silent. How wild and wonderful this place in the early morning!

  But I had not long to meditate and revel in beauty and wildness. Far down across the mouth of the canyon, at the extreme southern end of that vast oak thicket, the hounds gave tongue. Old Dan first! In the still cool air how his great wolf-bay rang out the wildness of the time and place! Already Edd and Pyle had rounded the end of the east ridge and were coming up along the slope of Dude Canyon.