by Jay Cassell
There was only one thing left to try. Willard and Elias climbed an acacia tree while Theo and I stood on the roof of the truck. We would try to look down into the reeds and shoot from above. Clive blocked off the end of the reedbed, and Wayne, who has a wife and two children, borrowed ammunition from Clive and headed back into the riverbed.
We could see the reeds waving as the buffalo maneuvered, and Clive got a glimpse of her. He shot, and was sure he connected, but it was a standoff. She would not leave the reedbed in daylight, and we could not go in after her. Theo called an end to it, and Wayne came out of the reedbed. We drove along the riverbank for a while, checking for tracks, but there was really no chance of finding any. It ended.
A few days later I asked Theo if he would ever know what happened to her, and he said no, something would drag her down and she would vanish. In fact, she was almost certainly dead as we spoke.
So be it. We failed. I would like to think that we got a few bullets into her and at least shortened her suffering if we could not end it outright.
There is one thing more. I would like to think that somewhere in one of the nastier neighborhoods in hell there is a wire loop waiting for the foot of the poacher who snared her.
PART X
Reflections on Our Sport
To Hunt: The Question of Killing
THOMAS MCINTYRE
At sixteen I hunted and killed a barren-ground caribou. He bedded on Alaska tundra under a lead sky, and I bellied to the rim of the basin and shot him through the lungs with a rifle I borrowed from my father. The bull shuddered and rolled to his side, big-hoofed legs stiffening, heavy-antlered head sinking. I rose and bolted another round, setting the safety. Pink blood frothed from his nostrils; and as I walked to him, he gasped, drowning. The big hooves kicked, and a round staring eye clouded from ice-water clear to bottle green. The caribou stopped shuddering. I trembled still. . .
To arrive at an at best imperfect understanding of the hunt in these latter days, it is almost impossible not to rely on the Spaniard José Ortega y Gasset, again. A cranky, rather-more-than-elitist existentialist critic of “mass man,” Ortega y Gasset remained a meritocratic republican. Although quoted to the brink of emesis by hunters desperate to demonstrate their literacy, his book-length essay, Meditations on Hunting, was the 20th century’s most luminous explication of the hunt. And at the heart of Meditations lay the truth that after his spotting, pursuit, and stalking of an animal, “The hunter is a death dealer.”
Hunting deals, inescapably, in death. Or, more precisely, killing. Killing is what places the hunter (animal and human) apart from every other walker in the woods. Not that this always explains the kill to the satisfaction of our friends, especially those of the more doctrinaire environmentalist or animal-zealot stripe, or often to our own families. Sometimes not even entirely satisfactorily to ourselves.
This killing is, of course, not homicide or the martial hunting of “armed men,” but the legal killing in the hunt of wild animals (traditional game animals, ones neither endangered as a species nor representing members of an imperiled population), with the recovery and consumption of the animal’s body moral and ethical obligations of that killing. The killing in hunting is not murder incognito—assuming a relative absence of psychopathological impulse. It is killing not for the sake (or thrill) of killing, and therefore causes hunters, oddly, to be excruciatingly tongue-tied about what draws them to the hunt, of which the kill is such an indissoluble component. Partly that’s a matter of trying to tell a stranger about rock ‘n’ roll, but also because, as Ortega y Gasset says, hunting means “accepting reason’s insufficiencies.” The desire to hunt, which must inevitably lead to killing (at least by intent), comes from a place well before consciousness and words, so that when it arises today it does so almost beyond articulation. Most hunters cannot even say when it began for them, yet some try.
At four I entered a small dark Lascaux of a den in my father’s best friend’s house. Both men were employed in aerospace, the industry just then becoming the ample bosom of the Southern California economy; but on the paneled walls of the inner space of that den were not heroic photos of rocket launches but the mounted heads of a deer, an elk, and a wild boar, with a black-bear skin on the hardwood floor. There were also the head of a red African forest buffalo and a pair of perfect rose-ivory tusks, my father’s friend having taken all his savings, cashed out his wife’s life-insurance policy, and gone to (then) French Equatorial Africa to kill an elephant at less than thirty paces in dense jungle. No such icons would ever be found on the avocado-hued walls or aqua pile carpet of our home; and it was inconceivable to me that they could be found anywhere else inside suburban Los Angeles county tract housing.
In later years there would be my walking behind on desultory hunts for farm-raised pheasants set out by the State of California and fetching birds during the once-a-year San Joaquin Valley mourning-dove shoots that my father approached as social requirements rather than outings, “outing” in its earlier connotation representing a letting loose for which my mad parent in his life was never entirely prepared. Through it all my mind grew into its own Lascaux of feathers and horns and tusks, until I was old enough to shoulder my own gun. Then the painted walls expanded only more.
The summer I convinced my father to let me go to the Talkeetna Mountains, taking the rifle he owned but never used, was the summer of ‘68, of Chicago police in Lincoln Park and Soviet tanks in Wenceslaus Square, which were matters of minor note to me compared to my desire to hunt something “bigger than me.” Then, looking at the caribou, the summit of Denali beyond, and the sky above, I realized that everything around me in the hunt was bigger than me, bigger than the caribou, too. It was bigger than both of us.
So, I had killed. What was it, though, I had really done? Killing is the most incomprehensible aspect of the hunt to a large extent because we have almost no widespread experience of the reverential or even prosaic forms of killing animals, no longer sacrificing, or even slaughtering, our own livestock. The writer Reynolds Price said, in one of those plummy commentaries National Public Radio so dotes on broadcasting, that “death has become almost the last obscenity, the single thing we’re loath to discuss in public.” This could, with all due respect, only be the opinion of an intellectual who must prattle on almost ceaselessly with his peers about death. It is based on an assumption that no one outside the cloister of the academy discusses so fraught a subject, when in fact we as a population have become further steeped than Aztec priests in a cult of death. It is impossible not to hear a constant drone about the “end-of-life experience” or oxymoronically termed “living wills,” “doctor-assisted suicide,” “death with dignity,” and the “right to die” (more an obligation, isn’t it?). The highest compliment to be paid fashion and food is that they are “to die for.” Death be not just proud, these days, but darn-near haughty.
With this peculiar exaltation of death, though, killing, as identified above, remains a conundrum. People can pruriently covet the sight of death at a remove (the fiery crashes on stockcar tracks, exploding space shuttles, fatal accidents memorialized on the Web, network-televised euthanasia, and as Susan Sontag wrote, “What pornography [both rampant and tolerated, I would add] is really about, ultimately, isn’t sex but death”) while believing it iniquitous, even inhuman, to participate in the killing of the hunt. And yet that killing can never be genuinely understood or experienced without direct participation (which is what makes most writing about it, and almost all visual depictions of it—such as some hideously obscene televised hunting shows dwelling in the depths of the cable morass—abysmal). The best that can be done is to try to answer the questions such killing raises.
Is it fun? Is it wicked? Most important, is there anything erotic about it?
Bull, bedded, belly, shuddering, stiffening, rolled, gasped, trembled—what other conclusion could there be than that killing must be leather-and-latex erotic? This is possible to conclude because (aside from the F
reudianization of all human behavior, and the view of some that the hunt is a form of “rapism”) hunting and sex can appear to be the last natural acts humans enjoy on earth. Not for nothing is intercourse vulgarly characterized as the “wild thing”; for a great many of us sex is the final bivouac in the wild, our only first-hand experience of it anymore. So sex becomes the template we, knowing no better, place over all wild experience, unable to recall that there was once for humans, and yet for animals, a little more to it than that. Sex in the wild, as it were, is an intense (often perilous) but seasonal activity, and only one of many wild conditions, far more time taken up by gestation, birth, nurturing, feeding, gathering, divination, migrating, concealment, flight—and killing. It is a subsequence of modernism that everything be classified as erotic (and practically a shibboleth of postmodernism that “all sex is rape”); but killing is not a division of a corporation established by Eros: in the wild it is its own going concern.
What about fun?
The correct response given by the more enlightened hunter of the day is that he takes no pleasure in killing. He does it solely in pious acknowledgement of the cost of his food, or as a desperate, unavoidable, altruistic, anguished conservation measure (“thinning the herd”). Which is all, if you will forgive me, more than passing strange. Very few people in the industrialized world are hunters for any reason other than personal choice; far from bumming out its participants, hunting is, in the words of another Spaniard, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, in his history of food, “an attractive way of life, which still exercises a romantic appeal for some people in sedentary and even urban societies: thousands of years of civilization seem insufficient to scratch out the savage under the skin . . .”
Aldo Leopold, the “father of wildlife management,” wrote, “We seek contacts with nature because we derive pleasure from them,” and hunting is contact with nature at the most elemental level. It is a mistake, though, to equate pleasure with fun, with its implication of frivolousness. Pleasure is a primary constituent of life, and not necessarily just human life. You can see this in real “savages,” those indigenous hunters for whom killing is hardly a style-of-life option. What experience I have had of such hunters, for whom killing can be both arduous and precarious, is that they tend to display something akin to sacred delight when an animal is brought down: why not, when a kill can provide food, clothing, craft material, even objects of veneration, all in a tidy bundle? Outside the human realm, watch the predators on the Discovery Channel or Animal Planet, if you cannot witness them elsewhere. Even in close-up it’s hard to detect much solemnity or remorse as the cheetah tumbles the Thomson’s gazelle in a billow of ochre dust, or the croc rolls in the black river mud, the wildebeest calf in its toothsome grin. There aren’t even crocodile tears.
The question should be whether one hunts for some sort of “joy of killing.” I can say only that I hunt to hunt. I could find far less taxing means of satisfying an obsessive love of killing, had I one, than by hiking for miles through chaparral to shoot a plateful of quail. And in fact, the too-easy, “lucky” kill can rob the hunt of much of its savor. Killing, though, I must admit, does give me pleasure when I do it well. I believe this is the raw response to good killing by all those who truly love to hunt. I know of nothing we do that is not, without coercion, finally rooted in pleasure, however postponed or sublimated or lofty. Denials of the pleasure inherent in the good kill are less heartfelt than they are hunters’ p.c. means of throwing an increasingly denunciatory public off the scent.
Then does this make it wicked?
In his NPR soliloquy, Price, quoting A. E. Housman’s translation of lines from the Roman poet Horace—Feast then they heart, for what the heart has had / The fingers of no heir will ever hold—counseled that unless “a heart craves blood and cruelty, its owner should feed it lavishly.” What Price did not explain was how blood and cruelty are intrinsically linked, making it wrong to feed with blood—certain kinds, anyway. Blood can be holy, sacrificial, celebratory, and yet not cruel. Some of the most profound cruelties involve the shedding of not a single drop.
In our ever-more denatured world, though, we can recognize nothing in spilled blood but heartlessness. This due not to any special characteristic of blood so much as of our stunted perception that makes us want to place our faith in a chimera like the one evoked by such phrases as “cruelty-free” or “no animals were harmed in the . . . etc.” Never mind that it is most often utilized as a marketing ploy by cosmetics companies or a goad animal-rightists brandish for extorting contributions from media conglomerates; it represents a real desire (perhaps to deny the “savage under the skin”), although one that fails to account for each second of sentient existence that rides upon (or at the very least owes an irredeemable debt to) an innate bow wave of cruelty from which we are powerless to exempt any living creature, ourselves included. Which is not to say that blood/killing cannot be cruel.
In true hunting, though, cruelty is never the goal and is either inadvertent or the result of inexperience. Good hunting means good killing. Good killing means possessing the skill, knowledge, and empathy to be able to inflict a wound that will end an animal’s life in a matter of heartbeats, honorably, and with a minimum of sensation, let alone pain. When an animal is killed well, to appropriate (who else?) Hemingway’s words, all of him will race all the rest of him to the ground, leaving the hunter with almost no opportunity for regret. Bad killing—fumbled, prolonged, visibly painful—can fill a hunter with physical unease, even disgust, both for the unintended cruelty and the dishonor to the animal. Bad killing, though, to paraphrase Ortega y Gasset a final time, exists only at the expense of good killing.
There was a time when good killing mattered, when men were expected to be good killers. There is D. H. Lawrence’s oft-repeated chestnut, referring to James Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer, about how the “essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” What never gets quoted is Lawrence’s next sentence: “It has never yet melted.” Maybe not in Lawrence’s day; but since then the essential American soul, at least that of sensitized man (I hesitate to use the now rather passé neologism “metrosexual”), has turned into nothing less than a sump of goo.
Killing has never been the exclusive route to manhood (or personhood), but neither has being abstractly repulsed by or irrationally ignorant of it. A soul that has neurotically diagnosed itself as unfit to kill, and wishes to advertise itself as such, can, curiously, all too often be a soul unfit for trustworthiness, commitment, self-sacrifice, and courage, as well.
I kill, and try to kill well, because it is a difficult and complex physical act, involves moral and ethical reflection, compels me to look at death—and life—without an arbiter, and is an authentic thing in a grotesquely inauthentic world.
An end to good killing will lead not to a sounder environment, but will merely be evidence of one too deteriorated to sustain any longer the most primeval of nature’s processes. Seeing a better world in the cessation of killing is like the conscious refusal of the “environmental movement’s leading intellects” to bear children for the sake of a better planet, because they consider it, puzzlingly, the “most humane thing” to do. Hardly humane; more like unearthly, and an endeavor to prove a negative: That it enriches the world to withhold a child from it. Similarly, how it will be a poorer world that can no longer afford human hunting. (In the end, neither the child nor the hunt is what impoverishes the earth.)
Within his environment all of a caribou’s life—all of the life of the caribou I killed—is an anticipation of the hunter, the killer, in whatever shape he assumes (the caribou’s existence, in fact, owes itself to being hunted and killed, because that is how the caribou was shaped by evolution: What but the wolf’s tooth whittled so fine/The fleet limbs of the antelope? as Robinson Jeffers wrote). If the killer were not me, then it would be the wolf ’s tooth or Old Ephraim the grizzly or winter, no animal going gentle into any good night (of them all, death by hunter may actually be g
entlest). And yet the caribou never fears dying, is never enthralled by it, never once goes on the FM radio to meditate upon its meaning. If it were possible for death’s lovers to tell the caribou how vital (sic) it is to embrace, even cherish death, it probably would shrug, if caribou shrug, and graze on.
Standing beside the body of a dead caribou, the trembling ebbing, I wondered at the thing of killing, which now seemed quite small, too. Against the sweep of the tundra, against the snows of Denali, against the curtain of light that would flourish late in the night sky, it was small and frail. All that I saw was greater than killing—this kind of killing. It made death itself, even my own someday, not some supreme Moloch, but something perceptibly withered and feeble, hardly worth mentioning. Hunting and killing gave me that. It let me shrug, too.
Would I have learned this without first having hunted and killed? There is no way now in which it will ever be possible for me to know.
The Wealth of Age
LEE WULFF
From the front cover of the magazine, a big caribou bull stared at me. In my youth, that would have set me dreaming of going on a caribou hunt. Instead, my mind flashed back to Jim John and what he called the “harvest fields” of the upper Gander River in Newfoundland. The year was 1940, and I was 35.
Jim was a full-blooded Micmac Indian. His home was on the south coast of Newfoundland some seventy miles away. He was one of the best guides in the province, and he had brought me to this, his favorite hunting area. We had a few days of fruitless hunting behind us when we spotted a stag (the Newfoundlanders use the English “stag” for males instead of the American “bull”). The animal was about a mile away, and he looked good through the binoculars. If we hurried, Jim said, we could intercept him, and we took off.