by Jim Harrison
We hunters are the perfect conduits. Unfortunately our fraternity is just as split on conversation as the rest of the interested assemblies. It is going to take education, lots of education, because we are blessed with an incredible number of obtuse members whose balefully uneducated acumen and compassion is mirrored by my neighbor and his buddies.
The occipital muscle-flexing of the “Me Tarzan, you Jane” stream of consciousness that grinds out of B.J.’s and Bubba’s mouths is enough to terrify the dullest dullard. To whack a deer, to drill a duck, to blast a bear are common gasconades—words that rhyme with nigger, kike, and spick—that when used repeatedly in the confines of a closed forum hail fascist loathing and mental imbalance. Hunting for many is an act of vengeance on a world that for millennia held the upper hand. For others it’s a means of getting even with everyday life, one’s boss, a difficult childhood, whimpering erections, or poor digestion, in ways and through acts that are paragons of brutality; behavior that since it is directed at animals goes unanswered. No one in the real world wants to deal with human baboons bearing guns, and in this day and age hunters shouldn’t feign surprise or outrage when private landowners turn B.J. away along with his curs and his blast-and-cast approach to what used to be referred to as sport.
The birds we love to make fly in front of our dogs are disappearing, and regardless of what was accepted as gospel in the past, the argument that hunting does not impose duress on game no longer holds water. There is no disputing that the ravages of human expansion and pollution are the main culprits in the disappearance of wildlife and that the demise of an eleven-thousand-year tradition of man as hunter-gatherer can be partially blamed on the fact that we have run out of geography. But predation is also to blame, and not only in the form of talons and claws but in the form of lead, and more recently steel. Simply put, there are more guns, less game, insufficient food, and fewer places for the animals to hide. It stands to reason then that how we approach hunting in the immediate future carries both practical and moral implications.
I would suggest to those modern-day hunters, those patriots so outraged that their undeniable right to “bear arms” is in jeopardy, that they resign themselves to the fine art of compromise instead of braying that digits kill children and that guns don’t. Because if they refuse to see what has happened to the social and natural structure of the world since the Constitution of this country was hammered out and insist on lamenting their diminished social standing in the eyes of the rest of society while continuing to make man-talk around the campfire, I believe that it will be only a matter of time before we live in a society so terrified that it will out of necessity amend the amendment, forbid the ownership of guns, and beg for a police state, period.
III
I have hunted with men who think of hunting as a contest between themselves and nature, others who kill to feed their families, and some who pit their abilities against whomever they are hunting with. I have hunted with safe hunters and dangerous hunters; some who cover as much ground as their feet will allow and others who are just as happy waiting for a partridge under the pear tree. The list is long and includes those who cared about the game and those who didn’t. I prefer hunting with men who care, but count as friends many who, in every other walk of life are honorable and generous, but when it comes to hunting think nothing of pushing the autoloader out of the blind and killing five times their legal limit. It is as though everything in their lives is in harmony except for a troubled corner of their soul, a denied need, a suppressed anger for which the escape valve is the wanton destruction of what they most cherish and want to preserve.
I know and have hunted with an otherwise fine fellow who, in 1988, with the help of five scrambling boys, proved something vague to himself by shooting and retrieving a thousand Colombian doves in one day. So, what does that mean? Is it that these otherwise good and, in the cases I’ve mentioned, intelligent men have some closeted hatred? Were they abused as children? Or is it more primal, in the sense that when their blood is up they cannot stop until they run out of bullets or get caught. That any of the upper-class predators kills for the joy of killing is well documented and has caused, in many cases, an unmerciful pursuit by man. Perhaps some of us are closer to our evolutionary ancestry than we care to admit; perhaps the basic urge to kill, which we have attempted to curtail for the sake of civilized behavior, is awake and present. I don’t know how it feels to kill a man, but I know what it takes to kill an animal and how I feel on those days when the birds fly just right and there are lots of them and I am shooting well and don’t want to stop.
A few years ago I spent a day with two brothers who work as dog trainers on separate plantations in the vicinity of Tallahassee. Once or twice a year, toward the end of the hunting season, they are invited by different landowners to thin out the quail population and provide the owner with birds for the freezer. In defense of the landowner, the guests invited from faraway places to shoot during the regular hunting season are for the most part of a certain age and can’t hit a damn thing; consequently, very few bobwhite quail are killed proportionate to the acreage hunted, not to mention proportionate to the expenses incurred raising them. A thousand-acre course on a ten-thousand-acre plantation is shot on an average of once every ten days. In a good year, thousands of birds are left at the end of the season, so when the boss decides to pack some into the freezer, the bounty hunters are called in.
To those who covet the opportunity to thin out a quail population I would suggest getting into the dog business, learning how to shoot really well, and preparing to kiss some demanding ass. To those who grind their teeth and make “Damn rich!” comments, all I can say is that these shooting plantations have been around for three quarters of a century or more. And although I don’t pretend to know what motivates their owners, the bottom line is that they pour huge sums of money into both habitat improvements and research, which indirectly benefits quail and turkey nationwide. Bob-whites are immensely vulnerable to hunting pressure, and if these private preserves were opened to the public the quail population would be decimated in three years. I say that without criticism because the bird is so much fun to hunt, shoot, and eat, and it would be impossible to apply rules of decorum to hunters who haven’t enjoyed decent shooting in twenty years. For obvious reasons, this quandary of private versus public access to hunting haunts the future of the sport.
Anyway, the brothers in question don’t miss, and I don’t mean that as a figure of speech. I mean: birds get up, birds fall down. They ride walking horses with greased gaits behind perfectly trained English pointers on grounds where the quail are pampered like bevies of high-priced models. I rode along because I had leased seven hundred acres of a plantation belonging to my cousins, which I hunted on foot. The undergrowth that year was ferocious, and the operator I had hired to mow the worst of it before hunting season was famous for his taste in cheap whiskey and taking naps, both of which he indulged the moment I left him alone. I can’t say I blamed him. The cover, the heat, and the insects competed with memories of old movies produced in the jungles of Borneo. However there were quail everywhere: crossing the roads, flushing in front of the tractor, perched in trees, and whistling from inside the deep perplexity of untended Southern vegetation. It was, to say the least, frustrating not being able to get at them on foot. Therefore, with two weeks left in the season and only a handful of birds logged in the game book, I called the plantation’s manager.
On a clear and cold February morning, the portcullis leading to this game-bird kingdom opened on one trailer full of dogs, another full of horses, the two brothers, the manager, and the owner’s blessings.
The brothers were in their late twenties, fair-skinned, tough from running bird dogs 250 days a year, and polite as only Southerners know how to be. They were also very quick about saddling the horses, readying the guns, and getting dogs on the ground. They had brought four brace: seven English pointers and a thin-coated white setter with pink eyes. The dogs wore shock colla
rs but were encouraged to hunt wide. They complemented each other and little if any cover escaped their solicitude.
Weather and habitat dictate the rhythm of any hunt, but add to that the gait of a horse and you begin to understand why plantation quail-hunting is the sport of kings, or certainly of presidents. I have hunted on top of animals whose cadences have varied from somnolent oscillations to the consternation of slam-dancing, from horses that were eventually sold for dog food to slick-coated, small-headed, gaited horses from Tennessee and Mississippi. As with dogs, guns, and even women, you get what you pay for.
The objective is to blanket as much ground as the dogs can handle in a pattern that gridlocks the cover, an objective that varies depending on scenting conditions, ability of the dogs, and number of birds per acre. The course, therefore, is either hunted methodically or as quickly as possible. The rhythm of each hunt differs as a result of choices that grow instinctive with time. On any given day, I, like every other hunter, have worked hard and never seen a bird, dragged my heels the next, and killed my limit by lunch. A fundamental reason for hunting.
A decade ago, a friend and I leased six hundred of the sorriest, most treeless, weediest acres of central Florida on which lived thirty coveys of bobwhite quail. On opening day we killed the same number of birds as there were coveys. The land was a wild food factory that no one had hunted for three years. The course the brothers, the manager, and I hunted that February day was similar in that it was rough as a cob and full of birds. That day I was finally hunting the lease from the correct angle, which was high above the cover that had ripped my ass to shreds for three months.
The brothers used 20-gauge plugged automatics. They held the guns barrel up with the butt snug against their thighs, or scabbarded, stock forward for quick unsheathing. They shot one-handed from the saddle more accurately than 80 percent of all the shooters I have known shooting conventionally.
I knew the whereabouts of the first covey, which the dogs quickly found, having shot into it earlier in the year on a cold morning in January when the cover was thin and wet and pushed into the ground. I had found three coveys and shot four birds (already the best morning of the year) when Mabel, the English pointer, stole quietly up to point on the edge of a fallow field grown up in dog fennel. The covey was twenty feet beyond the bitch, fanned around the stump of a live oak tree whose roots had suckered and formed an umbrella that rattled as I walked through. The birds jumped straight up through the branches in my face and at eye level split into two separate directions across the open field. I shot twice, killing three birds with the right barrel and a fourth one with the second. Not only a novel approach to filling the icebox, but an oddity under any circumstances because I shoot a 28-gauge, and unprecedented in that all four birds were male bobwhite quail.
So, having done my share for that particular covey’s parenthood planning, I declined to shoot. The brothers got off their horses and walked at top speed to and beyond the dogs. The covey got up, six shots rang out, six birds fell down, and the covey no longer existed. These boys were great killers and the most endearing men one would ever want to be with in the field. They love to hunt so much that every September they and two friends load their guns, dogs, ammo, junk food, and themselves in a Suburban after work on a Wednesday and drive nonstop from southern Georgia to Saskatchewan, Canada. They hunt Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, head the car south, and report back to work Wednesday morning. Their three-day bag usually exceeds one hundred Hungarian partridge and fifty or more sharp-tailed grouse.
The brothers work a tough six-day week that often includes cruising the swamp at night for lost dogs. They train dogs in the snake-riddled heat of summer and then guide the boss and his well-heeled guests during the fall and winter. Dogs and horses are fed, cleaned, trained, tended to when injured, and looked for when lost or running deer. The tack is lathered every night, the runs are washed, the stables mucked out, and the animals salved. The pressure of performing just right, six days a week for four and a half months, builds as the hunting season progresses. Admonishments from the mouths of Yankees, even politely understated, stick in the throats of Southerners, particularly when the smallest comment breeds uncertainty as to one’s future.
A time warp of sorts enclosed my companions and me in an historical sporting bubble, impenetrable and mostly incomprehensible to the rest of the working world. We hunted from horseback behind the best dogs in the country on hills that rose and fell into a lake famous for its bass and for birds that fly as fast as model airplanes. The hands-in-the-pockets morning gave way to a sweet-smelling day with floods of sunshine slanted by the dreamy shimmer of a late-winter sky. If we had been loafers, we could have loafed to perfection, but we weren’t.
We hunted from eight to noon and from two to five, the brothers shooting singles from horseback and the manager and I taking turns shooting covey rises from the ground. The horses moved through the woods quickly until contact between dog and quail was made. Then we hunted carefully, leaving a few birds in each covey but, to be honest, not keeping count. Good shooters don’t miss the first shot, and the brothers rarely did. They assured the first birds, caught up with the second, and once in a while stretched out for a third. One shoots for food, for the love of killing, or for making the shot; the brothers shot for all three.
That night I slipped the feathered bodies of seventy-nine bobwhite quail into baggies, froze them, and sent care packages all over the country to people I knew liked them. The dogs pointed nineteen coveys—thirteen held for the guns—and singles were shot from four of the six coveys that wild-flushed. It was a day I think about, a day in hell for Mr. Bob, a day that in some ways I regret, but also a day spent with two young men whose naive enthusiasm reminded me of myself twenty years ago; the puzzle was and still is my absence of guilt.
I did not renew the lease the following year but heard from the plantation manager that the hunting was as good as ever. So much for my after-the-fact population concerns, or rather, this is a good example of how privately managed land fares against land that is pounded on a daily basis. The birds that survived that one-day war regrouped and went on about picking partners for the breeding season. Had those same birds been hit two or three times a week for an entire season, none would have survived.
When I hunt I position myself firmly back in the food chain as a predator, and a good one because of my range. Shooting used to be a natural act for me, from the eyes to the hands, but now that I am not as sharp the act has gone from the eyes to the mind, back to the eyes, and finally to the finger that pulls the trigger. The added wrinkle has slowed me down. Thinking and shooting don’t mix, and my style, which used to be instinctive, has become more mechanical. To aggravate the problem, although I look for the easy shots they don’t interest me, and instead of assuring them I miss them out of momentary ennui. The longer I see the target, the more likely I am to miss. Quail shooting is the paramount remedy for shooting nerves, something I still catch the first week of the season but get over when I adhere to either of these extremes in social advice: “When the birds get up, if you chew tobacco, spit over your shoulder before you shoot” and “A gentleman may be in haste, but he should never be in a hurry.” The bobwhites of the Southern woods, as opposed to the quail of the open country of southern Texas, are excellent targets, particularly if one thinks in terms of doubles. Frank Forester summed them up quite nicely 150 years ago: “The Virginia quail is probably the hardest bird in the world to kill quickly, cleanly, and certainly.”
On researching the bobwhite quail I came upon hundreds of records kept for posterity, or was it glory? The best recorded shooting was in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1851, when three gentlemen shot more than one hundred quail apiece in a day’s hunting. In the same year in Rock Island, Mississippi, four hundred quail were netted in one afternoon and shipped to New York, where they sold for a dollar a dozen. A few years later, in “The Spirit of the Times,” a letter from Iowa Territory mentioned that the correspondent had netted ten th
ousand quail in one season. A man hunting with his dog on foot in eastern Louisiana in 1889 shot ninety-two rounds, with which he killed and found eighty-three bobwhite quail. Undoubtedly, one of the brothers’ ancestors.
IV
Now that I recognize cruelty for what it is, the more I see it, the more ashamed I am of my own. When I feel the life flow out of the breast of a crippled bird, I wonder about the sanity of what I’m doing and don’t have an answer. I think about it and go on, just as I think about the children I could save by paying for their medical care, or the homeless, or the elderly, but I don’t help them either, and, except when I am faced with a bird I have wounded, go on about my life blissfully.
Inherent cruelty of the kind that is demoralizing to a conscientious hunter is fatwood on the fires of those who want to see the sport abolished. It is killing for no reason, killing for the numbers and losing cripples for lack of looking. Nowadays, I kill only what I intend to eat or give away, but in the process of hunting I can and do conjure nightmarish visions of birds in pain, of birds grimly waiting to die because I have broken something as necessary to them as a wing.
Because physical pain has occupied an intimate place in my life I hate to cripple, and the more sophisticated the nervous system of a species the less inclined I am to hunt it. No one really knows what makes men act as if they didn’t know better, but I warrant to say there isn’t a hunter in the entire history of hunting who hasn’t at one time or another killed for no reason, targeted an animal to test his marksmanship, forgotten it, and left it behind. In my case shame invariably followed.
Indoctrinated to believe that nature is servant to man, that we alone are endowed with a soul, and that beasts have no feelings, we have conveniently pushed nature and its lower forms of life to the bottom of our list of priorities. Though the deformities we as hunters inflict on the natural world are minuscule in the light of the festering and permanent sores picked by the political machinations of business, they nevertheless pour out of the same faucet as dominion, arrogance, and dead-on stupidity. The truly fortunate hunters are those like B. J. Pruit, who never give death a second thought, who don’t feel remorse or empathy for a crippled bird, a gut-shot deer, a steel-trapped fox. Mention mother and country and tears swell, but not for the wood duck that fell too far away to bother with. They are the fortunate ones, for not having to carry the weight of that broken wing on their souls. Unfortunately for the sport, there have been too many “fortunate ones,” and their pervasive callousness has not only spread but has tainted the rest of us who, for better or worse, at the very least think about what we do or have done. We are a minority in a rapidly decaying sport.