I have hunted. I have killed. I say this without any special pride, but with some satisfaction that I have successfully gathered my own food on occasion. This season, sitting by the kitchen window, watching the leaves on the red oak at the back corner of my lot start to turn, I must confess to a certain urge to be chasing a pheasant down the rattling rows on a corn field, or stumbling through a grouse covert with a shotgun in my hands.
But before I’m run on a rail out of my charming suburb, let me make something clear. I have no use for “sport hunting” – killing animals you don’t intend to use, whether to hang on your wall or to test your personal courage – any more than I have any use for “catch and release” fishing. I believe I’d rather not fish at all than make trivial a salmon’s life and energy to give myself an hour’s entertainment.
But I do understand the basic sum of survival: for something to live, something else, whether animal or vegetable, must die. It’s a lesson comprehended instinctively if you’ve lived on a farm and I’ve eaten enough ribs from the family pig to understand that kids who believe that chicken legs appear on yellow foam trays in the cold storage locker at Shaw’s are one giant step removed from a world we all are part of.
I don’t always like that death is part of life in this system we shares, but I’ve accepted it, and if I’ve gained respect for death, it’s partly because I’ve hunted. Writers speak of the “joy of the hunt,” but all hunters soon learn their success is bittersweet.
Let me offer you a picture of an old friend, Kevin, a strong and competent person, a high-places iron worker and therefore not prone to emotional extremes, standing in an alder swamp near Hillsboro with his own brown eyes wet as he watches a grouse’s eyes film over and feels its body give up its warmth in his hand. Later on, he will enjoy that bird as the centerpiece of a dinner, but right then, I believe he was thanking it. Perhaps if you never see death, you can pretend it isn’t there, at least until it comes for you. I’d rather know what I can.
Add to this respect the satisfaction of doing for yourself. Our world has made a fetish of removing work from human hands, mechanizing whatever the imagination can conceive. And what has happened? Wildly successful businesses devoted to backpacking the Himalayas and rafting the white water of the Grand Canyon have sprung up as people seek to reconnect with the worked through self-induced hardship. A poet named Ted Enslin wrote once that he trusted more completely a person who accomplishes things the difficult way. It’s a peculiarly Yankee view, and one I find myself tending toward more and more.
Walking into the supermarket and trading slips of paper for food is easy; fighting the weather and my instincts in favor of the fire and a hot mug isn’t. But by tramping the miles through the puckerbrush or freezing in knee-deep ocean water, by sitting on a stump in a snowy field and trying to control my shivering enough to squeeze a shot off, I have learned to respect what is difficult. Hunting has taught me much about my place in the world, and not a little about perseverance.
Eating food I’ve harvested myself is the difference between a meal and sustenance to me. It’s a synthesis of work into direct survival, physical and spiritual. The food I buy in a grocery store, stripped of relation to nature, will keep me alive, but food I’ve tracked and hunted for myself, food in whose life and death I have participated, nourishes my soul as well as my body.
I hunt mainly for fish now, and that seems acceptable to far more people than killing animals or birds; a trout isn’t as easy to anthropomorphize as a deer. I can talk fishing at a party and not wind up in the eye of an ethical hurricane, especially if I confine myself to raptures on the parabola of a Payne bamboo rod or the sweet mechanic of a Hardy reel. I don’t often find someone who will confess to a certain sadness at the way the stripe of color down a rainbow trout’s flank fades as it dies, but when I do, I know we share something that people who don’t hunt cannot know. I won’t pretend the result of my fishing is any different from my hunting – I kill to live, to nourish myself. And when I die, I trust that I will nourish something in my turn. I’d prefer it to be that young red oak at the back of my lot, though I’d settle for the willow inside the village cemetery, the one beside the fish pond.