Читать книгу A Hunter's Confession - David Carpenter O. - Страница 8
Оглавление2 SKULKING THROUGH THE BUSHES
Meat eating helped make us what we are in a physical as well as a social sense. Under the pressure of the hunt, anthropologists tell us, the human brain grew in size and complexity, and around the hearth where the spoils of the hunt were cooked and then apportioned, human culture first flourished. MICHAEL POLLAN, The Omnivore’s Dilemma
I have often wondered where my sense of urgency for the hunt came from. I suppose it came from my father, because he nurtured it in me. Or, genetically speaking, it came from his father, who loved to drive a buggy to the outskirts of Regina and shoot sharptails during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Or, more to the point, because we are talking about urgency, it came from my mother’s dad, Artie Parkin, founder of the Saskatoon Straight Shooters, circa 1920 to 1940, a club for men to teach youngsters how to handle guns and hunt wild game. My dad and his Edmonton friends were keeners, but Artie Parkin was said to be obsessed.
Not only do I wonder what woodsy legacy brought my father and me from Edmonton to Richie Goosen’s trailer to hunt mallards in October of 1971; I wonder what historical phenomena made it likely that fathers in Alberta would buy firearms for their sons and take them hunting. I can see this paternal legacy being passed on from generation to generation in settlements up north among the Cree and Dene hunters, but we were middle-class white folks, and Mr. Noaks, our friend the butcher, provided us with all the meat we needed to get through the winter.
My quest for answers to these questions has sent me a long way from Edmonton, Alberta. It began in Scotland, in May of 1970, with a conversation I had with a woman who was a hunter herself and a member of the English gentry. We weren’t hunting, but we were both guests at a gentleman’s hunting lodge in northern Scotland. She was talking to me about the grouse, deer, and pheasants that people over there hunted each fall. The conversation featured the usual differences in nomenclature. We hunted bucks, for example, which they called stags. And we hunted pheasants without using gillies or beaters.
“And we don’t hunt pheasants—we shoot them,” said she.
“What’s the difference?”
“Well,” she said, “one doesn’t visualize oneself skulking through the bushes to shoot a pheasant.” Clutching an imaginary shotgun, she went into what I thought was a provocative crouch. I think she might have been going for Yosemite Sam in pursuit of Daffy Duck. “I mean, you people, you seem to fancy that sort of thing.”
She seemed to be calling upon centuries of cultural superiority to make her point. When she and her tribe did a-hunting go, they stood in a designated shooting area waiting for the pheasants to be released by the thousands. After the gamekeeper’s big release, the beaters would keep the pheasants flying until the affair was over. The skulking through the bushes in search of pheasants was the job of the dogs and the hirelings. This distinction between hunting and shooting is an important one. You might say that this exchange between the lady and me at least suggests, if not encapsulates, the history of hunting.
When we take a look at the lady’s ancestry, or indeed my own—I mean around two million years ago, at the time of the first true humans, Homo habilis (“handy man”), so named because these hominids had learned to use stone tools—we discover that as a species we had evolved into gatherers, scavengers, and occasional hunters. Without a hint of apology, we skulked around in the bushes looking for food. The much-debated hunting hypothesis of human origins came from scientific ruminations on the remains of these people. The theory goes that when one branch of apes learned to wield (throw, swing, carve) weapons to kill their prey, they were able to turn away from a diet of fruit and vegetation and become successful carnivores. Thus, they ceased to be apes and took the road to humanity. Hunting separated them from the lower orders of apes; hunting made them human. This theory of man as killer ape, however, has not gone uncontested over the last few decades. Indeed, as far as researchers have been able to discover, the animals these early humans ate were probably more scavenged than hunted down and killed.
If we examine the dietary evidence of hominids a mere million or so years ago, we discover that hunting for food has begun to complement scavenging as a source of food. Presumably, our Homo habilis had learned a great deal about predators during their millennia as scavengers: how to find the kill sites, when to scavenge and when not to scavenge, how to avoid the predators, and perhaps even how to defend themselves against these creatures that sometimes left their food sources unguarded. The same dietary evidence, however, indicates that plants are still the major food source for our gatherer-hunters.
By the time the skills of these hominids allowed them to take the offensive and hunt large mammals, they had evolved into bigger, stockier beings—“erectines,” as the paleoanthropologists call them. (Homo erectus is the variant we have come to know best.) The erectines, with their ever-more sophisticated stone tools, pursued the great migrations of large animals from the African continent to the Eurasian continent approximately 700,000 years ago. Like the great predator cats, they pursued elephants, hoofed animals, hippos, and smaller mammals simply because they were an abundant food source.
One of the most evolved branches deriving from the erectines was the Neanderthals, who hunted in Europe until about 35,000 years ago. They constitute the least fortunate branch of the human family (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis). They were probably not blessed with the genetic makeup to survive the last great ice age to its conclusion, and they became extinct.
Another branch of Homo sapiens emerged as the dominant species, what we, in our vanity, like to think of as the end result of erectine evolution. This emergence began somewhat before the last great ice age, perhaps as early as 140,000 years ago. These ancestors too were gatherer-hunters and are thought to be anatomically modern human beings. They are not credited with inventing fire, but their use of fire was so widespread that it came to define them as the modern humans who survived the last great ice age. They continued to evolve and flourish through the late Paleolithic age (the classic stone age) right up to the advent of agriculture.
Their period as consummate hunters reached a peak around the end of the late Paleolithic age, which saw the rise of the Cro-Magnons. They were the big-game hunters of Europe. Much like the diet of modern caribou hunters of the Canadian North, more than half of their food was meat. These ancient cold-weather survivors, the Cro-Magnons, managed to maintain populations all over Europe and northern Asia and later in North America. The quarry was large mammals—mammoths, horses, buffalo, and caribou. And as the availability of big-game animals began to diminish, the ingenuity of the hunters appears to have increased.
I am talking about the Mesolithic age, from approximately 20,000 to 9,000 bc. This is the age during which agriculture began to develop in isolated pockets around the Middle East. But until agriculture took over as the major source of food for tribal societies all over the world, including North America, hunting became increasingly high-tech. The hunters of the Mesolithic era had learned, over the millennia, to hunt in groups and to deploy weapons such as spears and, later, bows and arrows.
Hunting historians who reach the Neolithic age must surely lapse into melancholia, because they are then forced to concede that hunting for subsistence is losing its chic. Around 10,000 bc, the populations of the tribal units on several continents had grown considerably. This population growth coincided with the end of the ice age. With more mouths to feed, tribal groups turned to growing plants and corralling hitherto wild animals. The agricultural revolution took over as mercilessly as a swarm of McDonald’s franchises. Hunting and gathering could support one person per ten square miles. But the farming and animal husbandry that characterized Neolithic agriculture could support about one hundred times that many people.
With the obvious success of advanced hunting techniques, and with the disappearance of traditional habitat owing to the end of the ice age, the great mammals that had fed populations of Homo sapiens for so long went extinct. From dietary evidence gathered at tribal sites of the Neolithic age, we can see a dramatic shift from meat to wheat, barley, legumes, fruit, and nuts. For humans, the age of the Big Meat was relatively short, lasting from about 35,000 bc to perhaps as late as 10,000 bc. There were some big exceptions to this trend, Aboriginal hunters on the Great Plains and in northern Canada and Alaska being among them.
There is some strong evidence that this radical shift from meat to grains and fruit in the Near East, Western Europe, northern Asia, and scattered parts of Africa precipitated a widespread decline in human health. Communicable diseases sprang up, and with the drop in iron levels, anemia and osteoporosis proliferated. The height of early Neolithic peoples declined by about four inches from that of the hunting tribes of the late Paleolithic age, and poorer nutrition seems to be at the heart of this decline.
And so hunting, this time for smaller game animals, continued along the fringes of many tribal groups like a counterculture. In Israel, from the Hakkarmel burial sites, archaeologists have unearthed a stone-age culture from about 12,000 bc. These people, the Natufians, were hunter-gatherers until they collided with the agrarian and herding cultures. By the time of Moses, circa 1250 bc, the Natufian hunters had been wiped out.
As far as we can tell, this seems to have been the fate of most, though certainly not all, hunting cultures throughout the world. In the Near East, around 12,000 bc, hunters began to corral gazelles for later consumption. In Syria, between 11,000 and 10,000 bc, the diet radically shifted from wild gazelles to domesticated goats and sheep. By about 8500 bc, this shift was complete. Around 7000 bc, in what is now Mexico, deer hunting and seasonal plant gathering gave way to maize cultivation. In South America, evidence suggests that Andean tribes cultivated wild plants as early as 5000 bc. Agriculture spread widely after it took hold in this region, and hunter-gatherers began to trade wild meat for beans, maize, and potatoes. The spread of agriculture stopped in the far south, where growing seasons were short.
In large areas of the Near East, China, Thailand, Meso-America, and North Africa and parts of southern Africa, hunter-gatherers and agrarians managed to live side-by-side and trade wild game for plants. Whenever wild game and seasonal plants become scarce, however, hunter-gatherers inevitably would become dependent on agrarians. The agrarian cultures grow as their lands grow, and the hunter-gatherer tribes tend to shrink.
As grasses and grains began to flourish at the end of the last great ice age and spread throughout the world, the agrarian way of life began to dominate, resulting in the fall of hunting. The agrarian mode gained momentum when it became clear that hunting and gathering, and the nomadic life that went with it, was an arduous and doomed existence.
By about ad 1500, hunter-gatherers still retained a hold on about one-third of the world’s land mass (Australia, the northwestern half of North America, the southernmost part of South America, isolated regions in central and southern Africa, and scattered parts of Asia). But the agrarian producers had expanded at a steady rate and commanded the best soil and land for growing and for horticulture, and they had access to the best water. The remaining hunters were frequently stigmatized and marginalized until at last they were seen as the enemy.
The hunter-gatherers who began colonizing North America, however, from about 12,000 to 11,000 bc, were probably more fortunate than other nomadic hunting cultures in their choice of hunting grounds. According to recent theories, they might have been preceded by a contingent of hunters who first settled on the islands of the West Coast around 15,000 years ago. But the largest, most prolific colonists are believed to have descended from Alaska along a newly opened corridor, freed from ice, as though eternal spring had at last been declared.
The first of these people arrived about 11,000 bc at the northwesternmost extension of the Great Plains and gathered, yes, around my hometown of Edmonton. Well, it wasn’t quite Edmonton back then. The great hunters descending from the Bering land bridge and Alaska would search for evidence of Wayne Gretzky in vain. But in that place where, as a young man, I began to wonder where my dad and I had acquired such an avid taste for the hunt, the first pioneers gathered and multiplied, and their newfound success had much to do with hunting.
In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond tells us that, at this time, the North American West looked like “Africa’s Serengeti Plains . . . with herds of elephants and horses pursued by lions and cheetahs, and joined by members of such exotic species as camels and giant ground sloths.” The great wealth of Clovis sites tells us that these huge mammals were hunted with bow and arrow and with impressively large spears. Indeed, the bulkier, more exotic mammals were hunted to extinction. The Clovis hunters continued to follow their quarry southward into the Americas, and as the largest of the mammals began to disappear, various groups of hunter-gatherers evolved into agricultural communities.
This evolution of agricultural settlements was modest and very slow, because in vast areas of the Americas, such as the Great Plains, there was a lot of buffalo and not much of an incentive to move on from hunting and gathering. Hunting cultures persisted into the age of the railroad. For about ten thousand years, their main quarry was the bison. Liz Bryan, in The Buffalo People, put it this way:
Seldom in the history of the Earth has a single animal species had such drastic influence on humanity. Without the bison, it is doubtful if people could have existed at all on the arid plains; certainly not in the way that they did. For the bison was much more than a food source; its hide provided shelter, clothing, shoes, bedding and blankets; its bones were made into tools for shaping stone, scraping hides, working leather and for sewing; its sinews and hair were twisted into cordage; its horns, bladder, paunch and scrotum were used as containers; its dried dung was indispensable as fuel on the treeless plains. Tied inexorably to the movements of the wild herds . . . the people became nomads, following the source of their sustenance in daily and seasonal cycles from the high plains in summer to the shelter of the foothills and valleys in winter. If the herds prospered, the people prospered; when the herds failed, the people starved.
BRYAN RECOUNTS THAT the bison occupied a central role in the mythology of the people who lived off these animals. In their creation stories, the buffalo was an object of worship as the ultimate source of life. These stories constituted a kind of oral scripture that included tales of people and bison intermarrying, which seemed to suggest a mutual ancestry of the two species and the all-encompassing symbiosis between humans and buffalo. Just as the hunting peoples of the Far North maintained a strong spiritual connection to the caribou, so the hunting peoples of the Great Plains were strongly connected to the buffalo.
It is tempting to wonder if, out of this bison-centered religion, a conservation ethic might have come into play. Like all the emerging hunting peoples of the world, the people of the northwestern plains killed as many buffalo as they needed to feed their hungry. Unlike the great ice age mammals that were hunted to extinction, however, the great herds of buffalo seemed to go on and on into eternity—as though the animals and their hunters had struck some sort of balance. At their peak, the bison were said to number fifty to sixty million animals.
On the Great Plains, for perhaps ten millennia, the people hunted buffalo on foot with spears, atlatls, and bows and arrows. They would frequently hunt in large groups on the prairie above river valleys, first alarming the great bison then driving them over the edges of steep inclines known as buffalo jumps. At the bottom of these jumps, the foot soldiers, men and women, waited to kill and butcher the crippled animals. Where there were no river valleys or steep coulees, the hunters built buffalo pounds in dips and declivities in the prairie. Above these walled-in corrals made of stone, the men and women would pile rocks on both sides of the run to guide the bison toward the pound, which the animals could not see. The hunters then drove the animals into a wild stampede, and some of them would run into the pound and be slaughtered by waiting hunters with bows and arrows. A pound could contain two or three dozen animals. The weapons were like miniature longbows, some of them less than three feet long, tillered from chokecherry trees, green ash, maple, and even the trunks of saskatoon berry bushes.
This kind of hunting was dangerous, especially driving the bison, which was done on foot. The drives suddenly became more efficient when horses were introduced from the south, about a century after Columbus made first contact. Horses did not reach the northwestern plains in any numbers, however, until around the end of the seventeenth century. By a process of tribal rivalries and trading by Aboriginal groups, the horses made their way north to the Canadian prairie.
It was primarily the Shoshones, kin to the Comanche, who brought the horses north as part of their conquest of the Great Plains. For a long time, the Shoshones, and their greatest allies the Crows, were the dominant tribe on the central and northern prairie. Their horses were first deployed in the buffalo hunt, but by the early eighteenth century, they were enlisted in battle. The Shoshones, with their mounted warriors, presented such a terrifying spectacle that they sent the Cree and Blackfoot north in droves.
The Cree and Blackfoot didn’t take long to acquire horses and learn to ride them. They took even less time to trade their goods for muskets, metal tools, and other weapons with the French and English traders. In a decade or so, the Shoshones were sent packing, and the buffalo hunt, the high-tech version of it, spread over the northwestern plains.
By about 1730, the hunters on the Great Plains were able to use horses to herd buffalo to the edge of the jumps instead of doing all of this work on foot. They had learned as well to work with the dogs they had domesticated to help with the hauling. Now they could chase the buffalo and shoot them with muskets or, if not exclusively with muskets, with steel arrow and lance points. The bow-and-arrow hunters still had a big advantage over the musket hunters, because a man with a musket had only one chance to kill a buffalo. By the time he had reloaded, the entire herd would have stampeded away from him. Arrows were silent and accurate, and a good hunter could loose many arrows in a short period of time.
The buffalo were at last driven from the land on the Canadian prairie around 1890. Again, it is difficult to find any evidence of efforts to conserve the bison herds. Native hunters on the grasslands discovered that they could trade for guns, steel arrow points, and tobacco with pemmican. This dried-meat-and-berry mixture was in high demand by the voyageurs, who found it very nourishing. It was usually made from buffalo meat. Eventually the bison hunters were able to trade for repeating rifles, rather than the single-shot muskets of the early eighteenth century. Thus, a party of hunters with breech-loading repeating rifles could kill more bison by shooting them from a greater distance than a party of bow-and-arrow hunters could hope to kill.
Here is a case in which prehistory collided with recorded history in the tragic transformation of a great Aboriginal culture. The moment that hunting buffalo turned from subsistence to commerce, Native hunters began to slaughter bison at a hitherto unheard-of rate and did so more easily because of improved weaponry.
The great Métis hunters of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries were probably even more efficient in their slaughter of the bison than their grasslands Aboriginal trading partners. They entered the pemmican and buffalo hide business in a big way, and they were able to carry away their hides and meat on Red River carts and sell them en masse to the fur traders. These big-wheeled carts could convey considerably more buffalo hides than any travois.
The incoming settlers from Red River, Manitoba, to Fort McLeod, Alberta, were just as culpable in the destruction of the ten-thousand-year-old buffalo hunt. They wanted farmland and ranchland, not roaming herds of buffalo. And if the buffalo sustained the nomadic bands of Aboriginals across the northern prairie, then a good buffalo was a dead buffalo. Indeed, defeating the Indians by exterminating the buffalo was U.S. domestic policy. Sport hunters on both sides of the Medicine Line blasted away at bison from flat cars, leaving their victims to rot in the sun.
And last, but certainly not least, were the traders from the south. Primarily white buffalo hunters traded in buffalo hides to supply the leather industry and to meet the demand for buffalo robes throughout the United States. They slaughtered buffalo, abandoned the meat, and floated their hides with great efficiency on flat boats and small barges down the Mississippi River. The hides were used, among other things, to make belts to run factories in the East, and one of the uses for the bones was to manufacture bone china.
If prehistoric bison hunting with bow and arrow was skillful, organized, and life-sustaining, commercial bison hunting and agriculture were devastating. Nomadic Indians could not coexist with European agriculture. Without the political will from white settlers and sportsmen to save the bison, the animals were driven to near-extinction. The last of the great herds died with the meat still on their ribs, and the stink from their unharvested carcasses was unforgettable.
Wildlife conservation? Such a civilized and curiously modern expression. The dream of bleeding-heart liberals and animal lovers like me. But it was out of the question then. As we shall see, the first great strides toward wildlife conservation came from unexpected sources.
Some remaining fringes of hunter-gathering tribes found their last chance in the Far North, among the great caribou hunters from Alaska and the Yukon to Labrador and northern Quebec, where white civilization was less intrusive. Small pockets of Aboriginal hunters can still be found within a few hours’ drive from where I write these lines in northern Saskatchewan. But the horses are gone and the sled dog teams are fading fast, and the children of our last great hunters are pursuing their animals throughout the long winters on snowmobiles.
HUNTING FOR FUN is a relatively recent idea in our history as a species. First, we had to have leisure societies, buttressed by agriculture and trading, wherein the powerful few learned to celebrate hunting as a game. The earliest evidence of sport hunting comes from Thebes, in Egypt, during the mid-fourteenth century bc. Perhaps for the first time in recorded history, kings and noblemen hunted bulls, lions, and other large animals from chariots drawn by small horses. They brought along their retinues, bowmen and barmen with beating staves, who wounded and exhausted the prey so that the man in the chariot could finish it off.
I suppose the lady I spoke with at the hunting lodge in Scotland several decades ago might be tempted to imagine her ancestors on the chariot while mine were wielding a bow and arrow in advance of the chariot or beating the bush to put up something noble, like a lion or a stag. But in her eyes, on that evening in 1970, I was something of an anomaly. In her England, the men who skulked through the bushes like Yosemite Sam were called poachers. I don’t want to give the impression that I was therefore more closely aligned to the great hunters of the Mesolithic era than she. After all, in my native Canada, I was never hunting primarily to feed my family; I hunted for the adventure of it.
This is the kind of hunting we tend to read about. In my forays into the hunting section of the public library here in Saskatoon, I have discovered three rows of books (about ten feet of solid pages). There are books on target shooting with rifles, shooting varmints, shooting deer (many of these), and on shotgunning for quail, ducks, grouse, doves, geese, and clay pigeons. There are books on archery and black-powder rifles. There are anthologies (sometimes referred to as bibles) of hunting stories, by which I mean bang em ’n bag em stories, of great hunts throughout North America, and travel books on safaris to Africa and other continents in search of trophy heads.
But in this library, one of the most intensively used in all of North America, on any given day, there are a mere dozen or so books on those same shelves that have nothing at all to do with the how-to approach to sport hunting, nothing at all to do with the glory of the conquest, one well-heeled nimrod to another, bragger’s rights to the biggest trophy head and all that hairy-chested stuff. These dozen volumes rest on the shelf like lepers at a bus stop. David Petersen’s A Hunter’s Heart is one such book. The stories he has anthologized here all demonstrate a strong empathy for the wild creatures the hunters pursue. Invariably, the writers are conservation-minded people (Jimmy Carter, Tom McGuane, Edward Abbey, Jim Harrison, Ted Kerasote) who happen to love hunting. Rick Bass’s Caribou Rising is about defending an Arctic caribou herd, the Gwich’in hunting culture, and the wildlife refuge that is their home. James Swan’s In Defense of Hunting is a Jungian analysis of the sport hunter’s psyche.
These brave dozen or so are misfits among the shelves of hunting books in the 799.2 section. They are, let’s face it, nerds among jocks. At night when all the patrons have gone home, I can well imagine that the great army of how-to books and safari adventure books gang up on the sensitive ones and call them names that impugn their masculinity.
My point is that the sheer bulk of hairy-chested-gentleman hunting literature generates the illusion that sport hunting is in some mysterious way superior to subsistence hunting. I am tempted to believe that the writers and readers of this material consider that subsistence hunting, done mostly by Aboriginal people throughout the world, is not only less interesting and less heroic but less appropriate in defining the hunting narrative of our time.
Indeed, the paleoanthropologists of the next few centuries may well turn their attention away from dogsled and snowshoe cultures in the Far North and descend upon the dismantled and buried suburban malls and their sporting goods emporia, seeking out evidence of the great hunters of the early second millennium, the primitives who stirred fossil fuels into the mix. The people who hunted from cars along the side roads as I did with my father (Homo automobilis). The more sophisticated men who transported all-terrain vehicles in trucks and set them loose on timber roads because of their loathing for walking in the woods and fields (Homo outof-shapiens). And of course the northerly tribe of hunters who were so evolved that they could run down deer and coyotes to exhaustion in the deep snow and shoot them (Homo snowmobilis).
SPORT HUNTING IN North America aspired to be the sport of kings. The Theban chariots may well have evolved into jeeps and all-terrain vehicles, but sport hunting in North America evolved from one kind of feudal system or another. In various European countries, members of the landed gentry could secure hunting rights on vast estates, but their tenants had to poach their game to feed themselves. In North America, hunting for sport came out of the earliest leisure societies on plantations, ranches, and wilderness forests. Not only was it one of the privileges accorded to the landed gentry, but it came with the conquest of the land, the westward march of American and Canadian settlers, and the rigors of pioneer life. Hunting in North America developed into a beloved pastime that combined the gentlemanly appeal of golf with the shoot-em-up savor of the Wild West.
By the late seventeenth century, trappers, traders, and commercial hunters had spread out all over the North American continent in search of beaver, buffalo, bear, moose, and anything else of commercial value. As these incursions increased in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the impact on wildlife became catastrophic. As we have seen, the buffalo declined to near-extinction. The plains grizzlies all but disappeared. The last remnants of this population sought refuge in the Swan Hills of northern Alberta, and their future there is in grave danger. The passenger pigeons completely disappeared.
If there was one man who came to define hunting for sport in North America, it was Theodore Roosevelt, renowned trophy hunter, scientist, historian, war hero, naturalist, and politician. He embodied the whole tradition, from hunting to fill the larder, as early settlers had done, to hunting on safari for trophies. From his experiences of hunting, especially in the American West, he became the popular embodiment of the great white hunter. When he finished his years in the White House, he went on safari to Africa, where he hunted from Kenya to the southern Sudan. There he managed to kill at least two of every species of animal that he could find. At least two is putting it mildly. For some species he went as high as eighteen trophies. His total bag was five hundred and twelve. Let me put that in numbers: 512 dead animals. He must have seen them all as Democrats.
But Roosevelt was also one of North America’s most influential conservationists. He worked hard to establish strict laws to protect wildlife from being slaughtered by hunters who had no love for the animals they pursued. He fought, with real success, to protect wildlife habitat by helping to establish national forest reserves, national parks, and zoos. The following credo, written by Roosevelt around 1910, was thought to be a rather progressive stance at the time:
I never sought to make large bags, for a hunter should not be a game butcher. It is always lawful to kill dangerous or noxious animals, like the bear, cougar, and wolf; but other game should only be shot when there is need of the meat, or for the sake of an unusually fine trophy. Killing a reasonable number of bulls, bucks, or rams does no harm whatever to the species; to slay half the males of any kind of game would not stop the natural increase, and they yield the best sport, and are the legitimate objects of the chase. Cows, does, and ewes, on the contrary, should only be killed (unless barren) in case of necessity.
POACHERS WERE ROOSEVELT’S enemies. Sportsmen from influential American families were his friends. He hunted with the social elites of the Boone and Crockett Club, which he helped found, but he also hunted with wranglers and squatters. He combined the traditions of the European aristocrat and the North American maverick. His hunting ethic and his example were very much alive in my father’s memory, an orthodoxy to which many sport hunters belonged. In a profound and pervasive sense, the boys and men of America in the first half of the twentieth century and beyond were all skulking through the bushes with Teddy Roosevelt.
This brief history of hunting leaves us with two traditions: subsistence hunting and hunting for the fun of it. Both traditions survive to this day and face off along the shrinking habitats with a persistent level of antipathy. But between the two traditions are vital connections that should not be ignored. Some Native people, for example, have turned to sport hunting in recent years, and non-Aboriginal people engage in subsistence hunting as well.
Aldo Leopold, the naturalist from Wisconsin, who hunted for subsistence and for the fun of it, considers both sport hunting and subsistence hunting in his classic A Sand County Almanac (1949). He reminds us that Aboriginal culture often coalesces around the pursuit of wild game. Among (largely white) people who hunt and fish for the sport of it, the cultural landscape is very different, but the culture manages through hunting to reengage with its wild origins by renewing contact with wild things. From hunting, Leopold tells us, hunters can affirm three important cultural values.
First, “there is value in any experience that reminds us of our distinctive national origins and evolution.” Leopold sees this awareness as “nationalism in its best sense.” He doesn’t talk about nationalism in its worst sense, the history of wholesale slaughter and conquest that seems to be part of the colonial heritage and does not need to be reenacted. Instead, he gives us examples that may well have come from his own boyhood: a boy scout has “tanned a coonskin cap, and goes Daniel-Booneing in the willow thicket below the tracks. He is re-enacting American history.” A young boy who traps rodents is “reenacting the romance of the fur trade.”
The second cultural value derived from hunting and other engagements with the wild is “any experience that reminds us of our dependency on the soil-plant-animal-man food chain, and of the fundamental organization of the biota [Leopold’s term for living organisms in the environment].” Leopold quotes a nursery song about bringing home a rabbit skin “to wrap the baby bunting in.” This folk song is Leopold’s reminder of the time when human tribes hunted to feed and clothe their families.
Leopold concludes with a third cultural value: “any experience that exercises those ethical restraints collectively called ‘sportsmanship.’ ” These restraints might have been learned in the company of more experienced hunters, but they are enacted in solitude. The hunter “ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct. Whatever his acts, they are dictated by his own conscience, rather than a mob of onlookers. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this fact.”
As a young hunter exploring the wilderness twenty years after Leopold’s death, looking back on my own experiences of hunting in the United States and Canada, I can see obvious reasons why the split between the two hunting communities has been perpetuated. But I can also see a great deal of truth in Leopold’s conclusions about the two traditions. Having read him so recently, perhaps I am a bit closer now to explaining the depths of excitement I shared with my dad, my brother, and all our hunting buddies who gathered in Edmonton more than ten thousand years after the arrival of the first hunters in North America.
