I hadn’t expected to enjoy hunting so much. If you’d told me five years ago that I’d be hunting at all, I would have laughed/sneered in your face. Like many urbanites, I had an image of hunting that involved loud men in camo and big trucks, beer empties flying out the window. ‘What kind of person gets pleasure from killing things?’ I used to think. The reality is that I’d been killing things all my life. I’ve always eaten meat, and for there to be meat, something needed to have died. Just because I didn’t do the killing myself didn’t make me any less complicit.
I’m writing about my transition from non-hunter to hunter now for a magazine piece and am finding that I stray into long, discursive pontification, justifying or defending the decision to hunt. That I have the impulse to do so warrants examination itself.
But here, I’ll simply, unabashedly tell you what it is that I enjoy about hunting. Perhaps ‘enjoy’ isn’t the right word. I find it satisfying and rewarding. These are feelings that have germinated since getting my first buck just last season.
First, there are the exceptional places that we go in search of game, places that we otherwise would have no reason to visit. The estuaries, forested slopes and meadows studded with islands of trees. Even the clearcuts, piled with slash and scrubby young second-growth have something to offer, if just to see a small stand of old-growth spared from the saw or even to hear the distinctive water drop call of a raven we’ve come to know in a particular area. Much of the time is spent exploring and bashing around, gaining new perspective on land that we may have passed by many times before without much thought.
I say ‘we,’ since more often than not I’m hunting with others. And that would be the second thing that I appreciate most, the time that I get to spend with friends in a shared purpose. And the après-hunt to me is an integral part of the hunting itself.
But even when I’m hunting alone, there’s the heightened awareness of my surroundings. I’m rarely ever otherwise conscious of wind direction, the noise that I’m making, and so completely absorbed by what’s happening in the forest around me.
Then, of course, there’s the meat, the organic/free-range meat that I’ve worked hard to get. And if cooking is gratifying, then it’s even more so, when you know that you harvested the ingredients yourself. It’s a special feeling to feed yourself and others with what you’ve hunted and gathered. Having killed and processed my game, I also have a more visceral understanding of the direct connection between something dying so that I can eat and live. It makes me have more respect for my food.
Still, my initial reaction after dropping an animal is sadness. I don’t enjoy the killing part. This may sound contradictory but that’s the way it is. I feel sadness and remorse each time I’ve taken an animal’s life and I’ve been told that feeling persists in even veteran hunters. I follow the tradition that I was taught, which is to stop and acknowledge the animal, to give thanks.
Because the deer here is an introduced species and booming in population, the hunting season is nine months long and the bag limit is 15. Hunting has become an integral part of my life up here. Yesterday, I wrote in the morning, paddled waves in the afternoon, and hunted with friends in the evening (we didn’t even see a deer, but we did see an owl glide past as the moon came up and some gnarled, mossy bog trees that were straight out of a Tim Burton film). If I’d only got some building in, it might have been a perfect day.