There is nothing like the feeling you get while gazing at an animal you intend to kill.
Your heart pounds. Your hands tremble. Your guts churn with a mixture of exhilaration and fear. The animal might be moving slowly through the forest, unaware of your presence, or it may be standing still looking at you. Time speeds up.
Afterward, you wonder: Was this jittery wave of emotion about ensuring that the first shot be accurate, that every care must be taken before the trigger is pulled to avoid missing or wounding an animal? Or is it because every hunter, down to his bones, recognizes something elemental and primal in himself as he prepares to engage in a deliberate act of violence, to purposely cross a well-established psychological boundary?
I have hunted ever since I first followed my father into the woods in western Pennsylvania when I was 8 years old, and I still love it. I hunt even though my love of hunting puts me at odds with the world that I inhabit today in Washington's suburbs.
Friends and colleagues express surprise, and often disgust. So I seldom talk about hunting, at least in this part of the country. I don't usually admit that I even own guns. But last week, after the news reports about 8-year-old Sierra Stiles killing a bear on the first day of the season in Western Maryland, I couldn't avoid the subject. It was the talk of the office and local talk radio, with some people suggesting that allowing such a young child to participate in the hunt was a form of child abuse. When I heard about young Sierra's feat, my first reaction ran toward skepticism. A third-grader killing a bear? Two shots to the chest? Well, hats off to her: I know how hard it is to hunt such large prey, how easy it is to do everything right and yet fail to make the kill. I didn't bag my first buck until I was 16.
Whenever I do tell people that I hunt, they often want to put me on the spot. They want to know how it's possible for a person who has attended college and lived in New York City and Washington, who plays violin and attends the symphony, who is raising three smart and sensitive girls -- all of whom, like their mother, are opposed to hunting -- can engage in something so primitive. They want to know how anyone can participate in a sport whose central aim is killing. Hardest of all is to explain why a blood sport should bring such pleasure, and even a kind of spiritual rebirth.
And the truth is, no matter how much excitement there is during a hunt, at the moment of the kill, I have always felt remorse. I have walked up to a buck as he lay dying, horrified at the blood, the gaping wounds, the terrible reflexive gasps. I have felt the strange sensation of mercy and disgust that comes with administering a coup de grace.
And then I go out again.
This is not easy to explain. Although I eat what I kill, that is not why I hunt. The truth is, almost nobody in this country can honestly say he needs to hunt to eat. Partly, I hunt because of tradition, having accompanied my father, my grandfather, my uncles and now my brothers. But that is not the only reason. I have abandoned other family traditions. As for my father, he no longer hunts. He just does not like it anymore. (When I go out, my girls tell me that they're rooting for the deer.)
No, the reasons why I hunt go deeper than tradition, much deeper. For me, hunting is nothing less than a ritual, connecting me to a past that stretches from my father to his father and to countless generations before him. There is no other reason to hunt today, except as ritual. And like all rituals, it is grounded in customs as regular as the phases of the moon, and observed in practices that invite solitude and fellowship.
Every hunt places me in a specific time, and against the timelessness of nature. And although killing is essential to the ritual, it isn't the most important element. If it were only about the kill, then I wouldn't hunt. If the prey didn't have a chance, if the killing were easy, then it wouldn't be hunting. It would just be ritualized death.
True, for too many people who call themselves hunters, the first day of deer season is merely an excuse to run amok in the woods. For me, when autumn comes around, the very air seems to smell of hunting. A blade of sunlight slanting low across a newly harvested field on an October afternoon is enough to rekindle memories of other fields and hunts.
