Yes, I'm a Hunter -- Here's Why

I think of my grandfather's electric skillet heaped with potatoes and rabbit meat, or the elaborate pancake breakfasts served up at a hunting camp for two dozen people. I think of the endless hands of pinochle or cribbage, the bad jokes, the shared rites. Though I have never seen this, I have heard of hunters whose faces were marked with blood after their first kill. At our camp, when a hunter missed a shot at a buck, wise guys would cut a piece of fabric from his shirttail.

I can still remember the goofy stuff, such as the time my uncle and one of my brothers laid bets about who could shoot a hunting cap tossed into the air. My uncle was dead-on. My brother cheated, blasting my uncle's hat after it landed in the weeds.

But I remember the more solemn moments, too. I think of the time my father spent teaching me one of the best ways to hunt, the way I still prefer to hunt, the supreme art of the hunt. He called it Indian hunting, and it meant moving stealthily through the woods in search of animals, instead of just waiting for them to come to you. To do it, you immerse yourself in the woods.

You take a few steps at a time, perhaps 10, and then stop. You move tree to tree. You move into the wind, so that animals cannot detect your scent. You glance at the ground, note where sticks lie, and plant each footstep carefully to avoid snapping twigs. You become aware of the softest noise, the faintest sign of movement. Hours pass while you cover little ground. You pray for rain, knowing the wet ground and the sound of the water on the leaves can conceal your footsteps. Your heart jumps when you see a deer, a bit of a deer, a flick of an ear or a moving shadow. You focus on moving every part of your body with deliberate care, even resisting the urge to swivel your head quickly in the direction of a noise. You focus your mind on focusing. You learn the limits of your control.

As ritual, hunting summons a part of us that is unconscious and instinctual, and within a context that reaffirms a reverence for nature, and reminds us of our place there. Instead of burying these impulses, hunting revives and engages aspects of human existence that modernity would like to wish away or anesthetize. It reawakens us to nature's truth: To live is to be a part of the cycle of life that demands that other living creatures must die. Native Americans recognized this when they sprinkled corn pollen on a slain deer's snout in a blessing that demonstrated their awareness of life's circle. Hunting is a way not merely of acknowledging death, but engaging it.

Last year, one of my brothers and I spent several days hunting together. On the first morning, we awoke before dawn, fried eggs, brewed coffee and then walked in darkness along a 50-year-old strip mine into a stand of trees. Powerful winds snapped branches as we shivered and watched. But the wind was so fierce, we saw nothing. When it was light, we began to Indian hunt, and still we saw nothing.

As we walked the spine of a windswept ridge, however, a bright white object caught our eye on the brow of a hill more than 500 yards across a valley. I thought it was the bleached limb of a dead tree. But my brother saw something different. He saw bone.

We were looking at the antlers of a huge buck. All we could see was the animal's head because it was bedded down in what we call a slashing -- a place that had been clear-cut by loggers years earlier and then had grown back as an impenetrable tangle of brambles, grapevines and dead logs. His enormous silver-tipped ears looked like satellite dishes as he turned his head from side to side. The buck had chosen a spot on the point of the hill that gave him a panoramic view of the valley. We realized he had been watching us as we walked along the open ridge.

I sat down and peered through the powerful scope on my 7mm magnum rifle, realizing the deer was virtually out of range. It was possible to make a shot, but I was much more likely to miss or merely wound the animal. So we agreed that my brother, who was carrying a .44-caliber carbine without a scope, would try to get closer so he could make a clean kill. I would stay and watch and signal him from across the valley if the animal escaped before my brother could get close.

Snowflakes came curving out of the sky as we split up. The distance was so great that it took my brother about 15 minutes to walk briskly from the ridge to a gas line that ran 50 yards behind the thicket where the buck lay. Then my brother began to move very, very slowly, as my father had taught us, through a thicket of brush. To his advantage, he would be moving into a strong wind, which would prevent the deer from detecting his scent and help cover the sound of his footsteps.

My eyes watered as I squinted into the blowing snow, and my fingertips ached with cold, as I followed his painstaking progress. Nearly an hour passed as my brother moved through the thicket step by step, and the deer swept his massive rack of antlers from side to side looking over the valley. At last, I could see that my brother had closed to fewer than 25 yards from the buck.

Kill him, I kept thinking.