Editor’s note: This commentary is by Robby Porter, of East Montpelier, a self-employed woodworker and owner of small hydroelectric projects. This is an excerpt from his book of essays, “Concrete and Culture.”
My brother has a theory that everyone has something they are good at doing but which they don’t want to do. I have the inverse theory, everyone has something they are not good at which they like doing. So it goes with siblings. Both of us love to hunt and neither of us is any good at it.
It has to be said early on and as a disclaimer that very many hunters demonstrate the worst of everything. They are cruel, wasteful, dangerous, utterly without connection to place and they give hunting a bad name. So understand that by hunting I mean hunting when it is done properly. Because hunting is a heightened version of life, when it is bad it is a heightened version of bad living.
But when it is good, it is the best of everything.
Hunting is a blood connection to the land. The first thing non-hunters always say to you is, “Well, if you like chasing animals through the woods and trying to catch them, why don’t you just take a camera.” And this, of course, shows that they don’t even understand the first thing about what makes hunting important. Instead they have an urbanized view of challenges and goals, competition and scoring which misses most of what hunting is about.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with stalking through the woods with a camera shooting pictures, but it isn’t hunting precisely because you aren’t trying to kill something. (The fact that you are trying to kill something brings up a moral question about living on the flesh of other animals, a fair but different question than why hunting is so special.)
Hunting is a life and death struggle. The struggle is tilted entirely in favor of the hunter who is very rarely in any sort of threat from his quarry. Guns have exponentially increased this advantage, but it is nature’s way. Look at a cat and a mouse, or a fox and a mouse, or a lion and a gazelle. Predators are evolved to take very small risks when they go up against their prey. Nature has no use for fairness. Balance, yes, but not fairness.
And so when a hunter goes out into the woods looking for a deer and armed with a rifle that can kill a deer from 300 yards, it is a continuation, an exaggerated continuation of a habit that was in us long before we were homo sapiens.
Hunting is about survival. When you hunt you are directly engaged in an activity that sustained us and our ancestors for all those millions of years before we started farming. There are very few blood connections to the land. Not everyone is susceptible to a land connection. Many people are urbanized to the point where they live lives suspended above the land, complete, healthy, engaging lives that are totally dependent on human structures and never meaningfully attach to a place or piece of land.
But hunting, and farming, gardening, herding, fishing, these are blood connections to the land where the person’s existence, the fodder for their thoughts as well as their bodies comes from their interaction with the land. For most people this is a fleeting connection, a few days in the woods or the chickens they keep out back which are in no way critical for their survival but connect them nonetheless.
Connection to this timeless game of survival, the cycle of life, is what makes hunting special. As a hunter you are a participant, you have blood on your hands in the game of life that is inescapably a blood game. It is not for everybody nor is hunting the only way to be connected to the land, but when you immerse yourself in the woods with a weapon and the intent to kill, you become part of a river extending back to the earliest humans. Killing is unnecessary. Most hunts end unsuccessfully and this in no way diminishes the connection. But without the intent, the honest intent on which you will act given the opportunity, you are just an observer.
It is a fine line. Watch a house cat observing birds feeding, sniffing at a mouse hole, rotating its ears while walking across the lawn and you see that every hunter, like every prey species, is mostly an observer. But catch a glimpse of the cat’s flashing eyes and you know there is intent. The cat is a hunter.
The intent makes all the difference. It is a different game when it is a blood game. Your thinking and perception change. You’re connected. Not like a Bushman who hunts to live as his ancestors always have, whose existence and even language is seamlessly woven into his environment, but for an afternoon or a few days, you have a foot in the same stream — the stream of being purely alive on earth.
You matter. The wind matters. Your body matters. Your smell matters. Whether you can hike over the ridge or stand for an hour in one spot matters. And above all the land matters. Are the deer down in the softwoods or up in the oaks? Every undulation in the land makes a difference when you are hunting. And when you hunt you look around and what you see is the uniqueness of every square inch of earth — the interaction of chance and struggle — the arched over cherry tree grew on that spot because a seed fell there and the soil was favorable enough for it to compete with the maples all around it, and then loggers crushed it as a sapling when they came to cut the bigger maples and so it grew bent over but was able to survive because some of the maples were gone, and now, leaning, sitting almost, longer than you meant to because the trunk is conveniently angled and comfortable, you hear the small precise sound of a deer’s pointed hooves poking into leaves as it takes three steps and then stops, looking around, always, its whole life timid and tentative, taking three steps, looking and listening and always smelling. Your heart races for a minute knowing it is a buck until reality overcomes imagination and the slightly baby-faced head of a fawn emerges from behind a little hemlock. Had it been a buck and had you shot it, you would have imposed your action, struggle and chance again, on this place, but instead you watch for fifteen minutes as the deer, knowing something is wrong, but unsure what, drifts cautiously away until you see it one minute and then, turning your eyes but not your head to look at a noise you knew was a squirrel before you looked but couldn’t help looking anyway in case it was the buck, and when you look back you can’t even see the fawn although you know it hasn’t moved because the leaves are too dry not to have heard it, and then a tail twitch reveals its position as it takes three steps and disappears completely. That night your brother asks if you saw anything and you say, “Just a fawn by that big, bent over cherry tree up on the ridge” and he knows and you know without saying more that he knows where you mean because he too has stopped there. You ask if he saw anything. “No, nothing. Just a partridge. This is such a waste of time. I don’t know why I do it.” And you know this means for a certainty that he will be going out the next morning.
