Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/769056
Wild S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S • 149 I n Galway Kinnell's poem "The Bear," a primitive hunter tracks his mortally wounded prey for days, each one leading him further into a delirious state of hunger and thirst. When he finally finds the bear dead, he is exhausted and freezing. He climbs into the steaming, gutted carcass to save himself. Inside, he falls asleep and dreams "of lumbering flatfooted / over the tundra." When he awakens he realizes that as he had chased the bear, surviving on the spilled blood from its wounds, he gradually became it. The poem ends with him wandering off "one / hairy-soled trudge stuck out before [him]", perhaps to hunt again as the bear. I have read this poem often and always before hunting season. I have an affinity for it. Beyond the beauty of its imagery and language, there is a truth in it, especially its theme of transfiguration: When we hunt, we become like the animals we are hunting, and like those that hunt them. This seems absurd at first mention, but do we not mask ourselves in camouflage and scent? Is there not a mimicking craft to the way we move unseen, and unheard, through the woods? We imitate the calls of our prey, assume their routines. We devour our kill. I like to think the act of hunting is also the act of becoming wild. We do not call animals into our own places, but instead we allow ourselves to be drawn into theirs. As hunters, we enter nature. Like life and death in nature, success hinges upon how well we immerse ourselves there, how practiced we are at becoming an animal. If we are good at it, our senses become heightened. The squirrel's step on a leafy floor becomes that of a hulking giant. The beseeching screes of hawks, the grieving call of the dove, these are the score to the narrative of our time in the woods. We smell the egg-odor of marshes, the mustiness of goldenrod, and the dankness of earth. Our heartbeats become audible, a metronomic measuring of our transformation from caged city- dwellers and suburban serfs to denizens of our own wildness. We relish the change, and it makes us better hunters. Of course it does, because it makes us like our prey. The clatter of jays is not incidental, but instead deafening counsel that our presence has become known. Our senses are tuned for success, just as a deer's are for survival, or a wolf's are for his meal. When we talk about hunting as a reach back to our earlier selves, it is our animal selves we are talking about, and the longing to be in the animal universe. But to be in it, truly in it, we must shed a bit of ourselves, otherwise we are just visitors, arrivistes, uncertain, perhaps even unwelcome, thrashing about the woods, upending the balance of things, the sanctity of the place. We are like guests who leave beds unmade, towels piled on the floor, who talk too loudly and are heard through the walls. The hunter does not make himself at home; he behaves as if he has lived there all along. We've had deer sleep below our stands. They've grazed near us when we sat under the trees. A black-and-white warbler once alit on the muzzle of my turkey gun; chipmunks have hurdled my outstretched legs. A sharp-shinned hawk once nearly landed on me, its talons mere inches from my shoulder as it weighed taking me for its perch. They had been invited by the recognition that I had become one of their own. And, there was a conversation. Enlightened Man will argue that we have evolved beyond this. is the hunter The true hunter becomes one with the natural world. By Michael luders