Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/769056
He will say man does not need these senses to survive, and he has no business using them to stalk and kill animals; in fact, has a moral obligation not to. Leaving aside the implications this would have for conservation, I would argue that man has a biological impulse that begs him to, or at least it does those of us who maintain any kind of relationship with nature. Too many of us walk within the concrete and glass of cities. That is civilization, we are told. In my view, the word is nothing more than another for domestication. Live walled up long enough and we lose that feral impulse residing within us, and with it, all its attendant sensory rewards. We are told the stories of newcomers to hunting—many of them coming ready to oppose it, but coming nonetheless because of intellectual curiosity and honesty—who find themselves suddenly alive in the woods. They speak in awe and wonder of a place at once so familiar to them, and yet so entirely new. When noted food author Michael Pollan went hunting for the first time, the things he noticed were all the things he had never noticed before, and would not have had he just been strolling through a woodland. One can take a walk in the woods, or one can hunt them. One can visit nature, or one can become part of it. It is not the same thing. When I am sitting under the sprawling limbs of an oak, waiting on passing deer, I like to imagine those branches as antlers sprung from my head. I lift my nose to the breezes. I cock an ear to the sounds of a place coming more and more alive with the appearance of light. The trees sway in a rhythm like my own. It might be raining or snowing; the game does not care, so neither do I. All that matters is that they must eat, and not be eaten. I am sitting in their universe. Each day like this is another one closer to their world, each one another further from my own. If I stay there long enough, I am no longer myself—or at least no longer my previous self. I am like an animal. n 150 • S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S andyworks/istockphoto.com