Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/801177
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S • 11 This 'N That WHY By Gene Hill Once in a great while, when my wife shames me into it, we have a little party at the house. Invariably some meddling woman will notice the all-too-few woodcock shooting prints I have hanging on the wall or the all- too-few decoys in my sketchy collection. "You shoot birds? How can you?" And then I try to explain to her the difference between the swing-through method, the pointing-out method, and maintained lead. If that doesn't confuse her out of any further remarks, she can be counted on to say, "Oh, I don't mean that. I mean how could you? The defenseless little things . . ." Mentioning the fact that she is wearing a leopard skin coat that was probably poached by some African with a poisoned arrow has absolutely no relation to the conversation. Save your breath. Birds are different. It's of no help either to try to explain the ecology of so much land—so many birds. It does no good to explain about nature's law of the survival of the fittest; or that she's just knocked back second helpings on Pheasant Fricassee; or to point out that without the restraining laws of nature and predation etc., etc., she'd be up to her sweet derriere in bobwhite quail or wild turkey. What she wants to know—or have you admit, is that you are one hell of a killer, teeming with bloodlust, who comes home from a few hours in a meadow or marsh with enough stiff game slung over your bloody shoulder to pull the rivets on your truss. This, for some reason I don't understand, she understands and will accept as a perfectly valid reason. A friend of mine who makes his living, more or less, by working, more or less, for a gun company, is by nature a big game hunter. His answer as to why his house is decorated from cellar to attic with heads of antelope, impala, and the outer garments of lion and leopard and zebra, is guaranteed to stop the nonsense. He merely smiles a very mysterious smile that I'm sure he's practiced over African campfires and says, "Oh, I guess I just like to hear the thud of bullets smack against some solid flesh." But what happens when you ask yourself the very same question? Some excellent recent anthropology, notably Robert Ardrey's fine book African Genesis, claims that man owes his evolution to the fact that he learned how to kill. Ardrey has satisfactory evidence that man's first tools were killing instruments. Maybe we kill just to keep our hand in it, in case the job folds and we lose the mortgage and end up back in the father-in-law's cave. The non-hunter doesn't understand why you and I can go out and swamp it all day long, not popping a cap or cutting a feather and be delighted, if not satisfied, with Continued on page 12 I would rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth. — Steve McQueen "What do you say, to break the monotony we do a little hunting tomorrow?" humoRama by DaN DecaRLo – couRtesy heRitage auctioNs/www.ha.com