Call of the Mild Page 4

  This portrayal of hunting couldn’t have been more different from my own upbringing, in which animals were cherished companions. Like most modern-day Americans, my closest animal relationships involved pets. Throughout childhood, my sister, Gretchen, and I adopted fleets of gerbils and guinea pigs. We celebrated their birthdays. We bought them Christmas presents. And those were just the rodents. The center of our universe was Daisy, a tall, exotic supermodel of a mutt whom my brother found loping down the street when I was just five years old. We included her in our make-believe games. We shared our Popsicles with her.

  During high school, I worked at a veterinary clinic and then a veterinary research laboratory. Yet outside of work and the home, I gave only superficial thought to the animals who contributed to my daily life. I tried not to buy cosmetics or toiletries tested on animals, though I approved of animals’ use in medical research. I’ve long respected vegetarians because they seem to be animal lovers who are consistent in their beliefs. I’ve noticed, however, that when I don’t eat meat for a few weeks, I start to crave a hamburger as a vampire does blood.

  Court’s description—of rolling in pine boughs to cover up his scent, then creeping through the woods wearing camouflage face paint—reminds me of stories I’ve heard about American Indian hunters blending into their surroundings, almost becoming more animal than human.

  Despite my disapproval of hunting, I have always granted a special immunity to American Indian hunters. Perhaps that’s because Indians are, as I learned in grade school, careful to use every part of the animal. Or because they didn’t traditionally use guns. Or maybe I simply recognize the cruelty of condemning a lifestyle that has all but vanished at the hands of my own non-native ancestors. In any case, bow hunting sounds more like Indian hunting—the good kind—than the gun-fueled Disney kind I am used to.

  After that conversation with the fire chief, I go on to meet more hunters nearly every day. Sure, some of them perpetuate the gun-crazed stereotype that I grew up with. But more often than not, I find myself talking to hunters who are surprisingly thoughtful about their prey. They know all of these tiny, fascinating details about the animals they pursue, and they manage to poke this knowledge into unrelated conversations.

  When I act curious—which I am—they speak a little louder. Soon they forget to pause politely to let me respond or ask a question. Their eyes widen. They gesture wildly, absorbed in this world of non-human life. They remind me of enthusiastic volunteer docents at a zoo, not testosterone-fueled gun nuts. In fact, these hunters will do something that I never could have expected: teach me to rethink a sport that I once wrote off as the pastime of rednecks. Eventually, this will change the way I feel about my new home. It, along with falling in love with Scott, will compel me to stay beyond the one or two years I originally envisioned.

  That fall, a handful of small businesses in La Pine lock their doors and hang CLOSED UNTIL NOV. 8 signs in their windows. The flooring store. The lunch truck that is painted like a cow and drives around selling sandwiches and espresso drinks. The house painters. Even a mechanic’s shop.

  “What’s going on?” I ask a local know-it-all.

  She looks at me as if I’ve just asked what year it is. “It’s elk-hunting season.”

  “Oh. Right, of course.” Though I’ve met many hunters, we haven’t discussed details such as the time frame for hunting a particular species.

  As I drive back to Bend, where hunting season is about as noticeable as National Lead Poisoning Prevention Week (also the last week in October, apparently), I think about all the hunters I’ve met on my beat.

  I think about the twenty-something man who tracked a group of antelope in late summer so that on opening day, he not only knew where to find the herd, but also knew which individual animal he was going to kill and how to identify it. I think about the middle-aged elk hunter who tells me: “Most years, it doesn’t even matter if I get an elk. I love the meat, and it’s great to fill the freezer when I get the chance. But mostly, I just love to be outside.” It surprises me to hear that the slaughter is not necessarily the object of hunting. These people are not heartless killers as much as amateur biologists, real-life experts in the natural environment—something that I care very much about.

  I have always considered myself an environmentalist. But now that I stop and think about it, my résumé is pretty weak. I speak fondly of big trees, buy organic lettuce and chide SUV owners. Until now, that has felt like enough. Lately I’ve noticed some disturbing habits, though: I talk about the destruction of nature as if I play no part in it myself. The timber companies got greedy and cut down every tree. Oil companies are stabbing at the bottom of the ocean. Gas companies are scraping bare the Rocky Mountains. Meanwhile, I’m printing on paper, working and living in buildings made of wood, driving a car and heating my apartment with gas. It’s me. I’m fueling all of this destruction, even if I’ve arranged my life so I don’t have to see it or admit it. My hands may be clean and free of calluses, but there is blood on them just as there is on the hunter’s or the logger’s.

  Perhaps the hunters I’ve met are, in a way, responsible environmentalists like I aspire to be. They come face-to-face with what they take from the earth. They have a vested interest in making sure that wildlife populations are sustained in the long term. They have a better understanding than I do about how those populations fit into the balance of the world. I begin to grow jealous of the conservative hunters whom I interview and write about. They work on the land, while I merely play on it.

  It’s funny to find myself looking to hunters as environmentalist role models. These days, celebrity hunters such as Ted Nugent and Sarah Palin tend to be spokespeople for gun rights and right-wing politics, never for the environment. But it wasn’t always this way. In fact, modern conservationism was first promoted by hunters, including our Hunter in Chief Theodore Roosevelt. In his biography The Wilderness Warrior, Douglas Brinkley points out that, in the 1870s, while the poet and naturalist Henry David Thoreau “contemplated nature preserves in the Atlantic Monthly,” hunters’ organizations such as the Adirondack Club and Bisby Club were taking real action, setting aside private wildlife preserves.

  In 1887, more than a decade before taking over the Oval Office, Roosevelt co-founded the Boone and Crockett Club to create bison, elk and antelope preserves for future generations of hunters. Two years into his presidency, he declared Florida’s Pelican Island the nation’s first federally protected preserve and breeding ground for native birds. By the time he left office in 1909, Roosevelt had created or enlarged 150 national forests, fifty-one bird reservations, four game preserves, six national parks and eighteen national monuments. In total, he spared some 234 million acres of our country’s most valuable land from development. Roosevelt believed in a goal of conservation that his friend and colleague Gifford Pinchot defined as “the greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time.”

  Roosevelt was condemned by some (including Mark Twain, one of his most vocal critics) for his frequent hunting excursions. Other Americans didn’t bat an eye at photos of their president standing over a dead animal. Today, of course, hunting is nowhere near as widely accepted. Urbanization is a big reason why fewer Americans hunt or know someone who hunts. In 1950, two-thirds of Americans lived in cities or suburbs. Now more than four out of five Americans are packed into 366 metropolitan areas.

  Our image of environmentalism began to shift in the 1960s, when Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring warned of the dangers of industrial pollution and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb foretold the environmental devastation caused by rampant population growth. Humans—including hunters—were pegged as a growing threat to the natural world. “Nature seems safest,” writes historian Richard White, “when shielded from human labor.”

  Popular culture has also changed how we think about hunting. I learned only as an adult that the film Bambi is loosely based on a 1923 Austrian novel, Bambi: A Life in the Woods, by Felix Salten. Like the movie, th
e book tells the story of a forest from the point of view of an anthropomorphized deer. But the book is dark, with death as a central theme. Humans shoot birds and deer, including Bambi’s mother. Bambi must learn to avoid snare traps. A fox kills a pheasant in broad daylight as Bambi and others look on. A crow tears apart a young hare and it dies slowly, moaning. A ferret wounds a squirrel, who bleeds to death before magpies land and feast on him. In this Bambi, life is beautiful but also harsh and full of danger.

  The Disney film, however, portrays a utopia of frolic and fun. The animals never kill or procreate or even poop. They have just one enemy: man. Though humans never appear on screen, they violate hunting ethics and, in all likelihood, state law. In the film’s most famous scene, Bambi’s mother is shot during spring, with young Bambi still by her side. Later, humans use dogs to track deer and ignite a forest fire to chase the animals out of the woods. In other words, these people aren’t hunters, they’re poachers. There are poachers in real life, too, but they don’t represent hunting any more than counterfeiters represent artists. Yet as anthropologist Matt Cartmill writes, the name “Bambi” has become “virtually synonymous with ‘deer,’ ” and has shaped many Americans’ views of hunting.

  I’ve been living in Bend for a year when I take a week off work and meet my family in Recife, Brazil, where my brother now lives and teaches English. Nathan moved from Washington, DC, to this beachfront metropolis in Brazil’s Afro-Caribbean northeast just a few months before I moved to Bend. The strangeness of his new home puts my life in Bend into perspective. In just a little over one year, he has become fluent in Portuguese, adopted the local diet of grilled meats, bean stews and exotic fruits, and embraced the natives’ casual attitude about time (good-bye, wristwatch!). Meanwhile, in Oregon, all I’ve really had to do is learn to live without Vietnamese food and make small talk with cowboys and loggers.

  Seeing Nathan so engaged in his new setting makes me notice something else. I’ve always considered myself to be a good, adventurous traveler. I approach a mysterious place with my senses wide open, eager to inhale its smells, tastes and history. But my curiosity fades as soon as I go home. Or, at least, it always used to. I think about how much I took for granted in Takoma Park, including rivers that I never knew existed. I think about the efforts I’ve made, since moving to Bend, to assimilate—drinking lattes, riding a bike, learning to ski. All of that has made me more like the people who migrated here in the past decade, not the ones who have lived here their whole lives. In La Pine, which has become my reference point for the Old West, I still have very little in common with the people I meet.

  I frequently hear old-timers complain about Bend’s ongoing suburbanization. “Why do people come here if all they want to do is turn it into the place they left?” one asks me. At first, I’m defensive. I’m not trying to change central Oregon into something it’s not. Am I?

  I wonder how I would feel if my own hometown, Takoma Park, were suddenly overrun with people who wanted to shut down the hippie food co-op, cancel the raucous Fourth of July parade or otherwise disrupt the local traditions that I grew up with.

  Bend is attracting an athletic crowd that favors sports like running, yoga, cycling, golf and, of course, skiing—things that can be done in a well-groomed park or even indoors. Hunting and fishing, on the other hand, require a living, breathing ecosystem. They’re messier, more complicated activities. Some depth of knowledge is required to excel—knowledge about a specific place and an animal’s life cycle or, at the very least, its preference for food or cover. In a sense, hunting is the embodiment of rural America. Not the romanticized version that appeals to city slickers, necessarily, but the grisly, utilitarian truth of it.

  In central Oregon, public opinion about hunting has soured. We newcomers have fueled thousands of acres of development and passed anti-shooting ordinances in surrounding areas, too. It’s simple geometry that as neighborhoods and trails expand, there is less room in the woods for hunting. So perhaps it’s no surprise that nationwide, hunting has been on a steady decline. The age of the average hunter is rising, too, as older hunters retire to less-strenuous activities such as hiking and bird-watching, and fewer of their children take up the sport. Surveys have found that just one in four children raised by hunting parents will learn to hunt.

  When I return to Bend from Brazil, Scott picks me up at the airport. As we drive home, I scan the now familiar scenery—dusty juniper trees and slack barbed-wire fences corralling swaybacked quarter horses. I close my eyes and make a promise to myself: I will not take my new home for granted. I will scour the high desert like a hungry tourist. Or better yet, like a true native.

  The following summer, I sit down to dinner one evening and cut into a chicken breast that Scott just grilled. I think back to a conversation that I, a lifelong meat eater, had with my aunt Nina, more than a decade ago.

  Nina has been a vegetarian for as long as I can remember. I was a teenager when I finally asked her why she didn’t eat meat. She thought about it for a moment.

  “If it ever came down to it,” she said, “I don’t think I could kill an animal. And so it seems hypocritical for me to pay someone else to do it.”

  Though I’d never thought about it before, buying a package of chicken thighs at the grocery store suddenly seemed a bit like hiring a hit man: not only vicious but cowardly, too.

  Hunting—this theme that keeps showing up in my life, this intersection of culture and politics and history—offers a chance, as Michael Pollan writes, “to prepare and eat a meal in full consciousness of what was involved.” I spear a chunk of meat with my fork and stare at it. A question bursts into my head like a firework: Do I have what it takes to find and kill my own dinner?

  This same reasoning that led my aunt to a life of vegetarianism is what convinces me to pick up a gun and hunt my own meal. After more than twenty-six years of eating meat, I want to know if I have what it takes to cut out the hit man and kill my own dinner.

  When I first moved here, my plan was to get some experience under my belt, have some outdoors adventures and then move back to New York. But now I have fallen in love with a man, and perhaps I’m being seduced by a place, as well. My once flippant goal of “becoming outdoorsy” has morphed into deeper questioning of what kind of relationship I want with nature. My glimpses of La Pine have convinced me that rural life—perhaps even its uncomfortable traditions such as hunting—is worth protecting. But I can’t help protect it if I don’t first understand it.

  Here in Bend, where the dominant culture more closely reflects my own, it’s easy to marginalize the old ways. An element that is being dismissed is hunting for one’s own food and the vast knowledge necessary to do it. We risk losing something essential if we deign to define the New West without first understanding its old cultures and traditions. Besides, my liberal heart bleeds for any species on the decline, even if that species happens to wear camouflage and carry guns. It’s time for me to stop talking about giving back to the earth and start understanding how much I really take from it.

  I decide to do the unthinkable: I will learn to hunt.

  I break the news to Scott. At first, he’s confused.

  “If you want to understand where your food comes from, why not get a job at a feedlot?” he asks. “Or a slaughterhouse?”

  But it’s not just about the food. Hunting could teach me to read landscapes the way fly-fishing has taught me to read rivers. It could connect me to the rural culture that has shaped my new home. Hunting could also help me delve into the disjointed motifs of urbanization and environmentalism that have haunted my work and my thoughts for more than two years now.

  “I’ll help however I can,” Scott says. “But I don’t want to hunt.”

  He tells me about shooting and skinning a rock chuck (local slang for a marmot) when he was a kid. At the time, he says, he felt like a pioneer, and killing the animal was an adventure. Now he feels guilty about it.

  The way I imagine it, learning to hunt will be
a similar adventure. But I wonder if I, too, will kill an animal and then regret it for decades.

  CHAPTER 3

  GUN-SHY

  As a reporter, research is my bread and butter, so I start by going straight to a source: Tony, one of the elk hunters I’ve met on my beat. Tony and his wife own a truck, painted black and white to look like a cow, which they drive around La Pine, selling sandwiches and coffee.

  “What would you do if you were in my position?” I ask him. “You’re an adult and you’ve never hunted in your life but you want to try. How do you get started?”

  He rubs his beard and purses his lips for a minute.

  “I have no idea. Just get out there and do it.”

  It may be true that the only way to learn to hunt is by hunting. But I don’t know where to go, what kind of gun to carry or how to shoot it. I visit a couple of local bookstores but strike out, because they don’t carry anything related to hunting. (It’s Bend, after all; there’s not much shelf space between the Pilates and hiking books.) Next, I visit the library, where the relevant books are far too specific (say, Mule Deer Hunting in Eastern Oregon) and assume a base of knowledge that I don’t yet have. On Google, I slam into the same problem: All of the sites about hunting are for people who already hunt. And then it dawns on me: Hunting is a twenty-first-century rarity—something you can’t learn online or in a book. There’s no Hunting for Dummies. There are no intro classes at the local community college.

  Most hunters would have you think that theirs is the sport of the everyman. But I’m finding it to be oddly exclusive. Hunting isn’t so much a hobby as an inheritance, passed from one generation to the next. You have to learn from someone, and that someone is usually your dad. But where does that leave me—an adult whose parents are openly disgusted by the idea of killing an animal in the wild? Maybe this decision to hunt was a stupid one. Maybe you’re born a hunter or you’re not. I’m not.