I was introduced to hunting by a Normandy gamekeeper when I was seven years old. The gamekeeper was a huge middle-aged man who killed crippled birds with his teeth. My weapon was a single-barreled nine-millimeter shotgun. I shot a hare my first day in the field, wounded it, and cried. I was not allowed to shoot hares—rabbits out, hares non—but I did, and hit the animal in the hindquarters. I cried because I was in trouble, because the hare was screaming and dragging itself in circles on the ground, and because I had never killed with a gun before and it scared me. My tears fell on the rough cloth of the gamekeeper’s hunting coat. He made me finish what I had started but was sensitive enough not to rub blood on my face as was the custom.
It was a wonder I ever picked up another gun, but I did. The very thing that had frightened me, the conscious and formal resolution to kill and the tangible weight of that decision in my hands, pushed me out the door and into the woods two days later. Although the motives have changed, hunting began with killing. My affair with nature has since then been related to the pursuit of game. I studied a species because I wanted to kill it, and I looked at things through the quick, impatient eyes of the hunter; eyes that darted under brush piles, anticipated movement, plotted courses, assessed what belonged in the shadows and what didn’t; eyes that learned to recognize the details that made me good at what I did. I looked at nature from the narrow angle necessary to act out my passion and always with defined objectives in mind. I looked at a piece of country for the game it hid. I moved differently, dressed differently, and I thought differently from 95 percent of the other hunters, but the bottom line was that I was one of them and still am. I killed a lot of birds in those days and was good at it because I had no regrets. Game was for the taking, and I was galvanized by the glory of numbers; restraint and empathy came later.
The specific mission of hunting slanted my vision of nature throughout my life, to the extent that even as I grow older and spend more time in the field without a gun I still think, look, and move as though I am hunting. A quest lives in me. I am a hunter like other people are bankers, and along with the seduction of the landscape, my dogs, the efficaciousness of some of my shooting, and the mild aura of danger that follows any hunter in the field, the stroke that killed was always at the core of the sport that took me to the field. This is a waning passion in the gene pool of mankind, now that hunting has no meaningful role in society, no survival merits, no reason to exist except as a sport. In my case it is a sport as natural as dancing or making love, and just as ancient, but to others it is an abomination, and I do understand why.
I didn’t always obey the rules or the ethics of hunting and have over the years used my guns for all the wrong reasons, but when all is said and done I will make sure I have given back more than I have taken, which I presume is the essence of conservation. In the process of being comfortable with what I do for sport and how I go about it, I see much more of the natural world than most. But keeping things in perspective, I see less than a farmer, a rancher, a surveyor, and all those who are out there every day making ends meet.
As a hunter I am conscious of food and cover, space and time, predation and disease, hunger and overbreeding, and I understand the effects that these ingredients have on the species I hunt and those I don’t, including our own. In terms of pure knowledge I know less than a third-year biology student.
My farm has replaced my gun, and I don’t look for the same hiding places anymore; I don’t compute range and angles, I don’t look for feeding patterns. I look at birds that soar under the clouds, birds that eat other birds, and birds that fish with their feet (before this is over I shall be a falconer). I look at all sorts of birds, large and small, and I look at them with gentle eyes.
I have always been a walker, but before I became a landowner I walked looking at the ground and didn’t raise my eyes unless I was carrying a gun. I would pretend I was thinking but in fact was letting things pass by. In cities I walked into things because they happened to be there. I lost a bet to a woman once who guessed my astrological sign because of the way I shuffled through the streets of Paris wondering where my feet were taking me. “You are a Taurus,” she said, “an earth person.”
“Merde!” I cursed.
I tried blaming my posture on the fact that I had been thinking about ways to get into her britches, but she shook her head and laughed like Frenchwomen do. “Cheri, you have a tongue. Use it next time. I might have said yes, I might have said no, but at least you would not have lost that expensive bracelet in the window.” Compounding the affront, she patted me on the rear and it felt like she was burping me.
Now that I own the land I walk on, I have extended my horizons, dilated my vision, and adopted a druidlike contentment in the laws of nature. We have all reveled in the carnival of death and even lingered in the shadows of spilt blood, but those times, like the day of the great elephant herds, are gone.
There is nothing divine about man’s laws; in fact they are outdated and self-serving. The laws of God and nature are just as self-serving, and because they are not remunerative they are short on compassion. Darwin once said, “Nature will tell you a direct lie if she can.” So will our Congress, our children, and so will we; it is the nature of the beast.