Against the Grain

I EAT THEREFORE I KILL

Consider the word “venery.” It has two meanings: “the gratification of sexual desire,” and “the practice or art of hunting, the chase.” Its root appears throughout the Indo-European languages in a variety of permutations meaning to want, to desire, to pursue, to hunt, to lust. Think of Venus, the love goddess, whose name partakes of this lineage. Also “venereal,” “venison,” and “venerate.”

Webster’s labels both of the word’s meanings “archaic,” as if the conjunction of these ideas survived to the sixteenth century, then died, not to be revived in our era, sanitized as it is of base lusts. To desire, to pursue—both verbs are now reserved for consumer goods. We would like to think the conjunction of food and sex ended when our line split from the venal bartering of chimpanzees.

Years ago I used to go hunting in eastern Montana, an eight-hour drive from my home on the state’s western edge. I went not so much for meat as for the excuse of walking alone for a few days in one of my favorite places on the planet. Eastern Montana is quintessential high plains, which places it on the ragged edge of agriculture. Stretches of it, especially the stretch Montanans call the “Golden Triangle,” just east of Great Falls, are flat and tame enough to welcome a midwesterner. It gets enough rain (most years), has enough topsoil (or at least did), and is monotonous enough to grow wheat, and it does, usually in plots of three thousand or four thousand acres owned by a single farmer and neatly sliced into miles-long strips of wheat alternated with miles-long strips of fallow land that next year will be wheat. This is Choteau County, the place The New York Times profiled when it needed to make the case that farm subsidies have created a welfare state.

It is a welfare state precisely because it is an edge, the very limits, of farming. It’s easy enough to cross to the other side, up coulees, dry gulches, behind buttes and foothills, into badlands where wheat won’t grow and behemoth tractors won’t stay upright. Through generations people have tried to make a living here, and they have failed. It’s beef country largely, grazing land, but even that has its limits when the parched soils won’t raise enough grass to justify cows.

Still further east, out past Havre (a name that accurately reports European designs on the place), where the Bear Paw Mountains poke up out of the plains, a county-sized span is not farmable. Naturally enough, if one understands the history of these matters and what settlers regarded here as a destiny manifest for waste land and waste people, these mountains hold an Indian reservation, Fort Belknap, home of the Gros Ventres and Assiniboine Sioux. Once I spent a day there with Mike Fox, a native of the reservation and the tribe’s wildlife biologist. It was his job to supervise the herd of bison his people were bringing back to the land. The herd had grown sufficiently to accommodate a few feasts during the year, a practice that had been long abandoned but was being resurrected with these bison. The tribe was coming together again. I’d heard that the tribal courts once sentenced a woman convicted of child neglect to follow the bison and watch the example of cows caring for their calves. Fox took me to the top of a rock outcrop overlooking the herd and showed me petroglyphs, ancient drawings of bison that people of his bloodline had made when they hunted here.

East of Fort Belknap, the mountains peter out onto the Missouri River breaks. The plains here are as harsh and rocky as they come, sagebrush and rattlesnakes, so, naturally enough, this is public land—the Charles M. Russell Wildlife Refuge and adjoining federal holdings managed by the Bureau of Land Management. Like most public lands in the west, it is viciously overgrazed. Some biologists here told me that when their colleagues were commissioned to assess the condition of habitat on a section of this public land, the rancher who leased it (federal land, i.e., your land) chased them off with threats of violence. The rancher’s ban stood. Still, the cows leave sections of the land alone, so antelope coexist with their grazing.

I’ve spent most of my life around our continent’s wild ungulates, which in my native Midwest meant white-tailed deer. When I moved to the Rockies, I got to know mule deer and elk. There is a common thread through these species that one quickly senses, despite their differences. The antelope, though, is a different beast altogether, skittish beyond measure and powerfully built. An antelope is to a white-tailed deer what a Porsche is to a Ford Fiesta. This explains something crucial. The other megafauna—the deer, bison, and elk—are interlopers in this land, as are even the bison Mike Fox’s ancestors hunted and drew. They came across the land bridge with humans ten thousand years ago to fill the niches left by overkill, the hunting to extinction of all of the big mammals of North America. The antelope is the lone exception. Paul Martin, the paleontologist who first figured out that the overkill had occurred, said antelope survived because they are “gracile,” a nice word for what sports fans mean by both “quick” and “fast.” Simply, even if those early settlers were bent on hunting antelope to extinction, they would pay hell doing so with stone-tipped spears.

To hunters into our time, they are the most demanding game. One sneaks on hands and knees in this treeless, featureless landscape, hoping to inch within shooting distance of a wary animal, first spotted from two miles away. Even the glint of a forehead above a piece of sagebrush can make them demonstrate that they are indeed the continent’s fastest land mammal. The floor of the landscape is constructed mostly of prickly pear cactus and cinder-like rock, so miles on hands and knees seem longer.

At least that’s how some of us do it. I’d been told going into my hunting trip that I would see other methods. Modern times have brought those hateful little four- and three-wheeled motorcycles known as ATVs (all-terrain vehicles). “Sportsmen” use these to chase down and kill antelope. Now it is possible to see pickup trucks leave the area after a weekend’s hunt with antelope piled up in the back like cordwood. The state is liberal with limits because ranchers hope to keep the number of antelope low. It is axiomatic here that grass is for cows. Everything else is classified as “varmint.” This extends downward to prairie dogs. During the off season, these same sportsmen hone their skills by crouching outside a prairie dog town with a high-powered rifle, then vaporizing any dog that pops up. There are even organized contests.

I don’t hunt antelope much anymore.

Venery, the art of hunting, may be archaic as a term. As a practice, it is certainly old, but not extinct. When I take to the woods with a rifle each fall, I join a long line of forebears, some of whom I would as soon disavow. The bison hunters we know best from antiquity are not Assiniboine Sioux, but Poles, Germans, and Romans. I say “know best” as a Caucasian. These bison hunters are of my culture, and I feel as if I know them. The written records are good enough to give me some idea of their motivation.

The closest living relative of the American bison is the Polish steppe wisent (pronounce the “w” like a “b” and you have the linguistic connection). They probably both descend from a common ancestor that once wandered Eurasia. The European bison still survives in Bialowieza, a patch of relict forest on the Poland-Lithuania border. In his book Landscape and Memory, the historian Simon Schama makes extensive use of the forest as a focal point of European imagination, a stretch of wild that helps define a self-image. Schama’s own ancestors are from the region, but forest has served its role through most of European history.

There is, for instance, the case of Hussowski (or by his Latin name, Nicholas Hussovianus), a Polish scholar at Rome in about 1520. Part of a bishop’s retinue, he nonetheless traipsed about court in thigh-high boots and a sable coat, a sort of sixteenth-century wild-man getup. He was affecting a link to the Sarmatians, half-wild horse-riding hunters of northern Europe, just as a modern writer from Montana living in Manhattan might affect a buckskin jacket and moccasins. He was given to writing long odes to bison; he even dedicated one to Pope Leo X, who was himself a hunter.

The hunting tradition among Europe’s elite would not end in the sixteenth century. Notes Schama:

In Hussowski’s prototype of Polish bison lore and in many accounts which followed over the next century, like that of Ritter Sigismund von Herberstein, the Austrian ambassador to Muscovy, the animal was depicted as a miraculous relic of preso-cial, even prehistoric past—a tribal, arboreal world of hunters and gatherers, at the same time frightening and admirable. The bison became a talisman of survival. For as long as the beast and its succoring forest endured, it was implied, so would the nation’s martial vigor. Its very brutishness operated as a test of strength and justice.