Why We Hunt
You have to become a different person in the course of these years. For this is what the art of archery means: A profound and far-reaching contest of the archer with himself. You will see with other eyes and measure with other measures. It happens to all that are touched by the spirit of this art.
EUGEN HERRIGEL
ZEN IN THE ART OF ARCHERY
TRANSLATED BY RICHARD F. C. HULL (1953)
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No one, but he who has partaken thereof, can understand the keen delight of hunting in lonely lands. For him is the joy of the horse well ridden and the rifle well held; for the long days toil and hardship, resolutely endured, and crowned at the end with triumph. In after years there shall come forever to his mind the memory of endless prairies shimmering in the bright sun, of vast snow-clad wastes of lying desolate under grey skies; of the melancholy marshes; of the rush of mighty rivers; of the breath of evergreen forest in summer; of the crooning of ice-armored pines at the touch of the winds in winter; of cataracts roaring between hoary mountain masses; of all the innumerable sights and sounds of the wilderness; of its immensity and mystery; and of the silences that brood in its still depths.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
THE WILDERNESS HUNTER (1891)
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Pa did not like a country so old and worn out that the hunting was poor. He wanted to go west. For two years he had wanted to go west and take a homestead, but Ma did not want to leave the settled country.
LAURA INGALLS WILDER
BY THE SHORES OF SILVER LAKE (1939)
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I heartily enjoy this life, with its perfect freedom, for I am very fond of hunting, and there are few sensations I prefer to that of galloping over these rolling limitless prairies, with rifle in hand, or winding my way among the barren, fantastic and grimly picturesque deserts of the so-called Bad Lands …
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
HUNTING TRIPS OF A RANCHMAN (1885)
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There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy, and its charm.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
HUNTING TRIPS OF A RANCHMAN (1885)
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The farther one gets into the wilderness, the greater is the attraction of its lonely freedom.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
HUNTING TRIPS OF A RANCHMAN (1885)
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Old Flintlock, as friends and family knew [Archibald Rutledge], believed that hunting was the finest legacy a father could leave his offspring. It is my fixed conviction, he argued, that if a parent can give his children a passionate and wholesome devotion to the outdoors, the fact the he cannot leave each of them a fortune does not really matter. They will always enjoy life in its nobler aspects without money and without price.
JIM CASADA
“SQUIRREL HUNTING: THE MAKING OF YOUNG HUNTERS” (LATE 1990s)
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One of the main advantages of hunting, my amiable readers, consists in its compelling you to be incessantly on the move from place to place, which is quite a pleasant thing for a man with nothing in particular to do.
IVAN TURGENEV
A HUNTER’S SKETCHES (1852)
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In our rather stupid time, hunting is belittled and misunderstood, many refusing to see it for the vital vacation from the human condition that it is, or to acknowledge that the hunter does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, he kills in order to have hunted.
JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET
MEDITATIONS ON HUNTING (1942)
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I hunt to get in touch with an atavistic self that takes pure animal delight in the contest between hunter and hunted. In pheasant hunting I find my senses sharpened, my blood racing, and my whole being focused on what I am doing. I kill in order to have lived.
STEVE GROOMS
PHEASANT HUNTER’S HARVEST (1990)
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… the finding and killing of the game is after all but a part of the whole.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT (CIRCA 1900)
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On a hard hunting trip in mid-winter civilized man
learns once more
1. To earn his food and eat it with a hearty appetite;
2. To feel the delicious comfort of warmth and shelter
after extreme exposure;
3. To enjoy the life-renewing qualities of sound sleep
after utter exhaustion; and incidentally
4. To appreciate a respite from the eternal temptations
of sex.
J. WONG QUINCEY
CHINESE HUNTER (CIRCA 1938–39)
• • •
I wondered whether Kisik or any other great hunter could ever tell which he really liked better, the hunting or the eating. It was the old question in another form: Did he hunt to eat or eat to hunt?
ANGUS CAMERON
“A HUNT WITH THE INNUIT” IN
SEASONS OF THE HUNTER
EDITED BY ELMAN AND SEYBOLD (1985)
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September. It was, at last, September. If I shot him, it would be all over: the dawns to come and these twilights, the long, long walks through the country, the dead parsnip in the frosted meadows, and the musky smell of the bedded elk in the trampled grass. All over for another ten months … and all before I had watched and listened and smelled enough to be engaged with the season. I unloaded the rifle and closed the bolt.
TED KERASOTE
BLOODTIES (1993)
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After more than 50 years of hunting, I’m pretty sure of two things: that hunting is too deeply rooted in the metaphysical to allow clinical examination, and that it’s a happy man who keeps his youthful appetite for that sort of metaphysics.
JOHN MADSON
“WHY MEN HUNT” (1996)
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What an absurd time to be a hunter. Yet has there ever been a more vital one?
THOMAS McINTYRE
“WHAT THE HUNTER KNOWS” IN
SPORTS AFIELD (1995)
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Go to your freezer. How much and what kind of fish and game do you have left in there from the previous summer and fall getting freezer burn? Write it down and subtract it as penance from your bag limit this summer and fall.
JIM HARRISON
“A SPRING SERMON … OR SIBERIA” IN
SPORTS AFIELD (1994)
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As far as enjoyment is concerned, I think that hunting is a lot more fun than killing, but, if you take away the ability to kill, you automatically take away most of the fun of hunting.
ERLE STANLEY GARDNER
HUNTING IS MORE FUN THAN KILLING (1949)
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I hope you have an Old Duck Hunter in your life and I hope he lives in your blind … and shares your whiskey forever.
GENE HILL
“THE OLD DUCK HUNTER” IN
A HUNTER’S FIRESIDE BOOK (1972)
• • •
Nature designed me as a meat-eating predator, and I accept nature on its own terms, acknowledging death, including my own (and yours, madam) as an essential aspect of life, not to be euphemized or Disneyfied or otherwise denied. When I kill a wild duck or pheasant cleanly and instantly, in the fullness of its wild beauty and strong flight, I save the life of a domestic duck or chicken, which would be killed in abject, squawking terror.
When I kill a sharp-tailed grouse or bobwhite quail I become part of the process of life, accepting and fulfilling my role as predator and rejecting the destructive Old Testament concept of man as something separate from nature.
ED ZERN
HUNTING AND FISHING FROM “A” TO ZERN (1985)
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I believe hunters owe it to themselves to try to understand what it is that urges them out. To fail to examine the source of the hunting instinct is to fail to experience it fully.
CHARLES FERGUS
THE UPLAND EQUATION (1995)
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… by hunting, man succeeds … in separating himself from the present, and in renewing the primitive situations.
JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET
MEDITATIONS ON HUNTING (1942)
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Ten thousand years ago all men were hunters, including the ancestors of everyone reading this book.
CARLETON S. COON
THE HUNTING PEOPLES (1971)
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Another sharptail flew from the open hillside in the sunlight, far too far away, and I thought, before I walked down into the thorns, Gillis breathing beside me: At least they give some illusion of choice. At least they give you that.
JOHN BARSNESS
WESTERN SKIES (1994)
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