As I contemplated becoming a hunter, words helped. It was good, for instance, to read Richard Nelson’s introduction to A Hunter’s Heart. There, I caught a glimpse of his journey: from a boyhood of believing that “hunting was entirely evil—no matter who did it, how they did it, or why,” to an adulthood in which … Read more
I disposed of the lead fragment and picked through the rest of the venison carefully. I hoped none of my bullets would ever come apart like that again.
Don’t try too hard, some folks say. Desperation can drive the deer away. The less you expect, the more animals you see. How this philosophy dovetails with the undeniable value of perseverance, I’m not sure. But there may be something to it. In my first few years as a hunter, I dragged home exactly zero … Read more
A few nights ago, coyotes yipped and howled nearby. I was delighted to hear them. Granted, I was in bed at the time. My sentiments would, I suspect, be substantially different if I was, say, deep in the woods with a turned ankle and no flashlight. The next day I got thinking about those wild … Read more
Eighteen years ago, I had no doubt: hunting was wrong. Not that I made big distinctions among kinds of violence. I abhorred the idea of industrial meat operations, and thought little about the alternatives. Why split hairs? A murdered animal was a murdered animal. Hunting, however, did seem especially gratuitous. We no longer needed to … Read more
When Cath and I moved to our home here in the hills on the eastern side of the Winooski Valley, there was one group of people I wanted to keep off our few acres: hunters. Anywhere you stood on our land—or fired a rifle—you were within a few hundred yards of our house. In most … Read more
A philosopher I am not. Not in the academic sense, at least. My formal education in the subject consists of a single undergraduate class—“Reason and Argument”—which left me impressed by the contortions through which the human animal is willing to put its gray matter. So, some fifteen months ago, when I saw a “call for … Read more