Even with all of these official costs aside, hunting is not a cheap hobby. At almost every turn, I have discovered another piece of equipment I needed to buy. A chest strap to keep my binoculars handy but also out of the way. A vest to carry ammunition and birds. Warmer, sturdier pants. Waterproof boots. A gun case. A lock for my gun case. Once, I added up the costs associated with shooting one duck—hunting licenses, gas and ammunition—and discovered that its meat cost me more than twenty dollars a pound.
It’s no surprise, then, that the wealth of the average hunter is also on the rise. Private land that was once open to hunting has been cordoned off as public opinion has turned against the sport. The rising price of agricultural land means that hunters whose extended family members once owned farms and ranches are now looking to hunt on public land. (If they’re not retiring altogether.) Public lands face more and more hunting restrictions. As wealthy hunters turn to pricey private reserves, the sport faces a possible future as a pastime of only the very rich. This has long been the case in land-poor Europe, and it’s one of the key differences that set our culture apart.
As American hunting declines, the social losses far eclipse the financial ones. At its best, hunting balances short-term use with long-term preservation, and therefore provides us with a model for how to approach environmental protection. Our lives have become more computerized and climate-controlled, yet we must not forget that we are still animals, still dependent on clean water, fresh air and a functioning ecosystem. Hunting and angling teach us to understand the earth in a way that more passive activities such as hiking and nature-watching cannot. We must not lose our fluency with the natural world—because if we do, we will lose our greatest reason for protecting it.
But how we hunt matters. Too many hunters rely on vehicles and high-powered firearms to compensate for a lack of hard-earned knowledge and familiarity with the land. Hunting is difficult work. We must be in shape and willing to hike away from roads to find wildlife. We must take the long view and come down on the right side of important wildlife issues: That means agreeing to a ban on lead ammunition, no longer baiting wildlife, and acknowledging that predators play an important role in any functioning ecosystem. Nationally, hunters are more likely to vote for property rights than for habitat protection, even as rampant development displaces game species faster than any non-human predator. Clearly, forging a connection to a place is not the same as protecting that place. If it were, all hunters would already be the staunch environmentalists that they ought to be.
It is hard for me to picture a time when I won’t want to hunt anymore. Yet I promise myself that if I ever get to the point where I kill an animal and don’t feel in awe of it, I don’t feel twinges of guilt upon reflection or I don’t feel grateful for its life, then I will stop. Perhaps the biggest threat to hunting is not gun control advocates or even environmental destruction but those hunters who refuse to give the practice the respect it deserves, who treat it as no more sacred than NASCAR or Monday Night Football. Hunters who show more respect for guns, the tools they use, than the lives they take.
Hunters can and should be powerful advocates for the species they pursue. A family’s favorite hunting spot, year after year, should become an irreplaceable heirloom that they fight to protect. Good hunters should be intimately familiar with their prey. They should know what the animal eats, how it responds to different weather, what constitutes a particularly small or large specimen.
Ernest Hemingway used to worry that if American men stopped hunting, they would cease to be men. It’s a chauvinistic attitude, but I agree with a version of it. So much of American history—of human history, really—can be boiled down to the battle between man and nature.
In 1960, when our nation first considered designating wilderness areas, Wallace Stegner wrote a letter in support of the idea of wilderness, which, he argued, is itself an American resource: “We need wilderness preserved—as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds—because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed.” The same argument should be extended to hunting. It connects us to our past because we engage in the same pursuit our ancestors did for thousands of years. After a few seasons of hunting, I can’t help but feel new respect for what my ancestors went through. Their survival depended on their hunting abilities, and they hunted without the help of optical scopes, waterproof fabrics—many of them without guns. To paraphrase Hemingway: If humans stop hunting, we could lose some of our humanity.
My baby, this new life, is a constant reminder that amazing things can happen any day. Some of these wonders are tragic, like the death of my brother. Some are joyous, like welcoming a new family member into the world. And some, like shooting the elk, are a little bit of both.
Guilt resurfaces with each elk dinner. Also with each meal, my relationship with the animal extends and deepens. I didn’t spend much time tracking him, or observing him in the wild. But now we share a new ritual. I walk downstairs to our dirt-floored basement, open the freezer and sift through packages of his meat. I select one and carry it upstairs to the kitchen. While it defrosts on the counter, I flip through cookbooks or browse websites for recipes. Most are simple—grilled steaks or burgers, spaghetti with meatballs, stir-fry. Every couple of weeks, I transform some of the elk into a special meal, such as a classic bourguignonne recipe capped with buttery, homemade crust and baked for a decadent potpie.
Scott and I sit down at the built-in dining nook in our kitchen, with the rich smell of elk meat wafting from our plates. Unlike most of the meat that I’ve eaten in my thirty-one years, I am fully conscious of what this meal is and what it once was. That fatal shot created between us a bond that will last longer than the animal’s earthly life. Its flesh nourishes me, and the new life growing inside me. In return, I bear a responsibility to the species this meat belonged to, and to the land that nurtured it.
Before we lift our forks, we raise our glasses and make a simple toast, loaded with thanks: To our elk.
And then we eat.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
These pages reflect the efforts of many people, because this is my first book and because I had to learn to hunt before I could write it. Jessie Fischer, Andy Fischer, Charles Eisendrath, Gary Lewis, Russ Seaton, Del Jeske, E. V. Smith, Jack Jones, Marc Thalacker, Hank Fischer, Carol Fischer, Kit Fischer, James Johnston and many others welcomed me into the world of hunters and made me proud to call myself one.
My talented friends—Jill McGivering, Jessie Fischer, Andy Fischer, Kayley Mendenhall, Betsy Querna Cliff, Patrick Cliff and Lauren Dake—improved the early drafts. Shana Drehs helped hone my original proposal and nudge it toward publication.
I had great luck in finding two publishing professionals who understood my vision of the book and shepherded it into existence. My agent, Daniel Greenberg, has been a wise and levelheaded adviser. And my editor, Emily Griffin, gave each draft the kind of sharp, thorough read that I’d heard no longer existed. I shudder to imagine what this book would have been without her. Also at Grand Central Publishing, I give thanks to production editors Leah Tracosas and Tareth Mitch, copyeditor Laura Jorstad and publicist extraordinaire Erica Gelbard.
The Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources planted the seeds for this project in my head. Many of the thoughts around which I built these chapters arose in casual conversations, so I’m grateful to Frank Edward Allen, Jack Ward Thomas, Andy Buchsbaum, Roland Kalama and Nina Raff for saying just the right things to spur my curiosity and imagination. Adam Short, Susan Parrish, Barbara Smuts, Sarah Buss, Sally Schmall, Gregory McClarren and Durlin Hickok recommended books and articles that were pivotal to my research. The Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellowship at the University of Michigan and my home newspaper, The Bulletin, supported this project from the start.
It would have been understandable for my parents, Mel and Dee Raff, and my sister, Gretchen Raff—peaceful city folk, all three—to retch when I told them I was learning to hunt, loving it and fina
lly writing a book extolling it. Instead, they were a source of enthusiasm and encouragement. Scott McCaulou was at my side every step: talking through sticky ethical quandaries, proposing new titles, packing out the heaviest elk quarters and all the while insisting he was comfortable walking beside me while I carried a loaded gun. I couldn’t have asked for a better partner—in fishing, hunting, writing and life.
This is my own story in my own words, but many other lives are intertwined with mine. To all the people woven throughout this book: Thank you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lily Raff McCaulou was born and raised in Takoma Park, Maryland. She graduated from Wesleyan University and worked in the independent film industry in New York City before becoming a journalist. She writes an award-winning newspaper column in Bend, Oregon. This is her first book.
NOTES
Chapter 1: Going West
[Lava Butte] erupted seven thousand years ago and covered nine square miles with black, porous rock: “Lava Butte Vicinity, Oregon,” last modified April 15, 2008, http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/LavaButte/Locale/framework.html.
NASA actually trained astronauts for the moon landing on these desolate lava beds: Judy Jewell and W. C. McRae, Moon Handbooks: Oregon (Jackson, TN: Avalon Travel, 2010), 497.
Most come from California: The 2006 American Community Survey found that in 2005, 56,379 people migrated from California to Oregon, the sixth-largest interstate flow in the United States that year. The report is available at www.census.gov/acs/www, accessed July 24, 2011.
David James Duncan, The River Why (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1983).
Chapter 2: Pulling the Trigger
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, more than 10 percent of the city’s twelve thousand residents worked full-time at the town’s two lumber mills: Population figures (11,936 in 1960 and 13,710 in 1970) provided by the City of Bend. Historic mill employment estimate (twelve hundred full-time employees at peak) from the Deschutes County Historical Society.
Larix occidentalis: Latin name and details provided by the USDA Forest Service, available at www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/plants/tree/larocc/all.html, accessed July 24, 2011.
Bambi DVD. Directed by David Hand et al., 1942 (Los Angeles, CA: Walt Disney Video, 2005).
William Golding, Lord of the Flies (London: Faber and Faber, 1954).
As I drive back to Bend, where hunting season is about as noticeable as National Lead Poisoning Prevention Week: www.cdc.gov/nceh/lead/nlppw.htm.
Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 5.
In 1887, more than a decade before taking over the Oval Office: Ibid., 202.
By the time he left office in 1909, Roosevelt had created: Ibid., 19, 818–30.
“the greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time”: Gifford Pinchot, The Fight for Conservation (New York: Doubleday, 1910), 48.
Roosevelt was condemned by some: Brinkley, Wilderness Warrior, 702.
In 1950, two-thirds of Americans lived in cities or suburbs: From “Urban and Rural Population: 1900 to 1990,” prepared by the U.S. Census Bureau (October 1995), available at www.census.gov/population/censusdata/urpop0090.txt, accessed July 29, 2011.
Now more than four out of five Americans are packed into 366 metropolitan areas: From census data cited in A. G. Sulzberger, “Rural Legislators’ Power Ebbs as Populations Shift,” New York Times, June 2, 2011.
Our image of environmentalism began to shift in the 1960s: Carolyn Merchant, The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 177–82.
Richard White, “Are You an Environmentalist, or Do You Work for a Living?” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 172.
Felix Salten, Bambi: A Life in the Woods (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929).
the name “Bambi” has become “virtually synonymous with ‘deer’ ”: Matt Cartmill, A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 66.
The age of the average hunter is rising, too… Surveys have found that just one in four children raised by hunting parents will learn to hunt: Data from the 2006 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting and Wildlife Associated Recreation, available at http://wsfrprograms.fws.gov, and from a telephone interview with Steven Williams, president of the Wildlife Management Institute, in September 2007, partially reported in Lily Raff, “Recent Surveys Show a Steady Decline in the Number of People Who Hunt and Fish. So, Are Hunters and Anglers… Endangered Species?” The (Bend) Bulletin, September 9, 2007, F1.
nationwide, hunting has been on a steady decline: Since the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began tracking hunting licenses in the 1950s, license sales peaked in 1982, when about 16.7 million Americans paid for the right to hunt. In 2006, about 12.5 million people hunted, a 25 percent drop in hunters even as the national population grew more than 30 percent. Sales figures for 1982 found in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service National Hunting License Report, published December 2, 2004. Figure for 2006 from the National Survey of Fishing, Hunting and Wildlife-Associated Recreation. Both reports available at http://wsfrprograms.fws.gov.
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin, 2007), 281.
Chapter 3: Gun-Shy
The Last Shot, DVD, directed by Alan Madison (Chatham, NY: Alan Madison Productions, 2001).
Cheney was carrying a diminutive 28-gauge shotgun during his quail-hunting accident. But if he had instead used a burly 10-gauge (typically reserved for downing geese), his friend probably would not have survived: Extrapolated from Paul Farhi, “Grace Under Fire: Since Dick Cheney Shot Him, Harry Whittington’s Aim Has Been to Move On,” Washington Post, October 14, 2010.
“Yet cars kill way more people every year than guns do”: This quotation is backed up by 2009 U.S. data, which shows that motor vehicles caused 35,900 deaths and firearms caused 13,872 (excluding suicides). Injury Facts (Itasca, IL: National Safety Council, 2011), 94, 143.
In 2009, for example, 138 children ages eighteen and younger: Numbers of children, ages zero to nineteen, killed by accidental gunshot (138), accidental drowning (1,056) and automobile accidents (6,683) from ibid., 32.
the astonishing number of guns that we, as a nation, own—roughly 250 million: A 1994 survey published in 1997 by the National Institute of Justice as Guns in America: A National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms estimated that Americans owned 192 million firearms. Other organizations, including the National Rifle Association and the American Firearms Institute, estimate that we own 250 to 280 million guns as a nation.
Nearly three out of five gun-caused deaths: Gun-related suicides, murders and accidental deaths from National Safety Council, Injury Facts, 143.
The lifetime odds that you will be murdered by firearm: Odds of dying from murder by firearm (1 in 306), accidental gunshot (1 in 6,309), cancer (1 in 7), heart disease (1 in 6) and any cause (1 in 1) from National Safety Council, Injury Facts, 37.
Forty percent of U.S. households contain at least one gun. One in four adults owns one or more guns. Yet only 11 percent of firearm-owning households say they hunt. The rest keep their weapons primarily for self-defense: From National Institute of Justice, Guns in America: A National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms (1997).
Pulp Fiction, directed by Quentin Tarantino (Los Angeles: A Band Apart, 1994).
Chapter 4: Pull
Trapshooting was first developed in England in the 1700s: D. H. Eaton, Trapshooting: The Patriotic Sport (Cincinnati: Sportsmen’s Review Publishing, 1921), 1–4.
Today trapshooters take aim at standardized four-and five-sixteenth-inch disks: General information from the Trapshooting Hall of Fame in Vandalia, OH: www.traphof.org.
Chapter 5: Guts
This image was appropriated back in 1949, when a Pablo Pi
casso lithograph of a dove was selected as the emblem for that year’s World Peace Council meeting in Paris: Ina Cole, “Pablo Picasso: The Development of a Peace Symbol,” Art Times May–June 2010, www.arttimesjournal.com/art/reviews/May_June_10_Ina_Cole/Pablo_Picasso_Ina_Cole.html, accessed July 21, 2011.
Mourning dove Latin name, migration pattern, diet, habitat and fertility information as well as mortality statistics from D. B. Marshall, M. G. Hunter and A. L. Contreras, eds., Birds of Oregon: A General Reference (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2003), 304–5.
threatened or endangered species… fall under the purview of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration: “Summary of the Endangered Species Act,” last modified March 2, 2011, www.epa.gov/lawsregs/laws/esa.html.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began tracking hunting licenses: Sales figures from 1982 found in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service National Hunting License Report, published December 2, 2004. Figure from 2006 found in 2006 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting and Wildlife-Associated Recreation. Both reports available at http://wsfrprograms.fws.gov.
Doves are adaptable eaters, munching on a wide variety of seeds, grasses and forbs: Marshall, Hunter and Contreras, Birds of Oregon, 304–5.
A flock of doves is sometimes called a dule or a dole: “Animal Congregations, or What Do You Call a Group of…?” last modified September 29, 2006, www.npwrc.usgs.gov/about/faqs/animals/names.htm.
More than 96 percent of Americans: Vegetarian estimates derived from a series of surveys by the Vegetarian Resource Group, found at www.vrg.org/nutshell/faq.htm#poll; population from U.S. Census Bureau.
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