The Best Hunting Stories Ever Told

by Jay Cassell

  One day you get no chances for all your struggle. Or, worse yet, you fail chances that you should have seized. Another time you make them all. If you consistently get limits, however, consider making the rules more difficult for yourself. Field sports are not about targets and scores. Score-keeping is necessary in competitions between humans, unattractive in competitions with weaker adversaries. Consistent scores of many to zero do not smell of struggle and chance. They smell of greed.

  We oscillate between excess and fastidiousness, these days. We do not kill chickens in the kitchen and save their blood, as old recipes instruct, or make a holiday of butchering our pigs, as the Portuguese still do. We insulate ourselves from natural human death, too. I do not know whether it is a coincidence that our television sets are Roman circuses, displays of gladiators killing each other for the pleasure of an audience. Then there is the violence on streets, drug-pushers slaughtering for the privilege of selling effort-free thrills to the self-indulgent. Either this is not civilization or Freud was wrong when he saw civilization as holding unconscious impulses in check.

  My family escapes most of the nastiness. We have no television set, see few films, live far from big cities. It is a boycott and more. The fact is that I am squeamish. So is my son, who never had a chance to get used to television. My wife is made of sterner stuff; I can bribe her to trap mice, which would take over the place if I were in charge.

  Shooting our food is not like that. Sometimes I do feel sorry for woodcocks, ducks, bobwhites, and deer, in that order, but I hunt them, with restrictions to placate myself. We all draw the line somewhere. In Virginia, a neighbor installed an electric bug-zapper behind his opulently landscaped house. All night the infernal machine drew pretty moths to its light and fried them with sparks and sizzles. On the other hand, he would not teach his son to shoot an air rifle. Few of us today would kill a panda; many (but not me) are happy to squash spiders. I have no problem shooting rattlesnakes that threaten my pup. I do not want to kill any primate, any relative of the dog, anything young with big eyes. Do not bother to tell me that this makes no sense. I know that. It is anthropomorphism: the Panda or Cuddle Factor. It explains, I suppose, why the debate between anti-hunters and hunters is a dialogue of the deaf, between those who see hunting as an atrocity and those who suspect that the rest of life is the atrocity.

  I feel few pangs for the cock pheasant. He is a dragon. If this be sympathetic delusion, make the most of it.

  When I slay the pheasant, I kill, first, the dragon in me, which is the ugly one appearing in most Western art. Western painters have known about that greedy creature for as long as it has been threatening to consume us. They have, however, been ignorant of nature’s dragon, the one that lures rather than repels. You are not to think that all dragons are ugly. Watch those that appear in Chinatown parades. These are the lovely dragons of the swamps, the ones that a Chinese artist could see running around in a rice paddy: serpent’s tail, eagle’s wings, hawk’s beak and eyes, cruel spurs. I have watched the cock pheasant chase off a fox.

  At night I slay my dragon by the edge of the twisted forest. My son tells me that he does it too, and from the way Huckleberry runs and yips in his sleep, I conclude that pointer pups are in on the game. My wife, on the other hand, reports that the dragons in her country have been rendered extinct by a knight in shining armor. Perhaps the meaning of dragons is sex-linked. I do not know about this, but you may have confidence that my dragons are the real thing.

  I clutch this reality as an antidote to indifference. We think of hunting and fishing as escape, and they are. They are escape from a society of escapism: from pervasive complacency, from media pitched to the lowest common denominator, from trivialization of thought, from the politics of blandness, from gladiators, celebrities, entertainment, scandals, the life synthetic. A hunter chasing pheasants feels everything except anomie.

  Pheasants make the fields and roadsides glow with feathers; women make the town swirl with skirts and fresh-washed hair. It is (I guess) no coincidence that the goddess of the chase is female, or that wives wear T-shirts reading, “This marriage has been interrupted for the hunting season.” Diana’s pheasants and Eros’s women populate adjacent sections of the male landscape.

  Once, clothed in old jeans before old jeans were fashionable, I rode a decrepit motorcycle from my home in Montana to college in New York. North Dakota was the best part because the sun was shining and girls were on the sidewalks. My form of transportation seemed as romantic to me as it must have looked forbidding to anyone in her right mind. The streets shone with possibilities. As dungeon holds fair maiden, so might Fargo hold The Girl. I would scarcely have known what to do with her even if, by some miracle, her mother had not whisked her away from the hoodlum with bugs squashed between his black leather helmet and Lindbergh goggles. Thinking that she might appear was enough to make North Dakota beautiful.

  “A trip to Florence or to Athens is one thing for a young man who hopes to meet his Beatrice on the Ponte Santa Trinita or his Socrates in the Agora,” says Allan Bloom, “and quite another for one who goes without such aching need. The latter is only a tourist, the former looking for completion.”

  Diana the huntress is another kind of completion: perhaps the only kind besides Beatrice the woman and Socrates the thinker. Hunting aches as much as the other two needs. Diana is distinctly older than thinking and older even than Eros, properly speaking. (Do not confuse Eros with mere reproduction.)

  You can hunt with a bow and arrow or fishing rod instead of a gun. Perhaps you can hunt with binoculars and camera. I like them, but I use them mostly at comfortable times. The people I see hunting with lenses are near roads, in wildlife refuges, after breakfast, and sometimes in groups. They are more tourist than hunter. It seems to take a gun to get one into the lonely, thorny places before winter dawns.

  In Diana’s company you are not a tourist. You are not trying to peer into a distant secret magnified eight times by a lens. You are a hunter/forager like all wild animals. You have accepted the risks and discomfort that go along with climbing through the looking glass, into the secret.

  When you descend from Diana’s world and get back into your car, you leave the secret but take some of its emotions with you. You are now as far from real things as a tourist, but you see them differently. Bent cornstalks and collapsing barns are no longer objects, pretty or ugly. They are possibilities, sparks of excitement, stars that shine in the fields as you drive by. You must check them out next time. Hunting has populated the countryside with needs and meanings. The farm has become the faerie. It hides a pheasant.

  There is a future in this. We will increasingly value bird hunting, especially with pointing dogs. The conviction settled on me, oddly, when a friend and editor asked me to investigate trends in trout flies over the last thirty years. What I discovered was that there had been a boom in dry flies, and in imitative dry flies at that—those representing specific natural insects. Fishing with such flies is effective. It takes science, art, magic. It is visual, rational, demanding. It is fun. It is like hunting with a pointer, though more cerebral, not so relentlessly honest.

  Call the dog’s point a miracle or spell; either is close enough. Or consider it a gamble for high stakes between predator and prey. At core, the point is a prolongation of the pause before pouncing. All canids and felids (or at least all I have seen) do it. Why? Why not just jump on the prey without wasting time?

  The answer became clear when Jeff Koski loaned me a “recall pen” so big that I could walk inside. We stocked the pen with a dozen bobwhites. For each training session, I catch a couple and put them out in the grass for the pup to point. At the end of the session, the birds remaining in the pen call the loose ones back in through a one-way door.

  The catching is not as easy as it sounds, even in a pen. I cannot just walk in and start grabbing. If I do, all of the birds run or fly around. They confuse me. I reach for everything and catch nothing. Instead, I must stop and study, isolat
e one bird in my mind, ready my hand, then grab accurately. The pause gives me the advantage of surprise: I know exactly what I am going to do and choose when to do it. The bird must react to my initiative.

  In the wild, however, the bird can conceal itself, which means that it too may gain something by waiting rather than flushing. The predator may pass by without knowing what it is missing. Gallinaceous (chickenlike) birds around the world often choose to hide rather than fly, when the ground-cover is thick enough. They know that they are most vulnerable at the moment when they jump from the ground: fully exposed, but still moving slowly. Predators are skilled at exploiting this moment.

  The point, then, is tension. The pointer’s art is tension crystalized, frozen in time like an insect in amber. Dog must persuade bird that any other course of action carries more risks than sitting still. It is a game of nerves. The pheasant is superbly adapted to it.

  On the one hand, its reluctance to fly means that it is exposed to the dog for protracted periods. (A bird that flies takes itself out of the game either because it escapes or is killed.)

  On the other hand, the pheasant lays a longer trail than any other bird hunted by dogs, and at the end of the trail must still be persuaded to sit until the human gets in a position to shoot.

  The game, then, is easy to join, long of play, and difficult to win: sporting, in a word. And the key to winning is tension.

  The emotion of the point makes the game worth playing even off-season: Huck and I do it for half an hour on most winter afternoons. As opportunties for shooting constrict, more people will try no-kill hunting with a pointer, just as they now do catchand-release fishing with a fly rod. They will get everything except the shot. The point will provide enough emotion (and complication) to compensate, for awhile. I would like to tell you that hunting under no-kill rules can keep dog and man keen forever, but canine and human pups both need the consummation. Old dogs and men do not need the shot as often as they did when they were young, but they need it sometimes. And all human families need the pheasant dinner.

  Whatever the rules, we will need more of them to keep struggle and chance in balance as the natural world shrinks. Will our hunting mean less when it is more constricted? No: not if it is real hunting. Rules are part of that. Rules assure us that we are doing the thing right. The hunters who painted in the cave of Lascaux had art, so I would guess that they also had rules. If you have thought of those people as savages halfway down from the tree, have a close look at their paintings. They were as good as art gets. They had Picasso’s economy and at least as much emotion. Artists then were like us, except that they stayed with two natural subjects: game, mostly, and then women. (A liberated 21st century person like you would be bored with that old stuff, of course.)

  Those ancient hunters would have wanted to stalk the wild bull according to traditions and codes, even when he needed no protection. They would have had myths.

  Perhaps all of this seems primitive and forbidding. Perhaps you got this book to give to someone who deserves a present. You do not hunt yourself but you have read a little bit, trying to understand inexplicable tastes. How can a hunter shoot and love? Given a bit of time and sensitivity, it is natural—as natural as Achilles killing Hector, John D. Rockefeller turning philanthropist, or any teenage boy becoming a husband. Love and death are no harder to believe now than ten thousand years ago.

  From Pheasants of the Mind. Reprinted with permission of Anna Proper.

  Choices

  T. EDWARD NICKENS

  There is a particular expression that fixes my daughter Markie’s face when she is watching for a white-tailed deer to step gingerly out of the thick tangle of greenbrier along Black Creek. It is a look unlike any other I have witnessed, at any other time, under any other circumstances. Markie leans slightly forward from the waist, eyes boring into the brambles a hundred yards distant. She does not move. Her lips are pressed thin. She holds her eyes open so long that the corneas glisten with tears, then she forcibly blinks, as if she might miss that exact, exquisite moment when a deer emerges from the shadows and into the open cypress flats. She simply watches, with an intensity that suggests a belief, or wish, that sheer force of will can draw a deer from the thicket and into view from where our two-person tree stand perches 18 feet up a giant chestnut oak.

  Her expression is hopeful and expectant, and it is predatory. Not, perhaps, in the sense that mine is predatory, for I am holding the rifle. But it is predatory in that it carries her fervent desire to comprehend the wildness that manifests itself in a large mammal living unfettered in the woods, and her wish to make that deer, in some meaningful way, her own.

  I have lived 30 years as a hunter, but in the last two years my perspective of what hunting is, and can be, and should be, has changed in ways that have changed my relationship to my most passionate avocation. My two children, Markie, nearly ten, and Jack, seven, are now old enough to spend time with me in the field. In the past, their connection to hunting had been a step removed. They’d run out the door when I pulled in front of the house and squabble over who would get the duck feathers or who might score the deer hooves. Then, three years ago, I began taking Markie to the woods. Our trips were nothing as intense as hours on a deer stand, but purposeful walkabouts through the squirrel woods, with a shotgun in hand. Last year was Jack’s year to try to stay still long enough for an animal—a squirrel, a bird, any animal at all—to wander into view of a bundle of camouflage-clad fidget. They are hooked. For now.

  I want my children to grow up to be hunters for selfish reasons, and for reasons far beyond self—mine or theirs. Keep my kids hooked on hunting, and in years to come I’ll have hunting companions for life. Each morning chasing squirrels in the next county over is the seed for a greater adventure in years to come—ducks in the Dakotas, grouse in Vermont, deer in the big bottoms of Georgia.

  But an embrace of hunting can also be the starting point for a concept of nature unsullied by the overly animated version of the natural world kids are subjected to from birth. To truly understand hunting is to understand that nature’s beauty is found not only in the spirited, liquid eyes of a fawn, but in its spotted flanks, in that sun-dappled pattern whose sole purpose is to confound the wolf. What we take for nature’s exquisite and primeval elegance—the rabbit’s laughably long ears, the butterfly’s patterned wings—is often an expression of nature’s irrepressible calculus of eat-or-be-eaten.

  And that calculus is not limited to life beyond the sidewalk. I want my children to know that even the most modern life, the life lived closest to the cubicle and the subway, involves tremendous consequences for wildlife. We make a thousand choices every day—to wear cotton clothing dyed with ink, to eat fish, to operate an internal combustion engine on the way to a soccer field that once was a meadow filled with nesting meadowlarks—with little to no regard to their impacts on what Henry Beston called those “other nations.” Hunter or vegan, city boy or farmer’s daughter, life requires life. I want them to understand this fundament of existence in an elemental and clear form: a gun in hand, a finger on a trigger, a choice to make. And one not to make lightly.

  Markie is tender-hearted, empathetic to every bug that splats on the windshield. She has a love of nature that manifests itself in a collection of bones displayed near a family of stuffed tigers. She is beginning to process this push-pull of hunting—the love of the woods and its wild lives with those awkward still moments after the blast of the gun. She walks on my right, away from the muzzle, down the path at Edie Pie’s farm. She likes to look for the squirrels herself, wants me to shoot them as they dash through the treetops, swift as quail. “It’s only fair, Dad,” she shrugs. “You miss a lot, you know.”

  This is good, I think. Already she is fashioning an ethic of fair chase in which the jaws sometimes snap on thin air or tail feathers. “Are you going to take a gun?” she asked, the last time I proposed a deer hunt.

  “We are hunting, you know. That’s part of it.”

  Sh
e wrinkled her nose. “No mamas, then, promise?”

  “No does,” I agreed. “We’ll hold out for a big buck. And maybe we’ll just watch him hang out for a while.”

  Jack, however, is a bottom-line guy. The sight of a squirrel in the woods where we hunt, as we hunt, sends him into white-knuckled fits of excitement that threaten to burst through every pore of his body.

  “Daddy! Daddy! See him? Do you see him? Are you gonna shoot? Shoot! Daddy, Shoot!”

  He sits beside me, at the base of the tree, rocking back and forth in an attempt to stay still. He holds his little Buck BB gun in his lap, forgetting to pout because I won’t let him load it yet. Another year, perhaps.

  There is, after all, a process to this. It began, and continues, with uncountable forays into the wilds of backyard and backcountry. Long before Markie and Jack held a BB gun, they held a bug net. We live deep inside a city of a half-million people surrounded by a metro area of a million more, but we spent hours ferreting out creekbanks and strips of greenspace where frogs and salamanders could still be found. Our playroom stills sports air hockey and art easels and three glass aquaria regulated by a seven-day rule: live animals are returned to natural habitat within a week of capture. Frogs, snakes, fish, snails, lizards, insects, slugs—bring ‘em home. Watch. Feed. Water. Learn to care. Every box of PetSmart crickets carried a lesson: big or small, man or beast, scale or fin or exoskeleton—we rely on each other.