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Inside this Article

1. Intro	3. Keeping the debate honest
2. Hijacking hunting for politics

Last fall I traveled to my annual caribou-hunting grounds in the central Alaskan Arctic. I took the trip in mid-October, though I usually like to go about six weeks earlier, when air temperatures climb into the fifties and sixties during the day and then drop toward freezing at night. That makes for perfect hunting weather: It’s warm enough for biting insects, which annoy the caribou and keep them moving and visible, but cold enough to prevent large quarters of meat from spoiling (so long as they’re kept dry beneath a tarp and propped up on a bed of willows for air flow). As I found out, though, mid-October is a whole other story.

 

A landscape that I generally think of as pleasant and mild had become hostile and ruthless. Rivers I’m accustomed to traveling by canoe were completely frozen over. Ice fogs hung in the air for days on end, making it impossible to see more than 40 or 50 yards. Firewood in the treeless tundra was hard to come by, and every night my two buddies and I lay shivering in our sleeping bags while we waited for sunlight that became more scant every day. A trip that might have lasted just a long weekend—enough time to kill and butcher five or six bulls, under good conditions—stretched into its tenth day. By then our food was about gone. We ate the couple of mouse-gnawed packages of ramen noodles we’d found near an abandoned winter camp, and we were down to a quarter block of cheese and a few ptarmigan—quail-size birds you can eat like popcorn without ever getting full—that we’d shot. When the sky finally cleared one morning and I saw a herd of caribou coming at us over the horizon, it was like that rush you get when your most intimate loved one steps out of the airport terminal after a long, faraway trip. The animals came off a snowy bluff and plunged toward the frozen river, steam rising off their bodies, and I felt with crystalline clarity the answer to a question I often ponder: Why hunt?  

 

I’ve been pursuing big game for 22 years and small game for four or five years longer than that, and hardly a month has gone by when I haven’t asked myself that elusive question. I’ve come up with a lot of different answers over the years, but at the core of each lies a deep reverence for nature and a simple appreciation for wild foods. Not only do I like knowing where my food comes from, I also like understanding the minute, practical details of how it’s transformed from animal life into human sustenance. I like the way my hunting lifestyle has guided me to the wildest places in America, where I have spent weeks and months living by ancient practices that have sustained mankind for tens of thousands of years. I like knowing how to render the fat of a black bear over a fire; how to extract the nourishing marrow from an elk’s femur; and how to predict where a pheasant will flush from a patch of wild rose. I like knowing how to call a squirrel out of its hiding place in the upper reaches of a beech tree; how to kill a spruce grouse with a rock; how to preserve meat with smoke; and how to keep a grizzly bear away from a fresh kill. I like the way hunting has guided my two brothers, Matt and Danny, into their professions—not surprisingly, their appreciation for wild game became an appreciation for wilderness, which in turn led to their work as ecologists. Now their job is to scientifically justify and defend the protection of our remaining wild places.

 

I meditate on these things so often, I suppose, because I don’t find much commonality between myself and the folks who all too often represent hunters in the popular mind. In fact, there seems to be a pervasive disconnect. I think of a buddy of mine who recently worked for an outfitter, guiding trophy moose hunters in western Alaska. Explaining that his clients generally aren’t interested in eating the animals they kill, the outfitter told my friend to remove the meat from only the upward-facing side of the skinned carcasses to trick game wardens flying overhead into thinking the animal was properly butchered. And then there are other, more public instances of dubious hunting, such as the two famous Hogzilla cases—the first from Georgia, in 2004, and the second from Alabama, in 2006. These alleged thousand-plus-pound, man-killing boars reportedly terrorized the American South until two bold hunters gunned them down in what was spun as self-defense. The hogs and the gunmen became Internet sensations—at least until it was revealed that both Hogzillas were actually corn-fattened pets being masqueraded as wild animals for the sake of a joke and a little notoriety. Far from being funny, though, the spectacles only managed to highlight the brash hucksterism of a handful of wannabe hunters who have unwittingly succeeded in taking the rest of us down a peg or two in the nation’s eyes.

 

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