University of Northern Iowa

On Hunting Author(s): Eric Zencey Source: The North American Review, Vol. 272, No. 2 (Jun., 1987), pp. 59-63 Published by: University of Northern Iowa Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25124850 . Accessed: 25/10/2013 20:07

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of Northern Iowa is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The North American Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 165.123.34.86 on Fri, 25 Oct 2013 20:07:57 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

THE PRESENT CASE

On Hunting ERIC ZENCEY

A man walks the shoulder of state route 14, a two-lane road that winds north through the hills of Vermont from Barre ("Granite Capital of the

World") toward Hardwick ("the Gateway to the Northeast King dom"). The man wears a red wool

jacket with a black plaid design, a

bright orange peakless cap, and green wool trousers. He is portly. Firmly bound to one shoulder is the leather

strap of a rifle, and its barrel protrudes upward, a long thin snorkel bobbing above his head. It gives him a vaguely amphibious air. As I pass him at

something near the regulation fifty miles an hour, I can see that this hike is straining him; his cheeks are red and he seems, in the short glance I have of him, to be out of breath.

There is something anomalous about a man walking along a road with a rifle. To those with urban reflexes, the sight is likely to quicken the heart and sharpen the senses, for in a world of pavement and glass a man with a

gun can mean only one thing: danger. Even when there is no danger?even in open country where this sight is not unusual, even when the rifle is

strapped to a red wool shoulder and

pointed innocuously at the sky? there is something disconcerting about the vision. The man is a

hunter. His presence here along the

road means he isn't hunting: he is out of place, away from the activity that defines him.

Hunting is an uncivil activity. It occurs outside the boundaries of civic

organization, in a landscape whose distance from the city cannot be

measured solely by the space that lies between the hunter and the nearest

high-rise apartment. The city de

pends on

agriculture?the farmer's

fields are a necessary antipode to the

apartment building. In its essence,

hunting is a stranger to both farm and

city, a stranger to the form of order that is represented in the plow and in structural steel. While agricultural societies have domesticated the

hunt, turning it variously into a for mal and mannered social occasion, or a democratic, somewhat plebian escape from routine, true hunters?

those whose lives depend on success in the hunt?survive today only

on

lands that no farming tribe has ever

contested, lands in which the urban dominion that wraps the globe takes the form of a thin and tenuous juris diction over wilderness. For most of

recorded history there has been ani

mosity between farming peoples and

hunting peoples. The farmers have tended to see the animosity as being rooted in the pure uncivilized savage ry of the hunter; to the hunter, the

problem was always a basic incom

patibility of religious vision, manifest in the farmer's penchant for

owner

ship. An appreciation of the hunter's

point of view in this, the conflict that led to the first and longest of all world

wars, is a relatively recent develop ment in western culture. One does

not need to have read Hegel in order to see that the appreciation is neither accidental nor entirely innocent of self-interest. As agriculture has ex

panded its dominion, reaching the fullest development of its potential, its

shortcomings, too, have become

more apparent, a state of affairs that

seduces us into romanticizing the

simplicity and nobility of the hunter and gatherer. But romanticism is

meager reparation for four thousand

years of denigration; desire rarely does justice to its object. Because romanticism depends upon the form of memory (and the sense of loss) that comes from seeing time as an infinite series of unique moments, it does not

escape history?and history is what is at issue here. In this conflict, history

was not only written by the winners, it was invented by them, and its impo sition on the world was a crucial com

ponent of the injustice that agri culturalists visited on hunters. Today our romanticism of the paleo-hunter

only serves to affirm the complete ness of the farmer's victory: the

secure victor can afford to be indul

gent, even generous. And yet there is a paradox here, one that Hegel might have appreciated. Geologic time

(which, with its apparently infinite

stretches, represents the fullest

development of the historical con sciousness invented by the farmer) transcends the mindset that marks off

days and hours and minutes, and in so

doing offers a near replication of the hunter's immersion in cyclic and sacred time. And, to one mindful of

geologic time, agriculture and the urban life it supports are recent ex

periments in social organization, experiments that may yet demon strate the wisdom of peoples we once viewed as savage.

No one would mistake my portly hunter for a savage. And he is, in all

likelihood, only a commuter to the

territory of the hunt. But he has been in the woods. Now, as he walks the

road, he is out. Whenever an alien

culture intrudes upon ours, there is

incongruity, even when the intrusion is as mild as this, a part-time hunter

walking the graveled shoulder of a stretch of two-lane blacktop, far from the centers of the urban culture that

produced the road.

Hunters are men, mostly. (Of the 17.5 million Americans who, accord

ing to a census by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, hunted in 1980,

only eight percent were women.) And while they pursue a variety of

game, it is the pursuit of the white tail deer, odocoileus virginianus, that

defines them in the public mind. Deer are the largest animal taken in

any great number in this country? they are ranked as big game, almost in spite of the fact that they are plen tiful?and we as a culture are drawn

to the symbolism of the large. Hunt ers are too; for many, hunting means

deer hunting, and deer season is the event toward which the year moves.

Hunting is not a spectator sport: there are no vicarious thrills in hunt

ing, unless they are found in the emo

June 1987 59

This content downloaded from 165.123.34.86 on Fri, 25 Oct 2013 20:07:57 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

tions the hunter feels when his quarry escapes?or is killed. No one pays

money to watch another person hunt, and the few attempts at presenting

hunting on television have been dis mal failures, scarcely drawing audi ences even on slow and rainy

Sundays. This is not just because the

presence of a camera and crew dis

torts the activity, so that the hunting that can be shown is not the hunting that is. Hunting is a private, if not

solitary, act. We see hunters only when they have ceased hunting, only when they emerge from the woods.

In the towns of Vermont during deer season they congregate in the parking lots of general stores, eating their lunches while the rest of the world

commutes to work, drinking coffee or

liquor against the chill of sitting motionless in the autumn woods.

They gather to talk, to compare, to

commiserate, to mock, and above all

to tell stories. In the group that stands this morning outside my town's gen eral store, there is one man in particu lar whose hands gesture easily,

moving fluidly on forearms that are

pinioned against the hood of his pick up truck, which the group uses as a

coffee table. Now and again he

thumps the dusty hood of the truck for emphasis, shaking the styrofoam cups, threatening the

roast beef sand

wich that lies close at hand atop its

plastic wrap. They are a raucous and.

burly lot, and were it not for the fact that I recognize my friend Frank

among them, and can greet him, I

might feel ill at ease as I pass them on

my way into the store.

It is a discomfort others share.

Every autumn, during deer season,

many of my friends and acquaint ances become indignant. For some,

the indignity has to do with loss of services: a large proportion of the

native population here hunts, so much so that if it weren't for the urban refugees (the vast majority of

whom are members of the profes

sions), the economy would come to a

grinding halt. As it is, commerce suf

fers, and everyone comes to under

stand that certain things are impossi ble during deer season: you cannot

get your car repaired today, you can

not get that extra cord of wood deliv ered before it snows, you cannot get a

plumber or an electrician or a fuel-oil

delivery this week. But others have a resentment whose origin lies deeper than mere inconvenience. For two

weeks the hunters own the woods

and are an unavoidable presence in

much of the public space of Ver mont?not only in the general stores

but also on the backroads, where they are found walking, and where their vehicles are parked in the high weeds or tucked into small clearings and old

logging roads, a litter of metal that marks the passage of predators, like so much mechanical scat. It is not hard to see hunters as an invading force. Many people resent the feeling of insecurity this creates, and some

among them would like to prevent these men with guns from killing "defenseless" animals. But in this belief they have transposed their

knowledge of domesticated animals onto the wild: deer have not been

selectively bred for stupidity. As wild herbivores their primary defenses are stealth and flight, strategies so suc cessful that fewer than ten percent of the hunters here take home any

meat.

In their attitudes toward hunting, anti-hunters reflect the conventions

of our culture and their class. Most of them have grown up with a Walt Dis

ney version of nature: in the moral

universe of our culture's folk tales

and children's stories, herbivores are

always innocent, and carnivores dan

gerous or downright evil. It could

hardly be otherwise for an agricul tural tribe. Most anti-hunters come

from (or aspire to mimic) the great urban middle class, and part of their

disquiet comes from the sheer un

civilized earthiness of hunting. They bring with them an image of nature as a

tranquil, pastoral scene?much like

a city park,

or the close-cropped pas tures of a dairy farm?and they have

been taught that it isn't quite polite to dwell on bodily functions. Hunting reminds them a bit too directly that humans are animals, that animals eat

other animals, that gore, blood,

excrement, and death are natural.

Once, at a dinner party, the vice

president of a local college told me that it is immoral for a person to hunt if that person can afford to buy meat.

This is a popular belief; the middle

class, it seems, would forgive the

poverty-stricken?for whom a hun

dred pounds of venison can represent

a sizable addition to a food budget? but would enforce their morals on

their own. No doubt the vice presi dent thought he was being under

standing of the role that hunting plays in the traditional economy of a rural area. I can afford meat; I hunt. I tried to explain myself to him.

There is, of course, an obvious

hypocrisy involved in the belief that

killing is immoral if you can afford to

pay someone to do it for you. Most

people are properly taken aback when I point this out to them. More difficult to answer are the committed

vegetarians, who avoid meat for

health or moral reasons. Sometimes

we find common ground: I too am

wary of chemical additives, I too dis like the indignities that are perpe trated on animals by factory farming.

How much more noble, I suggest to

them, to pursue and eventually eat an

animal that has not been denied its

freedom, has not been genetically manipulated or chemically bloated, but is instead wholly other, occupy ing an ecological niche that its an

cestors, and not we humans, have

defined. I try to explain how it is that I believe the world would be a better

place if more people hunted?if more of our food calories came from hunt

ing and gathering. Anthropology sup ports me: hunting and gathering tribes are less bloodthirsty, in regard to their own species, than agricultural tribes. Thermodynamics supports

me: industrial agriculture is ex

tremely wasteful of energy, using on the average twenty calories for every

calorie of food delivered to the con sumer. Natural and organic farming techniques are better?they at least

have a positive caloric income?but

the most efficient food delivery sys tems that humans have ever known

have been those of hunters and

gatherers. I talk about the mind-set

of control that begins with agricul ture?control that begins with the

plow (an act of violence against the

earth), continues through property relations and ownership of land (an act of violence against the integrity of

ecosystems), through the genetic ma

nipulation of domesticated creatures so that they might better suit our

ends, and culminates in the most

depraved treatment of humans by humans that we can imagine. Only

an

agricultural tribe, I have been heard to say, could invent concentration

camps and practice genocide; hunt ers and gatherers have no notion of

"varmints," no tendency to define

other creatures as pests, no animus

that leads them to see total annihila tion of another species or race or way of life as a solution.

60 June 1987

This content downloaded from 165.123.34.86 on Fri, 25 Oct 2013 20:07:57 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Sometimes this argument makes an impression. But still there is the

problem of death. Many moral vege tarians have chosen their stance pre

cisely because they want to avoid

causing death; hunting too obviously contradicts the firmament upon

which their very selves depend. I have to confess to being impa

tient with this sort of moral vege tarianism. I think that it, like

anorexia, is self-denial in the service

of an acculturated pathology. But unlike anorexia, it seems to have only one cause: an all-too-human hubris

that leads the vegetarian to think that

antiseptic innocence is possible in this world. In turning away from the

ecological niche that shaped our an cestors even as they claimed it, by renouncing the eons of evolution

as

carnivores that have made us what we

are?conscious, self-conscious, erect

hominids with binocular vision,

opposable thumbs, an ability to sym bolize and communicate our experi ence through language, and a deeply seated faith that the events of our lives have a coherence that contains

meaning?the moral vegetarian is

trying to elect him or herself out of context. In this, the vegetarian

exemplifies the source of humanity's ecological problems no less than the

engineer, whose disregard for con

text is founded not on an optimistic faith in the possibility of transcen dence but on a faith in trouble

shooting, a faith that the principles of nature can be made irrelevant

through the exercise of more control and more power. But we humans are

inescapably of nature. Tragedy and sin have origins in our existence

deeper than mere ignorance, and

there is arrogance in believing other wise.

"Let me show you what I got in the mail today." I follow Frank into the

living room of the old farm house he rents. "This is Blacktop. I got him last bow season." Kneeling, he strokes a cured deerskin that is flat on the floor. "I call him Blacktop because of this brownish-black tinge here," he adds, indicating the hair roots down the center of the hide, the fur that would have covered the

spine. "Want to see pictures of him?" He shows me several photographs. In

them, Frank is dressed in his camou

flage clothes, though he has removed the camouflage paint from his face for the picture. (The camouflage is nee

^^^^^^H H ft ^H I H ^H I ^H i^H ^^ |ll|||l|ip ^^^^Bl*:s. *

Tbday our children are computing basic math.Tbmorrow, theyll be prograniming the future.

But before they can fill the computer screen with new information, well have to help fill their minds. With ideas. Information. Dreams. With the stimulation only a first rate college education can provide.

But theyll need your help. Because only with your help will colleges be able to cope

with the high cost of learning. Rising costs and shrinking revenues are threatening the

ability of colleges to provide the kind of education tomorrow's leaders will need to solve tomorrow's problems.

So please give generously to the college of your choice. You'll be programming America for success for years

to come.

Give to the college of your choice, wpfn COUNOL FOR FINANCIAL A? TO EDUCATION KMC M ? ?*V"J A PUBLIC SERVCE OF TMC PUBLICATION 680 FTTH AVtNUE, NIW YORK. NY 10019 M2l GOUXI AND THt ADVHTTONG COUNCl

June 1987 61

This content downloaded from 165.123.34.86 on Fri, 25 Oct 2013 20:07:57 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

essary to penetrate the deer's fright

and-flight range, and it is the main reason that bow hunters have their

own hunting season. They do not

share the woods with riflemen, who

sometimes mistake even uncamou

flaged humans for game.) The carcass

of the deer is on the ground at his knee. In one hand he holds the bow he used to kill the animal; in the

other, he holds one of the animal's

antlers, showing the rack to good advantage for the photographer. He shows me the hunting journal he

keeps. "August 29. Light frost this

morning (55 days since the last frost of spring). From the porch I saw three deer grazing at the edge of the hay field. One a spikehorn, another with a perfect eight point rack, the last

with a fringe of black fur on top.

Blacktop is 140 pounds, Perfect

Eight 120, Spikehorn less than a hun dred. They grazed through for

twenty minutes, disappeared into Nolfi's woods." Frank watched for

Blacktop throughout the fall, spot ting him once a week or so until the season started in November. Frank

recounts the confrontation he wit

nessed between Perfect Eight and

Blacktop just before the rut, when the bucks become territorial. "And

then," Frank says, acting out the role

of his deer, "Blacktop says 'enough of this' and rears on his hind legs, still with Perfect Eight locked in his rack, and he shoves him back, just bull dozes him out of the way." For

a

moment I'm afraid Frank will bull doze me out of his living room, but he

stops short before me. "That's the

last I saw of Perfect Eight." The flesh side of the deerskin has

slashes and scuffs at the neck. Did

Frank have trouble skinning him?

"No," he says. "Feel this?feel the

difference between the neck and the

skin down here." The skin at the

neck is thicker, stiffer. "That's all scar tissue, from years of fighting.

The scars go right through. You know

how I got him?" Frank is ready to tell me the story. "It was sheer accident.

Had nothing to do with my skill?it was just luck. Three of us went in the

woods, walking into our bow stands, and we came to mine first. I had this

stuff on, this imitation fox urine

scent, and I was waiting there, wait

ing in my stand." I know that every

year Frank hangs his hunting clothes

outdoors in the rain and weather for

the week before hunting season, and

then rubs them with cut apples. He

bathes with scentless soap, and for

two weeks before the season he eats

no meat: he is convinced that deer

can identify the scent of a carnivore.

"A fox runs by. That was just luck.

Blacktop came along, tracking

us to

see where we were headed, and he

passed right beneath me. I held on

him, not moving, and then I let it

go." The arrow passed into the rib

cage just behind the shoulder, pierc ing the heart. "If it hadn't been for that fox, I don't think I'd've got him.

He was tracking three of us, then two

of us and a fox."

The hunter's accomplishments and

failures, though reported in story, or

demonstrated to the group in the form of the kill, are individual: the hunter is not measured against other hunters but against something more

permanent and enduring. There are

no famous hunters; hunting happens beyond the city's need to generate

celebrity. (Hunters can and do achieve status as legends. The time

scape of hunting is that of myth, rather than history.) Hunting is bor

ing to watch because its rhythms are

slow, and its attraction is exercised not in physical action (though there is

enough of this, in its time, to test the

body: more hunters die of heart attacks than accidental gunshots) but in the state of mind and body that it

evokes. "The hunter," Ortegay Gas

set wrote in his Meditations on Hunt

ing, "is the alert man." In this the

hunter resembles no one so much as

the thinker, who must also be alive to

possibilities, who must also endeavor

to take nothing for granted, who also

cultivates an intense and open atten

tion because he must be prepared to

catch a glimpse of the quarry in any quarter. To this I would add: if the

opposite of aesthetic is anaesthetic, then I know of no more completely aesthetic activity than hunting.

My vice-presidential dinner com

panion told me that hunting as sport is wrong. Usually the people who tell

me this perceive only three broad cat

egories of human activity: work, rest,

and play. But if hunting is a sport, then so too is the ritual of holy sacra

ment, for it is this ceremony that

hunting most closely resembles in its essence. The ritual cleansing, the

mental and physical preparation, the isolation from social bonds through solitude or imposed silence?all these are prelude to the catharsis of

redemption in religion and the loss of innocence in the hunt. More than

one mystic has journeyed out from

the city to spend forty days in the wil

derness, the better to comprehend the essential qualities of being; it is no accident that in doing so they trav eled beyond the land of the shepherd and ploughman to enter the land

scape of the predator and the prey. In the terrain of the hunt a human can

escape the oppressive presence of the cultural self, mirrored in the human

works and tracks and trails that domi nate the planet, and begin to discover what lies beneath: something pre historic, a world devoid of human sig nifiers that is nevertheless alive with

significance.

Hunting is undeniably sport for some. This, it must be remembered,

occurs in a culture that brings us

celebrity tug-of-war on television.

The trophy hunter whose goal it is to accumulate experiences and stuffed

heads; the profligate buffalo shooters who "hunted" from trains a hundred

years ago; the urban male whose

annual hunting trip offers the chance to break the bonds of culture and

responsibility that define him: all have been seduced into envisioning the hunt as sport, as ego gratification, as a distraction to fill an emptiness of time or existence, as mere negation of that which constrains and confines. It is an attitude shaped by the neces sities that impinge upon hunting in our culture. Hunting-as-sport is testi

mony both to our continued need to

experience the primitive human na

ture that predates (and still underlies) the culture of the civitas, and to the

power of civil society to deflect the

expression of that need, to channel it

into forms that (at the least) do not subvert the premises of

an actively

disauthenticating culture and (at the

most) might make that culture more

bearable. A chief vehicle of that deflection is language: although hunting and farming could not be

more antithetical, Fish and Wildlife

Departments across the country

speak of the number of animals "har

vested," speak of leaving "seed pop ulations" in place at the end of the

season, speak of game as a "renew

able resource." In the world as it is,

hunting as an expression of a desire for an experience with the truly other cannot attain its object. The Dis

neyfication of our world is complete: hunters are mere consumers of expe

rience, experiences orchestrated by a

machinery that is as effectively hid den from view in the woods as the

garbage trucks are hidden in the

Magic Kingdom.

62 June 1987

This content downloaded from 165.123.34.86 on Fri, 25 Oct 2013 20:07:57 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

So hunting, a

practice that once

defined a way of life, remains popular today as mere sport?a category of

ar

tifice unknown to the paleo-hunter. One of the reasons sport is popular in our culture is because the goals of our tribe include the maintenance of civil relations between strangers, which is

necessary if we are to have large cities and a division of labor. Something deeply rooted within us is offended

by continual and abject dependence on

strangers?this is why we invent

governments and then by turns mock them or use them to punish others?

and under the compulsion of man

ners our need to experience the full

panoply of our capacities is frus trated. Sport provides

an arena of

acceptable release. Demonstrations

of physical strength, endurance, and

courage outside the realm of sport are

likely to be pathological?one recalls G. Gordon Liddy, holding his hand

in a candle flame?unless, of course,

they are channeled into war. (Signifi cantly,

war is more often conceived

through metaphors drawn from sport than the hunt.) In everyday life, the excellences of the body are subli

mated into emotional or intellectual realms?and the damage done by this abstraction can be seen anywhere

a

stadium full of fanatics is electrified

by violence or its potential. The vicarious nature of such experience prevents the fan from achieving much of anything in the way of

knowledge of self and the self's

capacity for bloodlust. Hunting, even

hunting-as-sport, has the virtue of

offering immediate experience, in the face of which only the most obdu rate of souls can maintain an immu

nity to introspection.

Even so, hunters are not renowned

for their sensitivity. In our culture's

stereotype, the hunter is a man who

is prone to violence and misogyny, whose annual hunting trip is a chance

to drink to excess, and whose bois

terous disregard for others hides deep

insecurity. But this stereotype has lit

tle to do with hunting as it is, and only

marginally relates to hunting as it is in

our society. Contrary to the agri culturalist's myth, hunting does not

make the hunter bloodthirsty, does not inure the hunter to the difficulty of causing death. This, admittedly, is

counter-intuitive?if not mysterious.

We are so ill-prepared to face

mystery, and hunting presents the

hunter with so many of them; is it any

wonder that hunters trivialize their

activity through drink and laughter? Ancient mapmakers sketched fan

ciful drawings of sea monsters and wild beasts in the margins and remote

whitenesses of the world; paleo hunters found their solace in ritual and in their habitation of sacred

space. But the expectation in our

culture has been that science will pre vail, that what is and can be known is certain and measurable. We have as a

consequence come to believe that in

matters cognitive as well as carto

graphic there is little more than amusement to be gained in exercis

ing one's urge to tell by transmuting the ineffable into faith or art. About that which we cannot speak,

we

must, science tells us, remain silent;

and so far from being a cause to reflect on the limitations of language, or an

invitation to the exercise of imagina

tion, the great blank stretches in our

knowledge and the silence that be falls us when we find ourselves there

are, at worst, thought to be "real"?a

true reflection of the nature of

things?or at best a sign that (lame benediction if ever there was one) "further research is required."

But the hunter has the oppor tunity to know better; the hunter will know that there is a pure incipience in every movement, every stillness,

every twig that crackles in the woods, for each of these foretells the

moment of the archetypal event,

when the hunter confronts the hunted and each becomes, in the in

stant, a part of the other, in a psychic transcendence of boundaries that is

ritually mimicked in the act of eating that comes later, when flesh becomes

flesh, when energy is transformed

through death into life, when two

become one. The hunters I know, without exception, eat what they kill, and pause before a meal made from

what they have killed, in order to pay

homage in one way or another to the

animal that feeds them; they would no more think of foregoing this duty than they would think to treat a fast food burger and soft drink as if they

were the body and blood of Christ.

Science sees any meal as a pure

caloric exchange?wine and bread

into flesh, energy into energy?and we are weighted down by that knowl

edge. The best that most of us

achieve is to understand mystery as

metaphor. The hunter, I believe, has the opportunity

to see farther.

And yet the hunter is as much a

product of our culture as anyone else,

and as much its captive. Even if we as

individuals have our doubts about the

ability of our culture to disenchant

completely the cognitive terrain that

shapes the psyche, we can express

our doubts most easily only as

doubts, for we are that much the crea

tures of our creation. The positive

assertion, the language of faith in the

elusive, comes to modern tongues

only with great difficulty. Ours is a

language better suited to bullying things into understanding

or com

pliance than to calling apparitions into being, and our mimetic arts have

long since forsworn participatory rit

ual for spectacle, drama, and story.

This means that, ultimately, a

non-hunter's expression of distaste

for what hunters are and do may be no more than an expression of dissatis

faction with the limits of our lan

guage. Only the sturdiest or the most

disturbed of psyches can long main tain a belief system whose categories,

premises, and axioms are

inexpress ible and find no resonance in the lan

guage and experience of others. And so the tales the hunter tells?the tales that are the one universally accepted act of homage to the transcendent nature of the experience?become little more than shallow exercises in

demonstrating the techniques and lore of the hunt. At their best these stories will reflect a hunter's under

standing of the moral codes and per haps even the inescapable ironies of the hunt; but still they fall short of

rendering the experience truly. The audience and the tale teller know that the action of the hunt takes place

within a deeper interior terrain as

well, and that the hunter has a claim to

territory?a home range?like no

other in this indifferent cosmos. The

story's inability to express this?and the knowledge that, imperfect though it is, the story is the only hope of expressing it?is the source of the hunter's near-insatiable appetite for

telling and retelling the tales. In

translation, in the publicly available

vocabulary of our culture, the story of

any hunt is ineluctably drawn toward the corrupting presence of ego, and

the knowledge shared by hunters will

sound like cheap and brutal machismo. Other tribes have a vocab

ulary, in language and ritual and

belief, that lets each tale affirm the

depths of meaning of the hunt. In our

tribe, mystery is reduced to a mere

temporary puzzlement, and the self is held accountable for what is, after

all, a cultural ignorance.

June 1987 63

This content downloaded from 165.123.34.86 on Fri, 25 Oct 2013 20:07:57 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions