The Sadness of the Hunter

David Stout

So much has been written about the joy of hunting and so little about the sadness, the sadness that fills the silence after the echo of the shot has died away.

If the hunter is skilled, or lucky, he has just killed something. In a moment he may feel joy. But first he must pass through another emotion, one akin to grief. He must pull the trigger to get there. Nothing could be more appropriate, for grief is supposed to be linked to death.

Hunting is going on in many places, and with it the conflict in the heart of the hunter. Hunters use the word "harvest" again and again. Hunters speak of harvesting deer or ducks or grouse or rabbits. There is a paradox' at work here, for the hunter knows better than his nonhunting friends that pork chops and drumsticks do not grow on trees.

Why Do It?

"I don't know any hunter who hasn't felt a sense of sadness after he's shot a deer," said David C. Foster, editor of Gray's Sporting Journal, a decidedly upscale hunting and fishing magazine, who is himself an enthusiastic hunter.

Why do it, then? It is not enough to speak of loving the outdoors, or the camaraderie, or the challenge. No, there is some kind of blood communion between the hunter and that which he kills. "It takes courage to kill an animal as beautiful as a deer," another hunter, Ed Van Put of Sullivan County. N.Y., said. Then he mused: Was courage the right word? For him it was. "It takes something extra to pull the trigger," said Mr. Van Put, who monitors fish in lakes and streams for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

Many non-hunters find such talk absurd, or horrible. Many of them wouldn't think of killing wild game yet think nothing of buying meat at the supermarket. There are those who don't eat meat but do eat fish, as though sure that the flopping in a net or boat is merely reflex, not desperation, and that the writhing creature's unblinking eye betrays no more emotion than it will later, staring up from a bed of chopped ice.

A longtime hunter may be sad at the sight of a giant tree, toppled in its old age by rot or wind or lightning. This is death too. Such thoughts grow with age, as the hunter's own years add to his knowledge about the frailty of life, and they lead in many directions.

Even if the hunter has a sound compass—some bedrock beliefs about his place in the world, in which all time is borrowed—he will wander around and around, returning only to a question: What life is so precious that it should not be taken?

I remember hearing in my boyhood talk about whether it was less noble to kill a doe than a buck; "whether it was all right to hunt just for trophy heads, antlers, or tusks; or whether a decent hunter always ate what he shot (not that he needed to). I found myself wrestling with those questions too much. So I took timid retreat, closeting my own 12-gauge shotgun and trying to shut away some emotions, which still emerge from time to time out of some dark forest of memory.

It is reassuring to find that men who still hunt are stalked by these emotions too. "There is a momentary feeling of sadness that you had to take a life in pursuit of what you're doing," Jack Samson, the retired editor of Field and Stream magazine, said the other day from his home in Santa Fe, N.M., as he reflected on a lifetime of hunting big game and small. Nelson Bryant, a retired outdoors columnist for the New York Times, said that he had never shot anything "without a sense of sadness, very brief, but it's there ... whether a duck or deer or whatever, it was something alive." When pressed on just why they hunt if it brings such sadness, hunters fumble with words. Mr. Van Put responded with, "It's something that man has done forever." Mr. Bryant tried to articulate his thoughts and said finally, "It's inexplicable."

Inexplicable or not, the lure of hunting is also irresistible, at least for some. Field and Stream is celebrating its 100th anniversary and has a circulation of about two million, mostly middle class, according to a managing editor, Slaton L. White. The recent survey for the Interior Department's Fish and Wildlife Service showed that about 75 percent of Americans approve of hunting, 22 percent disapprove. Hugh Vickery, an agency spokesman, said the money hunters contribute for conservation efforts is essential and totaled some $700 million in 1994 through license fees and taxes on firearms and ammunition.

There were 15.3 million licensed hunters in the United States in 1994, down from the 1982 peak of 16.7 million. Mr. Vickery said the survey found that dwindling open space was the main reason for the decline.

But perhaps there are other reasons, at least for a few. Mr. Bryant said he knew of some men who stopped hunting as they got older, not because they grew infirm but because they grew more keenly aware of the finality of all life.

And a personal note on why I gave up hunting. I was not squeamish, say, about slitting the belly of a freshly killed rabbit and dumping the steaming guts onto the damp leaves on a chill November day. But I cannot forget the day when I was 13 and shot at a big rusty fox squirrel three times before it came tumbling down from the tree, bouncing off limbs as it fell, then trying to crawl away.

And this hunter who would not remain a hunter grabbed the animal by its tail, dragging it to a clearing to finish it off with the gun butt. Then he stood still in the dusk, listening to a chain saw in the distance and waiting for his sadness to go away. He has been waiting for 40 years.

From New York Times, December 10, 1995.