WHY I HUNT

(A Predator's Meditation)

by Rick Bass

In the fall, it's what I want to do. It would be unnatural and dishonest to sit on my hands; I'm a hunter, a predator (in the fall), with eyes in front of my head, like a bear's or a wolfs or even an owl's. Prey have their eyes on the sides of their heads, in order to see in all directions, in order to be ready to run. But predators — and that's us, or at least some of us — have our eyes before us, out in front, with which to focus to a single point.

For two months of the year — or until I have killed one deer and one elk — that's what I do. I want to be out in the woods, walking quietly, walking slowly, or not walking at all but just sitting in some leaves, completely hidden and motionless — waiting, and waiting. To not pursue the thing one wants would be a waste of one's life.

In the fall, I can do things I couldn't do in my normal, civilized life. I can disappear into the woods, and over the next mountain, the next ridge. My roaming has meaning — it's no longer just roaming, but hunting. The year's meat supply is in question. My meat, my family's meat — not some rancher's heifer from Minnesota. Meat from my valley, where I hope to live and die — where I cut firewood, where I pick huckleberries, where I walk, where I watch the stars — my valley.

For those two months, I am after something: something tangible, something that's moving away from me, and somet­hing that I must have for the coming year. It's as simple as that.

Over the next ridge. The new life of stores and towns falls away, and the old life returns. There's a loveliness to looking ahead — looking straight ahead — that only hunting brings out.

The other ten months are okay, too — I can be the artist, can loll around eating grapes and reading poetry, but the fall comes like a splash of water to my face on a hot, dusty day; and the dust, and my new ways, new feelings — the ones bound by rules — are washed away, leaving the old ways revealed.

I keep eating those lovely candlelit dinners — grouse and potatoes, and the red, almost purple heartthrob steaks from elk; fried trout for breakfast, and homemade huckleberry jam... I feel alive... I draw immense strength from those meals — strength to live my life — and it feels good. I eat about a pound and a half of meat a day. The cancer studies for this kind of diet alarm me, but I have to trust that they apply to fatty steroid beef, and cattle that must have been raised in pesticide fields. I was seven miles into the moun­tains when I shot last year's elk, and I carried him out in three trips over a twenty-four-hour period.

Into those same dark woods I go each year, looking straight ahead, and stopping and listening and turning my head....

Of course, it's possible that there's a greater life force that judges us; and of course, sometimes I feel guilty about being a hunter, a killer — a killer of deer and elk, though not moose, because they're too easy, and not bears, because... well, bears themselves are meant to hunt. During part of the year they're predators, not prey. It seems unnatural to hunt predators.

I'm scared, sometimes, that all the animals I've killed — few as they are — add up, and that I'm liable for them.

I wouldn't mind paying for them with my life someday — we must all give up our lives — but sometimes I get scared I may have to pay afterward, in the afterlife, for my gluttony, my insatiable hunger for clean meat, and so much of it. Nonetheless, I've studied it, and have come up with this: I am who I am, and I've come from the place we all came from — the past — but I still remember, and love, that place. Some of us are glad to be away from that place, but I'm not one of those people — not in the fall.

The worst day I ever had hunting was when I shot an elk in the neck, where I was aiming, but it made me feel stran­gely ashamed after it was over. I broke the elk's neck, the way I always try to do — that instant drop — but he groaned when I walked up to him. He couldn't have been feeling anything, and I hope it was just air leaving his lungs — but it was still a groan.

For a fact — or rather, for me — hunting's better than killing. It takes a while after it's over — sometimes a long while before you can think of it as meat. You can't go straight from a living animal to 250 pounds of elk steaks. There's too much knife and ax work involved — and you're the one who has to do it — skinning the animal, and pulling the hide back to reveal your crime, the meat — and already, sometimes, the call of ravens drifting in black-winged shapes flying through the treetops, past the sun....

Instead of trying to make that instantaneous conversion — which I cannot do — life to meat — what I do is pray, sort of. I give heartfelt, shaky thanks to the animal as I clean it — ravens calling to ravens — and I do this with deer and grouse too, and even, if I can remember — which I don't always — with fish. A man or woman who apologizes for hunting is a fool. It's a man's or a woman's choice and he or she must live with it.

I don't do it for profit or gain, and rarely do I tell anyone about it after I've done it.

I watch ravens in the off-season. I think ravens have more of a soul than humans — and I think ravens understand the hunt better than I ever will. Sometimes ravens, in Alaska, lead hunters — wolves, or humans — to prey, and then they eat the pickings from the kill.

Ravens, black as coal, shiny and greasy, flying in the sun, like winged, black devils... I feel as if I'm on their side, and it scares me, but it would be a lie in the fall to switch sides: to pretend that I'm not. I'm a killer, sometimes. I wish I weren't, but I am. I've wrestled with it but I can't escape it, any more than — until death — one can escape one's skin.

Rick Bass lives in Montana

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