For years now, I have been hearing about this Evolution of the Hunter. It just sticks in my craw. I do not think they have it right. According to the theory, hunters go through a series of steps. At first they want shooting opportunities. Next, they start looking to place various self-restrictions on their hunting, by method and by the trophies they seek. Lastly, you have this fully-evolved Sportsman that hunts for just the pure enjoyment of it all. It did not sit well when I heard it the first time. That was when I took my #2 son to Hunter Ed. It still sits in my belly like a rancid taco.

I tried to tackle this subject before (see Why Do I Hunt?). Now, all laughs aside, it is time to get serious on the subject. Looking back on a quarter-century of hunting, I have to say it was not like that with me.

To me, the Evolution of the Hunter, was more like the Evolution of Man, more precisely the Evolution of the Man, me. My hunting pretty much followed how I grew up after I got loose from the pen and started trying to make it on my own. My hunting made me, and whatever I was at the time matched my hunting.

I remember early on just wanting to get out of town and be alone with myself. That seemed to be the driving force back then. I wanted to get away from all the friends and family and work and so forth. I wanted to  go listen to myself say nothing for a day or so. The fact that I was doing it with a bow or a shotgun in my hand was important. It separated it from other activities like hiking and camping. It made it different. This was my time, dang it!

See, right there, you have the whole Evolution of the Hunter thing turned on its head. I was supposed to be out there shooting something. I wasn’t. Honestly, killing things has been sort of boring. Most things die really easily, given the opportunity. There had to be something to hunting that kept me going; otherwise, I would have stopped at my first cockroach and never left the house.

The other thing I remember about deer hunting in my early years was that I was most concerned with the process. For me, the process was quite complex. I lived in the inner city and the place I had picked to hunt was a good 3 hours away. When I got there, I had to camp. Ohio did not have any Sunday hunting in those days so the whole thing was condensed into a massive push out of town on Friday night, capped with a late-night setup of a tent and the building of a fire in the dark and cold.

I would get only a few hours of sleep and then I would have to get up, get going, and get a climbing stand into position and get up the tree before first light. At sundown Saturday, the whole thing would be over, I would relax Saturday night and then head home on Sunday. Any little screw-up could blow the whole weekend. In those first years, I went from being a scatterbrained Yuffie (that’s a young urban failure) to a Zen master of mindfulness, at least when it came to hunting.

Conquering the Demons, Inside and Out

Somewhere in that process, all the gunk in my head started to come to the surface, and I had to learn to deal with it. Mostly it was the inner voice of criticism and self-doubt that I had to contend with. That is probably something every man has– inner demons that is. Those just happened to be my two. It took years to get them handled. Those inner voices did me no good at all, and probably cost me a couple of deer along the way. I have seen a bunch of others with theres. Some handled them hunting, some did it elsewhere. Some never have beat their demons.

There our outer demons as well as inner ones. A lot of hunters have to deal with jobs, bosses, wives, families that stand in their way of getting out to hunt. For me, it was an uneasy bargain I had to make with my wife that left me with one half-day of hunting per week during the deer season and one weekend of turkey hunting a year. Even then, I had to fight to maintain that. Even if you conquer those hurdles, you have the constant turnover in hunting land, loss of habitat and overcrowding that threaten all of us.

Hunting really goes a long way to pointing up the things that are wrong with one’s life. When the first wife told me that she had discussed the deer head in the family room with her therapist and that after repeated warnings from the shrink that she was playing with fire, she still insisted that I remove the mount forthwith, I realized that there was just no room for a stuffed head in the family room. There was also no room for me. My second wife has no problems with the head. She has no problems with me hunting. As long as I come home most nights and stay sober she is happy. Seeing as though I am a generally sober person and never stay out, that’s a fairly easy mark to hit.

For me, the last great hurdle was losing a dear friend that had let me come hunt on his place for several years. On his fiftieth birthday, Al came home from a good dinner at Red Lobster, complained that he wasn’t feeling well and laid down on the couch and died. His forty acres was the last place I had for deer hunting, and my turkey hunting was in shambles too. I nearly gave up.

I did not mean to make this sound like my experience is a model for the evolving hunter. It would suffice to say that a hunter must conquer his inner and outer demons if he is to evolve. If not, he is destined to eventually wind up on the couch watching football and NASCAR and living out his life not fully knowing what he missed. Some guys have to deal with a crushing work schedule, some never get a grip on their alcohol consumption. One guy I knew said he wanted to come hunting with me, but the wife and kids had ridiculed him when he mentioned it at the dinner table.

Coming to Grips with the Big Mystery

The next part of the evolution of a hunter starts to surface even before the first hunt, and it stays with you throughout your life. It bothers you like a hangnail, and every successful hunting trip rubs your nose in it. If you are looking for THE BIG MYSTERY, here it is:

You are born, you live, you suffer, you die.

That’s it. Now mind you, I am a good Methodist boy. I’ve been washed in the blood of our Saviour and all that. The problem is that everything in this life points to that basic set of facts. If there is anything beyond that for you, it is going to have to come to it by Faith or some other means. The bottom line in this world is that. Now, most people think they have an easy time of the first part. You are born, but most people do not want to get into how you got there.

However, the cycle of life in my world begins in October as soon as the velvet comes off the antlers, it begins when the big turkey flocks of Winter start to break up and the Gobblers start gobbling. Nowadays, we seem obsessed with sex in our media, but it is all stylized and porno-ed and nobody really wants to deal with the real down and dirty of it. Animals court, copulate and try their best to gestate and give birth. Sex on its own is a lie. It hides the truth that it is inextricably linked to the other three spokes on the wheel, Life, Suffering, and Death.

Now I have nothing against golf. My grandfather was a champion golfer. It has never appealed to me, but that is just me. If you golf, that is fine. However, I want to use golf as an example of the rest of the discontinuity that hunters must deal with in order to become fully evolved. Golf is all green and verdant. You have fairways, greens, tees, all immaculate, all carefully trimmed. You never see fields going fallow and being turned over to thorns and weeds. There is really no Life to it. Golf is stuffed. Hunting, on the other hand, thrives in the wild edges of cover, the unkempt expanses of last year’s leaves and this year’s deadfall. Every trip afield is a bit of a struggle and every bit of woods looks like it woke up with a bad case of bed-head, uncombed and tousled. That is life.

This whole One-Shot-One-Kill nonsense is a lie that armchair hunters use to impress each other. Sure, when I go out to hunt, I am doing my best to make sure nothing suffers at my hand. However, there are going to be times when I fail. I know that. Some days the dove is still flopping when I get there, and I have to pick it up by the neck and finish it. Sometimes the deer does not go down with the first shot, and I have to apply another. That is hunting. There will be suffering sometimes. We pray that there will not be any at our hands, but in the end, it is part of the great plan before us that suffering will happen. That is not a bad thing. It just is.

It is not something you can run from either. Sooner or later it will catch up to you. It is better to go out hunting early in life and get a grip on it and learn to deal with it, rather than shut it away. Without accepting the responsibility for at least a little suffering, there would be no bow hunting. That is no knock on bow hunting or bow hunters. I bow hunt. However, you are betting your skill with a bow against an animal’s potential to suffer, when probably a 30-06 would do the job a bit cleaner and a bit quicker. The truth is that to live is to suffer, and if the hunter does his part, the quarry suffers less than if it had been left up to the tools of Nature: old-age, starvation, and predation.

The last spoke in the wheel is Death. You die, I die, everyone dies. The cow that contributed to your hamburger died. Everything around you dies. We live off of death and so does everything else. Opening up your first steaming carcass is a really freeing experience. All of a sudden you see that whatever you just killed is a lot like you. Blood is not magical. Guts are guts. There is nothing mysterious in any of it. One moment, the animal was alive. You killed it. Now it is a carcass that you have reduced to possession and you are going to eat it. You are going to eat it, aren’t you?

Now, finally, you have put everything into its proper perspective and you can get on with your life. The big bugaboos are removed. The Big Mystery is solved. Now you can apply whatever Faith you have to what remains and get on with living with the time that remains. They say there are no atheists in foxholes. In the same vein, I would postulate that it is well-nigh impossible for a man to gut his first deer and not have his being go searching for something bigger than himself to explain what he has just experienced.

The Great White Whale

“Who told thee that?” cried Ahab; then pausing, “Aye, Starbuck; aye,
my hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick
that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye,” he
shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a
heart-stricken moose; “Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale
that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!”
Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted
out: “Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the
Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames
before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to
chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of
earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye,
men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave.”

from Moby Dick
by Herman Mellville

Every man has his great white whale to conquer, some great wall on which to bash his head. Mine was always turkeys. My obsession came simply from not having all that much time in which to hunt one. Most years, I had only a weekend or two. In my first ten years as a turkey hunter, I only hunted Ohio and only hunted one weekend, and because it was Ohio and turkey hunting ceased by noon and there was no Sunday hunting, I was forced to attempt to bag one in one half-Saturday per year. I knew I could bag one if I just had a week to do it.

The first time I actually took off a full week and devoted myself to turkey hunting, I was successful. That bird was easily the #5 atypical gobbler ever scored with the NWTF. The problem was all I had was a bathroom scale, and I had already skinned and frozen him before I went to the website to score him. Meanwhile, my great white whale had escaped, never again to be hunted, for I had taken the monster on Day 5 of a seven-day hunt. If I had remained true to my original quest, I would still be turkey hunting only a single half-day a year. I probably still would not have a turkey.

Everyone has something like this. Some hunters achieve their goal. Some hunters forget their goal. Thre are some guys who die trying. However, after you have pierced the Great Mystery of life and death, you have to get at least a wee bit existential. You have to set personal goals for yourself. You need a Moby Dick in your life. The other folks that have written about the evolution of the hunter have come closest to the truth I see when they talk about the Method Phase and the Trophy Phase.

To me, it’s all about the same thing. It boils down to this: Now that I’ve killed something, I need to step it up a notch. I may wear buckskins. I may try to take one with a pistol, or with one hand tied behind my back, or in some expensive and exotic place. I may try to do it standing on my head or take three of a kind, a Grand Slam, an inside straight or go for the big one and shout “Yahtzee!” as I leap his back like Meschak Browning and slam my knife in and take out his lights.

. . . or maybe I’ll just try PowerPoints instead of CoreLokts this year. It all comes down to the same thing and so does counting points, counting mass, counting beards, spurs, and so on. It’s your whale, make it whatever you want. Let me know when you’re done. If you hunt long enough, eventually you’ll let the white whale go free. You won’t stop hunting. You will just stop beating your head against the wall.

One thing that puts an easy end to this is paying for a guide to take you to the white whale. I am not knocking guides, guided hunts, or anything to do with paid-for hunting opportunities. My point is simply this, you can go through a lot of white whales, pink whales, any kind of whale you want if you are willing to pay the money to go have someone find it for you. You will go through a lot of money getting there, and in the end, the wall is still there and the lumps on your forehead are still there. I am truly thankful that my search for Moby Dick ended so painlessly and I was able to move on.

You cannot buy your way to successful hunting.

One other thing that I should mention here is how money affects this whole evolution. Do not figure me as a guy who thinks money is bad, technology is bad, or that spending a lot of money on hunting is bad. This is quite to the contrary. What is true in all phases of this evolution is how spending money can be counter-productive.

• Do not attempt to buy anything as a substitute for good hunting skills, practice, or scouting.
• Never buy a better rifle to substitute for lack of time at the bench.
• Resist the urge to buy a gadget, a call or a scent, because you did not have time to scout.
• Never buy a premium arrow, or premium ammunition, because you are unsure of how the more mundane offerings will work.

The first 15 years of my hunting was spent filling my pack with stuff. I have spent the last 10 years getting rid of that stuff out of my pack. By the time I took my first big bird I had started leaving my 25-pound turkey vest at home and had gone to a small shoulder bag. In bowhunting for deer, I finally realized my mistake of trying to carry my bow, my climbing stand, and my deer decoy all in the same trip.

It was an early-season hunt and very warm and I started showing signs of heatstroke. The only thing that saved me was dropping my whole load in the woods right there and calling for help. This year, I carried less than five pounds of gear outside of my rifle and clothes into the woods for Opening Day of rifle season. I still found myself fumbling through useless stuff as I went looking for my grunt call.

The End of the Road

So let’s see. So far, the hunter has tempered himself in the fires of hunting, erased his demons, conquered the great questions of life and redefined himself with a great task. He has bought his way into the hunter heaven with blood and sweat and toil. Now what?

That is what I am asking both you and myself. To quote the great Bard of Texas, “The Road Goes on Forever, and the Party Never Ends.” I call Robert Earl Keen that because he managed to rhyme something with “. . .a single shot four-ten.” I don’t know about you, but I rank that feat right up there with anything Shakespeare pulled off. He’s right. The road does go on forever, prey and predator dancing their dance on the wheel of life, death, and rebirth. You get on. You ride for a while. You get off. Along the way you get some tasty venison, or some good bear steaks, some elk jerky, some smoked salmon, some squirrel brains. . .er. . .sorry, but I draw the line at squirrel brains.

There is no end to the road, there is only an end to you. Somewhere on a cold and soggy evening as the last light of season hits you. All you have to look forward to is tag soup and some ribbing at the office. You finally realize this one fact and you drag your stiff body back to the truck and start the ride home. Somewhere in the dark, you start to decide where and how you’re going to hunt the next season. The cycle begins again. Someday, they will pull your rifle out of your hands and cart you off to the home. However,  they didn’t do it this year and you’ll be damned if you will let them do it the next.

Putting something back

All this comes down to something akin to self-idolatry if all you have done is run yourself through the gauntlet of life and come back home only to sit amid your trophies and eat game. It is an empty victory. It will be lost in time like spit in a puddle. There is only one redemption. You may not have sons and daughters by this stage of your life. However,  you need to find someone and pass it on. This passion needs to be passed on before the fire dies. You need to put something back. Get that kid that keeps pointing at the deer head on the mantle. Take him out back and show him what a BB gun can do. Take the kid out and show them deer tracks and turkey tracks and get them thinking about going hunting.

You do not have to be a great hunter. You do not need to be a great teacher. All this plan needs is a guy willing to draw attention to the dog turds in the path and tell the young ones to take heed. Someday the road will keep going on, but your earthly remains will have turned to mulch. In the meantime, someone needs to be there to say: “Carry dry socks.””Keep the rifle butt firmly planted in your shoulder.” and “Check your flashlight batteries before heading to your stand.”

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