04/02 © Ronald L. Moody (2002)
All rights reserved.
Reprinted here with permission.

Freedom and the Idea of the Hunt -
A Modern Question

First of May 1769. Daniel Boone and five hunting buddies set off from Dan’l’s farm in North Carolina to follow the Cherokee Warriors Path through the western mountains. Theirs was a quest to hunt the country around Big Bone Lick somewhere near the big river in mystical Kaintuck.

Though virtually every person on the colonial frontier used gun and hook to put wild meat on the table, the idea, the image, of the American hunter had not formed in the minds of a new people just then discovering themselves.

Dan’l and his buddies changed that.

The story of their year-long outdoor experience filtered through the culture. Fixed in people’s minds was the image of the noble wilderness long-hunter, self-sufficient, self-empowered, absolute of courage, and a dead shot, of course.

Two hundred thirty three years later some kernel of Dan’l’s legend still germinates in the self-image of pretty much every American Nimrod. Virtues of character stick to this image like Carolina pine tar and spawn the ideal of the modern sportsman. Meanwhile, contrasting villainy darkens its shadow fathering the stigma of the contemporary slob game thief.

Holding true across the generations, however, is the idea that a real hunt separates the hunter from civilization, climaxes in individual heroism, and can be measured by the magnificence of the trophies taken. Virtues such as courage, competence, and self-reliance still stand with this idea. The excesses of hunter behavior still plague it.

Human history, however, is a constant testament that a changing circumstance imposed upon an unchanging idea means extinguishment of one, the other, or both.

Hunting in the modern world has come to an accounting before this testament.
The idea of the American long-hunter hunter must accommodate the reality of the modern world - or one, or the other, or both must perish. This, I believe, is the greatest opportunity for true heroism offered to contemporary Nimrods.

For myself, this opportunity gives interest and zest to the life of a hunter. For some of my fellows, the whole notion sounds like pontificated do-goodism.

Time will tell.

But the telling will be carved into the stones of the hunter's path.

My greatest discouragement is that modern hunters, as a whole, are so drugged with ‘gadgetism’ and ‘get-moreism’ they can no longer see the forest beyond the mail-order catalog - much less trace a virtuous path through that cultural forest. Particularly rankling is the hunter who says he finally has decided “to give something back” as if he is doing somebody a favor. Excuse me, but giving to the wild is an ethical necessity if one is to be an honorable part of the wild. Such obligation cannot honorably be deferred beyond the first day of the first hunt.

My greatest hope comes in meeting new, young hunters whose capacity for virtue has not yet been bought or sold. The potential of the next generation to bring the idea of the hunt into harmony with the needs of the world is much stronger than that of the gray generation now passing. We silvertips have allowed the flame of conservation to burn dark and low but our heirs can, and I trust will, rekindle it.

Guiding the next generation is, I maintain, the highest calling for a sportsman. When it comes to trophy value, the making of a new hunter-conservationist knocks the biggest horns in the so-called world record book right into the dirt.
We adult hunters, however, cannot escape our personal responsibility to nourish our heritage.

Somewhere in the council lodges of the hunt the talk must turn to our image of ourselves and of how that image fits with the world in which we live. There are many questions.

In the 21st Century, is it possible to ‘leave civilization’ as we undertake the hunt? I believe hunters still try. It is this illusional imperative that drives hunters to lock up and seal off private hunting grounds where they can imagine themselves to be Dan’l on the Warrior’s Path. This notion lies at the heart of the common practice of locking up wildlife - a practice that denies so many in order to serve so few.

Truth is - the Warrior’s Path is now a four-lane highway with fences on both sides, well-salted with No-Trespass signs. The real question for the future becomes: "Will the hunting grounds be chopped and diced into personal fiefs?" Or, will America make room where people of a populous nation can feel free? Is not the courageous use of community and civilized discourse more likely to result in the preservation of great wilderness?

Individual heroism came to Boone and Company in the form of Shawnee landowners enforcing a pre-existing trespass law, and in the form of physical deprivation. Today, such heroics are available mainly to hunters with a good library. Hunters in grizzly country have to keep looking over their shoulder, but the rest of us will never stalk a man-eating tiger in the steps of Jim Corbett among the hills of Kumaon.

Is not the opportunity for heroism precisely at that point where one’s fear is greatest? Where do modern hunters meet greater personal threat and intimidation than in the forums of public policy?

At some point prior to falling into their deathbed, most hunters wake up to the fact that ability to kill an animal brings no lasting self-worth. To kill and eat natural food makes a person part of nature; it no longer makes a hero out of a hunter. At the same time, a hunter’s prowess in the skills of his or her craft has been a point of pride for at least 30,000 years.

The question now is: "How is the skill of a hunter relevant to the hunter’s life?" In the Ice Age, such prowess was the measure of a hunter’s ability to feed and cloth the family. Is the hunter’s measure today not that of our ability to sustain an unfettered wilderness where wild animals can lead natural lives?

Time will tell. But hunters who are not in their council lodge talking about these questions are part of the past; they are not part of the future.