04/05© Ronald L. Moody (2005)
All rights reserved.
Reprinted here with permission.

Tracing the Hunters’ True Path
Toward an Ancient Future

“It is not indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way.” - Henry David Thoreau

The sign on the marquee outside the small town hotel read: “Welcome Traditional Bowhunters.”

Curious, I parked the truck and went into the meeting room. Along with clusters of denim clad nimrods murmuring hunting stories I observed a few vendors of handcrafted long bows and sellers of other possibles. In one busy corner a huddled group of flint knappers worked arrow points from stones of chert and obsidian. As I watched the stone flakes gather around the legs of one, I recalled that I recently had seen a photograph of just such flake piles left by another nimrod before he stood and walked away to use his new points in the hunt. Those flake piles had been dated as more than 30,000 years old.
The room of quiet, dexterous bowhunters painted a distinct visual portrait to any passerby as to who hunters are, and the connection to the past that hunting has become in the modern world.

A couple of weeks later, the huge SHOT trade show in Las Vegas multicasted a starkly contrasting visual signal - giving the world a different insight into the character of the American hunter in loud, bright high-tech splendor.

To see all the thousands of booths piled with gadgets, gizmos and gear, promoters boasted that a visitor had to walk ten miles of aisles. The only things moving faster than bullets fired by the hot-on-the-market new syn-stocked, titanium-barreled ultra magnums were the lightening bolt credit card debits ricocheting across cyberspace.

Many variations on these polar portraits of the modern hunter can be observed - depending on which rod & gun club meeting or fund-raising banquet you attend. The obvious question is: ‘which signal best shows the true face of the modern hunter?’ The ambiguous answer is: ‘all of the above.’

One central theme of my Nimrod’s Trace essays has been that the prime value of hunting in the modern world is the strength of the force it creates among humans to continue the existence of a wild and natural portion of the Earth. In the U.S.A. today, a conservation rampart of sufficient strength to hold back the flood of human folly requires 14 million to 15 million active, license-buying hunters.

It must be said that the glitzy, gadgetized nimrod lionized by sporting goods marketers and the hand-crafted, homemade woodsman with his longbow both contribute to the current hunting constituency for wildlife conservation.

The traditionalists weave a thread of connection to the roots of our very human nature and original relationship to life on earth - a slender strand of honor that most people instinctively respect whether they hunt or not. By themselves, however, traditionalists have not attracted enough participation in hunting to forge a strong force for conservation of wild things and wild places.

To this point in time, the hunting community has depended on the admittedly crass (but effective) hucksterism of gizmo marketing to attract enough new nimrods to keep the hunter population numbers up. Most programming on outdoor TV channels, for example, makes hunting and fishing look like some kind of dirt-track stock car race in which sportsmen dress as billboards and road kill is the object of the contest. But the TV shows do bring new hunters through the door.

A large majority of hunters cling to this ad-agency definition of hunting as a thrilling vanity quest pumped up with a steroid injection of expensive toys. This we do even as we receive a growing contempt from a non-hunting urban society that despises high-tech, low-moral killing of wild animals. This we also do as all hunters lose honor because of the destructive, dishonest and alienating behavior that often springs from mass marketing unnatural expectations of the wild to a city-bred population of uninformed wildman wannabes.

The most disturbing fallout is found in hunter character - how hunters and anglers define success, what it takes to make them proud, and what role models they look up to and emulate.

Even as natural hunters despair for a revival of wildness in human culture, we abet unethical behavior when we hypocritically ballyhoo the statistics of jobs and economic benefit created by industrialization of the hunt. (Yes, I do it too.)

Can the modern hunter continue to walk all paths while seeking an avenue for our heritage into the human future? Or, does Thoreau have it right - that it makes a difference if we seek one true way? If so, what is the hunter’s true path to the future?

This, of course, was precisely the question in my mind 10 years ago when I wrote the first of these essays. The name of the column was intended to keep the theme fixed over time. {Nimrod’s Trace is a metaphorical combination of Nimrod (Old Testament) as emblem of the hunter and the old English meaning of ‘trace’ - to seek or follow the correct, best or truest way. i.e., I traced that definition to its roots thru a series of dictionaries.}

I suspected in the beginning, and I believe now, that our hunting tribe will survive in the future only if we find and follow a path that binds a culturally compromised modern recreation activity to both the roots of our nature as living beings and to the enduring human moral spirit. Indeed, only nimrods who find that path will trace their way through the industrialized digitized social jungle of the future.

Lacking this connection to universal human values, hunting becomes just another leisure pass-time - golf with guns ‘n gut piles. Alas, the future promises nothing but ferocious competition among mere pass-times; the marketing equation predicts a cultural death spiral for future recreational losers.

Already, a hunting trip is ever more expensive, difficult and fatiguing for the typical city dweller; meanwhile other pleasures become easier, cheaper and more stimulating. Next consider the growing approbation of both ignorant anti-hunting fanatics and honest, discerning critics of the modern hunt. Add in the destruction of the wild by an exploding human population and the hunting death spiral becomes a demographic free fall about the year 2025 when the baby boom generation begins to hit the nursing home in force.

Even today the tacit alliance of natural hunting with commercialized vanity hunting is failing to keep up the conservation force. Hunter numbers are falling between one and two percent per year. This despite our having the most amenable demographic population from which to recruit new hunters that we will ever again enjoy.

So, how will we recognize a “right” path? And how will enough people follow that path so hunters of ordinary means can continue to buy more wildlife habitat when it costs a zillion dollars per acre. Will there be enough hunter conservation leaders to stop politicians from taking wildlife biologist salaries to give tax breaks to investment bankers, or turning national forests into industrial zones? And do we really have to shiver in buckskins and chunk stone spears at deer in order to be “natural” hunters? (You will get my synthetic insulated, waterproof hunting boots from me when you pry them from my cold, dead feet.)

I am not a prophet. I do try, however, to be a futurist who calculates a probable tomorrow based on an observable today. That said, I predict that finding the hunters’ future path in the 21st Century is far from a sure thing. When we do find it, if we find it, the path will trace through the heart first before it reaches the wallet and both will precede the ego on the survival trail.
There are a few other general probabilities that predict cultural survival for hunting: (Read a capital ‘IF’ before each item.)

1. The attractive force capable of holding a hunting culture together will be centered on who the hunter is as a human being, not what he or she possesses in the way of toys and trophy status. The fuel for this force will be the reward of personal respect bestowed by society upon character of the hunter. (The single greatest truth made invisible by the blinding glare of our industrial consumer culture is the immense power of respect from others to compel human values and behavior. To the degree that the modern hunter earns respect from the larger society around him and her so will we find the vector of the true path.)
   
2. The tribe of hunters that survives is made up of nimrods who reward each other with status based on giving, not getting. Picture the day that a hunter who takes the neighbor’s kid to the duck blind with her will get more Boone and Crockett points for the record book than the guy who kills a 20-tined megadon on a spaceship safari. (There is much about this prospect that is foreign to human nature and must be achieved by artifice.)
   
3. The 21st Century hunting tribe following a true path will strongly subordinate technology to nature on the hunt. This means the ordinary hunter must learn and understand what Jose Ortega Y Gasset taught us about purposefully balancing the power of the human predator to kill with the power of the prey to avoid being killed. (Big IF here, technology building is at the very core of human nature so restraining our tool-use does not come naturally for people.)
   
4. The hunting tribe that survives will deliver real value to the larger society. I predict two enduring currencies of value will make the difference. First, hunters will supply the central leadership and energy to maintain portions of the Earth in wildness so that all may profit from that universal asset. Second, the nature of the hunt will be a socially valid and visible ceremony both to refresh the universal understanding of our original place on the Earth and to remind us that all living beings share a common creation. (As Joseph Campbell observed, the beast is no ‘it’ but a ‘thou.’)

Ironically, the billions of dollars of cash flow associated with hunting and fishing will prove to be a much weaker validation of our way of life than the social capital represented by the two currencies described above.

There also are a couple of predictors for hunting extinction. Cultural extinction has a lot in common with biological extinction. Precedent for these hunting hazards is found in the story of every species that has ever gone extinct.

1. Hunters fail to adapt to change. Hunters are inflexible and close-minded in their attitudes and behaviors - particularly toward non-hunters.
   
2. Leaders of the hunting community are narrow-minded and self-righteous in their perception of the true path. All leaders must know and convey which moral navigational stars they are following when they chart a course; but people on different courses are not all adversaries. Beware the leader who demands unquestioning allegiance to their vision of the true path. (i.e. ‘we’ve got to stick together and show a solid front so shut up.’)
   
3. My last prediction is that we hunters will find the end of the hunter’s path at the very animal we hunt. As that animal lives we will live; as that animal goes we will go. When the beast who feeds us is no more, we are no more. This truth promises that our wild trace through the civil jungle leads to a treasure beyond value.

   “Earth can not count the sons she bore:
   The wounded lynx, the wounded man
   Come trailing blood unto her door;
   She shelters both as best she can.”
   - THE RETURN (1934) Edna St. Vincent Millay

Ron can be reached by email at couleeking@hotmail.com.