08/01© Ronald L. Moody (2001)
All rights reserved.
Reprinted here with permission.

The Hunt ... Finding Who We Are
Along The Hunter's Path

The snapshot of my three grandkids sticks to the front of the refrigerator under a magnet button portraying a mule deer buck. My fridge door, like that in millions of other American homes, has become a totem pole of who I am and what is important to me.

Bringing a child into the world is a gamble two people take on the future. Grandkids are your second chance -- and a clear warning that time beyond your future, like a locomotive in a dark tunnel, may be closer than you think.

The going-to-sleep dreams of grown-up Nimrods are filled with big antlers and charging lions. But parents of the grown-ups, those Nimrods we politely call "silvertips," sleep with the growl of that on-rushing locomotive.

Doubts cloud the hunter's dreams. Do human journies to the wild truly belong only to our past? Is the immense conservation effort needed to preserve wildness worth it when the grandkids likely will prefer whatever hype is cool?
Have we achieved a world where one generation still creates the next, but no longer can extend its identity or values into the future? Does wildlife continue to need the modern hunter as its conservation savior? Or, can all the world's urban animal lovers take over and do the job?

In the end, the people in the snapshot on my fridge door will answer the questions. For the natural hunter, however, the vision of a future in which people no longer can be a real part of a wilderness where great silver bears roam evokes a grief as though the children themselves had perished.

Not all of human nature can be posted to a financial database, or quantified in a social survey. Our emotional values reveal our older nature. Conservation, for instance, costs money but money cannot buy conservation. There also must be passion and willingness to commit oneself beyond money.

Modern, urban people are smart enough to understand we can have a sustainable civilization that could conserve part of the Earth for the ancient wild. But people are demonstrably NOT smart enough to choose the sustainable option if other rewards and penalties intercede -- which, of course, they always do.

There is "something" about the hunt, however, that opens a person's eyes to the human necessity of the wild and makes the sustainable choice plausible to a market-driven mind. Whatever the real "something" may be, it certainly is older and deeper in our nature than our civilized lust for liquid net worth. Actual participation in the wild apparently can infect a person with commitment.

In the 10,000-plus years since the dawn of agriculture and the rise of the first city walls, countless generations of peoples have maximized the profits they take from the natural Earth. Repeatedly, across all history, when their production-driven civilizations eventually consumed available resources, the people weakened and their way of life fell.

Trying to convince a New York stock broker today that this history has real-time relevance surely is as hopeless as trying to persuade a Roman tribune in 50 b.c.e. would have been -- for Euro-American civilization remains Roman in its soul to this day.

There is, however, an older human story that still can teach.

Some 20,000 years before Remus and Romulus raised their city, hunters painted the great beasts of their world in the hidden vaults of caves located in the land that Romans would call Compania and we today call France. The cave images are like our modern fridge doors, a totem place filled with long-hidden snapshots of a hunter's world. They reveal that, from the beginning, the hunt has been much more than economics. Other human capabilities could fill our stomachs. But the great animals we hunted identified who WE were. The painted visions of the aurochs bull and the great cave bear (images that agricultural man surely would have destroyed had they been discovered too soon) testify that humanity must become something other than human before we can rid ourselves of that which we truly are -- hunters.

For nowhere in the caves appear images of the grass, seeds, nuts, berries and other plant foods that must have been even more important than meat in the Pleistocene economic plan. Neither are the animals pictured as food, they are shown always as living beings striving for existence. Seen through a hunter's eyes, the cave paintings can only be an effort to evoke the wild spirit of the hunted animal. There are no words in human language to explain why that is important. If people of today still share the spirit that moved the artist hunters of the painted caves, they simply look at the images and know.

In one cave, and perhaps in others, the small foot prints of young people can still be seen. The ancient children danced where the skin and head of a great bear was draped over a mound of clay.

The details of the snapshot are long faded. The humanity revealed is familiar, however. In the cave, before the totems, a generation of elders taught future people who they were and what was important.

Those ice-age senior citizens knew nothing of locomotives in tunnels but they certainly could see both ends of existence.

Children of today come into this world with the same software package as the children who danced in the cave. They want to learn who they are and what is important as much as any generation before them. The only remaining question is whether their elders possess the passion to convince them -- to compete with mega-corporate marketeers for the souls of their descendants.

I certainly will not stop any of my grandkids who wants an MBA so they too can kneel before the profit gods. If they ever do learn from me who they really are and what is really important, I have only the hunting field for a place to teach them -- the painted cave was sealed a thousand generations ago.

The ancient cave totems are a letter from Eden. They remind us that animal spirits of the Earth's natural life are old and true reflections of ourselves. To understand them is to better know ourselves. We need such knowledge to find that trace through the forest of civil confusion to a future in which people remain naturally human, rather than become data-morphed into something else.

If there are no hunters to interpret the letter to future people then this oldest knowledge of ourselves is finally lost.