08/02 © Ronald L. Moody (2002)
All rights reserved.
Reprinted here with permission.

Modern Natural Hunters -
Architects of a Hunting Future

Animal hunters, especially those who are still hungry at the last edge of darkness before the new sun, make no plans for the future. Their whole being is directed at killing food before the dawn puts their prey beyond reach.
Human hunters as well (particularly those persuaded that pleasure is the reward of the hunt), rarely design their future. But the human hunter blinded by impatient desire, like the natural hunter blinded by the sun, lives under the shadow of a larger predator - extinction. Of the two, however, only the human can plan an escape.

Many pre-dawn mornings ago I sat among oaks and dogwood waiting for deer as a hard, dark cold ate at my feet and hands. For me the sun would be welcome, but another hunter in my woodlot was up against a harsher deadline. Nearby an early-rising gray squirrel rustled for acorns as dawning light brought the grove into view. The gray of the squirrel became the gray of the leaves every time the acorn-eater stopped. Gray on gray, rustle, stop. No colors, no white, just blacks and grays.

The hunt I didn't know was happening ended with a rush of leaves and one tiny squeak. A gray fox had the squirrel in its teeth, one snapping shake and life became food for life - the fox as fast a killer with teeth as I could be with an arrow.

Hunger and death are shades of gray, little different from hunger and life. Even blood is gray in shadow.

The cumulative teaching of many such wildland lessons puts a normal, civilized human recreational outdoorsperson through an ancient metamorphosis. At some point the world view of fox and squirrel begins to look natural in the eyes of an urban week-end nimrod.

The fox makes no plans, his limited purpose forces him to blindly trust that the next squirrel will be there for him. If not, both fox and squirrel surrender to extinction. Only the human who can view the future through the eyes of the fox can see how the same limitation of purpose will produce the same outcome for the human hunter - extinction.

Such vision is rare to civilized eyes, however, particularly among humans who call themselves hunters, but who never visit the wild with the watchful humility of the hunted.

The lesson in this story became clear to me three years after that gray morning hunt. The woodlot of the fox and squirrel was logged and cleared to make way for planting row crops. A new government program had raised crop subsidies high enough to make the wooded land worth more as producer of a hundred bushels of soybeans.

In that place, for remaining time, the squirrel, the fox - and I - are without place or life - functionally extinct.

What makes the hunter singularly important in the 21st Century is that few civil people, other than an occasional experienced hunter, ever learn to see the world through the squirrel's eyes. Without such vision the limitation of purpose shared with our wild kin cannot be overcome because there is no lust for an escape plan - for creating by design a future that includes the wild.

A single moral principle supports modern human hunting in a human dominated Earth. The hunter obligates himself or herself at the moment of kill. In exchange for the reward of taking one's lawful game, the hunter is morally bound to preserve the kind of the hunted, and to preserve free and natural living places for all wild kind.

The importance of this "deal" between hunter and hunted cannot be overstated. Wild life and wild lands cannot survive in a human dominated world without an active, assertive human support system. Human dominion has gone too far for it to be otherwise. Our record of conservation successes and failures makes clear the vital role ethical recreational hunter must play in any such support system.

When it comes to designing the future, I sort modern hunters in roughly three varieties: pleasure hunters, dominion hunters and natural hunters.

Like the fox and human hunter-gatherers of old, the pleasure hunter casually trusts the next squirrel or deer to be there. Like the fox, they are totally vulnerable to the decisions of those people who actively create the future.

The dominion hunter hunts for status or symbols of his own dominance of the wild. When the hunt eventually fails to reward him with status, the dominion hunter either moves on and leaves the wild behind, or begins taming it to his own purpose. In the end, any design created by the dominionist will serve only human ambition. A hunting heritage built such selfish ambition is a house on sand.

The natural hunter goes through the metamorphosis that lets her or him look at the woodland through wild eyes. Having done so, they can no longer leave the wild behind. Their options are limited, however. They must either honor the deal with real results or they become functionally extinct along with the wild kind they fail.

The journey gets hard at the corner where a person understands the responsibility but can't find a hunter's path leading toward "the deal." In truth, there is no one way; but this path does exist, it is the Nimrod's Trace into the future.

Remember that our peculiar human civil-wild challenge is to create a future by design. This demands that natural hunters be active, assertive members of the human community - just as they are proficient stalkers in their wild journey.
In the dawn of the 21st Century it becomes clear that the design of the future must be preceded by re-design of the modern hunter.

First and foremost - The natural hunter must know themselves and appreciate their own importance. We are not masters of the universe, and hunting is not playing in a bloody toy box full of gadgets and gizmos. We must be civilized enough to design civilization; at the same time we must be wild enough to be passionate defenders of the wild communities where we hunt.

Second - We must revive an almost lost tradition of hunter citizenship. A 21st Century person simply cannot be a hunter if they are not also honoring "the deal." Society will define the difference between animal hunters and killers by this standard. I do not mean hunters to be two things at once - hunter and citizen. I mean that a hunter must be one thing that is both.

Third - We must create institutions of teaching and learning that will secure the wild and civil future across many generations. Education must become an integral, ongoing, lifetime part of the existence of the human hunter. This was true before civilization (nobody ever lived long enough to learn it all). It must become true again.

In particular, young people who are increasingly isolated from wild lands by urban and social barriers must be given a hunting passage to maturity within an adult mentoring "Village." But the hunting community also desperately needs an Academy where friends of learning can provide intellectual leadership to a way of life that started before language was invented.

A new identity, a new citizenship, new learnedness - a new incarnation of an ancient person - the natural human hunter.

One can imagine another morning where the burst of dawn makes bright the red of hunted blood and dancing colors of the hunter's wild lands.