Hunt for Meaning

Perusing David Carpenter’s book inspires an eerie sense of déjà vu. I too started with a BB gun, a Red Ryder carbine purchased with money squirrelled away over the course of the year, accumulated at my second-hand comic book stand from miners heading home at shift’s end. I too was bemused to have managed to knock a dickey bird—in retrospect a starling, I hope—off its perch and, upon presenting it proudly to my father, was devastated to have him comment wearily: “We have so few birds
around here [Red Lake, Ontario] and you had to shoot one for no reason at all.” And I too started hunting in earnest with my father, being shocked as I listened to the handsome young man my father had invited along on our first outing recount stories of serving in a German U-boat. Later I had exclaimed: “Dad, Freddy was a Nazi; we hate Nazis, right—why did you bring him along?” To which he replied: “Freddie was a German, and he served his country as a Hitler Youth. It was the system that was evil and why we must protect ours.” So, too, Carpenter’s experiences hunting with his father and later with his friends are fraught with ambivalence and contradiction if not irony, perhaps the very essence of the experience of the hunter who hunts not because he has to in order to survive, but because he loves to do it. And, finally, Carpenter is a sometime teacher and writer of several award-winning books.

Carpenter’s book, A Hunter’s Confession, is not a tightly reasoned apologia fashioned by a latter-day St. Augustine or St. Francis. He has chosen, rather, to mount an impressionistic carousel of anecdotes and observations that briefly touches upon his early hunting, his experiences with his companions, the history and prehistory of hunting, and the relative morality of subsistence hunting versus hunting for sport. He recounts among many ironies the little-known conclusion that subsistence aboriginal hunters in North America, possessing only the Clovis point spear, rendered the horse extinct along with the mammoth, sloth and many other species and only benefited from the horse in its second iteration, reintroduced by the murderous Spaniard Pizarro, whose 168 riders with a mere dozen muskets defeated a panic-stricken army of 80,000, killing 7,000 in a single day. Within 300 years, aboriginal hunters on horseback, using repeating rifles, had, along with commercially hunting Métis and gratuitously bloodthirsty European tourists and settlers, almost completely wiped out 50 million bison.

A further irony lies in the fact that it was sports-men, men like Teddy Roosevelt—hunters not above killing huge numbers of magnificent animals merely as trophies—who recognized that something had to be done before all wilderness and things wild disappeared and so proposed what Ken Burns has dubbed “America’s Best Idea,” national parks. In a rambling impressionistic manner, using an almost self-consciously unpretentious prose style, Carpenter points out many such incongruities during the ride he takes us on.

Carpenter, however, overlooks one major consideration in favour of hunters and hunting: that hikers and wildlife watchers, like the passersby along a river, have little knowledge or information regarding the symbiosis among water, weeds, insects and fish or field and fauna. Only the predator, the angler on the river, the hunter in the woods, takes the trouble to notice whether the forest cover, the food, the water, the weather are sustaining the species upon which he or, less often, she depends for sport or even survival. It is ironic that it is the predator who cares most for the prey’s survival and is in favour of setting enough territory aside to allow the proliferation of the species, while the environmentalist sounds the alarm too late, when only a few creatures survive—so few, in fact, that the surviving numbers would not permit their hunting and harvesting and might represent the death knell for the species.

There is a second issue that Carpenter touches upon but leaves largely untilled. Since we do not have to hunt to survive, why should we hunt at all? It is one quandary I have struggled with a great deal over the years, but have reached the conclusion that a truly moral human being should be willing to kill anything he or she is willing to eat. It builds consciousness of the respect one should have for anything that sustains one’s life by giving us its own, even unwillingly, whether carrot or caper or capercaillie. As a hunter one learns to be grateful for the animal that appears just as one has despaired, whether because one is starving or merely worried about driving home through a snowstorm at the end of the day. The author concurs with Roderick Haig-Brown that both situations put you at risk, thereby heightening the senses that contribute to survival.

Carpenter points out that Aldo Leopold, a conservationist of canonical stature, believed hunting revived the roots not only of one’s connection to one’s country but to the ecosystem as a whole. Today, at the opposite end of that spectrum, vegetate in limbo the modern Kaspar Hausers whose experience of nature is confined to, as one wag said many years ago, “that split second between the taxi and the hotel awning.” Or perhaps the New York bar that Carpenter describes where flannel-shirted denizens shoot animals they hunt in video games.

Carpenter’s is an imperfect resolution, but as a criminologist who in his formal studies must wrestle with the imperfections and ironies that emerge from prominent social policies and laws, I find it abundantly clear that, as with any decision regarding the continued use of guns, the perpetuation of hunting cannot be neatly resolved without lingering ambivalence. The lesson is that there are very few solutions without caveats the size of canyons when making decisions regarding the major conundrums confronting modern society. Carpenter makes few formal arguments of the type to which I allude, preferring a colloquial style that is at first almost irritating, but becomes increasingly charming if you hang in there. The reader distills from the ride he has taken us on—bringing us full circle to where he began—that ultimately the decision to kill or not to kill is entirely personal. In Carpenter’s case, that decision is idiosyncratically based upon a promise he made that if he survived a medical emergency experienced at a hunting camp, he would kill no more creatures. He was granted life and now honours that pledge, in spite of the fact that, in one last irony, his wife had just come around and qualified for a hunting licence.

As much as I enjoyed Carpenter’s stories and writing and description of the history of hunting, I found the end deflating, rather like the deus ex machina ending to an initially fascinating Hollywood potboiler. But the trip one takes to get there is definitely worth the effort, and I shall reread this book at my leisure and pass it on to my son, who has been a passionate hunter since the age of two but is showing signs of the same ambivalence at the tender age of 23. Perhaps all hunters have a half-life of two decades. My take on Carpenter’s enduring message is that society eliminates the ambivalence-fraught experience of hunting at the resource’s, and perhaps even its own, peril.