Hunting, like everything else, takes place in an environment. Perhaps more than any other activity, hunting is possible because of its environment. It’s pretty basic. No sagebrush flats, no pronghorn. No woods, no deer. No healthy rivers and habitats, no game. And no hunting. More and more hunters are beginning to see this connection, and more and more are realizing that the only way hunting will survive is if we become better stewards of our environment—of our woods and rivers and sagebrush flats.
Some habits die hard, of course. My dad, for example, would never self-identify as an environmentalist. But by taking me hunting as a boy he trained me to become one. Thoreau was right: the good habits that hunting cultivates—attentiveness, deliberation, stillness—help us to better inhabit our world.
But when I’m really honest with myself, I have to admit that the most important lesson hunting has to teach isn’t really about something as seemingly selfless as becoming an environmental steward. When I’m really honest, I have to admit that it’s not so much about the world as it is about me. Or what will become of me and the people I love.
Yes, the environment is the place where we live, but it’s also the place where we eventually die. Hunting helps us come to terms with this living and dying by rooting the ineluctable nature of things in the logic and spirit of specific landscapes. A philosopher might think of this as the processes of life fed by the deceased, while an ecologist might think of it as the cycling of energy within a balanced ecosystem. But no matter how we articulate it, the key fact is that the living world, the natural world, is animated by death. It’s the hunter in the woods and the hawk on the wing, but it’s also the unseeing eyes of a deer and the red mess of a dove unmade.
Hunting helps us think about life even as it prepares us for its end. Every moment I’ve spent carrying a gun in the woods with my dad, pursuing and sometimes killing game, was a lesson preparing me for the day that he, like his buddy Gene, will climb into his sleeping bag and not get out.
Everything I know and love will eventually pass—my parents, my wife, my daughter, myself. Hunting helps us see and know the joy and beauty of our lives born out of an attentiveness to the end of things, a lesson in the glorious seriousness of living and of dying—the final stillness.
Nels Christensen lives in Albion, Michigan, and teaches environmental literature and writing at Albion College.
Illustration: Decision at Dusk by Brett James Smith