hunters could hope to kill.
Here is a case in which prehistory collided with recorded history in the tragic transformation of a great Aboriginal culture. The moment that hunting buffalo turned from subsistence to commerce, Native hunters began to slaughter bison at a hitherto unheard-of rate and did so more easily because of improved weaponry.
The great Métis hunters of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries were probably even more efficient in their slaughter of the bison than their grasslands Aboriginal trading partners. They entered the pemmican and buffalo hide business in a big way, and they were able to carry away their hides and meat on Red River carts and sell them en masse to the fur traders. These big-wheeled carts could convey considerably more buffalo hides than any travois.
The incoming settlers from Red River, Manitoba, to Fort McLeod, Alberta, were just as culpable in the destruction of the ten-thousand-year-old buffalo hunt. They wanted farmland and ranchland, not roaming herds of buffalo. And if the buffalo sustained the nomadic bands of Aboriginals across the northern prairie, then a good buffalo was a dead buffalo. Indeed, defeating the Indians by exterminating the buffalo was U.S. domestic policy. Sport hunters on both sides of the Medicine Line blasted away at bison from flat cars, leaving their victims to rot in the sun.
And last, but certainly not least, were the traders from the south. Primarily white buffalo hunters traded in buffalo hides to supply the leather industry and to meet the demand for buffalo robes throughout the United States. They slaughtered buffalo, abandoned the meat, and floated their hides with great efficiency on flat boats and small barges down the Mississippi River. The hides were used, among other things, to make belts to run factories in the East, and one of the uses for the bones was to manufacture bone china.
If prehistoric bison hunting with bow and arrow was skillful, organized, and life-sustaining, commercial bison hunting and agriculture were devastating. Nomadic Indians could not coexist with European agriculture. Without the political will from white settlers and sportsmen to save the bison, the animals were driven to near-extinction. The last of the great herds died with the meat still on their ribs, and the stink from their unharvested carcasses was unforgettable.
Wildlife conservation? Such a civilized and curiously modern expression. The dream of bleeding-heart liberals and animal lovers like me. But it was out of the question then. As we shall see, the first great strides toward wildlife conservation came from unexpected sources.
Some remaining fringes of hunter-gathering tribes found their last chance in the Far North, among the great caribou hunters from Alaska and the Yukon to Labrador and northern Quebec, where white civilization was less intrusive. Small pockets of Aboriginal hunters can still be found within a few hours’ drive from where I write these lines in northern Saskatchewan. But the horses are gone and the sled dog teams are fading fast, and the children of our last great hunters are pursuing their animals throughout the long winters on snowmobiles.
HUNTING FOR FUN is a relatively recent idea in our history as a species. First, we had to have leisure societies, buttressed by agriculture and trading, wherein the powerful few learned to celebrate hunting as a game. The earliest evidence of sport hunting comes from Thebes, in Egypt, during the mid-fourteenth century bc. Perhaps for the first time in recorded history, kings and noblemen hunted bulls, lions, and other large animals from chariots drawn by small horses. They brought along their retinues, bowmen and barmen with beating staves, who wounded and exhausted the prey so that the man in the chariot could finish it off.
I suppose the lady I spoke with at the hunting lodge in Scotland several decades ago might be tempted to imagine her ancestors on the chariot while mine were wielding a bow and arrow in advance of the chariot or beating the bush to put up something noble, like a lion or a stag. But in her eyes, on that evening in 1970, I was something of an anomaly. In her England, the men who skulked through the bushes like Yosemite Sam were called poachers. I don’t want to give the impression that I was therefore more closely aligned to the great hunters of the Mesolithic era than she. After all, in my native Canada, I was never hunting primarily to feed my family; I hunted for the adventure of it.
This is the kind of hunting we tend to read about. In my forays into the hunting section of the public library here in Saskatoon, I have discovered three rows of books (about ten feet of solid pages). There are books on target shooting with rifles, shooting varmints, shooting deer (many of these), and on shotgunning for quail, ducks, grouse, doves, geese, and clay pigeons. There are books on archery and black-powder rifles. There are anthologies (sometimes referred to as bibles) of hunting stories, by which I mean bang em ’n bag em stories, of great hunts throughout North America, and travel books on safaris to Africa and other continents in search of trophy heads.
But in this library, one of the most intensively used in all of North America, on any given day, there are a mere dozen or so books on those same shelves that have nothing at all to do with the how-to approach to sport hunting, nothing at all to do with the glory of the conquest, one well-heeled nimrod to another, bragger’s rights to the biggest trophy head and all that hairy-chested stuff. These dozen volumes rest on the shelf like lepers at a bus stop. David Petersen’s A Hunter’s Heart is one such book. The stories he has anthologized here all demonstrate a strong empathy for the wild creatures the hunters pursue. Invariably, the writers are conservation-minded people (Jimmy Carter, Tom McGuane, Edward Abbey, Jim Harrison, Ted Kerasote) who happen to love hunting. Rick Bass’s Caribou Rising is about defending an Arctic caribou herd, the Gwich’in hunting culture, and the wildlife refuge that is their home. James Swan’s In Defense of Hunting is a Jungian analysis of the sport hunter’s psyche.
These brave dozen or so are misfits among the shelves of hunting books in the 799.2 section. They are, let’s face it, nerds among jocks. At night when all the patrons have gone home, I can well imagine that the great army of how-to books and safari adventure books gang up on the sensitive ones and call them names that impugn their masculinity.
My point is that the sheer bulk of hairy-chested-gentleman hunting literature generates the illusion that sport hunting is in some mysterious way superior to subsistence hunting. I am tempted to believe that the writers and readers of this material consider that subsistence hunting, done mostly by Aboriginal people throughout the world, is not only less interesting and less heroic but less appropriate in defining the hunting narrative of our time.
Indeed, the paleoanthropologists of the next few centuries may well turn their attention away from dogsled and snowshoe cultures in the Far North and descend upon the dismantled and buried suburban malls and their sporting goods emporia, seeking out evidence of the great hunters of the early second millennium, the primitives who stirred fossil fuels into the mix. The people who hunted from cars along the side roads as I did with my father (Homo automobilis). The more sophisticated men who transported all-terrain vehicles in trucks and set them loose on timber roads because of their loathing for walking in the woods and fields (Homo outof-shapiens). And of course the northerly tribe of hunters who were so evolved that they could run down deer and coyotes to exhaustion in the deep snow and shoot them (Homo snowmobilis).
SPORT HUNTING IN North America aspired to be the sport of kings. The Theban chariots may well have evolved into jeeps and all-terrain vehicles, but sport hunting in North America evolved from one kind of feudal system or another. In various European countries, members of the landed gentry could secure hunting rights on vast estates, but their tenants had to poach their game to feed themselves. In North America, hunting for sport came out of the earliest leisure societies on plantations, ranches, and wilderness forests. Not only was it one of the privileges accorded to the landed gentry, but it came with the conquest of the land, the westward march of American and Canadian settlers, and the rigors of pioneer life. Hunting in North America developed into a beloved pastime that combined the gentlemanly appeal of golf with the shoot-em-up savor of the Wild West.
By the late seventeenth century, trappers,
