of beaver, buffalo, bear, moose, and anything else of commercial value. As these incursions increased in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the impact on wildlife became catastrophic. As we have seen, the buffalo declined to near-extinction. The plains grizzlies all but disappeared. The last remnants of this population sought refuge in the Swan Hills of northern Alberta, and their future there is in grave danger. The passenger pigeons completely disappeared.
If there was one man who came to define hunting for sport in North America, it was Theodore Roosevelt, renowned trophy hunter, scientist, historian, war hero, naturalist, and politician. He embodied the whole tradition, from hunting to fill the larder, as early settlers had done, to hunting on safari for trophies. From his experiences of hunting, especially in the American West, he became the popular embodiment of the great white hunter. When he finished his years in the White House, he went on safari to Africa, where he hunted from Kenya to the southern Sudan. There he managed to kill at least two of every species of animal that he could find. At least two is putting it mildly. For some species he went as high as eighteen trophies. His total bag was five hundred and twelve. Let me put that in numbers: 512 dead animals. He must have seen them all as Democrats.
But Roosevelt was also one of North America’s most influential conservationists. He worked hard to establish strict laws to protect wildlife from being slaughtered by hunters who had no love for the animals they pursued. He fought, with real success, to protect wildlife habitat by helping to establish national forest reserves, national parks, and zoos. The following credo, written by Roosevelt around 1910, was thought to be a rather progressive stance at the time:
I never sought to make large bags, for a hunter should not be a game butcher. It is always lawful to kill dangerous or noxious animals, like the bear, cougar, and wolf; but other game should only be shot when there is need of the meat, or for the sake of an unusually fine trophy. Killing a reasonable number of bulls, bucks, or rams does no harm whatever to the species; to slay half the males of any kind of game would not stop the natural increase, and they yield the best sport, and are the legitimate objects of the chase. Cows, does, and ewes, on the contrary, should only be killed (unless barren) in case of necessity.
POACHERS WERE ROOSEVELT’S enemies. Sportsmen from influential American families were his friends. He hunted with the social elites of the Boone and Crockett Club, which he helped found, but he also hunted with wranglers and squatters. He combined the traditions of the European aristocrat and the North American maverick. His hunting ethic and his example were very much alive in my father’s memory, an orthodoxy to which many sport hunters belonged. In a profound and pervasive sense, the boys and men of America in the first half of the twentieth century and beyond were all skulking through the bushes with Teddy Roosevelt.
This brief history of hunting leaves us with two traditions: subsistence hunting and hunting for the fun of it. Both traditions survive to this day and face off along the shrinking habitats with a persistent level of antipathy. But between the two traditions are vital connections that should not be ignored. Some Native people, for example, have turned to sport hunting in recent years, and non-Aboriginal people engage in subsistence hunting as well.
Aldo Leopold, the naturalist from Wisconsin, who hunted for subsistence and for the fun of it, considers both sport hunting and subsistence hunting in his classic A Sand County Almanac (1949). He reminds us that Aboriginal culture often coalesces around the pursuit of wild game. Among (largely white) people who hunt and fish for the sport of it, the cultural landscape is very different, but the culture manages through hunting to reengage with its wild origins by renewing contact with wild things. From hunting, Leopold tells us, hunters can affirm three important cultural values.
First, “there is value in any experience that reminds us of our distinctive national origins and evolution.” Leopold sees this awareness as “nationalism in its best sense.” He doesn’t talk about nationalism in its worst sense, the history of wholesale slaughter and conquest that seems to be part of the colonial heritage and does not need to be reenacted. Instead, he gives us examples that may well have come from his own boyhood: a boy scout has “tanned a coonskin cap, and goes Daniel-Booneing in the willow thicket below the tracks. He is re-enacting American history.” A young boy who traps rodents is “reenacting the romance of the fur trade.”
The second cultural value derived from hunting and other engagements with the wild is “any experience that reminds us of our dependency on the soil-plant-animal-man food chain, and of the fundamental organization of the biota [Leopold’s term for living organisms in the environment].” Leopold quotes a nursery song about bringing home a rabbit skin “to wrap the baby bunting in.” This folk song is Leopold’s reminder of the time when human tribes hunted to feed and clothe their families.
Leopold concludes with a third cultural value: “any experience that exercises those ethical restraints collectively called ‘sportsmanship.’ ” These restraints might have been learned in the company of more experienced hunters, but they are enacted in solitude. The hunter “ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct. Whatever his acts, they are dictated by his own conscience, rather than a mob of onlookers. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this fact.”
As a young hunter exploring the wilderness twenty years after Leopold’s death, looking back on my own experiences of hunting in the United States and Canada, I can see obvious reasons why the split between the two hunting communities has been perpetuated. But I can also see a great deal of truth in Leopold’s conclusions about the two traditions. Having read him so recently, perhaps I am a bit closer now to explaining the depths of excitement I shared with my dad, my brother, and all our hunting buddies who gathered in Edmonton more than ten thousand years after the arrival of the first hunters in North America.
3 THE FOREST PRIMEVAL
I like the gun. It is a familiar thing, full of associations. I am a different man when I am carrying it, more alert, more careful, more purposeful than without it. Carrying a gun has taught me a thousand things about animals and country and wind and weather that I should not otherwise have bothered to learn, has taken me to a thousand places I should not otherwise have seen . . . Killing has a place in hunting, if only a small one.I see it as a rite, a sacrifice, an acknowledgment of the sport’s origin that gives meaning to what has gone before. But never as an end in itself. RODERICK HAIG-BROWN, Measure of the Year
IN THE mid-1960s, when I began skulking around in the bushes with my hunting buddies, I did not see my activities as springing out of an evolutionary process or a culture of hearty hunters, or, for that matter, any other culture. My only awareness of Teddy Roosevelt had to do with his bushy moustache and his alleged use of the word bully, as in, “The boys and I had a bully good hunt.” I was bent on pleasure and on paying off my student loans and not much else. Bringing back the details of that life is not easy for me. But one hunting trip seems to have burnt its way into my memory.
It started with a party at someone’s apartment in the fall of 1967. A friend of mine suggested that we go on a wilderness river trip during the October long weekend. I was probably not sober, and probably everyone in this jammed apartment was my best friend, life was a simple proposition, and so, why not? In my quest to discover all the things in life that were deemed to be far-out and to avoid all the things in life that were not, the response to this suggestion seemed an easy yes.
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