A Hunter's Confession. David Carpenter O.

have been cherishing a lot of my past lately, rolling around in nostalgia for a good old time when blasting away at birds with a shotgun was considered an innocent pastime. But hunting has come under fire these days for the best and worst of reasons, and grappling with some of those reasons is one of my motives for writing this book.

      Sport hunting is in decline in North America. So is subsistence hunting. Sport fishing is in decline. Outdoor activity in general is in decline. The more we talk about the environment, the less we see of it. Says Nicholas Throckmorton, a spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, “What we’re seeing among young people is, in a phrase, nature deficit disorder.” There are some exceptions to this general trend—my own province of Saskatchewan, for example, where the numbers of hunters have increased in recent years—but I cannot quite decide whether this increase in hunting activity is a good thing.

      I never asked such questions when I was a young hunter. The problem with innocence, of course, is its blindness to the moral implications of our acts. The problem with that good old time is that it is gone, and I am left to wonder just how good it was. We live on an imperiled planet in which humanity swarms all over the earth, compromising the land as it goes, the water, the air, the very climate at the distant poles like a metastasizing cancer. Whatever escapes getting tamed by us gets consumed by us.

      Nevertheless, when I examine deer tracks or grouse tracks in the snow, these things still awaken in me: the slight increase in heartbeat; the riveted attention; the awareness of sounds and smells; the patient, highly focused scanning of the bush around me. I am driven to ponder where this response comes from, and that is what the next chapter is about. But before we plunge into the ancient origins of hunting, I have to say this: cherishing the act of hunting for wild animals has become more and more difficult for me. My memories of the thrill of the hunt are tempered more and more with regret. If Bill Watson were around to hear my confessions, that is what I would tell him.

      2 SKULKING THROUGH THE BUSHES

      Meat eating helped make us what we are in a physical as well as a social sense. Under the pressure of the hunt, anthropologists tell us, the human brain grew in size and complexity, and around the hearth where the spoils of the hunt were cooked and then apportioned, human culture first flourished. MICHAEL POLLAN, The Omnivore’s Dilemma

      I have often wondered where my sense of urgency for the hunt came from. I suppose it came from my father, because he nurtured it in me. Or, genetically speaking, it came from his father, who loved to drive a buggy to the outskirts of Regina and shoot sharptails during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Or, more to the point, because we are talking about urgency, it came from my mother’s dad, Artie Parkin, founder of the Saskatoon Straight Shooters, circa 1920 to 1940, a club for men to teach youngsters how to handle guns and hunt wild game. My dad and his Edmonton friends were keeners, but Artie Parkin was said to be obsessed.

      Not only do I wonder what woodsy legacy brought my father and me from Edmonton to Richie Goosen’s trailer to hunt mallards in October of 1971; I wonder what historical phenomena made it likely that fathers in Alberta would buy firearms for their sons and take them hunting. I can see this paternal legacy being passed on from generation to generation in settlements up north among the Cree and Dene hunters, but we were middle-class white folks, and Mr. Noaks, our friend the butcher, provided us with all the meat we needed to get through the winter.

      My quest for answers to these questions has sent me a long way from Edmonton, Alberta. It began in Scotland, in May of 1970, with a conversation I had with a woman who was a hunter herself and a member of the English gentry. We weren’t hunting, but we were both guests at a gentleman’s hunting lodge in northern Scotland. She was talking to me about the grouse, deer, and pheasants that people over there hunted each fall. The conversation featured the usual differences in nomenclature. We hunted bucks, for example, which they called stags. And we hunted pheasants without using gillies or beaters.

      “And we don’t hunt pheasants—we shoot them,” said she.

      “What’s the difference?”

      “Well,” she said, “one doesn’t visualize oneself skulking through the bushes to shoot a pheasant.” Clutching an imaginary shotgun, she went into what I thought was a provocative crouch. I think she might have been going for Yosemite Sam in pursuit of Daffy Duck. “I mean, you people, you seem to fancy that sort of thing.”

      She seemed to be calling upon centuries of cultural superiority to make her point. When she and her tribe did a-hunting go, they stood in a designated shooting area waiting for the pheasants to be released by the thousands. After the gamekeeper’s big release, the beaters would keep the pheasants flying until the affair was over. The skulking through the bushes in search of pheasants was the job of the dogs and the hirelings. This distinction between hunting and shooting is an important one. You might say that this exchange between the lady and me at least suggests, if not encapsulates, the history of hunting.

      When we take a look at the lady’s ancestry, or indeed my own—I mean around two million years ago, at the time of the first true humans, Homo habilis (“handy man”), so named because these hominids had learned to use stone tools—we discover that as a species we had evolved into gatherers, scavengers, and occasional hunters. Without a hint of apology, we skulked around in the bushes looking for food. The much-debated hunting hypothesis of human origins came from scientific ruminations on the remains of these people. The theory goes that when one branch of apes learned to wield (throw, swing, carve) weapons to kill their prey, they were able to turn away from a diet of fruit and vegetation and become successful carnivores. Thus, they ceased to be apes and took the road to humanity. Hunting separated them from the lower orders of apes; hunting made them human. This theory of man as killer ape, however, has not gone uncontested over the last few decades. Indeed, as far as researchers have been able to discover, the animals these early humans ate were probably more scavenged than hunted down and killed.

      If we examine the dietary evidence of hominids a mere million or so years ago, we discover that hunting for food has begun to complement scavenging as a source of food. Presumably, our Homo habilis had learned a great deal about predators during their millennia as scavengers: how to find the kill sites, when to scavenge and when not to scavenge, how to avoid the predators, and perhaps even how to defend themselves against these creatures that sometimes left their food sources unguarded. The same dietary evidence, however, indicates that plants are still the major food source for our gatherer-hunters.

      By the time the skills of these hominids allowed them to take the offensive and hunt large mammals, they had evolved into bigger, stockier beings—“erectines,” as the paleoanthropologists call them. (Homo erectus is the variant we have come to know best.) The erectines, with their ever-more sophisticated stone tools, pursued the great migrations of large animals from the African continent to the Eurasian continent approximately 700,000 years ago. Like the great predator cats, they pursued elephants, hoofed animals, hippos, and smaller mammals simply because they were an abundant food source.

      One of the most evolved branches deriving from the erectines was the Neanderthals, who hunted in Europe until about 35,000 years ago. They constitute the least fortunate branch of the human family (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis). They were probably not blessed with the genetic makeup to survive the last great ice age to its conclusion, and they became extinct.

      Another branch of Homo sapiens emerged as the dominant species, what we, in our vanity, like to think of as the end result of erectine evolution. This emergence began somewhat before the last great ice age, perhaps as early as 140,000 years ago. These ancestors too were gatherer-hunters and are thought to be anatomically modern human beings. They are not credited with inventing fire, but their use of fire was so widespread that it came to define them as the modern humans who survived the last great ice age. They continued to evolve and flourish through the late Paleolithic age (the classic stone age) right up to the advent of agriculture.

      Their period as consummate hunters reached a peak around the end of the late Paleolithic age, which saw the rise of the Cro-Magnons. They were the big-game