Ready, aim, duck!

By M. John Fayhee

The news came to my senses via an Associated Press story in early September. It was headlined: “Hunters’ ranks wane, worrying state agencies.” The thesis statistic, which came from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, is that, between 1996 and 2006, the numbers of hunters nationally over 16 years old declined 10-percent, from 14 million to about 12.5 million.

Now, understanding that 12.5 million armed people walking around in the woods is still one big shitload of folks seeking blood (more than 12 times the number of soldiers in the standing Army), I did not exactly receive that news with anything save a smile. Like many of you reading these words, I live in a place where, for several months of the year, which usually occur in autumn, my personal very favorite time to be frolicking in the woods, the main people who are out and about are attired in attractive camo-and-orange ensembles. And what they are doing is trying to shoot and kill the very animals I come out into the boonies in hopes of seeing alive and kicking. Superficially, and selfishly, it would bother me not one whit if hunting ceased and desisted entirely, like, yesterday. It would not bother me one bit if the numbers related by USFWS pointed to a trend that continued along its statistical merry way till we got to the point where there was just one last old remnant codger using a walker to chase elk through the woods, like a hunting version of “I Am Legend.”

First things first: Don’t anyone for a nanosecond even think of laying any sort of city-boy-moves-to-the-sticks retort on me here. I was raised on a dirt farm in eastern Virginia that laid smack-dab in the middle of some of the redneckest, let’s-kill-everything-that-moves turf you can ever imagine. I grew up in the middle of hunting culture.

And, second things second: Understand that my long-held anti-hunting bias has little or nothing to do with guns. Like every farm in Gloucester County, Virginia, ours was well armed. We had firepower in just about every room, and frequently, I took said firepower out into the woods for some recreational target practice. I never once fired at anything living (except the time I almost head shot my buddy Bobby Nesselrode right in the head, but that had far more to do with our degree of intoxication than it did with anything resembling intent), but I surely did enjoy blowing off a little steam at the expense of beers cans whose only crime against me was being empty, something rightfully deserving of death by firing squad.

I brought my contrary POV toward hunting with me when I moved to the Mountain Time Zone in 1976. Here, I honed my admittedly predictable views toward the entire concept of going out into the hills with high-powered rifles for the express purpose of shooting animals whose only discernible crime was being born into their own species. My negative views about hunting were stereotypical, but that does not necessarily diminish their veracity.

A few years back, I wrote a column for the Summit Daily News, wherein I opened up this sacred-cow-based can of Pandora’s worms. It was autumn in the High Country, and the aspens were turning in all their glory and a month-long high-pressure system had settled down upon the mountains, guaranteeing blue skies and warm temperatures day after day after day. It was glorious beyond glorious, and all I, and every other person who lived thereabouts, wanted to do was go outside. Yet, outside at that time of year included entire roadside and trailhead slum villages, consisting of beat-up RVs and camper trailers and 20-year-old tents that looked like they were horked from African refugee camps and Road-Warrior-like pick-up trucks the size of tanks. Along Ute Pass Road. At Meadow Creek Trailhead. All along Rock Creek Road. Up Acorn Creek. At Vail Pass. And in these camps were scruffy and gruff people who mostly called home the faraway flatland elsewhere and whose main reaction to the scowls of local-resident people like me was to scowl back even harder while fingering their triggers and drawling mono-syllables about their “rahts,” while tobacco juice dribbled down their chins. Few were the times I ever laid eyes on a hunting camp that even slightly resembled the dignified, spiritual coming-together of righteous sportsmen who were continuing a proud tradition passed from father to son by learned men-of-the-backcountry that goes back a million years to the dawn of our species, which is what many hunters try to get everyone to believe is what their recreational avocation actually looks like in the aggregate.

Being rationally cognizant of my mortality, in that column, I avoided any references to tobacco drool and limited my points to economic and local-control issues:

1) If the Forest Service, which controls almost 80-percent of the land in Summit County, were to allow a local election on whether to ban hunting in the county, that ban would be supported by at least three-quarters of the population. We always hear from the kinds of rural counties where hunting is an integral component of the local culture that public lands management decisions ought to reflect local mores. Well, Summit County, like many places in the West, is populated by and visited by mostly people who want to hike, backpack and ski into the woods without fear of being mistaken for an elk by some half-drunk hunter from Georgia. And:

2) If hunting were banned in Summit County, we could then advertise ourselves as the one place in all of the Mountain Time Zone where people could come to enjoy the fine autumn weather without having to worry about getting shot all to shit. Thus, the economic impact of disallowing hunting in that one particular county would far outweigh the positive impact of allowing hunting. Tourists would flock to Summit County if a hunting ban were enacted and advertised.

The local reaction to that column was overwhelmingly positive, which was not surprising, given the dominant sociology of Summit County. I mean, I had Lycra-wearing New West poster children lining up to buy me pints of Fat Tire. There were a few negative letters-to-the-editor by hunters, but, not many, which sort of proved my point.

I hadn’t given too much thought to articulating hunting issues since I penned that column, until I read that aforementioned USFWS press release, which, given the preponderance of redneckism that defines the Bush theocracy otherwise known as America, actually startled me. And here’s where I maybe take a hard right turn.

A couple years back, I spent a summer hiking the Colorado section of the Continental Divide Trail from New Mexico to just inside the Wyoming border. On the last six-day stretch, I was joined by one of my dearest amigos, Chris Nelson. Chris and I have been buddies for years. We used to be backyard neighbors, we got our black belts in Tae Kwon Do at the same time, I watched his kids grow up, we’ve borrowed shit from each other and consumed many beverages together at the Moose Jaw. Chris, a professional firefighter who loves to hunt and fish, is my token good-ol’-boy buddy, and I am his token granola-cruncher buddy.

It was black-powder season while we were making our way along the CDT toward Wyoming, and, several times, we crossed paths with these Daniel-Boone look-alikes, people wearing tasseled buckskin and carrying cool old-timey muskets over their arms as they walked along with well-laden pack mules. Every time, Chris would stop and chat with these folks about their hunts. At first, I would walk ahead and roll my eyes. Then, after a few days, I found myself actually listening in on the conversations, and, by so doing, I came to realize that these hunter folks, who I have always viewed as being predominantly very closely related to the boys in “Deliverance,” knew a million times more about the natural history of the area through which we were traversing than did I.

Those of us who are members in good stead of the New-West/outdoor-recreation/environmentalist demographic most often believe that it is we who know how things truly are out in the natural world. Knowing how to ski or mountain bike and knowing all about the macro/legislative environmental issues facing the West these days is not the same as knowing where elk are likely to bed down on a frosty night and what kinds of grass mule deer eat in the fall. It’s a stunner to realize as we go through life happily ensconced upon the moral high ground, that, if shit hits the fan the way many of us believe it will during our lifetimes (if you’re a devotee of James Howard Kunstler, as I am, you will know what I’m talking about here), it’s those people who many of us have castigated (often at the organized behest of environmental organizations) for our entire lives— miners, farmers, ranchers, timber-cutters and, yes, hunters — who are the ones most connected to the skills that 1) we have mostly lost as a species in the past 50 years and 2) will help us survive whatever’ runaway freight train’s comin’ round the mountain.

We have lost so much connection to the natural world that it’s almost silly to even pen those words. Because industrial agriculture has killed the family farm, just in my lifetime, 100 generation’s worth of food-growing knowledge has evaporated. Globalization has all but killed our domestic timber industry/knowledge. Few folks now know how to weave or mill or make pottery from dirt or metal from ore. And, now, with the demise of hunting we are witnessing the death knell of yet another activity that connects us to our self-sufficient past.

Look, I hate the fact that so many hunters continue to comport themselves so poorly in the backcountry. But, when I read that their numbers are diminishing, I think, “There’s one more connection to the primal days of our species that’s almost gone.” And that rarely if ever feels good. MG