For Love of the World: Essays on Nature Writers

The Education of a Hunter: Reading Richard Nelson

The Education of a Hunter READING RICHARD NELSON Nelson's way in The Island Within, his most recent book, is not ours: The education to which he would be true and the experiment on life it proposed stand our way on its head. Thoreau says in the chapter on "Higher Laws" in Walden, in what I think is still the best morality on hunting and fishing, that hunting had been one of the best parts of his education, undoubtedly , as he goes on to say, because it "is oftenest the young man's introduction to the forest [Nature] and the most original part of himself [the correlative island within]." He acknowledges that there is "a period in the history of the individual , as of the race, when the hunters are the 'best men'''; but in respect to the race this period is past and in respect to the individual, who recapitulates this period, it is to be "outgrow[n]." Though he had "fished from the same kind of necessity that the first fishers did," the argument from necessity (subsistence) has little force for him. Even now, he says, "in civilized communities, the embryo man passes through [should pass through] the hunter stage of development." Yet in our civilized community I find, as William Carlos Williams says in "The Descent of Winter," that the hunters return to the city 135 empty-handed howbeit for the most part but aloof as if from and truly from another older world Wilham Carlos Williams captures the ambivalence and measure of the autumn ritual and grants the transformative power of an other, earlier world that itself is efficacious. "Empty-handed" tells us this, and placed initially and heavystressed , it carries for me the moral weight of Thoreau's determinative declaration : "No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its hfe by the same tenure that he does." Is Nelson's education belated? Or is it, as with others who return to the "old ways," full of needed instruction for us? Nelson never hunted in his youth in Wisconsin, where hunting (harvesting) deer, as Leopold learned, was always a heated pohtical issue. "I loved animals only with my eyes," Nelson says, "and judged hunting to be outside the bounds of morality." This sentence tells us that he has since found that hunting is a way of loving animals and within the bounds of morality, and this is the heart of the matter which, for those opposed to hunting, may be beyond appreciation. Yet this is what we must try to understand and what Nelson's unusual education and its praxis in The Island Within may enable us to do. (I choose praxis over application because I find it in the dictionary only a word away from pray, which is an aspect of sacralized hunting, and, homophonically, calls up prey. Prey, in tum, reminds me that hunting is predation and that of all predators human beings, as Nelson's ethnographic studies show, are the most skilled, the masters of the art.) The love of animals moved Nelson to study zoology, which proved unsatisfactory because, as science sometimes will, it put a "barrier [of detachment and abstraction] between humanity and nature." Contact, connectedness, intimacy -these are what he wants and, by way of anthropology, which he went on to study, he found that hunting peoples, the Eskimos of the Arctic and the Athabaskan Indians of the subarctic, had achieved: ''They had achieved the deepest intimacy with their wild surroundings and had made natural history the 136 ~ NELSON focus of their lives." He found this not so much from the traditional practice of observation and interview as by entering (he uses this word) the society of hunters, living their village life and, in demanding apprenticeship (often refused by the present generation of young men), participating in the hunt and thereby learning "their hunter's way." It should be noted that when he speaks of this, in the version of "The Gifts [of Deer]" published in Antaeus from which I've quoted, and elsewhere, notably in the appendix of Shadow of the Hunter, the biographical occasion is of the utmost importance. For, in 1964, when he left home for the first time, at twenty-two, to study the Eskimos of Wainwright, Alaska, the transition in his life had been as swift and disorienting as the flight from Madison to Barrow...