Shooters and the Tools they Use

AUTUMN means hunting season in these United States, a season that exposes folks who don’t wear orange or pack a gun. Stray, as I often do, around the rural West—on a bicycle, in a kayak, on skis, or on foot—and you’d best be prepared to yield ground to los hombres armados—the men with guns. Like Henry David Thoreau, I reveled in the chase at an earlier age, until such desires began to pass me by. Still today a rabbit or a marmot that scurries across my path can spark those ancient passions into flames.

My misgivings about the chase might seem petty when compared to human-rights abuses across the globe. A bird or animal killed for sport or food bears scant comparison to the great totalitarian evils of the twentieth century. In case I need to say it, yes, the U.S. is a wonderful place to live. To raise children among drug cartels or in the thick of an insurgency would be far worse than living within provinces where gun racks on pickups are more the norm than the exception. Still it galled the spit out of me to see my sons fall to crawling along a muddy trail when the guns of autumn began to boom nearby.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am a born-again non-hunter. Like a renegade priest with his fuming censer, I swung my guns and drew a lethal bead for some three decades, until I gave away the family “shooting irons,” as Daddy dubbed them—my father who taught me all their risky ropes and manly rewards. My pet weapon, a 12-gauge shotgun with 30-inch barrel and battered walnut stock, issued puffs of smoke that ordered nature to obey. Squirrels, doves, pigeons, partridges, ruffed and dusky and sage grouse, quail, pheasants, ducks, and geese—some of them now protected under the Endangered Species Act—tumbled to that gun. During my spell as a hunter, bird and animal habitats shriveled or crashed—an upshot of the human-population stressors brought to bear on critters in Washington State where I came of age. Under the tutelage of my older friends and my father, I split the flesh of hundreds of animals and birds. I was really good at it. But at last my heart came to grate and brim over with tender empathy for the dead. I felt my pastime adding to the wreckage of sensitive species, as shooting had done for dodos, bison, passenger pigeons, prairie chickens, sharptail grouse, sage grouse, and so on.

A whiff of the confessional arises when I speak of hunting and shooting now; on my chest I’ve borne a load of stones as dire as those Giles Corey bore in old Salem. And so I began to ask myself some questions about my family and culture. Is hunting chiefly a sport or a game? A way to produce food more honestly? An exercise of those primal drives that keeps us healthy and sane? An alibi for escaping to the great outdoors and keeping alive a shrinking reverence for nature? Depending on whom you ask, all of these answers and more might rise to hunting’s absolution. If one is going to eat meat, I agree, then witnessing or participating in the killing is the honest way to go.

Our language tells us much about our regard for this sport. One meaning of game is “wild animals, including birds and fishes, such as are hunted for food or taken for sport or profit.” Implicit in the meaning of this word is the notion that the contest needs to have a winner and a loser. Contrary to other games, though, the stakes of this one are high. The loser usually loses all, while the winner, in our technologized day and age, risks little. Discerning diners describe the meat of some prey birds and animals as gamy—“having the tangy flavor of game,” or “having the flavor and odor of game or other meat kept uncooked until slightly tainted.” Game—it is sport and prey and tang...