THE SPORTING LIFE

    I never understood why people call hunting a "sport." Sports are games that humans invent to entertain themselves and sell TV air time, usually where death is not the desired outcome. These days, like many things, hunting has been co-opted by Evangelical Christian Republicans as a rural American right of passage. Watch any hunting show on Youtube and you'll see waving 'Merican flags, dewy-eyed children and many thanks given to the Lord when one of his beautiful creature's guts are exploded with a full metal jacket .30-06. But strip the Second Amendment, vaccine hesitant, bone-headed, NRA, Trump insurrectionist rhetoric away from hunting and you'll start to get at its essence. It is as old as time. Before fire, before belief systems and art (that both represented the hunt on those cave walls) a hunter killed anything from a mussel to a mastodon to feed his hunger. Hunting was a matter of life and death. 

    I grew up hunting birds with my father and helping my grandfather butcher other hunters' deer kills. My grandfather didn't hunt. He had spent his poverty stricken youth subsistence hunting anything that could be put in the pot. Born in 1900, by the time he was a teenager one was lucky to see a deer track in Orange County, let alone a decent buck. Hunting on an empty stomach is about as far from "sport" as you'll get.  My grandfather was happy to let others hunt and for ten dollars (plus the hide) we butchered their kills. By the 1950's, when I was born, the deer herd was still so thin around Montgomery that the townsfolk had to travel to Sullivan County just to see a whitetail. By the time I was old enough to hunt "big game" in the late sixties, the deer herd was beginning to rebound. I couldn't wait.

   But coming of age during the Vietnam War and the hippie heyday of Woodstock left me facing a dilemma. I questioned the need for killing a deer as some of my friends and relatives were dodging bullets in Da Nang. Nonetheless, I loaded my gun and followed the old man and my brother into the woods. It took a couple of years in the tree until I got a shot at a deer. Then, instead of pulling the trigger I whispered "bang" and shouldered my rifle. This was the beginning of my years from 1970 to 1994 of "hypothetical hunting." It drove my father and brother (both serious deer hunters) crazy. 

   Then in 1994, still living on the Lower East Side I decided to actually go hunting with the purpose of killing and eating something. I started with squirrels. They are surprisingly tasty. I was OK with killing a squirrel. Then I shot a turkey, a couple of pheasants, and by the winter of 1994 I had killed my first buck in Lake Otsego. That's another story. The point is despite my earlier reticence to kill, by the late 1990's I had turned into a serious hunter. Over the years I only got more obsessed. I relearned how to hunt, taught myself how to shoot a bow and these days spend as much time in the tree as I can. It has become such an important element of my personality and work as an artist and writer that I can't foresee ever ceasing the activity. Yet, there are times (like last week) when I had a giant ten point buck five yards from my tree stand, drawstring back, waiting for him to take one step into the open....... when I question the whole process. (to be continued)