Missoula Notebook

Hoping To Hunt

By Sutton Stokes, 11-10-08

	So far this is all I'm seeing. Photo by Flickr user lancefisher. Some rights reserved.

Rubber gloves.

Knife.

These are the last two items listed on an index card that’s been lying on our kitchen table for the last few days. My eyes fell on this part of the list Sunday morning as I was making some oatmeal, and I pointed out to Amy that the only way to make it sound more ominous would be to add “duct tape.”

But while duct tape can come in handy in many situations, so far as I know it is not considered a must-have on a hunting trip, which is what I’d been getting ready for when I sat down on Friday to write out this list. A friend had invited me along for deer on Saturday morning, and I wanted to get my gear straight before driving down to Hamilton for the Preservation Hall Jazz Band concert.

Perhaps only in Montana would the PHJB be mentioned in the same sentence as deer hunting. The fact that I just did so is testament to how far I’ve come — where hunting and geography are concerned — since the spring of 2007, when I was preparing to move from Baltimore to Montana after a lifetime spent mostly in big east-coast cities.

Maybe I wasn’t hanging out in the right bars, but I never met anyone in Baltimore who hunted. If I thought about hunting at all, it was in terms of stereotypes: drunken hicks, or dabblers chasing a trophy. I certainly never gave much thought to the possibility that, for some people, hunting might still play an integral role in putting food on the table on a regular basis — not at this point in the 21st century, surely, with Sam’s Clubs from sea to shining sea.

So it was an education to arrive in Montana a year ago August, in the run-up to hunting season. One of the first things I noticed was the frequent ads in the local newspaper for rifles, ammunition, and these things called “game saws.” Believe it or not, these aren’t the kind of ads I was used to seeing back home in the Baltimore Sun.

It was also interesting to hear Montanans talk about hunting as something that mattered — to the health of ecosystems, to the budgets of conservation agencies — as opposed to something quaint engaged in by backwards holdovers, whose “culture” we in the big cities were “respecting” by “allowing” them to do it at all.

But what really surprised me was the way hunting cut across social boundaries I had come to think of as mostly inviolable. I expected to notice gun racks in the windows of pickup trucks sporting “W” and “NRA” stickers, but not in the houses of new friends who otherwise would have fit in perfectly with the gun-wary city folk I knew in Baltimore.

My first hands-on experience with hunting came last November, when I helped one of these new friends fetch a deer he’d shot.

The trip turned out to be a good way to dip my toe into the hunting experience. The deer was already dead; the frozen gut pile looked more like a mound of melted plastic than anything organic. And before we dragged the deer out, we made a several-hour circuit through the surrounding woods so that a third guy who’d come along could try for a deer of his own — unsuccessfully, as it turned out.

But even though this hunt was fruitless, the day was a revelation for me. The experience of picking my way in silence along steep hillsides and through snow-drifted fir groves, paying nerve-straining attention to my surroundings, felt entirely different from the predictable hikes along official trails that are my usual mode of experiencing the outdoors.

I found myself in a mental state familiar from childhood, when a walk in snowy woods would have had a similar feeling of exploration and contingency. In fact, what I was experiencing was that old feeling of play, not in the sense of lighthearted fun but of absorption in the moment, guided by curiosity and instinct, free from the multi-tasking jumble of anxious grown-up thoughts.

I had expected hunting to be in some way interesting, and I knew that — assuming I’d be able to pull off the hard, gruesome work that would come after a kill of my own — I would be glad for the inexpensive, organic meat. But for some reason, I hadn’t expected hunting to actually feel so uniquely pleasurable. We’ll see if I still feel this way when it comes time to gut my first deer, but that day almost one year ago helped me begin to understand what it really is about hunting that holds such a powerful attraction for so many people.

As it happened, this weekend’s hunt was cancelled, which was disappointing. I hear that this has been a sparse season for deer anyway, so who knows if I would have even seen one, much less gotten the jittery cross hairs in the scope of my borrowed rifle to sit still enough on its kill zone to risk a shot.

I’m still eager to try, though. I suspect it’ll be a good day even if I come home empty-handed.

For more like this, read the rest of the Missoula Notebook.

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