Heroes, Bears and True Baloney

By John Skow

^ Let's say that I am the benevolent and enlightened despot of my exasperating homeland, the U.S.A., and can eliminate any stupidity or foolishness by waving my hand. I have already banished basketball coaches, light beer and neckties. Now, on the third or fourth day of hand waving, will I decide to ban hunting? My local newspaper, the Concord, N.H., Monitor, reports that black bears have migrated southward in our state. I knew this already. I haven't had the luck to see one, but a few weeks ago a neighbor saw three of them, presumably a female and two cubs, at the edge of a pond a few hundred feet from my house in central New Hampshire. We can all rest easy, however, because the state's fish and game commission has opened a five-week bear-hunting season in our county. Since Oct. 1, the hairy-eared fellows who keep two big-game rifles racked in the back windows of their pickups 52 weeks each year, in case World War III starts, have been blasting away at the hairy-eared invaders.

The Monitor story told of a local farmer who had been pestered by bears getting into his feed corn. Had to shoot two last year, he said. A fish-and- game-commission biologist said, "Rather than have farmers kill the bears, we would rather have sportsmen utilize the resource." You get used to blood- sport bureaucratese; "utilize,"or "harvest," is what you do when you get something fuzzy and four-footed in your sights. As in most states, New Hampshire's fish and game policies often seem to be caught in a time warp, perhaps in the decade of the 1820s, when subsistence hunting was an important food source for most families. Bears, these days, behave like large raccoons. They are smart, cute, hungry corn thieves and garbage raiders, happy in the suburbs and virtually harmless. Last year the state paid less than $7,000 to corn farmers because of bear damage. This is a tolerable figure. It would cost more to keep a bear in the zoo. A citizen determined to be grumpy might reflect that while the last recorded human fatality from a bear attack in New Hampshire was in the 1700s, the last recorded human death from a hunter's blunder was last week.

The fact is that in New Hampshire, it is hunters, not bears or deer or moose, that are troublesome pests. For most of the fall, shooting of some kind is legal, and while I am willing to risk a peppering of bird shot, I don't want to be hulled by the antitank ammunition used for bear or moose (59 moose no longer menace us as the result of a recent three-day shooting season). So most of us stay out of the woods during the year's most beautiful season. Once, during deer season, I rounded a turn on a logging road while running with my dogs. A couple of heroes were sitting in a pickup truck, drinking beer. One had his rifle trained on my midsection. If he had killed me, he would have received a severe talking-to from the authorities. No one I mentioned this to was surprised. They all had similar stories.

So here I sit, leafing through Meditations on Hunting, by Jose Ortega y Gasset, who never jumped deer from a pickup truck. His book is a classy volume that hunters like my friend George Butler give, with wry smiles, to nonhunters like me. Butler is a gifted documentary filmmaker (Pumping Iron and Pumping Iron II: The Women) who was raised in Somalia and Kenya when hunting was a natural way of living in the great, broad grassland. His new documentary, called In the Blood and shot in Tanzania, is about hunting. The action builds toward a scene in which his eleven-year-old son Tyssen shoots his first buffalo and is "blooded" -- his forehead is smeared with the animal's blood -- by a celebrated hunter, Robin Hurt. "Today you were part of nature," Hurt tells the boy. "It is also a sad occasion . . ." This is baloney, of course, but it is true baloney, like the guff about climbing a mountain because it is there. I am not so sure about another remark in the film, that killing is a way of taking responsibility for what you eat. I can take responsibility for eating meat without hunting, or spending my vacation hacking up beef quarters at an Armour plant.

Still, Hurt is a serious man who believes that Kenya's decision to ban hunting in 1977 has led to the near extinction of elephants there. In the old days his clients and those of other hunters killed about 200 bulls a year, from an elephant population of about 160,000. When the hunters were forced out and game officials no longer patrolled the bush, gangs of ivory poachers moved in from Sudan and Somalia. Hurt is not optimistic about the future of animals or hunters in East Africa. "I don't think we're there for long," he says. But never mind Africa; it's truth time at home: Do I wave my despotic hand and ban hunting in the U.S.? (Silence. More silence; the despot is thinking hard.) At last, the answer: no.

It is a glum, unconfident no. The fact is that hunters are pests. Their blather about improving wildlife is mostly self-serving (though the effective & Ducks Unlimited effort to preserve wetlands is both self-serving and environment-serving, which is fair enough). But we all need true baloney, even the armed innocents from Massachusetts who drive up here, see three trees standing together in my side yard and think they have discovered the Big Woods. Their fantasy is bloody and obsolete, but hunting gives them something they can't get watching golf on the tube. Theodore Roosevelt wrote of the hunting life that "when it is gone, there can be no substitute." Probably true, for good or not.

And the bears? Ah, the bears. They have put up with people for a long time. Hunters will kill them, and fish and game will close the season next year. And five or ten years from now, with luck, they will again begin to repopulate central New Hampshire. Maybe then I will see one.