Winter Reading

Tovar Cerulli over at the Mindful Carnivore website has posted a very rich reading list that will likely appeal to most hunters and fishermen that I have known. Common to many of us is the realization that we "have always known" that we were fishers or hunters in some innermost way, but it has often been difficult to express this knowing to others, and, especially to ourselves.

Cerulli's book list begins and ends with two of my personal favorites. A Hunter's Heart: Honest Essays on Blood Sport, by David Petersen and Richard K. Nelson, is an eclectic assemblage of reflections on the hunt.  Many essays in this set will leave the reader wondering how the hunting experience can mean so many different things to hunters. The complexity of meanings undoubtedly testifies to the centrality of this practice to humans in all walks of life, including those who refuse to acknowledge it. 



Mary Stange's book, Woman the Hunter brings fitting closure to any list of titles that have grown from personal experience. This is not an apology, nor an "alternate feminist view" of hunting, but a deeply personal recounting of one woman's acknowledgement of her inner self. Her story is couched in her disciplinary experience in Nordic mythology, and in some small measure in her studies in feminism, but it is clear to the reader that the results of her analysis are not gender-dependent.

One other book that Cerulli mentions had escaped my notice earlier, but has now been added to my own book list.  The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod by Henry Beston, first published in 1928, has long been judged a classic in American environmental writing.  In the Introduction to the 2003 reprinting, Robert Finch wrote, "He understood, as well as anyone before or after him, the psycho roots of our need for and response to wild nature". And, in this simple attribution, without proof or documentation, I recognized that my own perception of the authenticity of any hunting or fishing expedition hinges critically upon the notion of "wildness" in the quarry.

But there is clearly a reciprocity between the wildness of the prey, and the wildness of the predator. Without this reciprocity, the contest devolves into entrapment by means of superior technology. Thus is the hunter or fisher obligated to establish and maintain a notion of fair chase and fair capture.

For insightful analysis of the relationship between humans and other animals, it is illuminating to examine our parallel evolution. The great human ecologist, Paul Shepard, has done just that in his final synthesis, "Coming Home to the Pleistocene" edited and published posthumously in 1998 by his wife, Florence. Shepard's academic journey, culminating in this book, can be traced back through nearly a dozen titles.

If his final book whets your appetite to understand its origins, you will find a veritable trove of reason, empiricism and analysis in his earlier works that will shorten the remaining nights of this, our winter of discontent.