Book Review: Call of the Mild, by Lily Raff McCallou

Hunters and anglers often rankle when people refer to their pursuits as “hobbies.”  Most, myself included, are okay with  “sports,” but for some even that’s too watery a description, evoking people tossing balls around courts or mowed fields.   Outdoorspeople may protest that that fishing and hunting are passions, engrossing disciplines that demand long study as well as the best that body, heart, and mind can give.    They are labors that can come to define their aficionados.   They become dominant influences on how their practitioners see nature and society, and may dramatically reorient the views and values of those who adopt them as adults.   Call of the Mild: How I Learned to Hunt My Own Dinner  by Lily Raff McCallou offers a compelling demonstration of that last effect.   A  self-conscious and unassuming memoir, Call of the Mild nonetheless has the potential to upend the assumptions of both hunters and nonhunters about what it means to hunt (or not) and to simply live in a world where all of us—humans as surely as their furred, feathered, or finned relations—eventually become prey.  

In keeping with a pattern that must have been common in America a couple of centuries ago, The author’s evolution from gun-fearing nonhunter to gun-toting hunter began when she moved west.  An aspiring screenwriter in New York  paying the bills as a filmmaker’s assistant, Lily Raff was drawn to journalism  by the idea of getting paid to write stories  every day but lacked the credentials for a job at a paper in the city.    Figuring she had a better chance at joining a small town paper, she applied for a reporter position at a Bend, Oregon daily and was hired.   Initially she intended only to gain some experience there before returning to New York, but Bend complicated her plans.  She met and married Scott McCallou, a passionate fisherman and professional environmental advocate, for starters.    The longer she stayed, the more she realized she was putting down roots (a idea that initially was as scary to her as picking up a gun); McCallou felt, she writes,  like she was “marrying Oregon.”   She became deeply interested in the lives of people in struggling rural communities outside Bend.  Loggers bespeaking admiration for a favorite tree and hunters devoted to land conservation forced her to reconsider her notions of what it meant to be an environmentalist.  Encounters with hunters provoked questions about relationships to animals, especially those on her dinner plate, she had taken for granted.  Could she eat meat fully aware of its origins and of her responsibility for taking the lives that fed hers? 

To settle the question she began hunting.   Her answer would be an unequivocal but hard-won “yes.”   McCallou took the steps to begin hunting methodically and deliberately, but she had her share of anxieties and conflicts along the way and she isn’t afraid to let them show.   She had to let go of sterotypes about hunters and hunting she freely admits she took from the movies (including, yes, the nortorious Bambi), overcome severe gun shyness,  confront astonishment among relatives and friends when she informed them of her new venture,  and endure an acute bout of self-consciousness as a rare woman (and for that matter, an adult) in a hunter safety class.   Fellow hunters (including some prepubescent hunter safety classmates) are in most cases key to helping her overcome her doubts and discomforts through the helpfulness and safety-consciousness she finds among them, as well as the deep sense of ethics and the concern for land and wildlife they demonstrate.  McCallou’s greatest uncertainly, understandably enough, is whether she can actually pull the trigger on a game animal when the moment comes.  She delayed it by leaving her gun at home when she went on her first hunt in the company of some neighbors, though when the moment arrived, she found it curiously exhilarating.  (The feeling would become a familiar one since despite her initial dread of guns she turned out to be an excellent shot.)  Guilt would follow—as it does for most hunters—but she would come to see this as an expression the hunter’s respect for the animal taken.   What she felt most strongly after her first kill was a sense of the world becoming much closer than it ever can be when kept at a safe, bloodless remove.  

Yet as her hunter’s apprenticeship continues, the world’s risky and predatory dimensions get much too close for McCallou’s comfort.    A series of unexpected and sometimes inexplicable deaths among her family and friends stuns her and stirs doubts about whether she can continue to kill for sport and an occasional dinner.  She also begins to have doubts about beginning a family.  Her doubts give rise to an unpretentious but far-ranging meditation about mortality as a shared bond among creatures and a cause for humans no less than deer or pheasants to live as alertly and intensely as possible.  This carpe diem is a call not only to individual determination (though McCallou found her work ethic sharpened considerably  during this harrowing period), but to engagement in every way possible with the lives of all kinds in our surroundings, seeking the wealth they offer for both body and soul.   In light of these reflections, hunting becomes a means not only to eating ethically or connecting with a place, but to living in awareness of and contact with the cycles of life and death that give and take everything that makes our time on earth matter.    There is, as McCallou acknowledges, an ancient, aboriginal wisdom in these ideas.   However, her statement of them,  connecting the tooth-and-claw realities of the wild world to the familiar human tragedies that modern society and technology screen from view or divert us from much of the time, offers one of the most powerful contemporary defenses of hunting I’ve seen. 

Hunting immersed McCallou in a new way of seeing the world and a new culture, yet she stands consciously apart in some ways from most of hunters she encounters, a distance that gives her a critical perspective on the sport and its dominant ways of thinking.   She takes hunters at large to task for focusing excessively on issues like gun rights and threats to hunting from animal rights advocates while giving short shrift to dangers posed by the extractive industries and commercial development, and for reflexive hostility to the predators that help create a healthy ecosystem.  Though she oversimplifies her case and overlooks some marked exceptions, it is largely well founded and carries a message that needs to be heard.   It perhaps is an easy case for a newbie hunter raised in a liberal enclave on the east coast to make, though liberal anti-hunters and environmentalists don’t get off any easier.   Hunters, she reminds them, could be some of their most valuable allies in preserving the environment and resisting wanton consumerism.   Even those who couldn’t imagine ever killing an animal and eating it have ample reason, McCallou affirms, to put aside stereotypes of hunters and simplistic beliefs about the cruelty and backwardness of the sport to not only tolerate but support and honor hunting.  

Of course, as McCallou’s case demonstrates, some who couldn’t imagine shooting their supper eventually do just that.  If any recent book is likely to inspire a non-hunting reader to do the same, this is it.