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.
