TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/111389/11138900.000

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.0 KB | 111 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 122

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.