TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/111389/11138900.000

Text File | 1990-09-19 | 6KB | 101 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.