Man..Meat..and Hunter Porn

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The Modern Hunter-Gatherer

 

By MICHAEL POLLAN

Published: March 26, 2006

The New York Times

 

I. A WALK IN THE WOODS

 

Walking with a loaded rifle in an unfamiliar forest bristling with

the signs of your prey is thrilling. It embarrasses me to write that,

but it is true. I am not by nature much of a noticer, yet here, now,

my attention to everything around me, and deafness to everything

else, is complete. Nothing in my experience has prepared me for the

quality of this attention. I notice how the day's first breezes comb

the needles in the pines, producing a sotto voce whistle and an

undulation in the pattern of light and shadow tattooing the tree

trunks and the ground. I notice the specific density of the air. But

this is not a passive or aesthetic attention; it is a hungry

attention, reaching out into its surroundings like fingers, or

nerves. My eyes venture deep into thickets my body could never

penetrate, picking their way among the tangled branches, sliding over

rocks and around stumps to bring back the slenderest hint of

movement. In the places too deeply shadowed to admit my eyes, my ears

roam at will, returning with the report of a branch cracking at the

bottom of a ravine, or the snuffling of a. . .wait: what was that?

Just a bird. Everything is amplified. Even my skin is alert, so that

when the shadow launched by the sudden ascent of a turkey vulture

passes overhead I swear I can feel the temperature momentarily fall.

I am the alert man.

 

Hunting inflects a place powerfully. The ordinary prose of the ground

becomes as layered and springy as verse — and as dense with meanings.

Notice the freshly rototilled soil at the base of that oak tree? Look

how the earth has not yet been crisped by the midday sun; this means

wild boar — my quarry — have been rooting here since yesterday

afternoon, either overnight or earlier this morning. See that

smoothly scooped-out puddle of water? That's a wallow, but notice how

the water is perfectly clear: pigs haven't disturbed it yet today. We

could wait here for them.

 

Hunter and quarry maintain different but overlapping maps of the

hunting ground, places of refuge and prospect, places of prior

encounter. The hunter's aim is to have his map collide with his

quarry's map, which, should it happen, will do so at a moment of no

one's choosing. For although there's much the hunter can know, about

game and about its habitat, in the end he knows nothing about what is

going to happen here today, whether the longed-for and dreaded

encounter will actually take place and, if it does, how it will end.

 

Since there's nothing he can do to make the encounter happen, the

hunter's energy goes into readying himself for it, and trying, by the

sheer force of his attention, to summon the animal into his presence.

Searching for his prey, the hunter instinctively becomes more like

the animal, straining to make himself less visible, less audible,

more exquisitely alert. Predator and prey alike move according to

their own maps of this ground, their own forms of attention and their

own systems of instinct, systems that evolved expressly to hasten or

avert precisely this encounter.. . .

 

wait a minute. Did I really write that last paragraph? Without irony?

That's embarrassing. Am I actually writing about the

hunter's " instinct, " suggesting that the hunt represents some sort of

primordial encounter between two kinds of animals, one of which is

me? This seems a bit much. I recognize this kind of prose: hunter

porn. And whenever I've read it in the past, in Hemingway and Ortega

y Gasset and all those hard-bitten, big-bearded American wilderness

writers who still pine for the Pleistocene, it never failed to roll

my eyes. I never could stomach the straight-faced reveling in

primitivism, the barely concealed bloodlust, the whole macho conceit

that the most authentic encounter with nature is the one that comes

through the sight of a gun and ends with a large mammal dead on the

ground — a killing that we are given to believe constitutes a gesture

of respect. So it is for Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher,

who writes in his " Meditations on Hunting " that " the greatest and

most moral homage we can pay to certain animals on certain occasions

is to kill them.. . . " Please.

 

This was the enlightening of Michael Pollan...bob