M&M&Hunt porn..Michael's story continues

[Guest guest]

And yet here I find myself slipping into the hunter's ecstatic

purple, channeling Ortega y Gasset. It may be that we have no better

language in which to describe the experience of hunting, so that all

of us who would try sooner or later slide into this overheated prose

ignorant of irony. Or it could be that hunting is one of those

experiences that appear utterly different from the inside than the

outside. That this might indeed be the case was forcibly impressed on

me after a second outing with my hunting companion and mentor, Angelo

Garro, when, after a long and gratifying day in the woods, we stopped

at a convenience store for a bottle of water. The two of us were

exhausted and filthy, the fronts of our jeans stained dark with

blood. We couldn't have smelled terribly fragrant. And under the

bright fluorescence of the 7-Eleven, in the mirror behind the

cigarette rack behind the cashier, I caught a glimpse of this grungy

pair of self-satisfied animal killers and noted the wide berth the

other customers in line were only too happy to grant them. Us. It is

a wonder that the cashier didn't pre-emptively throw up his hands and

offer us the contents of the cash register.

Irony — the outside perspective — easily withers everything about

hunting, shrinks it to the proportions of boy's play or atavism. And

The experience of hunting suggests another explanation. Could it be

that the cannabinoid network is precisely the sort of adaptation that

natural selection would favor in the evolution of a creature who

survives by hunting? A brain chemical that sharpens the senses,

narrows your mental focus, allows you to forget everything extraneous

to the task at hand (including physical discomfort and the passage of

time) and makes you hungry would seem to be the perfect

pharmacological tool for Man the Hunter. All at once it provides the

motive, the reward and the optimal mind-set for hunting. I would not

be the least bit surprised to discover that what I was feeling in the

woods that morning, crouching against a tree, avidly surveying that

forest grove, was a tide of anandamide washing over my brain.

 

yet at the same time I found that there is something about the

experience of hunting that puts irony itself to rout. In general,

experiences that banish irony are much better for living than for

writing. But there it is: I enjoyed shooting a pig a whole lot more

than I ever thought I should have.

 

II. A CANNABINOID MOMENT

 

 

I had never hunted before, never had the need or the desire or the

right kind of dad. One of the world's great indoorsmen, my father

looked upon hunting as a human activity that stopped making sense

with the invention of the steakhouse. What first got me out there, in

the oak chaparral of northern Sonoma County that morning last spring,

hoping to shoot a wild pig, was a conceit. I'd gotten it into my head

that I wanted to prepare a meal I had hunted, gathered and grown

myself. Why? To see if I could do it. I was also curious to

experience the food chain — which has grown so long and complex as to

no longer even feel anything like a food chain — at its shortest and

most elemental. And I had long felt that, as a meat eater, I should,

at least once, take responsibility for the killing that eating meat

entails. I wanted, for once in my life, to pay the full karmic price

of a meal.

 

Yet when the day arrived, part of me did not want to go. The night

before, I had anxiety dreams about hunting. In one I was on a bobbing

boat trying to aim a rifle at a destroyer that was firing its cannons

at me; in the other, the woods were crawling with Angelo's Sicilian

relatives, and I couldn't for the life of me remember how my gun

worked, whether the safety was on when the little button popped up on

the left side of the trigger or the right. I had tried out my rifle

only once before taking it to the woods, at a firing range in the

Oakland hills, and by the end of the morning my paper target had

sustained considerably less damage than my left shoulder, which ached

for a full week. I wasn't ready to buy a gun of my own, so Angelo had

borrowed a fairly basic pump-action rifle, a .270 Winchester with an

old-fashioned sight that I had trouble getting used to. After my

session at the range, the first-order worry that I wouldn't have

whatever it takes to fire a rifle aimed at an animal was overtaken by

a second-order worry that, assuming I did manage to pull the trigger,

nothing of consequence would happen to the animal.

 

Why boar? The animals were introduced to California by the Spanish in

the early 1700's and today are regarded as pests in many parts of the

state; it seemed to me easier to justify killing an exotic pest than

a native species. Though the pigs have been living wild a long time,

they are not technically wild or even full-blooded boar; feral pigs

would be more accurate. They are also, by reputation, vicious; one of

the nicknames the California pig has earned is " dog ripper. "

 

When I asked Angelo why he hunted wild pig, he didn't hesitate (or

say word one about the environment); rather, he just kissed the tips

of his fingers and said: " Because it is the most delicious meat. And

there is nothing that tastes so good as boar prosciutto. You'll see.

You shoot a big one, and we'll make some. "

 

On this, my first outing, we were joined by Richard, the property's

owner, and Angelo's friend Jean-Pierre, a Frenchman who works as a

chef in Berkeley. Jean-Pierre grew up hunting boar with his relatives

in Normandy. He had on one of those green felt Alpine fedoras with

the feather (a hat he managed to wear without so much as a trace of

self-consciousness) and a pair of tall black riding boots. We didn't

look much the part of an American hunting party (Angelo had on a pair

of flouncy Euro-style black pants), though Richard did have on the

full international orange regalia, and I was wearing my brightest

orange sweater. We divided into pairs, me with Angelo, and went our

separate ways, with a plan to meet back at the cars for lunch around

noon.

 

" You are going to kill your first pig today, " Angelo hollered over

the roar of the A.T.V. we were riding on. Given the nature of

hunting, not to mention me, I understood this as less a prediction

than a prayer. After a while we parked the A.T.V. and set out on

foot. Angelo gave me a route and a destination — a wallow in a grassy

opening at the bottom of a ravine — and told me to find a tree with a

good view of it and wait there, perfectly still, for 20 minutes until

I heard him whistle. He would make his way toward the same spot from

another direction, in the hope of driving some pigs into my field of

vision.

 

When I could hear Angelo's footsteps no longer, my ears and eyes

started tuning in — everything. It was as if I'd dialed up the gain

on all my senses, or quieted myself to such an extent that the world

itself grew louder and brighter. I quickly learned to filter out the

static of birdsong, of which there was plenty at that early hour, and

to listen for the frequency of specific sounds — the crack of

branches or the snuffling of animals. I found I could see farther

into the woods than I ever had before, picking out the tiniest

changes in my visual field at an almost inconceivable distance, just

so long as those changes involved movement or blackness. The

sharpness of focus and depth of field was uncanny, though, being

nearsighted, I knew it well from the experience of putting on glasses

with a strong new prescription for the first time. " Hunter's eye, "

Angelo said later when I described the phenomenon; he knew all about

it.

 

I found a shaded spot overlooking the wallow and crouched down in the

leaves, steadying my back against the smooth trunk of a madrone. I

rested my gun across my thighs and got quiet. The whoosh of air

through my nostrils suddenly sounded calamitous, so I began inhaling

and exhaling through my mouth, silencing my breath. So much sensory

information was coming into my head that it seemed to push out the

normal buzz of consciousness. The state felt very much like

meditation, though it took no mental effort or exercise to achieve

that kind of head-emptying presence. The simple act of looking and

listening, tuning my senses to the forest frequencies of Pig,

occupied every quadrant of mental space and anchored me to the

present. I must have lost track of time, because the 20 minutes

flashed by. Ordinarily my body would have rebelled at being asked to

hold a crouch this long, but I felt no need to change position or

even to shift my weight.

 

Later it occurred to me that this mental state, which I quite liked,

in many ways resembled the one induced by marijuana: the way your

senses feel heightened and the mind seems to forget everything

outside the scope of its present focus, including physical discomfort

and the passing of time. One of the more interesting areas of

research in the neurosciences today is the study of the

brain's " cannabinoid network, " a set of receptors in the nervous

system that are activated by a group of unusual compounds called

cannabinoids. THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, is one, and

the brain produces its own: a neurotransmitter called anandamide.

Whether made by the plant or the brain, cannabinoids have the effect

of intensifying sensory experience, disabling short-term memory and

stimulating appetite. Scientists still aren't certain what the

evolutionary utility of such a system might be. Some researchers

hypothesize that the cannabinoids, like the opiates, play a role in

the brain's pain relief and reward system; others that they help

regulate appetite or emotion. But whether I was actually having a

cannabinoid moment or not, in the minutes before Angelo's whistle

pierced my vigil I did feel as if I had somehow entered nature

through a new door. For once I was not a spectator but a full

participant in the life of the forest. Later, when I reread Ortega y

Gasset's description of the experience, I decided maybe he wasn't so

crazy after all, not even when he asserted that hunting offers us our

last best chance to leave behind history and return to the state of

nature, if only for a time — for what he called a " vacation from the

human condition. "

 

Ortega believed that in hunting we returned to nature because hunting

is the " generic " way of being human and because the animal we are

stalking summons the animal still in us. This is atavism pure and

simple — the recovery of an earlier mode of being human — and that

for Ortega is the supreme, and the exclusive, value of hunting. For

perhaps his most outrageous claim is that the hunt is the only such

return available to us — we can't ever, as he points out, go back to

being Christian in the manner of St. Augustine, say, because once

history begins, it is irreversible. So how is it we can still go back

to being Paleolithic? Because our identity as hunters is literally

prehistoric — is in fact inscribed by evolution in the architecture

of our bodies and brains. Much that surrounds hunting is completely

artificial, Ortega freely admitted, yet the experience itself, the

encounter of predator and prey, is no fiction. (Just ask the

animals.) Even though the hunt takes place during a brief " vacation "

from modern life, what occurs in the space of this electrifying

parenthesis will ever and always be, in a word Ortega never shrinks

from using, " authentic. "

to be continued....bob