Practicing In The Wild

Hunting, fishing and otherwise pursuing life in the wild.

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Photo courtesy of Sitkagear.com

"Ortega has grasped that essential human nature is inseparable from the hunting and killing of animals and that from this comes the most advanced aspects of human behaviour. Intelligence in our species is a highly specialized function by which natural selection built the hunter's capacity to plan on the intensely social foundation of primate ancestry. The emergence of such complex functions as the unconsciousness, of language, and of dreams are inextricably part of the Paleolithic. Ortega does scorn but affirms this past."

Paul Shepard, in the Introduction to Ortega e Gassett's "Meditations On Hunting"

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“Accepting the Gift”

“If there is a sacred moment in the pursuit of game, it is the moment you release the arrow or touch off the fatal shot. ….. If there is a time for reverence in the ethical hunt , it is when you claim, or accept , what you have killed. For the hunter this can be the most serious and meaningful moment of the hunt.”

Jim Posewitz, ‘Beyond Fair Chase: The Ethic and Tradition of Hunting’

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Land, then, is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of solid, plants, and animals. Food chains are the living channels which conduct energy upward; death and decay return it to the soil. The circuit is not closed; some energy is dissipated in decay, some is added by adsorption from the air, some is stored in soils, peats, and long-lived forests; but it is a sustained circuit, like a slowly augmented revolving fund of life.

Aldo Leopold, ‘A Sand County Almanac With Essays on Conservation From Round River

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“The very existence of predation in nature, of animals eating animals, is the cause of much anguished hand wringing in the animal rights literature … A deep current of Puritanism runs through the writings of the animal philosophers, an abiding discomfort not only with our animality, but with animals’ animality, too.  They would like nothing better than to airlift us from nature’s ‘intrinsic evil’ – and then take the animals with us.  You begin to wonder if their quarrel isn’t really with nature itself.”

Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006)

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Photo copyright SitkaGear.com

“Hunting is the taproot consideration, the anchoring thread that has lately been taking the brunt of a culture’s changing attitudes.  It has been involved with 99% of human evolution and has been one of the principal factors in shaping our relationship toward nature.”

Allen Morris Jones, A Quiet Place of Violence: Hunting and Ethics in the Missouri River Breaks (2012)

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“That had been a fine hunt.  The afternoon of the day we came into the country we walked about four miles from camp along a deep rhino trail that graded through the grassy hills with their abandoned orchard-looking trees, as smoothly and evenly as though an engineer had planned it. The trail was a foot deep in the ground and smoothly worn and we left it where it slanted down through a divide in the hills like a dry irrigation ditch and climbed, sweating, the small steep hill on the right to sit there with our backs against the hilltop and glass the country.  It was a green, pleasant country, with hills below the forest that grew thick on the side of the mountain, and it was cut by the valleys of several watercourses that came down out of the thick timber on the mountain.  Fingers of the forest came down onto the heads of some of the slopes and it was there, at the forest edge, that we watched for rhino to come out.  If you looked away from the forest and the mountain side you could follow the watercourses and the hilly slope of the land down until the land flattened and the grass was brown and burned and, away, across a long sweep of country, was the brown Rift Valley and the shine of Lake Manyara.”

Ernest Hemingway, The Green Hills of Africa (1935)

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“It was a huge, beautiful Kudu bull, stone-dead, on his side, his horns in great dark spirals, wide spread and unbelievable …. I looked at him, big, long-legged, a smooth gray with the white stripes and the great, curling, sweeping horns, brown as walnut meats, and ivory pointed, at the big ears and the great, lovely heavy-maned neck the white chevron between his eyes and the white of his muzzle and I stooped over and touched him to try to believe it.  He was lying on the side where the bullet had gone in and there was not a mark on him and he smelled sweet and lovely like the breath of cattle and the odour of thyme after rain.”

Ernest Hemingway, "The Green Hills of Africa"

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This is the Mauser-action .275 that was presented to Jim Corbett in 1907, in gratitude for him killing the tiger in Champwat that had killed 436 people.

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"A good hunter's way of hunting is a hard job which demands much from a man: he must keep himself fit, face extreme fatigues, accept danger. It involves a complete code of ethics of the most distinguished design; the hunter that accepts the sporting code of ethics keeps his commandments in the greatest solitude, with no witnesses or audience other than the sharp peaks of the mountains, the roaming cloud, the stern oak, the trembling juniper, and the passing animal."

Jose Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Hunting (1942)

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“We must turn from the notion that death is an evil.  Its value, in the natural world is in sculpting form and function from a few animated pieces of carbon.  There’s no order to life which death has not put there.

Nature is a process.  Everything natural moves in a changing order.  We have been produced by the process even while trying to step away from it.  In the past 10 thousand years we’ve grown away from our original role to become unreciprocating, unsymbiotic, and unappreciative.  Ultimately, we cannot be separated from the process that produced us. But here’s the danger: We think we can. We think we are.”

- Allen Morris Jones, “ A Quiet Place of Violence: Hunting and Ethics in the Missouri River Breaks“

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© American Prairie Reserve

“A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal.  Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.“

- Aldo Leopold, “A Sound County Almanac with Essays on Conservation From Round River”

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“I still don’t know why I fish or why other men fish, except that we like it and it makes us think and feel.  But I do know that if it were not for the strong, quick life of rivers, for their sparkle in sunshine, for the cold grayness of them under rain and the feel of them about my legs as I set my feet hard down on rocks or sand or gravel, I should fish less often.  A river is never quite silent; it can never, of its very nature, be quite still; it is never the same from one day to the next.  It has its own life and its own beauty, and the creatures it nourishes are alive and beautiful also.  Perhaps fishing is, for me, only an excuse to be near rivers.  If so, I’m glad I thought of it.”

- Roderick Haig-Brown, “A River Never Sleeps”    

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“The ancestral people’s way of life was perhaps not so different from modern day !KungSan and were doubtless as skilled at exploiting plants and animals of their environment.  They would have possessed a carefully thought out suite of tools for hunting, food preparation and carrying things … they probably knew how to build boats and how to fish.”

-Nicholas Wade, “ Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors“

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© CD Clarke

I first came across C.D. Clarke, who labels himself a Sportsman Artist, in 2000 in a book entitled “The Angler’s Life”.  Reproductions of his landscape and fishing paintings together with the description of a seemingly idyllic life of painting, fishing and hunting were the highlights of the book.  I recently came across Clarke again at the Fly Lords Magazine (https://flylordsmag.com/artist-spotlight-cd-clarke-sporting-art/ ), which in turn prompted me to take a look at his own website (https://www.cdclarke.com/).  Still great paintings and an interesting life.

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