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The Modern Hunter-Gatherer
By Michael Pollan
/The New York Times Magazine/, March 26, 2006
*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.
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 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.
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.
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.”
*III. READY. OR NOT.*
As I said, all this seemed much less crazy to me after I’d been in the
woods that first morning with my gun, long before I even had occasion to
fire it. I’m chagrined to report that the occasion never presented
itself during that first hunting trip — or rather, when it did present
itself I was in no position to do anything about it. I know, I’ve been
talking here like Mister Big Game Hunter, comparing notes on the
experience with the likes of Señor Ortega y Gasset, but I returned from
the woods that day not only empty-handed, which in hunting is entirely
forgivable, but also what is not, having failed as a hunter because I
was not ready.
I blame this, at least partly, on lunch.
By the end of the morning, one animal had been shot, a small boar, taken
by Jean-Pierre. On our way back up to the ridge in the A.T.V., Angelo
and I picked it up. Not a whole lot bigger than a beagle, it had a
florid blotch erupting from the side of its bristly black head. Angelo
hung it by its ankles from the limb of a tree near the cars; he planned
to dress it after lunch.
Being Europeans, as well as accomplished cooks, Angelo and Jean-Pierre
take lunch very seriously, even when out in the woods some distance from
civilization. “So I brought with me a few little things to nibble on,”
Jean-Pierre mumbled. “Me, too,” chimed Angelo. And out of their packs
came course after course of the most astonishing picnic, which they
proceeded to lay out on the hood of Angelo’s S.U.V.: a terrine of
lobster and halibut en geleé, salami and prosciutto and mortadella,
Angelo’s homemade pâté of boar and home-cured olives, cornichons,
chicken salad, a generous selection of cheeses and breads, fresh
strawberries and pastries, silverware and napkins and, naturally, a
bottle each of red and white wine.
It was a delicious lunch, but arguably it took off some of my hunter’s
edge. One of the easier questions on my state hunter-education course
exam went something like this: “Hunting after drinking alcohol is an
acceptable practice, true or false.” Not that I was intoxicated, but I
was feeling notably loquacious and relaxed when Richard and I set off to
look for another pig after lunch, while Angelo dressed Jean-Pierre’s pig
and Jean-Pierre enjoyed a postprandial nap in the grass. Our rifles
slung over our shoulders, we strolled down a shady trail toward a spot
where Richard had once had some luck, all the while getting acquainted
and chatting about one thing or another.
We were thoroughly absorbed in conversation when I happened to glance up
ahead and saw directly in front of us, not 30 yards away, several large
black shapes swimming in the shadows. There they were, four big pigs
milling beneath an oak tree, their attention fixed on the acorns
littering the path that connected us. Incredibly, they gave no sign
they’d spotted us or heard our yammering.
I grabbed Richard by the shoulder, put my finger to my lips and pointed
ahead. He stopped. “It’s your shot,” he whispered. “Go ahead. Take it.”
It is the custom when hunting with companions that the first shot
belongs to the person who spotted the animal, perhaps in recognition of
the fact that skill in hunting is as much about finding the game as
killing it. In fact in many hunter-gatherer societies, rights to the
meat go not just to the hunter who killed the animal but to the hunter
who spotted it as well. These pigs were mine.
One little problem. I had neglected to pump my rifle before we set out
on the trail. There was no bullet in the chamber, and to pump my gun now
would almost surely alert the pigs to our presence. I could take the
chance, but to do so probably meant the pigs would be on the run by the
time I was ready to shoot. I explained all this in a whisper to Richard,
whose own gun, a fancy new Finnish bolt-action job, could be cocked with
little more than a click of the little bolt. I gave him my shot.
Richard got down on one knee and slowly raised his rifle to his
shoulder. I braced for the explosion, preparing to pump my gun the
moment it came; perhaps I could still get off a shot at one of the
others. Richard took his time, aiming carefully, waiting for one of the
animals to turn and offer its flank. The pigs had their heads down,
eating acorns, utterly oblivious to our presence. Then the woods
exploded. I saw a pig stagger and fall back against the embankment, then
struggle drunkenly to its feet. I pumped my rifle but it was already too
late: the other pigs were gone. Richard fired again at the wounded pig,
and it crumpled.
The pig, a sow weighing perhaps a hundred pounds, was too heavy to
carry, so we took turns dragging it by its rear leg up the path back
toward the cars. Angelo trotted over to see the animal, excited and
impressed and eager to hear our story. It’s curious how the hunting
story takes shape in the moments after the shot, as you work through the
chaotic simultaneity of that lightning, elusive moment, trying to tease
out of the adrenaline fog something linear and comprehensible. Even
though we’d witnessed the event together, Richard and I had taken turns
carefully telling each other the story on the long march back,
rehearsing our lack of readiness, reviewing the reasons Richard had
taken the shot instead of me, trying to nail down the precise distance
and number of pigs involved, carefully unpacking the moment and turning
our shaky recollections into a consensus of fact — a hunting story. As I
watched Angelo drink in our hunting story, I could see the
disappointment bloom on his face. It had been my shot, my pig, but I
hadn’t taken it.
“You weren’t ready,” Angelo said, levelly. “In hunting you always need
to be ready. So, O.K., you learned something today. Next time you will
be ready, and you will take your shot.” He was trying hard not to sound
like the disappointed father; even so, I couldn’t help feeling like the
disappointing son.
So what had really happened? I hadn’t been ready to shoot. But why? The
practical reasons were clear; surely it had made more sense to give my
shot to Richard than to risk losing the animal. It was because of my
unselfish decision that we now had this pig. Yet maybe there was some
deeper sense in which I hadn’t been ready; maybe my failure to have a
bullet in the chamber reflected some unconscious reluctance about doing
what I was asking myself to do. The fact is I’d blown it, and I wasn’t
sure how deep I should go in search of an explanation. And yet I had
been, and still was, determined to shoot a pig — I had a meal to cook,
for one thing, but I was also genuinely hungry for the experience, to
learn whatever it had to teach me. So I spent the rest of the afternoon
hunting intently alone, walking the ridge, raking the shadows for signs
of pig, looking and listening as hard as I could to will another pig out
of the woods. When Angelo announced it was time to go home, I felt deflated.
Jean-Pierre generously offered to give me some cuts of his pig. Since I
needed the meat for my meal, I was grateful for his offer, yet I
understood that to accept it underscored my inferior status in our
little society of hunters. To the successful hunter goes the privilege
of giving away the spoils, and I’d read a lot in the anthropological
literature suggesting just how important that privilege was. The sheer
nutritional density of meat has always made it a precious form of social
currency among hunter-gatherers. Since the successful hunter often ends
up with more meat than he or his family can eat before it spoils, it
makes good sense for him to, in effect, bank the surplus in the bodies
of other people, trading meat for obligations and future favors. Chimps
will do the same thing. Not to say that Jean-Pierre was lording it over
me or demanding anything in return; he wasn’t. But that didn’t change
the fact that here I stood, on the vaguely pathetic receiving end of the
alpha hunter’s meat gift. I thanked Jean-Pierre for the gift.
in the days after, I wasn’t sure whether I needed to go hunting again. I
had my meat. And I had been hunting: I felt as if I had a good idea what
it was all about, or nearly all about — the hunter’s way of being in
nature, and the way of the pigs. I’d spotted the prey and witnessed the
kill. I had a pretty good story too. And yet everyone to whom I told it
managed to remind me how unsatisfactory the ending was. You mean you
never even fired your gun? I’d violated the Chekhovian dramatic rule:
having introduced a loaded gun in Act One, the curtain can’t come down
until it is fired. I might miss, but the gun had to be fired. That at
least seemed to be the narrative imperative.
And then of course there was Señor Ortega y Gasset, who was not about to
accept me into the fellowship of hunters until I’d actually killed an
animal. Mere spectatorship, or “platonic” analogues of hunting such as
photography or bird-watching, don’t cut it for him. Although Ortega says
one does not hunt in order to kill, he also says that one must kill in
order to have hunted. Why? For authenticity’s sake. If my venture was
about taking ultimate responsibility for the animals I eat, their deaths
included, well, I hadn’t done that yet, had I?
I e-mailed Angelo and asked him to let me know the next time he planned
to go hunting. He wrote back saying he would give me 48 hours notice, to
get ready.
*IV. MY PIG*
Word came about a month later, on a May Friday, that we were to meet at
a gas station in Petaluma the following Monday morning, 6 a.m. sharp.
This time it would be just the two of us.
We spent the first part of the morning doing the circuit of Angelo’s
customary spots, patrolling first the ridge in the A.T.V. and then
moving down into the lower forest on foot. The entire day, I kept a
round in my chamber. We staked out a wallow deep in the woods and then a
trampled clearing of ferns on the near side of the hill that abuts the
road, but saw no signs of boar.
A little after 9 in the morning, we were walking together down a logging
road cut into a steep hillside when we were stopped in our tracks by a
grunt so loud and deep and guttural that it seemed to be coming from the
bowels of the earth. A very big pig was very close by. But where? What
direction to look? The sound had no address; this was the grunt of the
ground itself, omnipresent, more audible to my torso than to my ears. We
crouched down low, making ourselves as inconspicuous as possible, and I
listened as hard as I’ve ever listened for anything before, listened the
way you listen when you hear a strange sound in the night.
I needn’t have strained so, because the next sound we heard was nearly
as loud as the first: the sharp, clean crack of a branch, coming from
above us to our right, where the thickly oaked hillside climbed to a
crest. A stream ran down the hillside and crossed the path in front of
us about 30 yards ahead. With my eyes I followed the silvery line of the
stream up through the woods to the crest, and that’s when I saw it: a
rounded black form, a negative of sunrise, coming over the top of the
hill. Then another black sun, and another, a total of five or six, I
couldn’t be sure, popping over the crest in a line like a string of huge
black pearls.
I touched Angelo on the shoulder and pointed toward the pigs. What
should I do? This time my gun was pumped of course, and now, for the
first time, I took off the safety. Should I shoot? No, you wait, Angelo
said. See — they’re coming down the hill now. I followed the pigs with
the barrel of my gun, trying to get one of them in my sight. My finger
rested lightly on the trigger, and it took all the self-restraint I
could summon not to squeeze, but I didn’t have a clear shot — too many
trees stood between us. Take your time, Angelo whispered, they will come
to us. And so they did, following the stream bed down to the road
directly in front of us, moving toward us in an excruciatingly slow
parade. I have no idea how long it took the pigs to pick their way down
the steep hill, whether it was minutes or just seconds. At last the
first animal, a big black one, stepped out into the clearing of the dirt
road, followed by another that was just as big but much lighter in
color. The second pig presented its flank. Now! Angelo whispered. This
is your shot!
I could sense Angelo a step or two behind me, preparing to take his shot
the second I took mine. We were both down on one knee. I braced the
rifle against my shoulder and lined up my sight. I felt calmer and
clearer than I expected to; at least when I looked down the barrel of
the rifle it didn’t appear to be wagging uncontrollably. I took aim at
the shoulder of the grayish pig, aligning the sight’s two parts — its U
and I — with the top of the animal’s front leg. I held my breath,
resisted a sudden urge to clamp my eyes shut and gently squeezed.
The crystal stillness of the scene and the moment in time now exploded
into a thousand shards of sense. The pigs erupted in panic, moving every
which way at once like black bumper cars, and then the blam! of Angelo’s
shot directly behind made me jump. One pig was down; another seemed to
stagger. I pumped my gun to fire again but the adrenaline was surging
now and I was shaking so violently my finger accidentally pressed the
trigger before I could lower my gun; the shot went wild, skying far over
the heads of the rioting pigs. Something like the fog of war now
descended on the scene, and I’m uncertain exactly what happened next,
but I believe Angelo fired a second time. I collected myself just enough
to pump and fire one more poorly aimed round before the pigs dispersed,
most of them tumbling down the steep embankment to our left.
We ran forward to the downed animal, a very large grayish sow beached on
her side across the dirt road; a glossy marble of blood bubbled directly
beneath her ear. The pig thrashed briefly, trying to lift her head, then
gave it up. Death was quickly overtaking her, and I was grateful she
wouldn’t need a second shot.
Angelo clapped me on the back and congratulated me extravagantly. “Your
first pig! Look at the size of it. And with a perfect shot, right in the
head. You did it!” Did I do it? Was that really my shot? I thought my
first shot had dropped the pig, but already that moment was blurred
irretrievably, and when I saw what a clean shot it was, I suddenly had
my doubts. Yet Angelo was adamant — he had fired at a different pig, a
black one. “No, this is your pig, Michael, you killed it, there’s no
doubt in my mind.” Our hunting story was taking form, the fluid
confusion of the moment rapidly hardening into something sturdier and
sharper than it really was. “What a great shot,” Angelo continued. “You
got yourself a big one. That’s some very nice prosciutti!”
Meat I was not yet quite ready to see. What I saw was a dead wild
animal, its head lying on the dirt in a widening circle of blood. I
kneeled down and pressed the palm of my hand against the pig’s belly
above the nipples and felt beneath the dusty, bristly skin her warmth,
but no heartbeat. My emotions were as surging and confused as the knot
of panicked pigs had been on this spot just a moment before. The first
to surface was this powerful upwelling of pride — that I had actually
done this thing I’d set out to do, had successfully shot a pig. I felt a
flood of relief too, that the deed was done, thank God, and didn’t need
to be done again. And then there was this wholly unexpected wash of
gratitude. But for what exactly, or to whom? For my good fortune, I
guess, and to Angelo, of course, but also to this animal, for stepping
unbidden over the crest of that hill, out of the wild and into my sight,
to become what Angelo kept calling her: your pig. More than the product
of any labor of mine (save receptiveness), the animal was a gift — from
whom or what I couldn’t say, but gratitude seemed in order, and
gratitude is what I felt.
The one emotion I expected to feel but did not, inexplicably, was
remorse, or even ambivalence. All that would come later, but now, I’m
slightly embarrassed to admit, I felt absolutely terrific —
unambiguously happy. Angelo wanted to take my picture, so he posed me
behind my pig, one hand cradling the rifle across my chest, the other
resting on the animal. I couldn’t decide whether to smile or to compose
a more somber expression. I opted for the latter, but I couldn’t quite
manage to untie the knot of my smile. Nor did I register, yet anyway,
the slightest disgust at the creeping stain of the animal’s blood on the
ground, the stain that I remembered Ortega calling a “degradation.” I
was still too excited, too interested in this most improbable drama in
which I had somehow found myself, playing the hero’s part.
*V. MAKING MEAT*
The sense of elation didn’t last. Less than an hour later, back up on
the ridge, I found myself in a much less heroic position, embracing the
pig’s hanging carcass from behind to steady it so Angelo could reach in
and pull out its viscera. I was playing the nurse now, passing him tools
and holding the patient still. Using a block and tackle and a
stainless-steel hanger with two hooks, we’d managed to raise and hang
the pig by its rear ankles from the limb of an oak tree. A scale
attached to the rig gave the weight of the animal: 190 pounds. The pig
weighed exactly as much as I did.
Angelo worked with a small cigar clamped between his teeth; the smoke
discouraged the flies and yellow jackets, which had taken an avid
interest in the dead animal. There were also a pair of turkey vultures
circling high overhead, patiently waiting for us to finish. Whatever
parts of this pig we didn’t take, the local fauna were preparing to set
upon and consume, weaving this bonanza of fat and protein back into the
fabric of the land. Using a short knife, Angelo made a shallow incision
the length of the animal’s belly, moving very slowly so as not to pierce
any internal organs.
Angelo talked while he worked, mostly, if you can believe it, about
food: prosciutto, pâté, ventricina, sausages. The pig was splayed open
now, all its internal organs glistening in their place like one of those
cutaway anatomy dolls from biology: the bluish links of intestine coiled
beneath the stout muscle of heart, beribboned with its map of veins; the
spongy pink pair of lungs like outspread wings behind; and below, the
sleek chocolate slab of liver. The pig’s internal organs, in their
proportions and arrangement and colors, were indistinguishable from
human organs.
I held the cavity open while Angelo reached in to pull out the mass of
organs, saving only the liver, which had a jagged tear across it. The
bullet had apparently crossed the rib cage diagonally from upper left to
lower right, tearing through a lobe of the liver. But Angelo thought the
liver was salvageable (“for a nice pâté”), so we dropped it into a
Ziploc bag. Then he reached in and pulled gently and the rest of the
organs tumbled out onto the ground in a heap, up from which rose a
stench so awful it made me gag. This was not just the stink of pig
wastes but those comparatively benign smells compounded by an odor so
wretched and ancient that death alone could release it. I felt a wave of
nausea begin to build in my gut. The clinical disinterest with which I
had approached the whole process of cleaning my pig collapsed all at
once: this was disgusting.
Since it was my plan to serve and eat this animal, the revulsion at its
sight and smell that now consumed me was discouraging, to say the least.
That plan was no longer just a conceit, either, since the moment I
killed this pig I felt it descend on me with the weight of a moral
obligation. And yet at the moment the prospect of sitting down to a meal
of this animal was unthinkable. Pâté? Prosciutto? Ventricina? Just then
I could have made myself vomit simply by picturing myself putting a fork
to a bite of this pig. How was I ever going to get past this? And what
was this attack of revulsion all about, anyway?
Disgust, I understood, is one of the tools humans have evolved to
navigate the omnivore’s dilemma — the elemental question of what we
should and should not eat. The emotion alerts us to things we should not
ingest, like rotten meat or feces. And surely that protective reflex
figured in what I was feeling as I beheld these viscera, which no doubt
did contain microbes that could sicken me. Our sense of disgust, as
Steven Pinker has written, is “intuitive microbiology.”
But there had to be more to it than that, and later, when I did some
reading on disgust, I acquired a better idea what else might underlie my
revulsion. Paul Rozin, a cultural psychologist at the University of
Pennsylvania, points out that many of the things that disgust people do
come from animals — bodily fluids and secretions, decaying flesh,
corpses. Beyond the sanitary reasons for avoiding certain parts and
products of animals, these things disgust us, Rozin suggests, because
they confront us with the reality of our own animal nature. So much of
the human project is concerned with distinguishing ourselves from beasts
that we seem strenuously to avoid things that remind us that we are
beasts, too — animals that urinate, defecate, copulate, bleed, die,
stink and decompose. Rozin tells a story about Cotton Mather, who
confided to his journal the powerful revulsion he felt at finding
himself urinating alongside a dog. Mather turned his self-disgust into a
resolution of self-transcendence: “Yet I will be a more noble creature;
at the very time when my natural necessities debase me into the
condition of the beast, my spirit shall (I say at that very time!) rise
and soar.. . .”
Exactly why we would strive so hard to distance ourselves from our
animality is a large question, but surely the human fear of death
figures in the answer. What we see animals do an awful lot of is die,
very often at our hands. Animals resist dying, but, having no conception
of death, they don’t give it nearly as much thought as we do. And one of
the main thoughts about it we think is, will my own death be like this
animal’s or not? The belief, or hope, that human death is somehow
different from animal death is precious to us — but unprovable. Whether
it is or is not is one of the questions I suspect we’re trying to answer
whenever we look into the eyes of an animal.
From the moment I laid eyes on my animal straight through to the moment
Angelo sawed off her head, her eyes remained tightly shut beneath her
disconcerting eyelashes, yet everything else about the episode asked me
to confront these kinds of questions. What disgusted me about “cleaning”
the animal was just how messy — in every sense of the word — the process
really was, how it forced me to look at and smell and touch and even to
taste the death, at my hands, of a creature my size that, on the inside
at least, had all the same parts and probably looked very much like me.
The line between human and animal I could discern here, gazing into that
carcass, was nowhere near sharp. Cannibalism is one of the things that
most deeply disgusts us, and while this isn’t by any reasonable
definition that, you could forgive the mind for being fooled into
reacting as if it were — in disgust.
In this, I decided, was one of the signal virtues of hunting: it puts
large questions about who we and the animals are, and the nature of our
respective deaths, squarely before the hunter, and while I’m sure there
are many hunters who manage to avoid their gaze, that must take some doing.
so we are left standing there in the woods with our uneasiness and our
disgust, and disgust’s boon companion, shame. I did not register any
such emotion in the moments after shooting my pig, but eventually it
dawned, or fell on me, like a great and unexpected weight. It happened
late that evening, when, back at home, I opened my e-mail and saw that
Angelo had sent me some digital pictures, under the subject heading
“Look the great hunter!” I was eager to open them, excited to show my
family my pig, since it hadn’t come home with me but was hanging in
Angelo’s walk-in cooler.
The image that appeared on my computer screen hit me like an unexpected
blow to the body. A hunter in an orange sweater was kneeling on the
ground behind a pig the side of whose head has erupted in blood that is
spreading like a river delta toward the bottom of the frame. The
hunter’s rifle is angled just so across his chest; clearly he is
observing some hoary convention of the hunter’s trophy portrait. One
proprietary hand rests on the dead animal’s broad flank. The man is
looking into the camera with an expression of unbounded pride, wearing
an ear-to-ear grin that might have been winning, if perhaps
incomprehensible, had the bloodied carcass sprawled beneath him been
cropped out of the frame. But the bloodied carcass was right there,
front and center, and it rendered that grin — there’s no other word for
it — obscene. I felt as if I had stumbled on some stranger’s
pornography. I hurried my mouse to the corner of the image and clicked,
closing it as quickly as I could. No one should ever see this.
What could I possibly have been thinking? What was the man in that
picture feeling? I can’t for the life of me explain what could have
inspired such a mad grin, it seemed so distant and alien from me now. If
I didn’t know better, I would have said that the man in the picture was
drunk. And perhaps he was, seized in the throes of some sort of
Dionysian intoxication, the bloodlust that Ortega says will sometimes
overtake the successful hunter. And what was I so damned proud of,
anyway? I’d killed a pig with a gun, big deal.
Like the image of the two filthy hunters I’d caught in the
convenience-store mirror earlier that afternoon, Angelo’s digital photo
had shown me the hunt, and the hunter, from the outside, subjecting it
to a merciless gaze that hunting can’t withstand, at least not in the
21st century. Yet I’m not prepared to say that that gaze offers the more
truthful view of the matter. Angelo’s picture resembles in certain
respects the trophy photos sent home by soldiers, who shock their brides
and mothers with images of themselves grinning astride the corpses of
the enemy dead. They are entitled to their pride; killing is precisely
what we’ve asked them to do, so why do we have so much trouble looking
at the pictures?
I’ve looked at Angelo’s pictures again, trying to figure out why they
should have shamed me so. I realize it isn’t the killing it records that
I felt ashamed of, not exactly, but the manifest joy I seemed to be
feeling about what I’d done. This for many people is what is most
offensive about hunting — to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or
allows, us not only to kill but also to take a certain pleasure in
killing. It’s not as if the rest of us don’t countenance the killing of
tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason we feel more
comfortable with the mechanical killing practiced, out of view and
without emotion, by industrial agriculture.
Perhaps there is a more generous light in which to view the hunter’s
joy. Perhaps it is the joy of a creature succeeding at something he has
discovered his nature has superbly equipped him to do, an action that is
less a perversion of that nature, his “creaturely character,” than a
fulfillment of it. But what of the animal in the picture? Well, the
animal, too, has had the chance to fulfill its wild nature, has lived,
and arguably even died, in a manner consistent with its creaturely
character. Hers is, by the standards of animal death, a good one. But
could I really say that yet? What if it turned out I couldn’t eat this
meat? Her death then will have been pointless, a waste. I realized then
that the drama of the hunt doesn’t end until the animal arrives at the
table.
So which view of me-the-hunter is the right one, the shame of the
photograph or the joy of the man in it, the outside gaze or the inside
one? The moralist is eager to decide this question once and for all, to
join Cotton Mather in his noble quest for transcendence. The hunter — or
at least the grown-up hunter, the uneasy hunter — recognizes the truth
disclosed in both views, which is why his joy is tempered by shame, his
appetite shadowed by disgust.
The fact that you cannot come out of hunting feeling unambiguously good
about it is perhaps what should commend the practice to us. You
certainly don’t come out of it eager to protest your innocence. If I’ve
learned anything about hunting and eating meat, it’s that it’s even
messier than the moralist thinks. Having killed a pig and looked at
myself in that picture and now looking forward (if that’s the word) to
eating that pig, I have to say there is a part of me that envies the
moral clarity of the vegetarian, the blamelessness of the tofu eater.
Yet part of me pities him too. Dreams of innocence are just that; they
usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of
hubris. Ortega suggests that there is an immorality in failing to look
clearly at reality, or in believing the force of human will can somehow
overcome it. “The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only
when the respect for what is has been exhausted.”
“What is.” I suppose that this as much as anything else, as much as a
pig or a meal, is what I was really hunting for, and what I returned
from my hunt with a slightly clearer sense of. “What is” is not an
answer to anything, exactly; it doesn’t tell you what to do or even what
to think. Yet respect for what is does point us in a direction. That
direction just happens to be the direction from which we came — that
place and time, I mean, where humans looked at the animals they killed,
regarded them with reverence and never ate them except with gratitude.
*VI. THE PERFECT MEAL*
Two weeks later, I prepared my first-person feast: a meal I had hunted,
gathered and grown myself. The menu featured braised leg of boar; morels
I’d gathered in the Sierras; greens and fava beans from my garden; bread
baked from, O.K., store-bought flour, but leavened with wild yeasts I’d
gathered from the air outside my house; and a galette made from Bing
cherries I’d foraged from a neighborhood tree. My guests included Angelo
and Richard and a handful of other new friends who’d taught me about
hunting and gathering food. The meal was, among other things, my way of
saying thanks. And not just to them.
Any dinner party is a little nervous-making, and I was more nervous
about this one than most. Would this rather haphazard assortment of
people gel? Would the meal be edible? I’d never cooked any of these
dishes; how would they taste? And, guests aside, would the hunter be
able to enjoy eating the animal he’d shot? Trimming and larding the leg
of boar that morning, I wasn’t so sure.
Cooking is a wondrous process, truly, and that Saturday, spent entirely
in the kitchen, I appreciated its magic in a way I never quite had
before. It was a day of transformations, as one after another of the raw
stuffs of nature — chunks of animal; piles of wild fungi; the leaves,
pods and fruits of plants; and piles of pulverized grain — took on whole
new forms. Bread dough magically rose and crisped; desiccated mushrooms
came back to fleshy life; the leaves of herbs from the garden inflected
whatever they touched; animal flesh browned and caramelized, turning
into meat. All the various techniques humans have devised for
transforming the raw into the cooked — nature into culture — do a lot
more for us than make food tastier and easier to digest; they interpose
a welcome distance too. It might be enough for other species that their
food be good to eat, but for us, as Claude Lévi-Strauss famously put it,
food has to be “good to think” as well; the alchemies of the kitchen
help get us there, by giving new, more human forms and flavors to the
plants and fungi and animals we bring out of nature. The long,
civilizing braise is a particularly effective one, rendering the meat
bloodless and fork tender. It was when I pulled the leg of boar from the
oven to check if it was done, and a deep, woodsy-winey aroma filled the
kitchen, that I felt my appetite begin to recover.
There comes a moment in the course of a dinner party when, with any
luck, you realize everything’s going to be O.K. The food and the company
having sailed past the shoals of awkwardness and disaster, the host can
allow himself at last to slip into the warm currents of the evening and
actually begin to enjoy himself. For me that moment came just around the
time that the platter of wild pig made its second circuit of the table
and found many eager takers. The meat was delicious, with a nutty
sweetness that tasted nothing like store-bought pork; the sauce I’d
reduced from the braising liquid was almost joltingly rich and earthy,
powerfully reminiscent of the forest. I was enjoying myself now, and
that’s when I realized that this was, at least for me, the perfect meal,
though it took me a while to figure out exactly what that meant.
Was the perfect meal the one you made all by yourself? Not necessarily;
it had taken many hands to bring this one to the table. The fact that
nearly all those hands were at the table was the more rare and important
thing, that and the fact that every story about the food on the table
could be told in the first person. I prized too the almost perfect
transparency of this meal, the brevity and simplicity of the chain that
linked it to the natural world. Scarcely an ingredient in it had ever
worn a label or bar code or price tag, and yet I knew almost everything
there was to know about its provenance and price. I knew and could
picture the very oaks that had nourished the pig that was nourishing us.
I knew the true cost of this food, the precise sacrifice of time and
energy and life it had entailed.
So perhaps that’s what the perfect meal is: one that’s been fully paid
for, that leaves no debts outstanding. This is almost impossible ever to
do, which is why, real as it was, there was nothing very realistic about
this meal. Yet as a sometimes thing, as a kind of ritual, a meal that is
eaten in full consciousness of what it took to make is worth preparing
every now and again, if only as a way to remind us of the true cost of
our food, and that, no matter what we eat, we eat by the grace not of
industry but of nature.
Filed under: Eating , Foraging
, Meat
, Nature
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