As published, Country Living Magazine, November 2007.

The Zen of Hunting

Outdoorsmen know their experiences connect them with Creation

By Craig Springer

It’s nine in the morning, and I’m yet to see the sun. The November sky is variegated gray like putty, dark like soot. Rain threatens again. Doughy mud curls around my boots as I slog through the fields. A Winchester 12-gauge pump shotgun gets heavy on my shoulder.

Lifeless Osage orange trees and knobby hackberries line the lane to this old Ohio farm. The brown hulls of autumn’s Queen Anne’s lace too wet to crackle belie the snowy white umbrella-topped flowers that they were in summer. The briar tangles reach through rusted field fence topped with a strand of barbed wire, encroaching on the sparsely used road. The two-track lane leads to the old barn, what’s left of it anyway. Gravity has been unkind; the barn’s roof caved in years ago, and the grain silo colored the same as this autumn sky next to it tilts a degree or two to the north. The two-story farmhouse has been carried away by time, and only the rock and mortar foundation and a little rubbish are testaments to there having been a family home here.

These 90 acres of brambles and hedgerows and fallow rocky fields cut at right angles once looked more manicured but weren’t too productive for farming. Old farmland reverting toward what once was a mosaic of hardwood forest and pockets of prairie makes a place ideal for bobwhite quail.

November in Ohio usually brings with it the first real makings of winter — cold, wet, dismally gray, sometimes in doses a week long. But it also brings with it a complete paradox — something that to many is irreducibly uplifting: hunting seasons.

Most any ardent outdoorsman will tell you that the full-immersion experience in nature that comes with hunting and fishing is a spiritual one: A largemouth bass rising to top-water bait in a weed bed; the raucous dissonance of a ringneck pheasant as it puts sky between the two of you, or the disquieting skirr that comes with a covey of bobwhite quail taking to the wing at your ankles. Duck hunters scan the skies for distant black specks. Squirrel hunters draw their eyes upward to the tops of towering oaks and maples. And they are mentally on point for that discordant shaking of leaves different from the wind, a swish that marks the movement of a bushy tail. All of these things have an upward movement, and maybe it’s not coincidence.

“The hunter and the hunted go back to the beginning,” says John Tertuliani. He is the Faith in the Outdoors columnist for Country Angling magazine published in Troy. Tertuliani is also a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Columbus and the author of two books on fishing. He cites a litany of Biblical scriptures that point to a conservation and stewardship ethic. “In the beginning, in Genesis, we were brought forth to take care of the Earth and the fish and birds and all things. Then in Genesis 27, Esau was instructed to hunt,” said Tertuliani. “When Isaac was so old that his eyesight had failed him, he called his older son Esau and said to him, ‘Son!’ ‘Yes, father?’ he replied. Isaac then said, ‘As you can see, I am so old that I may now die at any time. Take your gear, therefore — your quiver and bow — and go out into the country to hunt some game for me. With your catch prepare an appetizing dish for me, such as I like, and bring it to me to eat, so that I may give you my special blessing before I die.’”

Mark Wilson has something in common with Tertuliani. He’s a wildlife biologist, an avid hunter and angler — and is an ordained preacher. He lectures around the country on what he calls “creation stewardship.” He holds a master’s in wildlife biology and is about to earn a master’s in theology. On the face, they seem quite different fields of study. But Wilson says that’s not so: “The connection is they both deal with stewardship of the Creation, and I’ve been doing that already for 30 years as a biologist.

“Nothing speaks of a Creator in a language that anyone can understand more than being in nature, like standing in awe of something beautiful,” says Wilson. “And the oldest written laws about wildlife management reside in the Bible. You won’t find ‘thou shall conserve wildlife’ in the Bible, but we are instructed to take care of what we are given, like in Psalm 104, and there is a fullness, a blessing people enjoy in interacting with the Creation.”

Outdoorsmen and women variously describe hunting and fishing as connecting with the Creation in ways that can’t come from golf or billiards or corn hole. From Socrates to James Swan’s recent book, In Defense of Hunting, hunters describe the experience as lending emotional clarity, fully immersed and participating in nature, not just observing it. For athletes, it’s like being in the zone; for artists and writers, they’re caught in the muse. Swan called it the “Zen of hunting” where one is “in a state of awe and reverence which is the emotional state of transcendence.”

That transcendence is that state of being for hunters where the uncertainties of life instead become lucid, a state of being not unlike a religious experience. Being close to the land, hunters say they come to know themselves through the experiences. Many believe that it is there, in the out-of-doors, in nature in pursuit of fish or fowl that they come to know the mind of God. Jesus himself didn’t go to the synagogue to hear God speak. He went into the wilderness.

Few hunters anymore will go afield for the sheer reason of putting meat in the freezer. For all but the most ardent hunters, it’s really more economical to buy food at the grocer. But food isn’t the real reason people hunt, anyway. The father of modern wildlife management, Aldo Leopold, reduced the reason for hunting to this comparison: “The duck hunter in his blind and the operatic singer on the stage, despite the disparity of their accouterments, are doing the same thing. Each is reviving, in play, a drama formerly inherent in daily life. Both are, in the last analysis, aesthetic exercises.”

Hunting is recreation, as in re-creating one’s self, and can serve up food that sticks to the ribs of your soul on an otherwise dismal November day. In Tertuliani’s view, how better to re-create than to be close to “the majesty of God and his creation; hunting stirs my emotions.”

Craig Springer, formerly of Ohio, now resides in Edgewood, New Mexico.

Copyright 2007 Ohio Rural Electric Cooperatives, Inc.