3 THE FOREST PRIMEVAL

      I like the gun. It is a familiar thing, full of associations. I am a different man when I am carrying it, more alert, more careful, more purposeful than without it. Carrying a gun has taught me a thousand things about animals and country and wind and weather that I should not otherwise have bothered to learn, has taken me to a thousand places I should not otherwise have seen . . . Killing has a place in hunting, if only a small one.I see it as a rite, a sacrifice, an acknowledgment of the sport’s origin that gives meaning to what has gone before. But never as an end in itself. RODERICK HAIG-BROWN, Measure of the Year

      IN THE mid-1960s, when I began skulking around in the bushes with my hunting buddies, I did not see my activities as springing out of an evolutionary process or a culture of hearty hunters, or, for that matter, any other culture. My only awareness of Teddy Roosevelt had to do with his bushy moustache and his alleged use of the word bully, as in, “The boys and I had a bully good hunt.” I was bent on pleasure and on paying off my student loans and not much else. Bringing back the details of that life is not easy for me. But one hunting trip seems to have burnt its way into my memory.

      It started with a party at someone’s apartment in the fall of 1967. A friend of mine suggested that we go on a wilderness river trip during the October long weekend. I was probably not sober, and probably everyone in this jammed apartment was my best friend, life was a simple proposition, and so, why not? In my quest to discover all the things in life that were deemed to be far-out and to avoid all the things in life that were not, the response to this suggestion seemed an easy yes.