Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters A Wordsworth kind of question...

Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" stands head and shoulders above all his other works, and those of almost any other poet, by my poor reckoning. Yet it talks about the passion for life, and the challenge or loss of it in sighs too deep for tears... Like the other romantics, he sought answers in the natural world around him... until he realized he was seeing the shadows in his own soul.

For me, hunting is much like that: it evokes a connection with the world around me that is deeply passionate. To go out, rifle in hand, to bring home meat, to become more a part of the land around me, and make it more a part of me, somehow reaches deep inside. Funny thing: I like it more when it is a rifle. I know darn well that's my own quirk... I've taken more deer with shotguns and muzzle loaders simply because that's what is most easily available to me, but I like a rifle. Fair chase is important to me -- while many of these rules vary by geography, and have changed over time, they show me things about myself, and they show me things about wildlife I would not have seen otherwise. Having been through some disconnection with my more youthful passion, I have also come to see it again -- but with a memory of that lost time. It is also a place I can go to connect with that youth who had simpler worries in a world that did not yet feel so transient.

My question is: where does your passion for hunting and shooting connect with your soul?

Dan

Huh -- too much cabin fever...

Dan

Asked and answered.

So --- how do you deal with cabin fever?

Dan

What?

This sounds like a question on a high school exam. My soul tells me "Go huntin' mutherf*cker or I'll explode your ass." Dan you may want to look up some drugged out hippie literature web site.

On Saturday mornings when I make Elk Sausage with my Waffles.

DanEP, don't let the shallow and flippant answer above discourage you. It takes a certain amount of courage to bare your soul like you did. Too bad more "real men" aren't willing to discuss things of the heart. I've probably got cabin fever too, but here goes.
In answer to your question, this is what does it for me:

Deep in the northern bush in the third week of September, paddling a canoe almost silently past shores full of golden tamarack and birch, with a bull moose answering my call with deep grunts and slashing his antlers through a willow....

Flat on my back in a prairie stubble field, with 2000 geese wheeling overhead and my hand gripping my Model 12, finger on safety...

Walking the wide prairie, the smell of harvest in my nose, and my faithful dog on point with HIS nose full of sharptail, just ahead...
and

Trading insults with a bull elk, wondering if the stick and string in my hands is capable of killing the enraged bull that is letting me know that he really does not appreciate the invasion of his harem's space....

Baring the soul is one thing, being a good enough typist to do it in less then half an hour is another.

Hunting is as basic and natural as it gets.

CastnBlast -- Thank you!

It is the end of coyote season -- the last hunting opportunity until turkeys in NY State -- and we're in for yet another storm that is likely to lock up the woods yet again for that precious last few days.

In the mean time, we have a nominee for NYS DEC Commissioner that is likely to prove quite challenging -- certainly, has caused lots of tension among all the groups supporting hunting in this state -- and that's before we even try to make an impact with an administration whose leadership has strongly opposed 2nd amendment rights and various sporting activities in the past. I have myself gotten more involved in trying to make an impact... though it takes time and focus from the joy of the woods that drew me into trying to protect those opportunities.

You bring to mind the sound of loons in the night, the splash of the lake against the rocks near the tent in the evening, the flickering of the campfire and the sweet smell of balsam, and the promise of early-season bear hunting the next day. A memory of a coyote responding to a predator call on an early foggy morning along the grassy edges of swampy land, the fog so chill it cut to the bone -- with loons answering each blast on the call.

Then there are woods I used to hunt and the deer I've taken home from those woods, lands that have been closed to the opportunity through "greenspace acquisition..." and I'm back into it... I called it cabin fever. I think Wordsworth described it better.

Dan

So you're looking for something a bit more poetic?

The shooting sports provide me with the ultimate in instant gratification. "Boom", success or failure is instantly known. Success most often occurs when there is true "purity of focus".

Horse1 -- almost Haiku.

Shooting is almost instant gratification (or not, when that little twig that you couldn't or didn't see over your iron sights got in the way). Hunting gratification sometimes takes longer -- which is part of the fun. Sometimes that gratification takes a lifetime. (Some of this is coming from an issue I raised in my last post on the "What's happening with F&S" side about the squirrel hunter's dad.)

Dan

DanEP,

Welcome to the forum. You are a superb writer and a compliment to our sport. Please keep posting as you take our thinking higher.

Here is a link to the Wordsworth poem you reference. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

You have challenged my mind. What a refreshing happening.

Here are some lines from the poem that, to me, seem the gist of it.

Perhaps I need to study it more but here goes.

"The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet;
The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

Kneeling down behind a log as a frothed up elk charges in, realizing I am armed only with a recurve...or in a wet, cold hasty blind with my best friend, the lab Chesty, while the ducks cup their wings. So much more, would take hours. Deep thoughts are good. If hunting was like most things in modern life, shallow and cheap, it would be worth a crap. Thanks Dan for getting me to think a bit deeper.

Cast..,

Shallow? Flippant? I was being serious.BTW bared heart goes best with fried onions.

Pardon me as I go eat some mushrooms and become one with the Universe. Hold my mail.

I like my onions with deer liver and tenderloin -- heart isn't bad either.

I don't quite get why talking about why you like to hunt makes you want to eat mushrooms, but whatever suits your fancy...

Dan

Dan..,

Awww, I dunno. It got kinda artsy,fartsy, zen - in touch with the universe - for a primitive dude like me who triggers when the first cold rain in the fall knocks the leaves down and the forest is full of that smell.

Do you know the smell I mean? It only happens when the leaves first fall and you can smell it, even in town. I just walk outdoors one morning toward the end of Sept-first of Oct- after the first cold rain, and there's a special smell in the air. You can SMELL fall and hunting season and you have to pick up your shotgun and go or you'll explode. I can also smell snow 12hrs or so ahead of time. Yep. Certifiable.

How about this, by James Dickey

The Heaven of Animals
Here they are. The soft eyes open.
If they have lived in a wood
It is a wood.
If they have lived on plains
It is grass rolling
Under their feet forever.

Having no souls, they have come,
Anyway, beyond their knowing.
Their instincts wholly bloom
And they rise.
The soft eyes open.

To match them, the landscape flowers,
Outdoing, desperately
Outdoing what is required:
The richest wood,
The deepest field.

For some of these,
It could not be the place
It is, without blood.
These hunt, as they have done
But with claws and teeth grown perfect,

More deadly than they can believe.
They stalk more silently,
And crouch on limbs of trees,
And their descent
Upon the bright backs of their prey

May take years
In a sovereign floating of joy.
And those that are hunted
Know this as their life,
Their reward: to walk

Under such trees in full knowledge
Of what is in glory above them,
And to feel no fear,
But acceptance, compliance.
Fulfilling themselves without pain

At the cycle's center,
They tremble, they walk
Under the tree,
They fall, they are torn,
They rise, they walk again.

Outcast, your comments are on the mark. I suppose my comments came across that way... then again, my first answer to myself pinned it: a kind of cabin fever. The woods were (and are again, after this last storm) filled with ice. If you haven't been following NY State politics (and I don't see why a wildlife officer from WV should), our new Governor, Spitzer, has nominated a guy to run our DEC (which manages hunting, licensing, etc) who has as a state legislator, introduced bills to severely restrict trapping, severely restrict hunting, and has co-sponsored very piece of anti-gun legislation that has come along. I have gotten involved with one of the statewide organizations that supports 2nd amendment rights. So, for a while, I haven't smelled the woods, or even been able to look for coyotes (the animal kind, not the political) in the woods... truly a kind of cabin fever, and one that can be discouraging. It hasn't helped that a lot of 2nd amendment supporters, shooters, have expressed a lot of downright anger at hunters for being wishy-washy in support of 2nd amendment rights in this state -- Zumbo hasn't helped: now there's a name for hunters: Fudds. While almost every sporting and second amendment group in NYS has opposed this nominee, probably the oldest, and certainly the largest could not bring itself to do so. There's been quite a lot of talk about how NY hunters lack unity. Well -- I don't mean to import the debate or controversy, just to describe the shade of gloom.

What I found myself looking for, among the struggles with scopes on .25-06's, IMR-4007, and other such (that usually is enough to keep my happy while stuck in an office) was some simple passion for the woods, the smell of leaves (WV leaves are fine with me), even poetry (the James Dicky poem is a delight). It doesn't have to be articulate (since Obama was called articulate, that's now politically incorrect, so I suppose it is a good thing to do now...) -- it can be simple raw exuberant enthusiasm: along the lines of Ted Nugent.

Wordsworth's poem has, by some, been called about the best in the English language. I don't know about that.. but I know it gives a good description of someone taking pause, noticing that things that used to charge his juice didn't work anymore; then getting up and taking up the fight again, strengthened by the experience. It was through that that he understood Christ's sacrifice, and this experience brought him closer to the One Tree. It suited my mood.

There is still the sounds of leaves, of coyotes occasionally calling at night, long time since I heard an owl, but more deer activity as they try to find food through that glaze of ice filling the woods. We had a warm day just before the last storm -- even the moss was starting to turn green.

Dan