Rinella - Meat eater: adventures from the life of an american hunter

Copyright 2012 by Steven Rinella

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

SPIEGEL & GRAU and design is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

The skewered-trout drawing on by Mike Houston is reprinted courtesy of the artist.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rinella, Steven.
Meat eater: a natural history of an American hunter / Steven Rinella
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-64528-3
1. Rinella, Steven. 2. HuntersUnited StatesBiography. 3. HuntingUnited StatesHistory. 4. Hunting stories, American. I. Title.
SK17.R56A3 2012
799.290092dc23 2012018129

www.spiegelandgrau.com

Jacket design: Ben Wiseman

v3.1_r1

T HIS BOOK HAS a hell of a lot going for it, simply because its a hunting story. Thats because hunting stories are the oldest and most widespread form of story on earth. The genre has been around so long, and has such deep roots, that it extends beyond humans. When two wolves meet up, theyll often go through a routine of smelling each others breath. For a wolf to put his nose to another wolfs mouth is to pose a question: What happened while you were hunting? To exhale is to answer: You can still smell the blood.

Of course, nothing tells a hunting story like a human. Long ago, our ancestors may have told hunting stories in ways that are similar to those of animals today. Its been proposed that the human kiss finds its origins in a mouth-to-mouth greeting similar to that of the modern wolfs. Similarly, its been proposed that the handshake originated as a way of proving that neither party was concealing a weapon.

But at some pointat least by fifty thousand years ago, though possibly much earlierwe began to tell our hunting stories through the complex languages that are now a hallmark of our species. Linguists and anthropologists theorize that complex language evolved just for this purpose: to coordinate hunting and gathering activities, to categorize an increasingly complex arsenal of hunting tools and weapons, and to convey details about animals and habitat that might be hidden from sight. In short, language came about for the same purposes that Im engaged in at this very moment.

Granted, these first hunting stories were probably not stories at all, at least not in the way we now think of that word. I imagine them more as instructions and descriptions, which is fitting, since the purpose of the vast majority of writing about hunting today is to teach readers how to do something. This something can often be quite esoteric. Maybe its a technique for hunting mallard ducks over flooded corn in Iowa, or maybe its an explanation of why its better to sharpen the blade of your skinning knife at an angle of thirteen degrees rather than fifteen. Hunters usually call this kind of information how-to, and I have read and enjoyed a great many pieces of how-to writing in my life. But while you will find a trove of hunting tips and tricks within this book, this is not intended as how-to material. Instead, you might think of this book as why-to, who-to, and what-to. That is, this book uses the ancient art of the hunting story to answer the questions of why I hunt, who I am as a hunter, and what hunting means to me.

As I ponder the first of those questionswhy do I hunt?two particular moments come to mind. The first took place on a recent spring day when I was hunting turkeys in the Powder River Badlands of southeastern Montana with my brother Matt. Early that morning we left Matts pack llamas, Timmy and Haggy, tethered near our camp. Matt headed south, and I went into the next valley to the west. Around late morning I started after a tom, or male turkey, that Id heard gobbling several hundred yards away. I followed the bird for close to an hour, only once catching a glimpse of it. He was walking fast along the edge of a sandstone cliff, maybe about thirty yards higher than me and two hundred yards out. I sat down amid a tangle of fallen timber and used a turkey call to mimic the soft clucks of a hen.

Almost as soon as I did, the tom jumped off the cliff and took flight. He flapped his wings maybe six times and soared right over my head. Turkeys are not graceful fliers; nor are they graceful landers. This one crashed through the limbs of a ponderosa pine and then thudded to the ground on the timbered slope of a deep ravine off to my left. I turned my head in that direction, so that my chin was over my left shoulder. I kept on clucking. I was hopeful that the tom would come to check on the source of the calls, but after a couple of minutes I hadnt seen or heard a thing. I called some more, but still nothing happened.

You have to be very careful about movement and sound when youre hunting turkeys, so I continued to hold dead still even though I hadnt heard or seen the bird since it landed. Maybe about five minutes went by without my ever turning my head away from its position over my left shoulder.

And then something strange happened. Suddenly, someone sighed very loudly just behind my right shoulder. Ive had coyotes and bobcats come to my turkey call, but this sigh sounded like that of an annoyed person who was slightly out of breath from running up a hill. My immediate response was to turn my head very quickly in its direction. My chin was just about to begin passing over my right shoulder when I noticed a large male black bear standing on its rear feet with its front feet propped up on a log that was leaning against the log that I was leaning against. Im sure he was hoping to find a nest full of turkey eggs and, if everything went well, to catch the turkey, too. Now he was staring at me with a very inquisitive look in his eye as he struggled to recalibrate his expectations.

I once heard a radio interview with a neuroscientist who studies mental processes during extremely stressful moments. He described how people in such situations will recall having dozens of distinct thoughts in the seconds that it takes for, say, a person that has fallen from a roof to hit the ground. His belief, he explained, is that we arent actually having those thoughts when we think we are; rather, through a trick of memory, we just think we had them whenever we try to recall the moment. Regardless of what that guy says, I know that I had the following thoughts over the course of the next second or so: I thought about how weird it was that this bear and I both happened to be hunting turkeys in the same place at the same time; and I thought about how weird it was that I was trying to deceive a turkey in order to kill it and eat it, and how my efforts to do so had in turn deceived another creature that would have liked to have killed and eaten that turkey as well; and I wondered what effect my turkey gun, a twelve-gauge shotgun loaded with copper-coated #5 pellets, would have on a black bear at close range; and I imagined myself making a case for self-defense when I was investigated by a game warden for killing a black bear without the proper permit; and I imagined what it would be like to get mauled by a black bear; and, if I did get mauled, I imagined that it would be a very minor mauling as the bear would quickly realize that I wasnt what he was after; and then I thought about how black bears hardly ever mess with people; and then I imagined myself telling this story for a very long time, regardless of the actual outcome.