Let’s talk about hunting philosophy. Let’s use, as a jumping-off point, a piece on yesterday’s New York Times op-ed page by a man named Seamus McGraw. You can read it for yourself, but if you’re not inclined, I can pass along the important bits. The piece is a justification both of deer hunting, and of [...]
Hunt and wool-gather
December 15, 2011 By 10 Comments
Hang out with hunters and you’ll hear it, probably sooner than later: If you need to kill in order to have a successful hunt, you’re not a hunter, you’re a killer. Being in the woods, the reasoning goes, is an end in itself. You learn the animal’s habits and habitat. You learn how to make [...]
A Hunter’s Do-Re-Mi
November 14, 2011 By 9 Comments
Gear hunting
November 11, 2011 By 15 Comments
It’s gun season
November 1, 2011 By 36 Comments
We should all age as well as firearms. The basic operation of firearms hasn’t changed in the eight hundred years or so we’ve had them, and the principle is beautifully simple. The pressure created by burning propellant pushes a projectile through a tube. That’s it. Over those eight hundred years, the propellant has changed (although [...]
All’s fair
March 23, 2011 By 31 Comments
Ah, spring! The weather warms, the robins return, the crocuses poke their little heads up through the soil. The cycle of life begins anew and all thoughts turn to … hunting ethics. I blame Tovar. He started it, in a post at A Mindful Carnivore about wounding animals. Every hunter I know believes it is [...]
Hunting lessons
December 11, 2010 By 20 Comments
Deer hunting season has been over for three hours now, and we have to chalk this year up to experience. No deer, but something of an education. We learned about how, where, and when to look for deer, and what we should smell like while we’re doing it. We learned about deer blinds and tree [...]
Deer Season, Day Ten
December 9, 2010 By 14 Comments
There are only twelve days of the year when you can take a shotgun into the woods and shoot a deer. Ten of them, as of sunset this evening, are over. We hunted six of those ten days, including a sojourn to the National Seashore yesterday, and saw nary a deer. We assume we’re making [...]
Deer, 4: Kevin and Tamar, 0
December 6, 2010 By 22 Comments
I ask forbearance from those of you who are tired of, put off by, or simply uninterested in deer hunting. The season ends this coming Saturday, and then I promise I’ll be back to chickens, shellfish, vegetables, and variety. In the meantime, though, it’s all deer all the time. When I signed up for my [...]
Deer Season, Days Two through Five
December 3, 2010 By 5 Comments
After our first fruitless, deerless day, we changed the plan. Cape Cod has a military base called the Massachusetts Military Reserve, a 22,000-acre tract. Every year, they open about half of it to deer hunters. You have to register in advance, which I’d done, and they let in up to 500 hunters each day. Because [...]
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