Grim Reapers Of The Land's Bounty

I think I was about 14 when the problem first became apparent to me. It was late in November near the end of the deer season, very cold up in Michigan with a foot of fine powder snow, not bad to walk in as it burst around one's feet like weightless down or fluff. I was hunting along a ridge that completely encircled a large gully forming a bowl. At the bottom of the bowl there was a small marsh of tag alder, snake-grass, dried-up cattails and brake, and perhaps four or five slender tamarack. I sat down on a boulder to eat my lunch and watch the swale, thinking it might hold a large buck or even a young spike-horn. Across my lap I held an antique 38-40, the accuracy of which was less than profound but better anyhow than the shotgun and slug my friends used, which was an embarrassment to them. After an hour of sitting and staring, staring so hard that my eyes tried to trace the shapes I wanted to see, four deer calmly walked out of the far side of the swale. I looked at them quickly through my peepsight. All female. They picked their way cautiously single file toward a sumac thicket on the side of the hill, trying to minimize the time spent in the open. But then an explosion, a barrage, a fusillade. The first doe made the thicket and bounded up and over the ridge. The second dropped in her tracks but the third, shot probably in the hindquarters, tried to drag herself back to the swale by her forefeet. Then she was hit again and was still. The fourth doe ran in narrowing, convulsive circles until she dropped.

I don't remember thinking anything. I only watched. Three men walked down the hill and looked at the deer. They were talking but were too far away for me to hear distinctly. I sat very still until their red forms disappeared. I didn't go down the hill and look at the dead deer. I thought the game warden might come along and think I had shot them and the fine for shooting a doe would be enormous for someone who earned at best $2 a day for hoeing potatoes. I hunted without thought for a few more hours, getting a hopeless shot at a distant buck, and then walked to the car where I was to meet my father when it began to get dark. All the staccato noise of the rifle shots had served to remind me of the Korean war and what it must sound like. Pork Chop Hill was much in the news in those days.

I think it was Edward Abbey who coined the phrase "cowboy consciousness" to describe that peculiar set of attitudes many Americans still hold: the land is endless, unspoiled, mysterious, still remaining to be overcome and finally won. So shoot, kill, bang-bang-bang. WOW! And city dwellers, it seems, who come to the country during the hunting and fishing seasons, are now more guilty of these attitudes than their rural counterparts, who sense the diminishing wilderness around them, the truncated freedom of movement. Every dentist and machinist and welder and insurance adjuster in Michigan either owns or wants to own 20 posted acres "up north."

But we are hopeless romanticists about this imaginary Big Woods—it simply no longer exists in any faintly viable form. Even one of the far corners of creation, the North Slope of the Brooks Range, is littered with oil drums. It seems funny, too, to discover that every American in the deepest little synapse in his brain considers himself a natural at hunting and fishing, a genetic Pete Maravich of the outback, wherever that is. We always tell each other that the deer are on the ridges today or in the swamps or clustered in the grape arbors or frittering away the morning behind the woodpile despite the fact that few of us could identify five trees at gunpoint. And every little rural enclave has its number of wise old owls who have spent a lifetime sipping draft beer and schnapps and are rife with such witticisms as "you greenhorns couldn't hit a bull in the butt with a banjo. Now back in 1928, why...." The point is that in the old days the rivers were stiff with giant bull trout and deer wandered the countryside in grand herds like Idaho sheep. You didn't even have to aim. This cowboy consciousness is so ingrained and overwhelming in some violators that they will suffer any risks. A poacher near here was arrested for the 20th time, fined $1,000 and given 165 days in jail. An equal punishment was given to two men who dynamited a rainbow holding pond at a weir. I somehow doubt that this will discourage them.

I feel a very precise melancholy when I hear rifle shots in the middle of a September night; the jacklighters are at work after a tepid evening at the bowling alley. Picture this recent local case. A yellow cone of light is shining into a field. It is a powerful beam and nothing animate within a hundred yards escapes its illumination. Three teen-agers are sitting in an old Mercury playing the light against the backdrop of woods and field as they drive slowly along a gravel road. One of them has a loaded rifle. If a deer is spotted the light paralyzes it hypnotically. The deer will stare without motion into the light and even the shabbiest marksman can pick his shot. But this will prove an unfortunate night for shining deer. A car approaches from the rear at high speed and swerves in front of the hunters to block any escape. It is Reino Narva, the game warden, to the rescue. In this particular instance all of the culprits are juveniles and first offenders and the sentences are light.

There is nothing inscrutable about the matter of violation. I fancy myself an amateur naturalist and have hot flashes when I think of the sins of my past, harmless and usual though they may be. I think of the large brown trout I caught at age 12 by illegal set line in the Muskegon River. Turtles had eaten all but its head by the time I pulled the line in. I nailed the head to the barn alongside my pike and bass skulls as if I had caught the fish by fair means. Or the roosting grouse stalked and shot with a .22. Or diving into a lake for weeks on end with a knife, handle in mouth, to carve the heads off turtles we flushed from logs. We thought they were killing our fish. Or shooting crows. Or shooting at deer in midsummer with bow and arrow, though I don't remember ever coming close. All the mindless sins of youth committed in the haze of reading Edgar Rice Burroughs, Zane Grey, James Oliver Curwood, Jack London and Ernest Seton; wanting to be a steely half-breed Robert Mitchum type with hatchet, revolver, cartridge belt and a long mane of hair trained with bear grease.

Gentle reader, rules will never stop the jacklighter and snagger, the violator. It is not so much that enforcement of the law is inept, but that respect for the spirit of the law is insufficient. And in Michigan there are fabulous ironies; a portion of any fine for a game violation is earmarked as "restitution to the state." But you might well be shining your deer in an opening in a forest that has been ravaged by the oil interests—public land doled away for peanuts by conservationists in a state with boggling population and recreation problems. Or you might get caught snagging a trout in Manistee Lake where a paper company belches out thousands of gallons of fluid waste daily into public waters so rank that a motorboat scarcely can manage a wake. Who is violating what? Or as Rene Char said, "Who stands on the gangplank directing operations? The captain or—the rats?" Not a very subtle distinction, hereabouts. The problems seem, and perhaps are, insuperable. The political-business-conservation relationship in Michigan often reminds one of old-style Boston politics; everyone gets a piece of the action but the pie itself suffers from terminal rot. Of course, this is ho-hum stuff now. Pollution is "in committee" everywhere and government is firming up its stand, a la kumquat jelly, with a lid of yellow paraffin. I have a dreamy plot afoot for a court test to be decided on Saturn wherein the Constitution and Bill of Rights would be made to apply to fish and mammals.

Finally, it is a very strange arrogance in man that enables him to chase the last of the whales around the ocean for profit, shoot polar bear cubs for trophies, allow Count Blah-Blah to blast 885 pheasants in one day. It is much too designed to be called crazy or impetuous.

Those lines of Robert Duncan's about Robin Hood come back to me now: "How we loved him/in childhood and hoped to abide by his code/that took life as its law!" The key word here is "code." Sport must be sporting. We have a strong tendency to act the weasel in the hen house. At dawn not a single cluck was heard. It might be preposterous to think we will change, but there are signs. Judges are becoming sterner and people are aware of environmental problems to a degree not known in this country before. Game wardens get more cooperation from the ordinary citizen than they used to. Violating is losing its aura of rube cuteness.

The true violator, though, will persist in all of his pathological glory. Even if there were no game left on earth, something would be devised. Maybe a new sport on this order: ganghooking Farmer Brown's pigs. A high-speed power winch mounted on a vehicle hood is required, and a harpoon with large hooks. You shoot the harpoon over the pig's back and press the winch button. Zap! You've got yourself a squealer. Precautions: make sure Farmer Brown is away for the day, and take your finger off the winch button in time or the pork will really fly.