Dave Stalling - November 10, 2005
Hellgate Hunters and Anglers
Arduous Pursuit
Arduous Pursuit
By David Stalling
When I reminisce of past hunts, I often think (with an odd mix of remorse and joy) about elk, deer and bears I’ve shot, their delectable meat that has helped sustain my life. Sometimes I recall misery—long days and nights trudging up and down steep slopes of alder through rain, sleet and snow. Mostly, though, I remember remarkable, wild encounters. Once, while sleeping on a ridge under a bright fall moon, I awoke to see a grizzly just a short distance away looking right at me. While bowhunting several years ago, I spent an hour or so watching a wolverine waddle along the crest of a steep ridge. I’ve seen massive, missile-like bull trout spawning in wild rivers; played peek-a-boo with a pine marten. I’ve watched bull elk battle, been humbled by bears, had close encounters with wolves and mountain lions, fell off a cliff, got caught in an avalanche, napped away afternoons on warm, sunny hillsides, and experienced all the hardships, joy, challenges and splendor that go with wilderness adventure—all while hunting.
Elk have lured me through many long, lonely nights of extremes in cold, snowy mountains. I’ve hunted hard, killed elk and savored their flesh. And in the countless hours and miles of unpredictable adventure chasing these magnificent creatures, I’ve come to deeply cherish elk and the land they animate. Such devotion to elk and elk hunting kindled my concern for their well-being and their habitat, for protecting the places that sustain not only elk, but all the wild critters that make wild elk country so special.
These are the primeval connections that bind our heritage—vital connections between predator and prey, between wild things and humans, between conservationists past and present. We abandon these connections at our peril; we must come to understand and nurture this heritage because, as Montana author and hunter Jim Poswitz says, “What we understand, we can honor and sustain.”
Perhaps the most valuable lesson I’ve come to understand from Jim is the crucial importance of the arduous pursuit—the “doctrine of the strenuous life,” as Theodore Roosevelt put it, “skill and patience, and the capacity to endure fatigue and exposure, must be shown by the successful hunter,” the kind of experience that comes from wilderness hunting.
Unfortunately, there is an ongoing quest to make hunting easier, quicker, with more sure-fire results, changing the fundamental relationship between predator and prey. A look through most any hunting equipment catalog shows a plethora of technology available to the modern hunter, including trail-monitoring devices to photograph, record, and store animal movements, game scanners, hearing enhancers, night-vision goggles, range finders, animal scents, ATVs with gun mounts, and thousands of other gadgets designed to increase our chances of finding and killing wildlife. Several years ago, hunters in northern Idaho were shooting elk from a half mile away using .50-caliber rifles mounted on off road vehicles. A game warden from Wyoming tells me that every year, more and more hunters use airplanes to locate elk, radioing their sightings to friends on the ground. Some so-called hunters simply pay to kill fenced, domesticated big game animals on game farms. In Texas, hunters commonly lure deer into automated bait stations and shoot them from luxurious towers.
When hunters seek easier ways, focusing only on results and skipping the process (or, as Roosevelt put it, those who are “content to buy what they have not the skill to get by their own exertions”), they fail to gain the intimacy, knowledge, appreciation and respect for the prey, for the habitat, and for other wildlife that is gained through arduous pursuit. The connections are shattered. I suspect this growing disconnect is, in large part, why some hunters are either apathetic or outright opposed to policies that protect and enhance wildlife and wild places; they either ignore, or never came to understand, our hunting and wildlife heritage.
In the fall of 1999 my friend Bill Hanlon was hunting Dall sheep with some friends in the spectacularly wild 2.5-million acre Tatshenshini Wilderness of northwest British Columbia. Six days into their hunt, walking along the face of a 20-foot wall of ice, they found the 550 year old, well-preserved remains of a human hunter, recently exposed on a receding glacier, replete with a knife-like tool called a tugwat and an atlatl, an ancient hunting tool used to hurl spears into prey. The body was recovered by the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations, who dubbed the man Kwaday Dan Sinchi, or “long ago person found.” Researchers say the person was male, in his 20s, and most likely fell into a crevasse and died. The country he once hunted and died in is probably not much different today—still wild and home to the same species of wildlife. “I think of how tough and rugged he must have been, wearing just a skin cloak, carrying tools he probably made himself,” Bill says.
Bill is pretty tough and rugged himself, an avid and passionate wilderness hunter. A Sparwood, British Columbia schoolteacher, he hunts elk in the East Kootenay region, in the same country where, in the early 1900s, one of his (and our Continent’s) conservation heroes, William T. Hornaday, used to hunt. With a love for the wild gained through hunting, Bill helped found the Hornaday Wilderness Society and is working to protect and conserve the same wildlands that he, and Hornaday, and many others have hunted, or currently hunt, or will, we hope, someday hunt.
When he told me about Kwaday Dan Sinchi, imagining that long ago hunter’s plunge into oblivion, he said: “If I should fall and die in the wilds, God forbid, I would only hope that if my remains are found long into the future, they would be found by fellow hunters still pursuing wild animals in country still wild.”
If there are to be hunters and wild places to hunt in the future, we must understand and cultivate our heritage. What we understand, we can honor and sustain. Each fall, I again look forward to chasing elk and deer through this rugged country, happy to join with wolves and lions and bears and wolverines. It is through hunting—this odd, intimate bond between predator and prey; these wild encounters along the way—that I have come to truly know, understand and cherish this country, this wilderness and all it entails, evoking a passion to protect what little wildness remains.
An avid hunter and angler, past President and board member of the Montana Wildlife Federation, Dave Stalling lives in Missoula, where he works for Trout Unlimited and serves as President of Hellgate Hunters and Anglers.
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