Thursday, February 26, 2009
Thursday, April 24, 2008
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fromm, Erich. The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. (New York, 1973).
Ortega y Gasset, Jose. Meditations on Hunting. (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons,1972).
Kerasote, Ted. Nature, Culture & the Hunt.
Peterson, David, (Foreward by Ted Williams). Heartsblood: Hunting, Spirituality & Wilderness In America.
Eaton, Randall L. Sacred Hunt: Hunting As A Sacred Path. Print ISBN: 0966369629 ($ 29.95) In The Sacred Hunt, Dr. Eaton explores the inner dimensions of hunting, and shows that it profoundly connects people to the animals and the earth. Respect, admiration, even reverence charactize the hunter's innermost bond to the wild animals. An award winning author and expert on hunting.
Sullivan, Mark T. The Purification Ceremony. (New York, 1998).
Swan, James A. In Defense of Hunting.
Others To Consult:
Ernest Hemingway, Bill Mason, Henry David Thoreau, James Fenimore Cooper, Tom Thompson
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Ethos of the Hunt
"Dreams and hunting are windows into mysterious other worlds."
Spirit Hunting is a voyage into the metaphysical world of primitive hunting.
Universally misunderstood today, as the the foundation of animate being hunting is, paradoxically, a fundamental act of human creation. Spirit hunting forms an existential return to the source of the human soul. Thus we come to the hunt with the greatest of reverence. The hunt is a ritual act of creation, one in which we continually recreate ourselves through the necessary death of other creatures.
Spirit Hunting is a voyage into the metaphysical world of primitive hunting.
Universally misunderstood today, as the the foundation of animate being hunting is, paradoxically, a fundamental act of human creation. Spirit hunting forms an existential return to the source of the human soul. Thus we come to the hunt with the greatest of reverence. The hunt is a ritual act of creation, one in which we continually recreate ourselves through the necessary death of other creatures.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
UNDER CONSTRUCTION !
My apologies for any disappointment re this undeveloped site.
Many interesting articles will be posted at the end of April 2008.
Thanks for the patience.
Many interesting articles will be posted at the end of April 2008.
Thanks for the patience.
Monday, April 7, 2008
Misc. Notes
Whitetail Deer, Robert Bateman
Spirit HuntinG
"Dreams and hunting are windows into mysterious other worlds."
Spirit Hunting is a voyage into the metaphysical world of primitive hunting. Universally misunderstood, hunting is the foundation of animate being and paradoxically, a fundamental act of human creation. Spirit hunting forms an existential return to the source of the human soul.
We come to the hunt with the greatest of reverence. The hunt is a ritual act of creation, One in which we continually recreate ourselves through the death of other creatures.
SELECTIONS
TRAIL of the Spirit Hunter (spirit of-- del)
ORIGINAL ARTICLES
REPRINTED COMMENTARY
RELATED SITES
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
DEERHUNTER'S VESTPOCKET COMPANION
MISCELLANEOUS NOTES
I. TRAIL of the Spirit Hunter
Trax
Moon Lit Deer
Sunset Deer
Lascaux, Pon du Arc etc.
II. ORIGINAL ARTICLES a III. REPRINTED COMMENTARY a IV. RELATED SITES UNDERSTANDING THE WHITETAIL A MEDALLION RATED SITE http://www.thecontentwell.com/Fish_Game/Whitetail%20Deer/whitetail_feeding.html V. a VI. DEERHUNTER'S VESTPOCKET COMPANION a VII. MISCELLANEOUS NOTES
Addi ELEMENTS: LOGOS (stone arrowhead, paw prints deer, bar, lion)X
READINGS for the Spirit Hunter
Tracking Arrowed Game
SANCTIONED LINK
Original ARTICLES
Hunting As a Sport
Hunting: Evolutionary Road to Intelligence
3.
Return to SELECTIONS MENU
NOTES ON SPIRIT HUNTING
From Randall L. Eaton's Sacred Hunt: Hunting As A Sacred Path
We hunt because we love it, but why do we love it so? As an inherited instinct, hunting is deeply rooted in human nature. Around the world in all cultures the urge to hunt awakens in boys. They use rocks, make weapons or sneak an airgun out of the house to kill a bird or small mammal. In many cases the predatory instinct appears spontaneously without previous experience or coaching, and in the civilized world boys often hunt despite attempts to suppress their instinct.
The fundamental instinct to hunt may link up with the spiritual. An analogy is falling in love in which eros, the sexual instinct, connects with agape or spiritual love. Initiation on the path of love changes our life irreversibly. Henceforth, we shall know the meaning of our authentic love experienced with the totality of our being.
When we fall in love, the instinctive or primal self merges with the spiritual. It is a vertical convergence of subconscious to superconscious, lower to higher.
Hunting is how we fall in love with nature. The basic instinct links up with the spiritual, and the result is that we become married to nature. Among nature pursuits, hunting and fishing connects us most profoundly with animals and nature. As Robert Bly said in his best-selling book Iron John only hunting expands us sideways, "into the glory of oaks, mountains, glaciers, horses, lions, grasses, waterfalls, deer."
Hunting is a basic aspect of a boy's initiation into manhood. It teaches him the intelligence, beauty and power of nature. The young man also learns at a deep emotional level his inseparable relationship with nature as well as his responsibility to fiercely protect it.
Essentially, hunting is a spiritual experience precisely because it submerges us in nature, and that experience teaches us that we are participants in something far greater than man. Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher, described the hunter as the alert man. He could not have said it better. When we hunt we experience extreme alertness to the point of an altered state of consciousness. For the hunter everything is alive, and he is one with the animal and its environment.
Though the hunter may appear from the outside to be a staunch egotist dominating nature, on the inside he is exactly the opposite. He identifies with the animal as his kin, and he feels, as Ortega said, tied through the earth to it. The conscious and deliberate humbling of the hunter to the level of the animal is virtually a religious rite.
While the hunt is exhilarating and unsurpassed in intrinsic rewards and emotional satisfactions, no hunter revels in the death of the animal. Hunters know from first-hand experience that "life lives on life," as mythologist Joseph Campbell said. The hunter participates directly in the most fundamental processes of life, which is why the food chain is for him a love chain. And that is why hunters have been and still are, by far, the foremost conservationists of wildlife and wild places, to the benefit of everyone.
Today as for countless millennia proper initiation to hunting engenders respect for all life, responsibility to society, even social authority, and spiritual power. It develops authentic self-esteem, self-control, patience and personal knowledge of our place in the food chain. According to Dr. Don T. Jacobs, author of Teaching Virtues, "hunting is the ideal way to teach universal virtues," including humility, generosity, courage and fortitude. As I said in The Sacred Hunt, "Hunting teaches a person to think with his heart instead of his head. That is the secret of hunting."
Consequently, the most successful programs ever conducted for delinquent boys have focused on hunting. The taking of a life that sustains us is a transformative experience. It's not a video game. Hunting is good medicine for bad kids because it is good medicine for all kids.
Hunting is a model for living. When we hunt we discover that we are more than the ego. That our life consists of our ego in a mutually interdependent and transcendent relationship with nature. We keep returning to the field because for us hunting is a dynamic ritual that honors the animals and the earth on which we depend both physically and spiritually.
While interviewing Felix Ike, a Western Shoshone elder, I asked him, "What kind of country would this be if the majority of men in it had been properly initiated into hunting?" He replied, "It would be a totally different world."
In a world imperiled by egoism and disrespect for nature, hunting is morally good for men and women, boys and girls. Hunters understand the meaning in Lao Tzu's statement,
The Earth is perfect, You cannot improve it. If you try to change it, You will ruin it. If you try to hold it, You will lose it.
Quotations Philosophical (Consider zen photos with quotations)
Hunting as a sport is a destructive and moraly incorrect activity. FBeyond Descartes July 11, 2001
It occurred to me to ask, “Why do hunting and fishing provide such sublime satisfaction --beyond almost everything else really?:” Why do recreational acts, actually not unlike mathematics or philosopy (which are both acts of enormous leisure), impinge so deeply on our existence. I suppose it’s all about being, about creation and in the act of recreation (re-creation) where we continually consecrate our being and re-create ourselves in the conscious image of being itself, of truth, of good, perhaps even of God. With absolutely no reason for apology to Rene Descartes, I must say it then, I hunt and fish; therefore, in both physical and metaphysical reality, I am. Here is the act that forges, for me at least, the past, present and future; embracing paleo-evolutionary psychological need, providing contemporary physical sustenence and laying foundations for the abyss of time yet unknown. - Grand River F
Whereas, hunting itself is a highly creative and morally sanctifiied activity. F
Therefore the hunt is a ritual act of creation, one in which we continually recreate ourselves through the death of other creatures. We com to it with revedrence. F
Hence we are "bound by a code of conduct based on a love of the animal and the forest and myself" "Be sure of your Quarry. PC Never shoot unless you believe you can kill surely, cleanly and humanely. Never leave a wounded animal in the wood. Never kill anything you will not eat. F
"In the hunt we celebrate our role in the beautiful yet vicious circle of life. ...rejoicing in ...predatory ancestry." PC
(along the same lne) "The hunt reminds us that all life requires death to sustain itself" PC
All life subsists on death. F
"We are murderers and cannot live without murdering. The whole of nature is based upon murder.:" Marie Louise Von Franz
The hunt is largely ceremonial, retying the ritual liknks to our paleolithic past, knitting the tissue of our existence with th fabric of nature. F
The price of lfe is always certain and inescapable. The price of life is death, not only our own eventual death, but more to the point, the thousands of lives xepended in the interest on every creature. F
Life and death are indivisible manifestations of the same being. F
The wages of life are deaths. F
"All of nature's creatures are murderer's. We must murder to live. It is the law of the forest. But unlike the animals, whe who are human carry the death within ourselves. As such we have been mbued wiith the hiighest and most complex of that thing my ancestors called Power. It drives us. It haunts us. It can become twisted and destructive. But it can also heal. It can giive us rebirth at every death. It can offer faith, forgiveness and sanity where there seems hope of none. Some of us will spend a lifetime hunting for it" PC
Warfare and later sport succeeded hunting as displaced (and pale distorted) dsplacements of the necessity of the hunt. Religion to has played its role. F
We must honour and "worship" the deer. He is our link with our paleolithic past, the consecraton of the present moment, and the gateway to eternity. He is our cosmic liink. a messenger between man and god. F
'To hunt for a large buck is not to hunt for a trophy but for the purest test the art can offer, offering a process of self refinement' 'PC'
"those who do not feel great sorrow at the death of an animal should not take to the woods" PC Profound sorrow upon the death of an animal is a necessary condition of spiritual hunting. Those who cannae shouldnae. F"Taking life is as profound as giving life, it s the transfer of spiritual power which our ancestors believed is everywhere around us." PC
The purpose of lfe is to make good our death (through living a meanngful life; and the purpose of death to remake liife. The paradox of life and death. F
"There is no death only a change of worlds." Squamish Chief Seattle
Zen of Deer Stalking Being One with
The idea is to present yourself and your fly as part of the river. Then the trout will will accept your offering. F
The idea is to present yourself as part of the forest. Only then the deer will come to you. F
"To hunt the deer your must become the deer." PC F=Then the deer will accept you as one of its own. Then the deer will come to you. See deer antler mask. Injuns knew this. Applies to image, scent, behaviour, disturbance move as the deer sensorily clearing as you go. two or three steps and listen.
.To be the deer is to be more in union with the greater essence of life and being in general. F
"(In) haviing a purpose you are making the woods yours, which is foolish. The woods are the woods. what you have to do is find a way to just be in the woods so the woods accept you. When you do, you'll be like a mirror, reflecting everytthing around you. You'll sense worlds that are invisible to most people." PC
Traditional Indian Hunting
For the Micmac, "the deer hunt was a drama of Power in the true Indiian way " an act of creaton, a reflection of the fluid, continuous state or transformation between life and death in whiich we live" PC
"The deer and iits tracks were but shadows of the spirit we stalked, but by learning to engage wth the deer, we learned how to conduct ourselves correctly in the presence of Power." PC
In the end the hunter really hunts himself. --Huichol Indian PC
"Leave part of yourself in the woods because you are taking part of the woods with you." PC
"Dreams and huntng are wndows nto other worlds." PC Principles of Hunting
"A deer will distrust its eyes and its ears but never its nose." PC
"Whitetails past three are 'a diifferent species". PC Just Transcendant
"Everything leaves the sign of its passing, the trace of its energy." PC
"Energiies that give evidence of an animals passing." PC
Lay on your belly when necessary to see disturbances in the leaves.
See which way a fern has been twsted by an animal (and caught on its neighbour) to discover the direction of moving deer." PC
"The doe's urine was pink; she was ready to breed." PC
"Keep one eye on the deer's directon and the other on the land ahead." PC
"Notice where deer have ticked a tree with their antlers as they pass." PC
antler ticks, leaves standing, crescents in the frost. F
hair on barbed wire (note direction by looking carefully)
much hair indicates the deer have been hurried -seen wolves push deer in this manner F
Notice where deer have browse nibbled, seek these species F
He adds, "We must accept that a million years of hunting has genetically changed the diet of our species and that(the most recent)ten thousand years of crop feeding has not been long enough to modify it a second time." Survival of the fittest, in evolutionary terms, means survival of those most adept at getting their genes into the next generation, and generations to come. "No species, ours included, possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by genetic history."(Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature.)
Hence, as Morris notes, "The thousands of millions of humans alive today share an almost identical genetic inheritance," -- whatever our language, skin colour, customs, or mores.
"If natural selection is continued over many generations, the favoured genes will spread throughout the population and the traits will become characteristic of the species."(Wilson)- as in the male hunting imperative and the female gathering, and the latter's ability to remember and handle detailed information.
Not only did meat eating speed the development of language, but because it provided quickly consumed, concentrated nourishment, living in Paleolithic times did not involve the hours needed by herbivores to feed and nourish themselves. There was time for leisure activities: sculpture, some superb cave art, technological development of new tools(more than a hundred until the advent of the "Neolithic catastrophe," after which only a handful were needed for farming and war), and for singing, dancing, story-telling, day-dreaming, games, fire-gazing, conversation...things we love today.
In his Mediations on Hunting, published in 1942, Jose Ortega y Gasset recognized that "Hunting has existed for over 99 per cent of genetic evolution," and he used this fact to explain the hunting imperative or trait exhibited by the modern hunter. "One does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted." Some other hunters' comments should be recorded here too:
"Hunting gives a man a sense of balance, a sanity, a comprehension of the true value of life," and "There is still hope for the race when some members are not wholly dependent upon effete and urbane artificialities for their recreation."(South Carolina poet-hunter Archibald Rutledge, 1937.)
Two Oglala Sioux, war chief Crazy Horse and spiritual leader Sitting Bull, both of Little Big Horn-Custer defeat fame, respond to the destruction of their culture and heritage by "civilization":
"Now you tell us to work for a living, but the Great Spirit did not make us to work, but to live by hunting...We would live as our fathers did, and their fathers before them."(Crazy Horse.)
"When the buffalo are gone we will hunt mice, for we are hunters and we want our freedom."(Sitting Bull.) "Go out on the land(to hunt, trap, live)and it will heal you."(Recent statement by a northern Cree.) "The love of hunting is almost a physiological characteristic. One may not care for golf and still be human, but the man who does not want to see, hunt, photograph, or otherwise outwit birds or animals is hardly normal."(Aldo Leopold.) "The genuine hunter is probably as free as it's possible to be in this technocracy of ours,(as the hunter can become)wholly absorbed in a quieter, deeper, and older world...while trying to close the magic circle of man, wilderness, and animals."(John Madson, Why Men Hunt.)
Spirit HuntinG
"Dreams and hunting are windows into mysterious other worlds."
Spirit Hunting is a voyage into the metaphysical world of primitive hunting. Universally misunderstood, hunting is the foundation of animate being and paradoxically, a fundamental act of human creation. Spirit hunting forms an existential return to the source of the human soul.
We come to the hunt with the greatest of reverence. The hunt is a ritual act of creation, One in which we continually recreate ourselves through the death of other creatures.
SELECTIONS
TRAIL of the Spirit Hunter (spirit of-- del)
ORIGINAL ARTICLES
REPRINTED COMMENTARY
RELATED SITES
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
DEERHUNTER'S VESTPOCKET COMPANION
MISCELLANEOUS NOTES
I. TRAIL of the Spirit Hunter
Trax
Moon Lit Deer
Sunset Deer
Lascaux, Pon du Arc etc.
II. ORIGINAL ARTICLES a III. REPRINTED COMMENTARY a IV. RELATED SITES UNDERSTANDING THE WHITETAIL A MEDALLION RATED SITE http://www.thecontentwell.com/Fish_Game/Whitetail%20Deer/whitetail_feeding.html V. a VI. DEERHUNTER'S VESTPOCKET COMPANION a VII. MISCELLANEOUS NOTES
Addi ELEMENTS: LOGOS (stone arrowhead, paw prints deer, bar, lion)X
READINGS for the Spirit Hunter
Tracking Arrowed Game
SANCTIONED LINK
Original ARTICLES
Hunting As a Sport
Hunting: Evolutionary Road to Intelligence
3.
Return to SELECTIONS MENU
NOTES ON SPIRIT HUNTING
From Randall L. Eaton's Sacred Hunt: Hunting As A Sacred Path
We hunt because we love it, but why do we love it so? As an inherited instinct, hunting is deeply rooted in human nature. Around the world in all cultures the urge to hunt awakens in boys. They use rocks, make weapons or sneak an airgun out of the house to kill a bird or small mammal. In many cases the predatory instinct appears spontaneously without previous experience or coaching, and in the civilized world boys often hunt despite attempts to suppress their instinct.
The fundamental instinct to hunt may link up with the spiritual. An analogy is falling in love in which eros, the sexual instinct, connects with agape or spiritual love. Initiation on the path of love changes our life irreversibly. Henceforth, we shall know the meaning of our authentic love experienced with the totality of our being.
When we fall in love, the instinctive or primal self merges with the spiritual. It is a vertical convergence of subconscious to superconscious, lower to higher.
Hunting is how we fall in love with nature. The basic instinct links up with the spiritual, and the result is that we become married to nature. Among nature pursuits, hunting and fishing connects us most profoundly with animals and nature. As Robert Bly said in his best-selling book Iron John only hunting expands us sideways, "into the glory of oaks, mountains, glaciers, horses, lions, grasses, waterfalls, deer."
Hunting is a basic aspect of a boy's initiation into manhood. It teaches him the intelligence, beauty and power of nature. The young man also learns at a deep emotional level his inseparable relationship with nature as well as his responsibility to fiercely protect it.
Essentially, hunting is a spiritual experience precisely because it submerges us in nature, and that experience teaches us that we are participants in something far greater than man. Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher, described the hunter as the alert man. He could not have said it better. When we hunt we experience extreme alertness to the point of an altered state of consciousness. For the hunter everything is alive, and he is one with the animal and its environment.
Though the hunter may appear from the outside to be a staunch egotist dominating nature, on the inside he is exactly the opposite. He identifies with the animal as his kin, and he feels, as Ortega said, tied through the earth to it. The conscious and deliberate humbling of the hunter to the level of the animal is virtually a religious rite.
While the hunt is exhilarating and unsurpassed in intrinsic rewards and emotional satisfactions, no hunter revels in the death of the animal. Hunters know from first-hand experience that "life lives on life," as mythologist Joseph Campbell said. The hunter participates directly in the most fundamental processes of life, which is why the food chain is for him a love chain. And that is why hunters have been and still are, by far, the foremost conservationists of wildlife and wild places, to the benefit of everyone.
Today as for countless millennia proper initiation to hunting engenders respect for all life, responsibility to society, even social authority, and spiritual power. It develops authentic self-esteem, self-control, patience and personal knowledge of our place in the food chain. According to Dr. Don T. Jacobs, author of Teaching Virtues, "hunting is the ideal way to teach universal virtues," including humility, generosity, courage and fortitude. As I said in The Sacred Hunt, "Hunting teaches a person to think with his heart instead of his head. That is the secret of hunting."
Consequently, the most successful programs ever conducted for delinquent boys have focused on hunting. The taking of a life that sustains us is a transformative experience. It's not a video game. Hunting is good medicine for bad kids because it is good medicine for all kids.
Hunting is a model for living. When we hunt we discover that we are more than the ego. That our life consists of our ego in a mutually interdependent and transcendent relationship with nature. We keep returning to the field because for us hunting is a dynamic ritual that honors the animals and the earth on which we depend both physically and spiritually.
While interviewing Felix Ike, a Western Shoshone elder, I asked him, "What kind of country would this be if the majority of men in it had been properly initiated into hunting?" He replied, "It would be a totally different world."
In a world imperiled by egoism and disrespect for nature, hunting is morally good for men and women, boys and girls. Hunters understand the meaning in Lao Tzu's statement,
The Earth is perfect, You cannot improve it. If you try to change it, You will ruin it. If you try to hold it, You will lose it.
Quotations Philosophical (Consider zen photos with quotations)
Hunting as a sport is a destructive and moraly incorrect activity. FBeyond Descartes July 11, 2001
It occurred to me to ask, “Why do hunting and fishing provide such sublime satisfaction --beyond almost everything else really?:” Why do recreational acts, actually not unlike mathematics or philosopy (which are both acts of enormous leisure), impinge so deeply on our existence. I suppose it’s all about being, about creation and in the act of recreation (re-creation) where we continually consecrate our being and re-create ourselves in the conscious image of being itself, of truth, of good, perhaps even of God. With absolutely no reason for apology to Rene Descartes, I must say it then, I hunt and fish; therefore, in both physical and metaphysical reality, I am. Here is the act that forges, for me at least, the past, present and future; embracing paleo-evolutionary psychological need, providing contemporary physical sustenence and laying foundations for the abyss of time yet unknown. - Grand River F
Whereas, hunting itself is a highly creative and morally sanctifiied activity. F
Therefore the hunt is a ritual act of creation, one in which we continually recreate ourselves through the death of other creatures. We com to it with revedrence. F
Hence we are "bound by a code of conduct based on a love of the animal and the forest and myself" "Be sure of your Quarry. PC Never shoot unless you believe you can kill surely, cleanly and humanely. Never leave a wounded animal in the wood. Never kill anything you will not eat. F
"In the hunt we celebrate our role in the beautiful yet vicious circle of life. ...rejoicing in ...predatory ancestry." PC
(along the same lne) "The hunt reminds us that all life requires death to sustain itself" PC
All life subsists on death. F
"We are murderers and cannot live without murdering. The whole of nature is based upon murder.:" Marie Louise Von Franz
The hunt is largely ceremonial, retying the ritual liknks to our paleolithic past, knitting the tissue of our existence with th fabric of nature. F
The price of lfe is always certain and inescapable. The price of life is death, not only our own eventual death, but more to the point, the thousands of lives xepended in the interest on every creature. F
Life and death are indivisible manifestations of the same being. F
The wages of life are deaths. F
"All of nature's creatures are murderer's. We must murder to live. It is the law of the forest. But unlike the animals, whe who are human carry the death within ourselves. As such we have been mbued wiith the hiighest and most complex of that thing my ancestors called Power. It drives us. It haunts us. It can become twisted and destructive. But it can also heal. It can giive us rebirth at every death. It can offer faith, forgiveness and sanity where there seems hope of none. Some of us will spend a lifetime hunting for it" PC
Warfare and later sport succeeded hunting as displaced (and pale distorted) dsplacements of the necessity of the hunt. Religion to has played its role. F
We must honour and "worship" the deer. He is our link with our paleolithic past, the consecraton of the present moment, and the gateway to eternity. He is our cosmic liink. a messenger between man and god. F
'To hunt for a large buck is not to hunt for a trophy but for the purest test the art can offer, offering a process of self refinement' 'PC'
"those who do not feel great sorrow at the death of an animal should not take to the woods" PC Profound sorrow upon the death of an animal is a necessary condition of spiritual hunting. Those who cannae shouldnae. F"Taking life is as profound as giving life, it s the transfer of spiritual power which our ancestors believed is everywhere around us." PC
The purpose of lfe is to make good our death (through living a meanngful life; and the purpose of death to remake liife. The paradox of life and death. F
"There is no death only a change of worlds." Squamish Chief Seattle
Zen of Deer Stalking Being One with
The idea is to present yourself and your fly as part of the river. Then the trout will will accept your offering. F
The idea is to present yourself as part of the forest. Only then the deer will come to you. F
"To hunt the deer your must become the deer." PC F=Then the deer will accept you as one of its own. Then the deer will come to you. See deer antler mask. Injuns knew this. Applies to image, scent, behaviour, disturbance move as the deer sensorily clearing as you go. two or three steps and listen.
.To be the deer is to be more in union with the greater essence of life and being in general. F
"(In) haviing a purpose you are making the woods yours, which is foolish. The woods are the woods. what you have to do is find a way to just be in the woods so the woods accept you. When you do, you'll be like a mirror, reflecting everytthing around you. You'll sense worlds that are invisible to most people." PC
Traditional Indian Hunting
For the Micmac, "the deer hunt was a drama of Power in the true Indiian way " an act of creaton, a reflection of the fluid, continuous state or transformation between life and death in whiich we live" PC
"The deer and iits tracks were but shadows of the spirit we stalked, but by learning to engage wth the deer, we learned how to conduct ourselves correctly in the presence of Power." PC
In the end the hunter really hunts himself. --Huichol Indian PC
"Leave part of yourself in the woods because you are taking part of the woods with you." PC
"Dreams and huntng are wndows nto other worlds." PC Principles of Hunting
"A deer will distrust its eyes and its ears but never its nose." PC
"Whitetails past three are 'a diifferent species". PC Just Transcendant
"Everything leaves the sign of its passing, the trace of its energy." PC
"Energiies that give evidence of an animals passing." PC
Lay on your belly when necessary to see disturbances in the leaves.
See which way a fern has been twsted by an animal (and caught on its neighbour) to discover the direction of moving deer." PC
"The doe's urine was pink; she was ready to breed." PC
"Keep one eye on the deer's directon and the other on the land ahead." PC
"Notice where deer have ticked a tree with their antlers as they pass." PC
antler ticks, leaves standing, crescents in the frost. F
hair on barbed wire (note direction by looking carefully)
much hair indicates the deer have been hurried -seen wolves push deer in this manner F
Notice where deer have browse nibbled, seek these species F
He adds, "We must accept that a million years of hunting has genetically changed the diet of our species and that(the most recent)ten thousand years of crop feeding has not been long enough to modify it a second time." Survival of the fittest, in evolutionary terms, means survival of those most adept at getting their genes into the next generation, and generations to come. "No species, ours included, possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by genetic history."(Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature.)
Hence, as Morris notes, "The thousands of millions of humans alive today share an almost identical genetic inheritance," -- whatever our language, skin colour, customs, or mores.
"If natural selection is continued over many generations, the favoured genes will spread throughout the population and the traits will become characteristic of the species."(Wilson)- as in the male hunting imperative and the female gathering, and the latter's ability to remember and handle detailed information.
Not only did meat eating speed the development of language, but because it provided quickly consumed, concentrated nourishment, living in Paleolithic times did not involve the hours needed by herbivores to feed and nourish themselves. There was time for leisure activities: sculpture, some superb cave art, technological development of new tools(more than a hundred until the advent of the "Neolithic catastrophe," after which only a handful were needed for farming and war), and for singing, dancing, story-telling, day-dreaming, games, fire-gazing, conversation...things we love today.
In his Mediations on Hunting, published in 1942, Jose Ortega y Gasset recognized that "Hunting has existed for over 99 per cent of genetic evolution," and he used this fact to explain the hunting imperative or trait exhibited by the modern hunter. "One does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted." Some other hunters' comments should be recorded here too:
"Hunting gives a man a sense of balance, a sanity, a comprehension of the true value of life," and "There is still hope for the race when some members are not wholly dependent upon effete and urbane artificialities for their recreation."(South Carolina poet-hunter Archibald Rutledge, 1937.)
Two Oglala Sioux, war chief Crazy Horse and spiritual leader Sitting Bull, both of Little Big Horn-Custer defeat fame, respond to the destruction of their culture and heritage by "civilization":
"Now you tell us to work for a living, but the Great Spirit did not make us to work, but to live by hunting...We would live as our fathers did, and their fathers before them."(Crazy Horse.)
"When the buffalo are gone we will hunt mice, for we are hunters and we want our freedom."(Sitting Bull.) "Go out on the land(to hunt, trap, live)and it will heal you."(Recent statement by a northern Cree.) "The love of hunting is almost a physiological characteristic. One may not care for golf and still be human, but the man who does not want to see, hunt, photograph, or otherwise outwit birds or animals is hardly normal."(Aldo Leopold.) "The genuine hunter is probably as free as it's possible to be in this technocracy of ours,(as the hunter can become)wholly absorbed in a quieter, deeper, and older world...while trying to close the magic circle of man, wilderness, and animals."(John Madson, Why Men Hunt.)
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