Animals such as deer, we are told, have no predators in many areas, and therefore need systematic culling. Yet here they are breeding wild animals, year after year replenishing the stock, all for the sole purpose of selling and killing them, deer and bears and elephants so many products being readied for the market. “Wildlife, we are constantly told, would run loose across our towns and cities were it not for the sport hunters to control their population, as birds would blanket the skies without the culling services of Ducks Unlimited and other groups. And if he is perpetually, hopelessly a boy, he will lust to go do it again, with a bigger beast.” And if he is, in all parts and purposes, a man, he will file that away as a part of his process of growth and life and eventual death.

He should have his shot at something, a shining running something, and see it come a-tumbling down, all mucus and steaming blood stench and gouted excrement, the eyes going dull during the final muscle spasms. A man should have one chance to bring something down. They are merely slightly more sophisticated versions of the New Jersey file clerks who swarm into the Adirondacks in the fall, in red cap, beard stubble and taut hero’s grin, talking out of the side of their mouths, exuding fumes of bourbon, come to slay the ferocious white-tailed deer. I do not like the bully boys, the Teddy Roosevelt’s, the Hemingways, the Ruarks. “I do not like the killers, and the killing bravely and well crap.

Hunter have a nice life