I don’t come away with a clean feeling from these experiences, so I tend to avoid them.

Now, when I watch Youtube videos that people have posted about their exploits, I often see elation and some blood-lust in the eyes of these guys, high fiving when they kill, describing the vapor coming out of a wound on the slow-motion video with awe and wonder…kinda makes me feel like a boy torturing frogs must feel. I would hope that we all have some sort of line that we feel uncomfortable about crossing. I’ve kept myself fairly clean of guilt associated with my acts as a hunter, but I can remember when I did my varmint hunting, I wasn’t really overjoyed with killing for the sake of it, using animals as target practice. Ok, I guess they eat trees, and are somewhat destructive, but I remember it with a feeling of guilt. I remember the first time I went deer hunting with him, and since we hadn’t seen any deer, we shot a porcupine out of a tree. My dad wasn’t an intellectual, but he was a fairly honest person, and he gave me mostly good examples. I saw all sorts of behavior around me, most of it proper, but some definitely questionable, in terms of regard and respect for the process. I got a lot of looks for my long hair, but I ignored it. Later, in my teens, when I started to grow my hair long and do all the rebellious things my generation did back in the ’60s, I still hunted for a while. When I was a kid, I worked with and for my father, who held my wages, and bought my guns with them, then turned them over to me. I was raised as a hunter, and I was always ambivalent. When I consider the future of hunting-how it will fare in the public eye, and what meaning it will have for generations to come-it’s not anti-hunters I worry about. But he’d had enough of prostituting his skills to guys who cared nothing for what he loved.

When this young man and I crossed paths a few years ago, he was still a hunter. Had his fellow guides been as outraged as he was, the outfit might have tightened ship. Had these been isolated incidents, he might have stuck it out. Then came the hunter who wouldn’t keep his rifle pointed away from people, even when reminded. The tag on the animal belonged to an inexperienced and luckless companion. Then came the hunter who, having already taken a bear, illegally shot another one on the last day of the hunt. A half mile or more of high-speed travel over rough ground left the carcass battered: the hide torn and stripped of hair, the meat covered with dirt. Then came the hunters who used their truck to drag a bear back to camp. They laughed, describing how close they had gotten to the animal and how wildly he had run. There to hunt deer or bear, they had just happened onto the bull. Then came the group of hunters who returned to camp bragging about how they had chased a moose with their truck. What he didn’t count on were the hunters.įollowing his boyhood dream, he earned his license as a Registered Maine Guide and landed a job with an outfitter. He loved the woods, the animals, and the hunt.

Long road to ruin car