Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter

by Steven Rinella

In a moment like that, there is no time for emotional dawdling. It is a time for unerring judgment. It is a time for speed, both mental and physical. It is a time for action and precision and discipline. It is a time to do what millions of years’ worth of evolution built us to do. And in the act of doing it, you experience the unconfused purity of being a human predator, stripped of everything that is nonessential. In that moment of impending violence and death, you are gifted a beautiful glimpse of life.

At this moment, in a per capita sense, there are fewer hunters on earth than at any other time in human history.

As a nation, we have swapped the smelly and unpredictable pungency of the woods in exchange for the sanitized safety of manicured grass.

While we once wondered about the migrations of wild animals across the landscape, we now wonder whether the putting greens will be slow or fast. While we once pushed deep into the wilderness in search of herds that have been untouched by other men, we now ask politely if we can play through. While we once feasted on venison liver seared over an open fire and washed back with creek water, we now buy beer from a cooler fixed to the back of a motorized cart parked on a gravel pathway.

I am a hunter. This is my story.

In Scotland it’s a ritual to smear the hunter’s cheeks with the blood of his first deer.

All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.

We’ve had to become frontiersmen of a different breed: The ground and the animals that we leave behind are the same ones that we’ll be returning to tomorrow and the day after.

Maybe stalking the woods is as vital to the human condition as playing music or putting words to paper. Maybe hunting has as much of a claim on our civilized selves as anything else. After all, the earliest forms of representational art reflect hunters and prey. While the arts were making us spiritually viable, hunting did the heavy lifting of not only keeping us alive, but inspiring us. To abhor hunting is to hate the place from which you came, which is akin to hating yourself in some distant, abstract way.

War is an act of hate, while hunting is an act of love. The warrior does not decorate his home with beautiful images of his enemy; he does not donate money to the preservation of his enemy’s habitat; he does not manage his own property with a goal of attracting his enemy for viewing; he does not obey a code of conduct meant not only to stabilize his enemy’s numbers but to increase them.