Ortega believed that in hunting we returned to nature because “hunting is the generic way of being a man” and because the animal we are stalking summons the animal still in us. This is atavism pure and simple—the recovery of an earlier mode of being human—and that for Ortega is the supreme, and the exclusive, value of hunting. For perhaps his most outrageous claim is that the hunt is the only such return available to us—we can’t ever, as he points out, go back to being Christian in the manner of St. Augustine, say, because once history begins it is irreversible. So how is it we can still go
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