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Upland Days:
50 Years of Bird Hunting in New England

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Excerpted from Upland Days:

"How can you?"

The first time I heard this question was at a neighborhood cookout about twelve years ago. I'd casually mentioned that I was looking forward to the bird-hunting season, and one of the women wrinkled her nose as if she'd suddenly gotten a whiff of something evil. "How can you?" she said.

"What do you mean?" I said, quite innocently. "How can I what?"

"Hunt," she said. "Kill."

I felt like asking her how she could eat that cheeseburger or make love to that fat husband of hers, or sleep or go to the bathroom or sneeze. Her question struck me as rhetorical, and the answer to it seemed self-evident.
I resisted the impulse to say: "Well, see, you sneak up on some innocent wild creature with sweet brown eyes, and you take your gun, and you aim, and you pull the trigger, and BLAM! �That's how. It's easy."

Instead, I recall muttering something inane like: "I dunno. I guess I just enjoy being out in the woods in the fall." And when she narrowed her eyes and said, "Yes, but --" I made a cowardly escape. The fact was, I had no answer ready for her. It was a question I'd never felt I needed an answer for. For most of my life, no one asked why I hunted. Not everybody hunted, but everybody seemed to understand it.

This is no longer the case. Nowadays I get that How-can-you question all the time. And I'm glad I do, because it's forced me to think about it. I suspect I convert no one, and convince few, with my answers. I give them earnestly, nevertheless. It helps me to keep things clear . . .

I hunt because my father hunted, and he took me with him, and so we built a bond that I still cherish, and because his father hunted, and his father's father, and all of the fathers in my line and yours, as far back as those fathers who invented spears and axes and recorded their adventures with pictures on the walls of caves.

I hunt because it links me with the boy I used to be and with the young man my father was then. I hunt because it keeps my passions alive and my memories fresh and my senses alert even as my beard grows gray, and because I fear that if I stopped hunting I would instantly become an old man, and because I believe that as long as I hunt I will remain young. I hunt because . . .