Should the Tent Be Burning Like That? by Bill Heavey

Author:Bill Heavey [Heavey, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802189271
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2017-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

The Bear Essentials

I recently returned from the annual SHOT (Shooting, Hunting and Outdoor Trade) Show in Las Vegas. It’s a four-day orgy of stuff you don’t need. Yet. But if the marketing guys push the right buttons, you’ll change your mind. Weird as it is, SHOT is a core sample of the American outdoorsman’s psyche. And what we secretly long to be is one of two things: an elite sniper, or the first member of a three-man SWAT team through the door. The identity of the enemy is unclear, but it doesn’t matter. What does is that we are up to the mission. We are professionals, immune to either fear or pity. We are competent, lethal, not to be messed with. And all that stands between us and our heroic best selves is the proper hardware: ARs in exotic calibers—the 6.5 Grendel, the .300 Blackout—that bristle with night scopes, lasers, computerized ballistics calculators, and silencers the size of salamis.

By the time I got home, I felt strangely tainted. I’d been exposed to too much technology, too much of the invisible desire machine that makes us want it. So I did what I’ve done every few years for about four decades. I dipped back into the flat-out best hunting story ever written, William Faulkner’s “The Bear.”

I warn you. Faulkner is everything that SHOT is not. He doesn’t give a damn about being user-friendly. If anything, he goes out of his way to be difficult. His stream-of-consciousness style veers from reality to myth and back again. He’ll uncork a page-long sentence without warning. He often dispenses with fact entirely in pursuit of truths larger than mere facts. If you’re confused, you’ve got company. Scholars still debate whether the thing is a long short story or a short novel. It often reads as if Faulkner wrote “The Bear” for an audience of one—himself.

But it’s worth the whistle. Whatever his faults, Faulkner has hunting in his marrow. Read this description of wilderness and hunters who go there “with the will and hardihood to endure and the humility and skill to survive, and the dogs and the bear and deer juxtaposed and reliefed against it, ordered and compelled by and within the wilderness in the ancient and unremitting contest according to the ancient and immitigable rules which voided all regrets and brooked no quarter.”

Told you.

The story unfolds through the eyes of Ike—first as a boy of ten, then as an accomplished woodsman of sixteen. He is the youngest in a group of hunters who journey each fall to the Big Bottom to run dogs on deer and other game. To Ike, hunting isn’t a pastime. The woods are his school, his path to manhood, his only possible salvation. He is ravenous for the skill, humility, and pride by which a man may prove worthy of being called a hunter. For as long as Ike has been alive, the main event of the annual trip has been the hunt for Old Ben, who is not just a bear, but the bear.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.