On Landscapes

The spirit of the hunt; connections, awareness, and intuition.

Traditionally, after a hunt, the hunting party would gather around the campfire and tell stories about their day. Whether or not each individual hunter was successful didn’t matter — the act of retelling, recounting, reliving those experiences with the rest of the tribe made them real¹.

I got back earlier this week from a five-day stay in Northern Maine, where I was taking part in a “Spirit of the Hunt” course put on by the Maine Primitive Skills School. I thought that the course was going to be about hunting — which it was — but it was really, really about so much more. It was a five-day crash course in woodsmanship skills, tracking, camouflage, scent control, and animal behavior — but it was also about spirituality, about the sacredness of the hunt and of taking a life, about the interplay of the environment and ecology of place, about how that changes and shifts and moves over time, how that affects the behavior of the animals — humans included — who live and die in it.

We covered a lot of ground.

I have a lot I processed² — a lot I still need to process — coming out of the trip. My biggest take-away, though, was a reiteration — a reaffirmation, really — of the interconnectedness of everything. I remarked half-way through that I thought I was taking a hunting class but, really, it felt like this was a culmination of all these disparate ideas that I’ve been thinking about, been reading about, been writing about for the last three or four years³. By giving these ideas a name — “Sacred Silence,” “Wide Angle Vision,” “Heart Connected” — it solidifies them in your brain. It makes them real. And, as I discovered — or, really uncovered, since I think I knew this intuitively⁴ all along — that’s what I’ve been doing each week as I write this newsletter. Retelling and reenforcing and realizing stories.

I need a little bit of time to reorient myself to these latest stories. To understand how they overlay into my own thinking on radical living, radical eating — radical being. I imagine a longer dispatch will come out of that, but, since we’re all here, around the proverbial campfire, I do feel compelled to tell one story, to cement it in my mind. One of the themes of the course was about the energy you bring with you when you step in the woods. The idea that the landscape has a rhythm, a flow, and the you need to adapt your own internal energy to that of the forest’s — which it both reflects and is reflected by. That internal landscape — yours — manifests itself in the physical world⁵.

Maybe that sounds a little woo-woo to you. But after the lecture — the “download” in the school’s parlance — on this idea, we broke for the day. I was hunting in the morning, in and around a swamp I had scouted earlier. As I sat and planned how my hunt would go, I focused my own energy on slowing down, on the moment the deer walked out of the field, down the trail into the woods, cautiously working toward an oak flat filled with acorns, just after first light. I watched, from a hawk’s point of view, the deer moving in to eat, relaxing, standing broadside in my shooting lane. I fell asleep that night thankful for the opportunity.

The next morning, fox walking into the woods two hours before sunrise, I stop in front of a patch of pines to orient myself toward the tree I had prepped the day before. Disoriented in the dark, at 5:15am, as I open my phone to look for the pin I dropped on a map, I hear a gentle crunching, an ephemeral woofing, the unmistakable sound of deer.

I freeze, flicking off my headlamp, fading into complete darkness.

The sounds drift closer; the crack of acorns, hooves piercing wet leaves.

The sound drifts so close, me standing dead still and silent, heart beating and holding my breath, that I can hear deer breathing. In the faint moonlight — so faint, I might be imagining that it’s there — I see their shapes moving through the trees and around me.

I could reach out my hand and touch one.

I’m somehow just upwind of the deer and they’re moving towards me. None of the three — I think it is three, maybe four — catch my scent; and if they do, they don’t seem to care. I’ve surrendered to the rhythm of the landscape.

I see the moonlight flecking from their eyes.

I stand there for an eternity as they move through me. When I take my next breath the deer are gone.

It’s 6:05am. Seven minutes before legal shooting light.

The day before, we talked about manifesting into the physical world. About everything being in your imagination — until it isn’t. You just need to let go — trust your intuition, have a little faith. But one thing that you need to remember is that sometimes these reflections get a little warped, the mirror gets distorted. It doesn’t mean the picture is wrong, but it does mean it might not be all the way right.

One of these most common distortions is one of time — there being a shift of hours, minutes, days, or seasons. I had the vision right, the path of the animals right, their pattern right, their behavior right.

I was just an hour off⁶.

So I sit here now, visions of smoke curling off the campfire, telling this story. Reminding you, myself, that none of this is new. The way we experience the world hasn’t changed in the hundreds of thousands of years we’ve evolved in it — but our connection has. And, how sometimes, we just need a reminder that the connection is still there. How as I tattoo this memory into my mind, I realize that the way we approach hunting — the way we approach gardening, approach fitness, approach cooking, approach life — is, as it has always been, how we should approach everything: With eyes wide open and with deep gratitude.

We’ll see you back here next week.

1. As Mike, the head instructor would say: “It’s all in your imagination — until it isn’t.”

2. I wish this were a pun, but no, I didn’t kill a deer.

3. The CWD “Radical Living” curriculum forthcoming: featuring The Tao Te Ching, A Sand County Almanac, The Creative Act, Mushashi, The Wheel of Time, The Art of Racing in the Rain, and more!

4. I can hear

Sam Sager

laughing from here.

5. I’ve heard of a wise dog who said something similar.

6. When I told this story to Sam on my drive home, he reminded me that deer don’t recognize daylight savings. I had the time right, I was actually just a few weeks early.