Autumn draws near. Soon now, some 12.5 million Americans will purchase a state hunting license as the first annual step into their personal adventure to slay a beast in the wild.
No single tale can tell the story of all these hunters. Some (too few) will be youths who make a single journey to bag a gray squirrel in a suburban oak tree. A tiny number will be grand slam questers spending a fortune to stalk a dall ram on an Alaskan peak.
Between are the millions of nimrod's of all ages and wallet sizes who go afield as often as possible pursuing as many game animals as they can find: sharing in common only the belief that a bad day hunting is better than their best day at work.
A second common thread among all hunters is the basic need for a hunting place to which they can go and the presence of game when they get there.
A relationship with wild animals and wild places may be common to every hunter. But the character of that relationship varies dramatically from one person to the next. Many hunters, probably a majority, achieve only a user's relationship; they go, they hunt, they come home, they don't give the land or the animals another thought. These folks simply expect it to be there for them when they want it.
Some hunters, however, become personally entangled with the places they hunt and the lives of the animals that become their quarry. Something inside these hunters gets caught by the experience and remains in the wild place all year - never ever completely returning to the city.
For these folks the health and vitality of the places they hunt, and the animals they seek, become blurred with their perception of their own personal health and vitality.
Who knows what infinite universe of emotions is felt among these hunters who can no longer separate themselves from their epiphany of the wild: nobody, after all, really gets the straight dope from inside another person's soul. What we can see, understand and describe, however, are their behaviors. Hunter folk who gain a personal relationship with wild places and things habitually act on their values.
We have a word for the sum of their actions - we call it CONSERVATION.
In his classic fable, ALICE IN WONDERLAND, author Louis Carroll has Alice begin her wondrous adventure by falling down a rabbit hole. My observation has been that the hunter’s path to becoming a conservationist would be familiar to Alice.
A fine morning's duck hunt in an autumn gold marsh can leave a person vulnerable to joining Ducks Unlimited. (You are now standing beside the rabbit hole looking in). A couple of good days afield and, whoops, you've volunteered to run the 50-50 fundraiser booth at the next local DU banquet. (Feel the brink of the rabbit hole passing over).
By the time you are on first name basis with the Mad Hatter and the Red Queen you have probably been elected to the Board of Directors of your state chapter of Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, or the Isaac Walton League, or the Wildlife Federation. You are likely helping run the town rod & gun club and for a few of special calling - helping teach Hunter Education classes. Perhaps you have written letters to state legislators or lobbied congressmen arguing for better laws for habitat funding or access to public resources (think Mad Tea Party).
You will have one last thing in common with Alice; you will see wondrous things. The next duck hunt conveys a different essence when you can see where the dollars from your DU booth landed out among a mixed flock of mallards and pintail.
That new law protecting habitat values can be savored as much more than dry words on paper when it is smelled, touched and tasted at dawn on the opening morning of deer season.
Far down the burrow through our conservation 'wonderland' will be a place where the journey comes full circle and we find ourselves greeting that part of our soul we left in a wild place - a greeting of mutual respect for these two aspects of our personal nature - taker and giver back - because our place in the wild was honestly earned by our actions in the human world beyond.