Twilight of the Hogs
By Ryan Gossen
The night is a tunnel I make with my headlamp. It's like entering into the earth itself as I pick my way across the field and follow my sense of the trail between trees. The damp sticks and leaves are quiet. I find my way to a lowland meadow. It's not the one I scouted weeks ago, which I must have overshot, but it will do. I find a spot on the edge which affords a clear shot in multiple directions. Trails intersect the meadow, so many tracks it's impossible to tell their direction.
In the perfect dark, owls punctuate the silence of the canopy, their strangeness amplified by the stillness. Insane, warbling screech owls and impossibly big-sounding barreds. Other birds I don’t know make announcements before dawn. They’re all super weird. You hear the weird ones now, when everything else is quiet.
After waking up at 4 am and entering a strange place at a strange time to do a strange thing, it feels right to be welcomed by surreal birds.
Dawn is the drama hour. Once there is enough glow in the sky to see the outlines of the treetops, all hell breaks loose and it’s hard to single out individual sounds. I hear rustling leaves, which could be many things, then the sound of a heavy stick snapping, which could be a couple of things. Something is moving behind me, beyond the tree wall.
As always, when presented with an actual pig, I review the decisions that led me to this point. Some hunters wear kevlar chaps or gaiters as defense against upward-pointing tusks. Some hog hunters carry guns, even if they are bow hunting. A twelve-gauge loaded with slugs is considered ideal, but a large handgun is typical. It seemed absurd to me, before, in the daytime, part of the American male gun fetish.
I don’t have any of those things.
If I am charged, and I can’t get to a tree, I won’t be nocking an arrow or drawing my knife. I don’t know what I'll do.
Why am I here? I didn't grow up hunting, this is all new to me. After living in Austin, Texas for a few years, I ran out of places to explore. I was bored with the same old climbing crags, with the Greenbelt, with driving an hour to get to a park with three miles of trails. For a culture that is rooted in the land, Texas has relatively little public space. Traditionally, hunting is how Texans connect with the land, but I had no idea how to go about it.
Just getting to this meadow represented the end of a long learning curve. This is a place I wouldn't have bothered to hike. It's flat, not much variation in the terrain, no big vistas, but being here as a hunter, it's fascinating. Every arroyo, every stand of brush shapes the movements of the animals. It's filled with riddles and I never know enough. I struggle to understand because I am a participant in what is happening here. Hunting is intimate. I get closer and closer to these animals until I am so close I can kill one. Then, I will break the skin and disassemble it, first in the field, then more thoroughly at home. Then, as if all of that were not intimate enough, I will eat it and literally become one with the thing.
To do this, I have to cross boundaries in myself, and it makes me wonder if I'm becoming a psychopath in some way.
A psychopath is someone who is violent, egocentric, manipulative, and willing to cause harm. All those things are necessary for hunting and, for that matter, fishing. Even when it's human on human, there are too many socially sanctioned examples of violence to define a psychological profile. So in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), you won't find “psychopathy,” but instead the nebulous “Antisocial Personality Disorder,” which roots the problematic behavior in inappropriate social contexts. Hunting is an approved social context for violence (to some), but for someone who did not grow up with it, it still carries the shock of crossing important boundaries, and it makes one question the nature of boundaries in general.
Though it's not a diagnosis that is sanctioned by our medical establishment, our culture still seems to find “psychopath” to be a useful term. Like “pornography,” we know it when we see it. Certain social roles have been identified as being likely vocations for psychopaths; CEOs, lawyers, surgeons, wall street traders. These roles benefit from a lack of empathy. Hunting, on the other hand, requires empathy to understand what animals will do.
This presents a problem: How to live with intimacy and understanding, while still committing murder.
To resolve this, death itself has to be put in context. Religions are constructed around stories that contextualize murder as sacrifice, transcendence, transmutation... It’s heavy lifting, reconciling these things.
I find my struggle with empathy while hunting to be similar to my fear of heights while climbing. If I had no fear of heights, climbing wouldn't be interesting. Like the fear of heights, the pain of empathy dissipates with practice. For me, the shock of hunting for the first time is already gone, and I’m trying to understand my empathy and moral shock before it changes, leaving me only with ethics.
When hunters talk to each other about ethics, they talk about “fair chase.” What kind of opportunity did the animal have to evade the hunter? Was the animal in a fenced enclosure? Was bait used? These questions are about the rules of a game, not the effect of its outcome. They are about bragging rights.
The ethics I cobbled together are about the effect of my actions on an ecosystem. In practical terms, I allow myself to murder things if their removal is a net benefit to the ecosystem. Being destructive and invasive, feral hogs fit that description easily, but it's awkward for me that my own species is not safe from this line of reasoning. It's also problematic for me that I strongly identify with hogs. They are social, intelligent, adaptable animals. When I sense one around me, the hair goes up on the back of my neck in a way it does not for any other animal. Piglets are impossibly cute. According to my ethics, I really should be killing piglets, but I doubt I could do it. This feels correct, having ethics that are not an outline of my comfort zone.
My ethics are there to accommodate the behavior of hunting and to allow boundaries to exist even when others are crossed, but what do I get out of all this?
I think the behaviors of hunting feel good to me because I have ADHD.
Researchers have speculated that the scattered attentive patterns of ADHD, while maladaptive for a traditional classroom or a factory, are ideal for a hunter-gatherer who must change focus quickly to adapt to opportunities as they reveal themselves. A room where the temperature is controlled, containing no other life than humans, where food and hunger are not connected to any active project, is not a condition under which we evolved. My ADHD was a bad fit for the world I grew up in, but it fits hunting like a glove. After hunting, my mind feels rested in a way I had not thought possible.
My mind wanders in the dark. So much so that when I actually hear the hogs, I feel as though I have been woken up from sleep. When I smell them, it feels like being run over by something. I don't have a particularly good sense of smell, but this is not a subtle note. An overwhelming mixture of manure and rotten fruit laced with athlete’s foot rolls through, and it feels as if the meadow is absolutely theirs. Deep, guttural snorts pushed by huge, twitchy lungs and frantic, mischievous squeals.
It sounds like a lot of them, just past the black tree wall, in the dark between grainy, gray forms of trees. I've nocked an arrow and I'm pulling on it just a little, down at my waist. I won't come to full draw until I'm ready to release one because, at fifty pounds of pressure, I can only hold it for a few seconds. I'm shaking, so I rehearse what my release should feel like, upper back extending, touch my ear with my fingers.
They feel so close now, and I remind myself this is what I wanted. This was exactly the plan.
They do not enter my meadow, but go the other way, deeper into the brush, to another meadow, to daytime beds, or to forage. I'm still standing motionless as the tide of sound and smell peaks and subsides around me slowly as the sky reveals the details of trees and bushes. I walk to other meadows in bright sunshine and study tracks. It's astounding how many pigs are apparently here, though it no longer feels like a place with any surprises, with every crevice and stick illuminated.
I check a few places I know they bed down, walk for a few hours, and surrender to ADHD. I find things: interesting trees, shed antlers, bones. My mind roars through every thought I've been waiting to have all week in a kind of waking dream. I am nearly hallucinating.
When the sun is hot, I make my way back to the car and gather myself back together as I eat a sandwich. I wait for all the little parts of me to come back out of the woods and pile into the car. There is no carcass to deal with, which is both frustrating and a relief. I think about the hogs while I drive, the sound and the smell, how they evaporated in the sun… All those minds dreaming in the bushes, waiting for the moon.
Ryan Gossen is a writer living in Austin, Texas, where he also pursues dance, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and climbing, and is an active member of Texas Search and Rescue. He has had many vocations, including user experience (UX) designer, experimental psychologist, construction worker, arborist, and ski bum. He writes mostly about man’s interaction with nature. More of his writing can be found on his website. This is his first essay for Dead Foot Collective.
