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By Root 649 0

quality of this attention. I notice how the day’s first breezes comb the needles in the pines, producing a sotto voce whistle and an undulation in the pattern of light and shadow tattooing the tree trunks and the ground. I notice the specific density of the air. But this is not a passive or aesthetic attention; it is a hungry attention, reaching out into its surroundings like fingers, like nerves. My eyes venture deep into thickets my body could never penetrate, picking their way among the tangled branches, sliding over rocks and around stumps to bring back the slenderest hint of movement. In the places too deeply shadowed to admit my eyes my ears roam at will, returning with the report of a branch cracking at the bottom of a ravine, or the snuffling of a…wait: What was that? Just a bird. Everything is amplified. Even my skin is alert, so that when the shadow launched by the sudden ascent of a turkey vulture passes overhead I swear I can feel the temperature momentarily fall. I am the alert man.

Hunting powerfully inflects a place. The ordinary prose of the ground, the literally down-to-earth, becomes as layered and springy as verse. Angelo, my Virgil in this world, has taught me how to read the ground for signs of pig. Notice the freshly rototilled soil at the base of that oak tree? Look how the earth has not yet been crisped by the midday sun; this means pigs have been rooting here since yesterday afternoon, either overnight or earlier this morning. See that smoothly scooped-out puddle of water? That’s a wallow, but notice how the water is perfectly clear: Pigs haven’t disturbed it yet today. We could wait here for them. Angelo says that the pigs, who travel in groups of a half dozen or so, follow a more or less fixed daily routine, moving from place to place, feeding, sleeping, cooling off. This grove of oaks is where they root for acorns, tubers, and grubs. In the afternoon heat they snooze in oval nests scooped out of the dusty dirt beneath that protective tangle of manzanita. They cool off in these muddy wallows, the shores of which are letterpressed with dainty hoof prints. They scrape the mud from their backs on that pine tree there, the one where the lower bark is rubbed smooth and tan. And they move from one such pig place to another along narrow lanes that temporarily part the thick pelts of rattlesnake grass clothing the hillsides; since the grass springs back to erase their lanes after a few hours of sunshine, you can form a pretty good idea of how recently they’ve passed through here. On their appointed rounds the pigs can cover forty square miles in a day.

After hunting here for years Angelo has come to the conclusion there are three distinct groups sharing the oak forest and the grassy ridge above it like three overlapping nations, each with a slightly different map of good pig places. The hunter maintains his own mental map of the same ground, marked with auspicious spots, the places he has encountered pigs before and the connecting routes he can navigate, which of course are far fewer than those available to the pigs. Unlike that of the pigs, the hunter’s map also contains legal things like property lines and rights of way.

The hunter’s aim is to have his map collide with the pig’s map, which, should it happen, will do so at a moment of no one’s choosing. For although there’s much the hunter can know about pigs and about their places, in the end he knows nothing about what is going to happen here today, whether the longed-for and dreaded encounter will actually take place and, if it does, how it will end.

Since there’s nothing he can do to make the encounter happen, the hunter’s energy goes into readying himself for it, and attempting, by the sheer force of his attention, to summon the animal into his presence. The drama of the hunt links the actors in it, predator and prey, long before they actually meet. Approaching his prey, the hunter instinctively becomes more like the animal, straining to make himself less visible, less audible, more exquisitely alert. Predator and prey alike move according to