The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [173]
“You are going to kill your first pig today,” Angelo shouted over the roar of the engine. Given the nature of hunting, not to mention me, I understood this as less a prediction than a prayer. Around every curve of road we came upon another “really good spot” or “very prevalent area,” and each such place had a hunting story attached to it. Indeed, the whole landscape soon became an epic of pig death and pig death narrowly averted. There was the one about the sow Angelo couldn’t bring himself to shoot because her piglets were trailing behind. (“But since then I learned that another pig would have adopted the babies, that’s what they do, so maybe next time….”) There was the spot where he’d fired into a knot of pigs and hit two with one bullet. And then there was the place where he’d taken a long shot at a boar that must have been easily three, four hundred pounds, but missed. A story about the big one that got away is all-important, of course, since it imbues the hunting ground with mythical possibility. The big one was still out there, somewhere.
After a while we parked the bike and set out on foot on our own. Angelo gave me a route and a destination—a wallow in a grassy opening at the bottom of a ravine—and told me to find a tree with a good view of it and wait there, perfectly still, for twenty minutes until I heard him whistle. He would make his way toward the same spot from another direction, in the hopes of driving some pigs into my field of vision.
When I could hear Angelo’s footsteps no more my ears and eyes started tuning in—everything. It was as if I’d dialed up the gain on all my senses or quieted myself to such an extent that the world itself grew louder and brighter. I quickly learned to filter out the static of birdsong, of which there was plenty at that early hour, and to listen for the frequency of specific sounds—the crack of branches or the snuffling of animals. I found I could see farther into the woods than I ever had before, picking out the tiniest changes in my visual field at an almost inconceivable distance, just so long as those changes involved movement or blackness. The sharpness of focus and depth of field was uncanny, though, being nearsighted, I knew it well from the experience of putting on glasses with a strong new prescription for the first time. “Hunter’s eye,” Angelo said later when I described the phenomenon; he knew all about it.
I found a shaded spot overlooking the wallow and crouched down in the leaves, steadying my back against the smooth trunk of a madrone. I rested my gun across my thighs and got quiet. The whoosh of air through my nostrils suddenly sounded calamitous, so I began inhaling and exhaling through my mouth, silencing my breath. So much sensory information was coming into my head that it seemed to push out the normal buzz of consciousness. The state felt very much like meditation, though it took no mental effort or exercise to achieve that kind of head-emptying presence. The simple act of looking and listening, tuning my senses to the forest frequencies of Pig, occupied every quadrant of mental space and anchored me to the present. I must have lost track of time because the twenty minutes flashed by. Ordinarily my body would have rebelled at being asked to hold a crouch that long, but I felt no need to change position or even to shift my weight.
Later it occurred to me that this mental state, which I quite liked, in many ways