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By Root 647 0

resembled the one induced by smoking marijuana: the way one’s senses feel especially acute and the mind seems to forget everything outside the scope of its present focus, including physical discomfort and the passing of time. One of the more interesting areas of research in the neurosciences today is the study of the brain’s “cannabinoid network,” a set of receptors in the nervous system that are activated by a group of unusual compounds called cannabinoids. One of these compounds is THC, the active ingredient in marijuana; another is anandamide, a recently discovered neurotransmitter manufactured in the brain (and named by its discoverer for the Sanskrit word for inner bliss). Whether made by the plant or the brain, cannabinoids have the effect of intensifying sensory experience, disabling short-term memory, and stimulating appetite. Scientists still aren’t certain what the evolutionary utility of such a system might be. Some researchers hypothesize that the cannabinoids, like the opiates, play a role in the brain’s pain relief and reward system; others that they help regulate appetite, or emotion.

The experience of hunting suggests another theory. Could it be that the cannabinoid network is precisely the sort of adaptation that natural selection would favor in the evolution of a creature who survives by hunting? A brain chemical that sharpens the senses, narrows your mental focus, allows you to forget everything extraneous to the task at hand (including physical discomfort and the passage of time), and makes you hungry would seem to be the perfect pharmacological tool for man the hunter. All at once it provides the motive, the reward, and the optimal mind-set for hunting. I would not be the least bit surprised to discover that what I was feeling in the woods that morning, crouching against a tree avidly surveying that forest grove, was a tide of anandamide washing over my brain.

But whether I was actually having a cannabinoid moment or not, in the moments before Angelo’s whistle pierced my vigil I did feel as though I had somehow entered nature through a new door. For once I was not a spectator but a full participant in the life of the forest. Later, when I reread Ortega y Gasset’s description of the experience, I decided that maybe he wasn’t so crazy after all, not even when he asserted that hunting offers us our last best chance to escape history and return to the state of nature, if only for a time—for what he called a “vacation from the human condition.”

When one is hunting, the air has another, more exquisite feel as it glides over the skin or enters the lungs, the rocks acquire a more expressive physiognomy, and the vegetation becomes loaded with meaning. But all this is due to the fact that the hunter, while he advances or waits crouching, feels tied through the earth to the animal he pursues, whether the animal is in view, hidden, or absent.

The tourist in nature achieves no such immersion or connection; all he sees is a landscape, which is something made by history (and rather recently at that). His gaze conditioned by art and expectation, the tourist remains a spectator to a scene, unable to get outside himself or history, since the landscape he beholds is as much the product of his civilization as of nature.

The tourist sees broadly the great spaces, but his gaze glides, it seizes nothing, it does not perceive the role of each ingredient in the dynamic architecture of the countryside. Only the hunter, imitating the perpetual alertness of the wild animal, for whom everything is danger, sees everything and sees each thing functioning as facility or difficulty, as risk or protection.

Ortega believed that in hunting we returned to nature because “hunting is the generic way of being a man” and because the animal we are stalking summons the animal still in us. This is atavism pure and simple—the recovery of an earlier mode of being human—and that for Ortega is the supreme, and the exclusive, value of hunting. For perhaps his most outrageous claim is that the hunt is the only such return available to us—we can