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By Root 486 0

’t ever, as he points out, go back to being Christian in the manner of St. Augustine, say, because once history begins it is irreversible. So how is it we can still go back to being Paleolithic? Because our identity as hunters is literally prehistoric—is in fact inscribed by evolution in the architecture of our bodies and brains. (Of course, the same might be said about gathering, too, which Ortega doesn’t address; my guess is that that way of being in nature is insufficiently dramatic or masculine for the Spaniard’s taste.) Much that surrounds hunting nowadays is completely artificial, Ortega freely admits, yet the experience itself, the encounter of predator and prey, is no fiction. (Just ask the animals.) Even though the hunt takes place during a brief “vacation” from modern life, what occurs in the space of that electrifying parenthesis will ever and always be, in a word Ortega never shrinks from using, “authentic.”

3. READY. OR NOT.

As I said, all this seemed much less crazy to me after I’d been in the woods that first morning with my gun, long before I even had occasion to fire it. I’m chagrined to report that that occasion never presented itself during that first hunting trip—or rather, when it did present itself I was in no position to do anything about it. I know, I’ve been talking here like Mister Big Game Hunter, comparing notes on the experience with the likes of Ortega y Gasset, but I returned from the woods that day not only empty-handed, which in hunting is entirely forgivable, but, what is not, having failed as a hunter because I was not ready.

I blame this, at least partly, on lunch.

By the end of the morning one animal had been shot, a small boar taken by Jean-Pierre. He and Richard had spotted two pigs in the lower forest, a big one and a little one, but by the time they could agree on whose shot it was (Richard politely deferring to his guest, Jean-Pierre to his host) the bigger one had bolted. On our way back up to the ridge in the ATV Angelo and I picked up Jean-Pierre’s animal; it wasn’t a whole lot bigger than a poodle, with a florid red blotch erupting from the side of its bristly black head. Angelo hung it by its ankles from the limb of a tree near the cars; he planned to dress it after lunch.

Being Europeans, as well as accomplished cooks, Angelo and Jean-Pierre take lunch very seriously, even when out in the woods some distance from civilization. “So I brought with me a few little things to nibble on,” Jean-Pierre mumbled. “Me, too,” chimed Angelo. And out of their packs came course after course of the most astonishing picnic, which they proceeded to lay out on the hood of Angelo’s SUV: a terrine of lobster and halibut en gelée, artisanal salami and prosciutto and mortadella, Angelo’s homemade pâté of boar and home-cured olives, cornichons, chicken salad, a generous selection of cheeses and breads, fresh strawberries and pastries, silverware and napkins, and, naturally, a bottle each of red and white wine.

It was a delicious lunch, but arguably it took off some of my hunter’s edge. One of the easier questions on my hunter education exam went something like this: “Hunting while intoxicated is an acceptable practice, true or false.” Not that I was intoxicated, but I was feeling notably relaxed and loquacious when Richard and I set off to look for another pig, while Angelo dressed the little one and Jean-Pierre, having already shot a pig, had a postprandial snooze in the grass. Our rifles slung over our shoulders, we strolled down a shady trail toward a spot where Richard had once had some luck, all the while getting acquainted and chatting about one thing or another. We soon discovered we’d both once worked for the same newspaper, so there was fresh gossip to be traded, scandals to dissect. Thoroughly absorbed in conversation, our attention gradually floated off from these woods all the way to a building in midtown Manhattan. Until, that is, I happened to glance up ahead and saw directly in front of us, not thirty yards away, three or four large black shapes swimming in the shadows. The path