The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [177]
“You weren’t ready,” Angelo said, levelly. “In hunting you always need to be ready. So, okay, you learned something today. Next time you will be ready and you will take your shot.” He was trying hard not to sound like the disappointed father; even so, I couldn’t help feeling like the disappointing son.
So what had really happened? I hadn’t been ready to shoot. But why? The practical reasons seemed clear enough; surely it had made more sense to give my shot to Richard than to risk losing the animal. It was because of my unselfish decision that we now had this pig. Yet maybe there was some deeper sense in which I hadn’t been ready; maybe my failure to have a bullet in the chamber reflected some unconscious reluctance about doing what I was asking myself to do. The fact is I’d blown it, and I wasn’t sure how deep I should go in search of an explanation. And yet I had been, and still was, determined to shoot a pig: I had a meal to cook, for one thing, but I was also genuinely hungry for the experience, to learn whatever it had to teach me. So I spent the rest of the afternoon hunting intently alone, walking the ridge, raking the shadows for signs of pig, looking and listening as hard as I could to will another animal out of the woods. When Angelo announced it was time to go home, I felt deflated.
Jean-Pierre generously offered to give me some cuts of his pig. Since I needed the meat for my meal I was grateful for his offer, yet I understood that to accept it underscored my inferior status in our little society of hunters. To the successful hunter goes the privilege of giving away the spoils, and I’d read a lot in the anthropological literature suggesting just how important that privilege was. The sheer nutritional density of meat has always made it a precious form of social currency among hunter-gatherers. Since the successful hunter often ends up with more meat than he or his family can eat before it spoils, it makes good sense for him to, in effect, bank the surplus in the bodies of other people, trading meat for obligations and future favors. Chimps will do the same thing. Not to say that Jean-Pierre was lording it over me or demanding anything in return; he wasn’t. But that didn’t change the fact that here I stood, on the vaguely pathetic receiving end of the alpha hunter’s meat gift. (I briefly considered trying to educate Richard about the traditional meat rights of the game spotter, but thought better of it.) I thanked Jean-Pierre for the gift.
IN THE DAYS after I wasn’t sure whether I needed to go hunting again. I had my meat. And I had been hunting: I felt like I had a good idea of what it was all about, or nearly all about—the hunter’s way of being in nature and the way of the pigs. I’d spotted the prey and witnessed the kill. I had a pretty good story, too. And yet everyone to whom I told it managed to remind me how unsatisfactory the ending was. You mean you never even fired your gun?! I’d violated the Chekhovian dramatic rule: Having introduced a loaded gun in Act One, the curtain can’t come down until it is fired. I might miss, but the gun had to be fired. That at least seemed to be the narrative imperative.
And then of course there was Señor Ortega y Gasset, who, as you might expect, was not about to accept me into the fellowship of hunters until I’d actually killed an animal. Mere spectatorship, or “platonic” analogues of hunting such as photography or bird watching, doesn’t cut it for him. (“Platonism,” he writes, “represents the maximum tradition of affected piety.”)
“One can refuse to hunt,” he allows, “but if one hunts one has to accept certain ultimate requirements without which the reality ‘hunting’ evaporates.” Killing is one of those requirements. And although Ortega says one does not hunt in order to kill, he also says that one must kill in order to have hunted. Why? For authenticity