Cookie's Day

Dove season opened today. For me, here in North Dakota, the first day of dove season is the opening of the hunting season. Next week the season on grouse will open and it seems that every week or two thereafter another season will open, in some cases the new season replacing one that is closing. The sequence of seasons opening and closing is something that I truly enjoy. However, in this household I am not alone because Cookie, my German Wirehair, suddenly finds a new purpose in life--the hunt.

For the past several days Cookie has been like a tight clock spring. Every few minutes she would walk around my desk and push her muzzle under my arm and then try to flip my hands off the keyboard. If that didn’t work to get my attention she would start looking around on my desk for something to “retrieve,” usually one of my fountain pens. She doesn’t pick up ballpoint pens and rarely grabs a pencil but when she finally settles on something to retrieve she grabs it, sometimes working herself into a semi-standing position to get what she wants. Her game then is to go around the desk, with the pen in her mouth, and then “bring” me the pen. I don’t know if it is the change in temperature, or like the deciduous trees when the hours of sunlight changes it triggers their change of color, the sunlight somehow tripping Cookie’s awareness that it is nearly hunting season, but something does trigger the change.

As August counts down to September she becomes increasingly fidgety, wanting to get outside, get in the Suburban and do something. She wants to be active. Usually the opening of dove season finds me up early to get in the fields. Today everything had to wait until I had taken care of other business, and I don’t know if Cookie could read my desire to go hunting, or there is a mysterious connection between us, but she knew. This afternoon, when I walked over to the hunting vests hanging on one wall Cooke came unglued. She began jumping around the office and one minute she would be sitting by the door and the next she was right beside me. Suddenly, when I picked up my shotgun she calmed down and went to the door and sat in front of it. Her tail was wagging furiously across the floor and her legs were quivering and she was staring at the door as if she could open it by sheer doggie willpower.

Normally, when I open the office door and Cookie “escapes” into town she runs a few laps around our block, giving my heart another reason not to work as intended because she has no appreciation of cars on the street, but this time she went to the Suburban and waited. I let her in, clipping her leash so she couldn’t get in the front seat, and then I loaded Buster (“her” Basset hound, that’s another story).

After putting my shooting bag and shotgun in the front seat we were off. Cookie was calm, or at least as calm as she can be, while I drove to a prairie road between roost trees and a harvested field. Somewhere between leaving my office and reaching my hunting spot, a place where I could make a blind for pass shooting at dove, I decided that it was Cookie’s day. I arranged my shotgun, possibles bag and all important Thermos of coffee while Cookie and Buster were clipped to the Suburban. Then I was ready. I turned them loose and stood back to watch. Buster started on a heading and his stumpy, fat, legs blurred as he ran across the stubble field. Cookie immediately started hunting. She had her nose down and began coursing, but just as I had earlier decided that it would be her day, she decided to have more fun. She found water, chased the blackbirds out of the cattails, and when I shot at a passing dove she turned to see if it would fall (it didn’t).

Today was Cookie’s day. She ran, she swam, and she hunted, and generally enjoyed life. That is what it is all about, enjoying our world. I fired one barrel of my muzzle loader double and I missed. Okay, who cares? I don’t. Maybe I am becoming older, or less critical of myself, but whatever it is I had more fun watching my dog bound across the stubble field, charge into the cattails and then splash and swim. She shook off the summer and prepared herself for what is truly her season--the autumn, when colors of celebration burst throughout the tree lines, farmsteads and along the rivers, and deep inside those color filled days is the time of the hunt--Cookie’s time--our time. I suppose that is what separates us from those who don’t hunt. All they can do is look at Cookie’s time; those of us who hunt are part of her time. It really is a big difference in how we are living life.

Think about it. glg

The Rocking Horse Effect

At last we have a real summer day, the mercury has climbed into the high 90s and with the humidity we’re having a heat index of 107. For us, that’s a lot of heat. We’ll be dropping back into the 80s and below in a few days so we will have had our “summer heat wave.”

One of my pleasures in life is thinking. I know that all of us “think,” but what I enjoy doing is taking a problem and putting it in my head, somewhere in the subconscious, and letting it percolate. After some amount of time I have my answer. This is probably why I am lousy at taking tests. I want to spend too much time looking at the problem before presenting my answer. This is the point of “The Thinking Hunter.” I am not interested in presenting quick answers to questions that are presented to me, but answers that I try to reach after working with the question. I like to research the question and the ramifications of the different answers before I settle on one. I am not saying that my answer to a question or problem is “the” answer, but that when I do offer an answer it is one that has been carefully thought about. Some questions have no viable answer because each answer creates a new set of problems that require different answers. Philosophers have dealt with this problem for centuries and while they understand it, have identified it and provide several different descriptive names and analyses for it, are no closer to resolving it. An example of this (in our world of the outdoors) is the question of wild geese. Regardless of the course of action taken to control wild geese numbers that have reached problematic population levels the action is going to produce both negative and positive results. Plus, if the action taken is emphasized to produce greater results, whether negative or positive, more negative results will be produced.

For Example: If, in one population area, the action taken removes 500 geese and the positive result is a cleaner (but not completely clean) park then removing 1000 geese should increase the positive result. In fact, the result will depend entirely on the remaining population. If the number of remaining geese is too low to insure the population’s survival of the annual migration there are new problems to consider. Will the park’s aesthetic value be decreased by the lack of returning geese? Or, perhaps the value will increase because the geese were actually decreasing the value. The list of consequences for each action goes on.

So what am I getting at?

Recently I was in a discussion in which the primary topic was whether we (humans) could actually manage wildlife and/or nature. The center of the discussion consisted of the fires, floods, geese and of course wild hogs, all which were brought up by one side as examples of failures of human efforts, while the other side claimed that the present flood situation is a product of humans never having seen this much water, the fires are wholly nature’s doing because of the droughts, the geese populations are a success story and the spread of wild hogs is a benefit by providing meat (when on accessible lands) and income (guides, etc.). I retreated from offering an opinion because I wanted to think about the question: Can we humans manage wildlife/nature without creating such imbalances that nature’s corrections create an ecological rocking horse effect?

Think about it--I am.

glg

Outside vs Inside Nature & Caves of Steel

If we hunt we are acting “within” nature. If we only observe then are we acting “outside” of nature? Over the past few weeks I’ve been reading a couple of books and a number of essays on the subject of identification of our position in relation to nature. Now, as some of you may know, I maintain that nature is consistent with wherever a person happens to be. The sort of nature a person is experiencing will vary, from the living room of a home to the nature of the northern woods, but I believe each one is nature. In the one nature will exist the mites, insects, pets, houseplants, people and maybe even mice, and at the other end we will have moose, bear, fish, with thousands of other forms of wildlife.

My question is this: “Is there a true separation between being “within” and “outside” of nature?

Can anyone actually find themselves living outside of nature short of living in a bubble to be isolated from even bacteria? I want to answer my own question with the statement that “no, we cannot escape from nature.” But, if that statement is true then how do we explain the identified psychological problems that are known to arise with children and adults who have been raised to think of themselves as being separated from nature by the march of technology and growing reality of Asimov’s Caves of Steel?

We don’t need to read the work of today’s influential thinkers to realize there is a functionality disorder commonly shared among people who grew up in the sans-nature environs of urbanized cultures. Frequently, we find these people the targets for fund raising campaigns by radical anti-hunting/fishing movements, or similar activities, and these people never check the groups’ backgrounds to verify their claims. Simply being pro animal rights on some level is enough and they make their donations, ignoring the Silver of Judas in the leadership’s hands. Sadly, these same people will reject valid conservation and preservation programs administered by organizations with no connection to the consumptive sports—even in their own backyards—to follow the movement’s credo. What is truly disturbing is that very few of these well-meaning people are capable of identifying wild flowers, animals, and even local bird species and when asked, cannot identify the ecological zone they live in! For millions of people the very closest they ever come to “wildlife” is the city zoo and the only interaction with an animal is a dog, cat, or other pet and they cannot fathom a cat relieving itself outside of a box of kitty litter or a day not following Spot on the city sidewalk and picking up after the dog.

Most authors of academic studies place the blame for the creation of our “no nature” generation on the advent of replacement social technology. That is the technology of tools that replace the need, or desire, to go outside and interact with nature and other people in the freer environment of nature where playful creativity and social interaction generates a stronger sense of well-being. These researchers are on to something that is important, except that the replacement technology, whether we are talking about computer games (online or in computer) or other aspects of technology, are only as valid as the individual is willing to let them become and they only gain validity when the technology is an economical substitute for outdoor activities. I realized the importance of the economic battle between technology and the outdoors when pricing fishing tackle after a discussion with my step-son over the price of a computer game—the computer game was much less expensive than the lowest priced, moderate quality rod and reel combination. That revelation had been foretold nearly twenty years ago when an older hunter stopped by our Colorado hunting camp to share hunting tips and coffee. I and another hunter from our group had been working on our laptops because both of us had article deadlines for the day after we returned from camp. The older hunter looked disgustedly at the computers. He asked me how much I paid for my laptop and after I told him he snorted and said, “Someday, when that thing is cheaper than a hunting trip, people will stay home with those and your grand kids won’t get to go hunting.”

He was a prophet.

That’s the problem that so many researchers are alluding to—technology is replacing activity. I maintain there is much more to the equation than technology being guilty of locking us indoors—we’ve made nature a victim of ourselves. We’ve damaged nature with the industry that drives our civilization and if there is to be any repairing of nature then people have got to be willing to foot the bill. I’m not so sure people are. Consider the BP spill, media attention has increasingly focused on how much the spill is costing BP and then how and when that cost will be passed on to consumers. Already, those people who live close to the spill are worrying that both the government and BP are setting the stage to “cut-n-run.”

I suspect that two strong factors are working against the repair of the damaged nature and they are the public’s fear of paying for cleaning up coastal wetlands that most people have never seen, nor do they understand, and the second factor is time—the more time after the event the farther the event is from the public’s mind. The public needs to understand that when nature has people interacting and protecting it, it is going to support us as a species. We, as individuals, must not be tricked into accepting an artificial nature created in a computer or the lobby of a massive hotel as the nature that sustains our world. No matter how hard programmers try to incorporate nature into the machine it remains the machine and is outside of nature, and when the real nature needs humanity’s help a line of computer code will not save nature as we know it.

Think about it. glg

If you have never read Caves of Steel, the robot series, Caves of Steel (Robot (Spectra Books)) or Robot Trilogy: The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn it is well worth the time to read it. He wrote The Caves of Steel in 1954 and it is incredible how much of the book has become reality. You don't have to be a fan of Science Fiction to enjoy Asimov's work. glg