A thoughtful commenter on one of my recent blog entries asked why exactly I have been setting about packs of wild boar on foot with nothing more than a knife in hand. This is a reasonable question. There are two reasons.
First, I have become very much interested in very primitive hunting methods. Persistence hunting has been one of those primitive methods that I've blogged about before, but I'm not really cut out for long-distance running at the moment. I'm in decent shape but I haven't been training for marathon-type distances and with several old injuries to my feet and knees (broken bones which were not properly dealt with at the time) I doubt that I am physically capable of running for that long.
Yet persistence hunting is only the first of humankind's early hunting techniques. Ambushing prey on foot with a simple blade must surely have followed closely on the heels of persistence hunting.
This is what I have been attempting with these wild pigs. Indeed, I do not think that it would be possible to use persistence hunting methods to take a wild pig. Swine tend to head straight for very thick cover that they know very well and a runner would be lost quickly in it. Pigs create a maze of tunnels roughly three feet high through thorns and scrub which they can run through but which a human pursuer would have to drop to hands and knees to pass through. Trust me, I have tried.
Taking wild pigs on foot requires either something that holds the pig in place (as when hunting with trained dogs) or closing with the animal very rapidly and either overtaking or cornering it in order to kill it with a knife or spear.
I have made a habit of hunting armadillos this way, which has been good practice for running down pigs. Only a few days ago I used a steep cliff to corner an armadillo and took it on foot alone, butchering it for food. The idea is to scale up these tactics against more dangerous prey. Eventually I would like to amass enough experience hunting a variety of prey this way to be able to produce a book or a documentary film about it. As a survival tactic, it would be a valuable skill. All that you need is a sharp thing and good health. Nobody else seems to be researching this so it seems like something I ought to be doing.
I think that actually attempting these primitive techniques can help me to understand some very old aspects of being human in a way that mere research cannot.
The other reason, which I find difficult to explain, is that once I had the idea I cannot bear the thought of failing to follow through with it.
I realize that what I am doing is extremely dangerous and arguably stupid. If I keep it up then eventually I am going to find myself up against a large, aggressive boar and I will be badly injured. I know this. A subsistence hunter 20,000 years ago had the advantage of growing up in a society where these things were taught from a young age and he or she learned tactics from stories and examples that I have to learn for myself, the hard way.
Yet I live in an age of penicillin, plaster casts and expert stitching. The odds of me actually being killed by a wild boar are very low. Worst case scenario, I get torn up and bitten and lose some blood and maybe suffer some nerve damage and broken bones. I can deal with that. The real problem is that I have had the idea and now that I have been presented with the opportunity to follow through with it, I would never be able to forgive myself for not making the attempt. At heart, I suspect that this is the same thought process that goes through the mind of any American football quarterback. He knows that its only a matter of time until he receives the big injury, but he goes back into the game again and again because he must.
My whole approach to the way that I live my life has changed very much over the last few years. I have a philosophy of living -- which I apply only to myself and hold up as a standard for nobody else -- which demands that I constantly seek out and choose a better story to live. This is approximately what Teddy Roosevelt referred to as "choosing the strenuous life." I am well aware of the fact that I am burning the candle at both ends and that sooner or later there will be a toll to pay.
[Photo copyright 2011 by Jackson Landers and Helenah Svedberg.]
6 comments:
"Eventually I would like to amass enough experience hunting a variety of prey this way to be able to produce a book or a documentary film about it."
Now that's a book I'd read, and a class I'd probably take too!
rob
Jack,
Thanks for answering my question in such a thoughtful manner. I would like to caution you to please be more careful. Killing a game animal armed only with a knife is a chancy proposition and, as you acknowledge, a dangerous one. Just last week, a Fort Wayne, Indiana man was kicked and killed by a wounded deer: http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20111116/LOCAL07/311169959/1043/LOCAL07
I am intrigued by your quest to hunt in the most primitive way possible, but I wonder about whether it is a realistic goal or not. After all, how many societies do we know of that actually used "chasum-with-a-stick" as a strategy for regular hunts? That works somewhat well for rabbits, armadillos, or other animals that are either slow-footed or dim-witted (or both), but I think that you are finding that it doesn't work very well for animals with any get up and go about them. Off the top of my head, the closest analog to such a strategy might be the childhood initiation rites that some groups used, but they served a different purpose than putting meat on the table regularly. My hunch is that most such groups used other means when hunting for food such as snares, drives, spears, bows, guns!, etc. Heck, even the persistence hunters of Africa use poisoned darts at the end of the chase.
As I tell my children each and every time that they ask me how I got skunked on a day in the woods: the animals do this for a living, I'm just a rank amateur.
Best of luck all the same. You can definitely sign me up for a copy of the book that you write from these adventures.
Bobby,
I am not aware of any African groups that combined poison with persistence hunting. Both methods were used, but my understanding is that these were independent tactics. I think the idea was that the poison prevented the hunter from having to run in the first place.
Running down large quadrupeds and finishing them with a rock or a spear works very well. Watch the very last episode of David Attenborough's 'The Lives of Mammals' to see this in action on a kudu in the Khalahari desert. By the time that those guys run the kudu down, you can just see that it is finished. No poison necessary.
I also suggest reading the pertinent chapter in the excellent book, 'Born to Run.' That chapter is loaded with sources and examples of this type of hunting.
Chasing things with a stick can definitely work. What you are talking about in reference to snares, drives and bows represents later technology. I absolutely agree that those technologies work better in many habitats and that they represented big steps forward.
The question as to whether game like wild boar can be run down and taken on foot with only a knife or spear is one that you and I and just about everyone else is answering with hunches and 'it-would-seems.' I have simply decided to try to answer the question with first-hand experience. Maybe a year from now my answer will be 'this does not work well enough to survive on', but at least that answer will come from real knowledge instead of the armchair wisdom that has informed my opinion on the topic in the past.
Ray Mears followed a group of hunters in Namibia who ran down a Kudu until they could put a poisoned arrow into it. It didn't die immediately, though, so they had to keep running else lose it to other predators. He indicated that it could take from several hours to several days to die depending upon the size of the animal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXlwyTSsDY&feature=related
BTW, I watched part of the David Attenborough documentary where they ran down the Kudu. That was interesting and the concept was very similar to what Mears documented. I couldn't help but notice that the hunter in Attenborough's documentary used a spear in the end. It's instructive to note that even folks who do that sort of thing regularly don't take chances by using a knife.
How long do you suppose a wild pig could run before it collapsed like the Kudu did in both documentaries? I am guessing that it could go for quite some time judging by the videos that I have seen of them being hunted from the air out in Texas. Those rascals flat out covered some territory.
I'll keep my eyes open for "Born to Run" and pick it up next time that I see it. Didn't Outside magazine do a story where they had some ultra-marathoners try this on a fenced ranch out West last year? I seem to recall that they were moderately successful but lacked the killer instinct to actually close the deal at the end, which is not too surprising as none of them were hunters anyway.
Bobby,
I figure that a kudu can put a horn through a man's ribcage pretty quick up close, killing him. There's no way that I would try to finish one of those with only a knife. The spear is the way to go there.
Eventually I would like to try a spear for hunting pigs. I used a knife in Texas because I happened to have knives and I was fresh out of spears.
The tactic I favor right now for running down pigs is not long-distance persistence hunting as with the kudu. I don't think that will work very well because the pigs will tend to head into a maze of thick cover which a human cannot run in. What I am favoring right now is either ambushing or stalking in very close in order to pounce and keep the chase very short. Hunting more like a leopard than a wolf. It becomes a question of reading the terrain and the wind to determine what point to put myself relative to where the pigs are or will be at the time that the chase starts.
I'm going to write up a blog entry in the next few days detailing the tactics that are working for me so far.
Jack,
I am not always a fan of your hunting methods (i.e. shooting geese over tree tops), but I am a fan of your persistence and internal desire to get out there and make it happen.
If this is coupled with the ability to say, "Wow, this is not a way to handle this type of hunt in the long term," you will be amongst a rare breed - hunters who learn new tricks and can admit their errors.
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