Nature and hunting books can supply literary comfort food over the holidays

The call to my office came on a sunny spring day that found me wanting an excuse to be outside. On the other end, my now ex-wife Brenda, a wonderful lady, was screaming with such fervor I could not understand a word.

Upon hanging up, I called the local police department and told the dispatcher I needed someone to go to my house as something terrible must be happening. The dispatcher, as they are wont to do, deadpanned, "Yeah, your house is burning down."

When I pulled up to the house there were fire trucks with firemen dispensing fire retardant. Others were running in and out with air packs and axes. Brenda was standing back clutching our 4-year-old son as the school bus deposited my daughter into the living nightmare.

Standing next to my family, relieved that no one was hurt, I watched flames shoot out of the house and black clouds of smoke billow into the blue sky. We would be OK, we had insurance, jobs and our health. What I could not recover were the images and words from a lifelong collection of hunting books that drifted away in black soot.

I read early and often, and most of my reading consisted of hunting tales. Books and magazines with hunting stories were ripe for my young eyes. The adventures of the early days of African hunting and exploration were mesmerizing. I wanted nothing more from life than to wander the length and breadth of the Dark Continent, shooting elephants, lions, leopards, rhinos and Cape buffalo. Stories of taking huge moose, caribou, bears and Dall sheep from Alaska and the Yukon Territory ran a close second.

[How to save lions in Africa?  Hunt them.]

In those days, outdoor stories were literature. Hemingway, Ruark, Selous, Bell and Stigand, to name a few, brought the outdoors into the living room in a way that seems to have become lost in the shuffle of the corporate world of outdoor products and developing one's "brand." One could settle into a comfortable chair and within minutes be transported.

What one does not do, having just lost most of your worldly possessions, is start trying to replace books, many of which were long out of print and rather expensive. It would be many years before time and circumstance led to replacing those lost treasures.

Most surprising, when I renewed the search for them, was realizing the person who cherished those books had changed.

Killing an elephant had lost its appeal. What would I do with it? Even if import-export laws allowed it, who could afford to ship the meat of a dressed-out elephant from Africa to Alaska?

I still understand those who love those tales; I just don't anymore. The stories of taking a leopard or a lion from a blind over bait no longer make the heart race. The adventure remains attractive — the thought of taking a rogue elephant or a man-eating leopard in full charge, or missing the mark and paying the ultimate price remains heart-throbbing. But those things are not a realistic possibility for a modern hunter in today's Africa.

Without the intense focus on hunting, the deeper and perhaps more important message came to light. The history portrayed in these works ironically is tied directly to the invasion and destruction of wild places by "civilized" man, places coveted above all by hunters. These resourceful and determined folks, unwittingly it seems, stopped at nothing to climb the next mountain or cross the next river to find more game.

Fortunes were won and lost, and some were killed by the game they pursued. They also paved the way for entrepreneurial Western Europeans seeking a new life in a place where there was land to conquer and empires to build.

During essentially the same time period, the late 1700s to the early 1900s, America was a virtual mirror image of Africa.

Running rampant across the country, market hunters killed virtually everything that crossed their paths.  If it had commercial value, it died. This period of American hunting history did not garner the attention or proliferation of writing that Africa did — perhaps because there were no elephants, rhinos, leopards, lions or Cape buffalo that so captured the imagination.

Alaska was a bit different. The works of Annabel, Young, Sheldon and McGuire illuminated the Alaska hunting adventure in much the same light as early Africa — a frontier where a hunter might roam for weeks and never see another person. That remains possible today.

The changed face of modern Africa has lost most of its allure. African photography would be awesome except taking photographs from a wildlife photography tour bus has about the same appeal as high-fence hunting. Perhaps it is still possible to find a place in Africa to wander unfettered by property rights or government regulations and maybe someday I'll find it.

But the prospect of hunting on your own, as far as I can tell, does not exist.

We still have Alaska, at least for the moment.

But I fear that Alaska's future could resemble Africa's. The new presidential administration could jeopardize the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, for instance.

Alaska may be the last place that can still get it right, and the ever-increasing demands of an expanding human biomass means we really have to pay attention and thwart efforts that could fundamentally change the Alaska landscape.

During my search to replace the "comfort food" that a good book provides, I have found a few that anyone who cares about the natural world — hunter or not — should read.

"The Wilderness Warrior" by Douglas Brinkley is an incredible 800-page history of the conservation efforts of Theodore Roosevelt and the cadre of people he surrounded himself with to ensure the American people would always have the natural wonders of flora and fauna.

[Review of Brinkley's "The Quiet World"]

In "Wild Ones" by Jon Mooallem, the author takes a rather unconventional look at efforts to save three species on the brink of extinction and finds that it is often much more about the people than the animals.

"The End of The Game" by Peter Beard is a sprawling work of photojournalism exposing the history of overhunting and over preservation in East Central Africa. A favorite quote from the book comes from Phillip Percival, one of the storied professional hunters who accompanied Theodore Roosevelt on safari. While admiring the way African hunting tribes had once lived in harmony with the lands they occupied, he said, "The ways of these hunters are beginning to show us how we are failing as human beings and as organisms in a world beset by a success that hunters never wanted."

I hope this holiday season you'll find time to take step back from the computer, settle into an easy chair next to the fire (not your house burning) with a gun dog lying close and revisit our hunting history through the written word. It's worth the price of admission.

Steve Meyer of Soldotna is lifetime Alaskan and an avid shooter. He writes every other week about guns and Alaska hunting. Contact Steve at oldduckhunter@outlook.com