What We Learn in the Woods The more my kids know about nature, the better they will understand why their particular species bears so much responsibility for the future of all the others. That’s why we hunt... By: T. Edward Nickens Photographs by: Erika Larsen There is a particular expression that fixes my daughter Markie's face when she is watching for a white-tailed deer to step gingerly out of the thick tangle of greenbrier along Black Creek. It is a look unlike any other I have witnessed, at any other time, under any other circumstances. Markie leans slightly forward from the waist, eyes boring into the brambles a hundred yards distant. She does not move. Her lips are pressed thin. She holds her eyes open so long that the corneas glisten with tears, then she forcibly blinks, as if she might miss that exact, exquisite moment when a deer emerges from the shadows and into the open cypress flats. She simply watches, with an intensity that suggests a belief or wish or sheer force of will can draw a deer from the thicket and into view from where our two-person tree stand perches 18 feet up a giant chestnut oak. Her expression is hopeful and expectant, and it is predatory. Not, perhaps, in the sense that mine is predatory, for I am holding the rifle. But it is predatory in that it carries her fervent desire to comprehend the wildness in a large mammal living unfettered in the woods, and her wish to make that deer, in some meaningful way, her own. I have lived 30 years as a hunter, but in the past two years my perspec- tive of what hunting can be has changed in ways that have altered my relationship to my most passionate avocation. My children, Markie, 10, and Jack, 7, are now old enough to spend time with me in the field. In the past, their connection to hunting had been a step removed. They'd run out the door when I pulled up to the house and squabble over who would get the duck feathers or the deer hooves. Then I began taking Markie. Our trips were nothing as intense as hours on a deer stand, but instead purposeful walkabouts through the squirrel woods, with a shotgun in hand. Last year was Jack's year to try to stay still long enough for any animal to wander into view of a bundle of camouflage-clad fidget. They are hooked. For now. I want my children to grow up to be hunters for selfish reasons, and for reasons far beyond self -- mine or theirs. Keep my kids hooked on hunting, and I'll have hunting companions for life. Each morning we spend chasing squirrels is the seed for a greater adventure in years to come -- ducks in the Dakotas, grouse in Vermont, deer in the big bottoms of Georgia. But an embrace of hunting can also be the starting point for a concept of nature unsullied by the overly animated version of the natural world kids are subjected to from birth. To truly understand hunting is to know that nature's beauty is found not only in the spirited, liquid eyes of a fawn but also in its spotted flanks, the sole purpose of which is to confound the wolf. What we take for nature's exquisite and primeval elegance -- the rabbit's laughably long ears, the butterfly's patterned wings -- is often an expression of nature's irrepressible calculus of eat-or-be-eaten. And that calculus is not limited to life beyond the sidewalk. I want my children to know that even the most modern life, the one lived closest to the cubicle and the subway, involves tremendous consequences for animals. We make a thousand choices every day -- to wear cotton clothing dyed with ink, to eat fish, to operate an internal combustion engine on the way to a soccer field that once was a meadow filled with nesting meadowlarks -- with little to no regard for their impacts on what Henry Beston calls those "other nations." I want them to understand this fundament of existence in an elemental and clear form: a gun in hand, a finger on a trigger, a choice to make. And one not to make lightly. Markie is tenderhearted, empathetic to every bug that splats on the windshield. She has a love of nature that manifests itself in a collection of bones displayed near a family of stuffed tigers. She is beginning to process this push-pull of hunting -- the love of the woods and its wild lives with those awkward, still moments after the blast of the gun. She walks on my right, away from the muzzle, down the path at Edie Pie's farm. She likes to look for the squirrels, wants me to shoot them as they dash through the treetops. "It's only fair, Dad," she shrugs. "You miss a lot, you know." This is good, I think. Already she is fashioning an ethic of fair chase in which the jaws sometimes snap on thin air or tail feathers. "Are you going to take a gun?" she asked, the last time I proposed a deer hunt. "We are hunting, you know. That's part of it." She wrinkled her nose. "No mamas, then, promise?" "No doe," I agreed. "We'll hold out for a big buck. And maybe we'll just watch him hang out for a while." Jack, however, is a bottom-line guy. The sight of a squirrel in the woods where we hunt, as we hunt, sends him into white-knuckled fits of excitement that threaten to burst through every pore of his body. "Daddy! Daddy! See him? Do you see him? Are you gonna shoot? Shoot! Daddy, shoot!" He sits beside me, against a tree, rocking back and forth in an attempt to stay still. He holds his little Buck BB gun in his lap, forgetting to pout because I won't let him load it yet. Another year, perhaps. There is, after all, a process to this. Long before Markie and Jack held a BB gun, they held a bug net. Our playroom sports three aquariums regulated by a seven-day rule: Live animals are returned to natural habitat within a week. Frogs, snakes, fish, lizards, insects -- bring 'em home. Watch. Feed. Water. Learn to care. Every box of PetSmart crickets carried a lesson: Big or small, man or beast, scale or exoskeleton, we rely on each other. Another part of that process involves the gun in hand. Vice President Dick Cheney's recent relationship with a Perazzi 28-gauge shotgun -- a dainty firearm compared to the workhorse 12-gauge -- caused a national spotlight on hunting safety, and it's one I welcome. I want gun safety front and center. I want my kids to know what I knew at age 10 -- to pick up a firearm and, without thinking, check the safety, point the muzzle up, and peer into the chamber to make sure it's unloaded. In my house, there is nothing mysterious about a gun. Unless it is on its way to the truck, it is locked in a safe. But guns are used, and regularly. My kids think of a gun as they think of an axe or duct tape. It is a tool. But I don't take my kids hunting just to teach them firearm safety or to ensure that I'll have playmates for my dreamy forays to distant woods. I take them so they will experience the natural world in a way that puts them in the picture. The more my kids know about nature -- real nature, beyond the pixel-perfect world of Pixar Studios -- the better they will understand why their particular species bears so much responsibility for the future of all the others. There will come a time when my children will choose whether they wish to hunt or not. It may be a precise moment of great weight and consequence or it may be a gradual dawning of self apart from nurture and experience: This is not for me. I'd be lying if I said that their choice does not matter. But I'm working on that.