Fatherhood

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
[ Updated: Jul 14, 2008 - 5:10:25 PM ]

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 irre