Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter
2:
The
Beginning,
Bruce's
introduction
Journeys of moment are often like rivers of moment. They start in many places and end
up in one. This journey was multiple rivulets that came together. When I was a kid in
grade school, we studied Africa in geography and history, both of which I was pretty good
at, but Africa was a long way away and my grade school education was pretty Eurocentric. I
knew that most of the countries in Africa were colonial, had a pretty good idea of who
owned them, how long they had owned them for, and that there was “jungle” in Africa. I
also knew that people hunted big animals in Africa.
I grew up in North Dakota in the 1950s. In the winter, it got dark between 3:00 and 4:00
in the afternoon and when it got dark it got really cold. We didn't have television until I
was 10 years old, when we did, there wasn't much on, and there was no baseball game to
listen to on the radio in the winter the way you could in the summer. So cold winter nights
were usually spent reading. Some of what I read were hunting magazines, Stories about
blue bills coming over a pass, or mallards landing in a field, or Jimmy Robinson's duck
club up on the Delta marsh were the things that I was most interested in because it was
duck hunting that my father and I did together when I was a boy, not big game hunting.
There were few deer around, (just seeing a wild deer was an event) my father had never
gotten into deer hunting and so I wasn't, and we didn't even own a rifle. But I read those
magazines cover to cover and what I knew about big game hunting came because I read the
stories by Jack O'Connor and Warren Page and Col Townsend Whelan about hunting with a
rifle. Sometimes they wrote about Africa. I read those stories because I read everything,
but they didn't resonate.
The first time Africa resonated with me was one of John Hunter's topics that I happened
to stumble upon when I was eleven years old in the library/waiting room of the nursing
home where my grandmother recovered after she broke her hip. For some reason, John
Hunter's description of the hunting life in Africa seemed, to me, then and now, as more
vivid even than Hemingway's. Through Hunter's eyes the “lure of Africa” seemed real.
But although hunting in Africa seemed real, it was not possible, at least for me, and I
dismissed it.
But, one of the rivulets of this journey, in fact, its origin, is that I am a hunter. Foggy
memory can return me to a time before I actually hunted but not to a time before I knew
what hunting was, or before I wished to hunt. For me it began with ducks on the Dakota
prairie, hunting with my father. I carried a BB gun when I was seven years old, just to go
along. I loved hunting, loved ducks, loved the prairie, and loved my father. Within a couple
of years I had learned to use a shot gun, and we would spend hours looking for water,
looking for ducks, figuring how to set the decoys out, where the ducks wanted to be, what
the wind direction was, and how to get dry when the water came over our hip boots. The
first few years I hunted I had a single shot 20 gauge and when I was 12 years old and in the
 
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