Publisher: Norton | 2003 | $24.95 cloth | 320 pages
Reviewer: Thomas Rain Crowe
THE HUNTERS PARADOX
When outdoorsman and nature writer Christopher Camuto goes hunting, he takes
more than his gun. He takes with him: all his senses and all his powers of
observation, as well as deadly aim relating to reportage and what he will bring
back to his readers--we who are lucky enough to share in the feast of this
man's hunt. A hunter's hunter and a writer's writer, Camuto is one of those
rare "birds" (much akin to those he stalks and hunts--quail,
pheasant, turkey or grouse) who doesn't separate himself from his environment.
In this case, the environment is in and around the farms, woodlands and streams
of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where he makes his home.
Hunting
From Home is
Camuto's third book in the last decade, following previous signature classics Another
Country and A
Fly Fisherman's Blue Ridge, and is something of a nexus of the first two books, gathering in the
best qualities of both and bringing them all back home--in and around the two-hundred-acre farm "tucked into
the rumpled upper end of what used to be called the Valley of Virginia about
halfway between the trim-and-tidy college town of Lexington and the
rough-and-tumble factory town of Buena Vista." In Hunting From Home Camuto takes the reader through a
year of intense experiences: hunting grouse with his setter through snowbound
forests in winter; wading trout streams in spring; closely observing birds and
wildlife through summer; exploring the backcountry cutting wood, and hunting
deer in autumn. While Camuto writes incisively about the hunter's paradoxical
love of the game he pursues, he also hunts in the
broadest sense possible, searching out and witnessing the life of the things he
loves--brook trout and black bear, hawks and warblers--with the idea of sharing
the pleasures and preoccupations of a pastoral life lived with deep
satisfaction, on his Highland Farm residence in the shadow of the Blue Ridge.
Never far from home, and with the
sensitive insight of Emerson and the rapier-like thrust of Thoreau, in Hunting
From Home Camuto is firing on all cylinders--synapses crackling, connected and
engaged. "Perhaps staying is a way of passing through," he says,
sage-like, and yet paradoxically before continuing: "The world is sacred
because it is, not because it is a sign of something else....You take what
wildness from a river you bring to it.
The wildness is there in many forms without you, but you must practice
discovery to find it....Give yourself over to it and a river leads you to the
fish. What makes you a fisherman
over time is being interested in the same things as fish. Being in a river gets
you thinking like a fish!...The sound of the big river below sorting stones
like a shaman....
While Camuto can write wisely with the best of them,
("I like things the way they are--tangibly mysterious, the known and the
unknown set out in the open side by side.") he can also dance rings
around a soapbox. And watch out if he should actually climb up on one!
"When the news fools chatter on television about the human genome, they
miss the point. I don't need to hear that they have unlocked the secrets of fingers
and toes, so that some biotech firm can clone more movie stars and athletes. I
want to hear that they have found imprints of the Tigris and Euphrates in our
genes!"
While this may sound a lot like other well-known patrons and
protectors of the environment--such as Thomas Berry and Gary Snyder--Camuto is
nobody's clone. In fact, for my money, Camuto is, pound for pound, word for
word, the heavyweight champion of
Southern nature writing. His book Another Country is, in my mind, the canon and the
standard by which all other nature books are gauged. Hunting From Home simply raises the bar for this man's vault into literary
history.
In this new book, with blackbirds "bursting,"
waxwings "gusting," buntings "clinging," kestrels
"slicing," and swallowtails "festooning," he doesn't need
anyone in the background chirping about his talents and accomplishments, as his
song is all too evident in the text itself. Champions don't need champions, they can speak for
themselves. "The pinky-wide yellow beauties are the platonic form of the
mayfly, their diaphanous yellow wings as pale as the pale evening into which
they disappear. Unless, of course, a plump trout should slurp that
diaphanousness down before dorothea takes flight."
Here, as always, I take the position that the artist (in this
case, the wordsmith) should always have the last word. This is, I believe,
as prudent as it is a proper courtesy. The "pudding" followed by
"the proof." For Hunting
From Home there
need be no exception made; and it ends, rightly, if not prophetically, with these words: "Perhaps we are whatever
we are doing when sunset catches us, working, walking, the ends of the earth
all around us--on Highland Farm and on this hard-used planeteverything aspiring
to be and to show us what it would. Either everything matters or nothing matters.
Either we are all always at home or all everywhere homeless."
