I Am A Hunter Essay example -- Personal Narrative Writing

One cold and bleak December day, I set off into the woods with the sole intention of shooting a grouse for dinner. There would be no sport today; no explosive flushes, no finely crafted double barreled shotguns, no spectacular wing shots. They have their place but not today. A semester at college had made me hungry for fresh, clean, unprocessed meat. I would shoot the bird in the head, on the ground, with a .22 rifle. I was unashamedly out to kill. It was getting dark when I glanced up into the dark boughs of the spruce. I had searched every alder thicket, brush pile, and apple tree that I knew of and here, not one hundred yards from my back door, was the dark, unmistakable, silhouette of a grouse. I slowly raised my rifle, took careful aim, and slowly pulled the trigger. With the snap of the shot, it somersaulted to the ground. My heartbeat quickened as I rushed over to where the bird had fallen . . . Man is a predator and therefore by nature, a hunter. Do not doubt this. While we do not possess the speed of the cheetah, the rapier-like talons of the falcon, nor the strength of the bear, we do have the greatest weapon of all- our superior ability to think. It was the great equalizer that brought us the club, the spear, and the 30.06. For over ninety-nine percent of our history we have utilized weapons as hunter-gather societies (Caras 7), with males traditionally doing the bulk of the hunting. Certainly the remaining one percent is too short a time in our evolutionary history to lose complete touch with our instincts. True, today's "civilized," sedentary world has rid us of our original need to hunt but it has not completely rid us of the urge to hunt in all of us. There are still those of us, for what ever reason, maybe ... ...id. Walden and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. Macmillan Publishing Co. New York. 1962. U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S Fish and Wildlife Service. 1985 National Survey of Hunting, Fishing, and Wildlife Associated Recreation. Washington, D.C. 1988. Works Referenced Casada, Jim (editor). Tales of Whitetails. South Carolina University Press. 1992. Chatwin, Bruce. The Songlines. Viking Penguin. 1987. Hemingway, Ernest. The Green Hills of Africa. Charles Scribner's Sons. New York. 1935. Johnson, Roger. Aggression- In Man and Animals. W.B. Company. Philadelphia. 1972. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. Oxford University Press. London. 1949. Marsh, Peter. Aggro- The Illusions of Violence. J.M. Dent. London. 1978. Robinson William and Eric G. Bolen. Wildlife Ecology and Management. Macmillan Publishing Co. New York. 1984.