Adventure

Decades ago in western Africa, a young Belgian was fishing with Alfred Nobel's tackle. But as he prepared the dynamite, a fuse shorted. The blast took his arm off at the elbow and hurled him out of the canoe. Stunned and bleeding profusely, Jean-Pierre Hallet managed to stay afloat. But then, over the water's surface, he saw a sandbar empty of crocodiles.

Six-five and 220 pounds, Hallet was a powerful man and could swim well, even trailing the shattered limb. With great force of will, however, he stopped kicking and let his legs sink until he was upright. Crocodiles are built to take horizontal prey, he reasoned. A tall man might survive if he stayed vertical. Slowly, treading water, Jean-Pierre began pulling himself toward shore with his one good arm. Several times he felt the bump of cold, hard snouts. It was, he told me years later, a long journey.

Jean-Pierre went on to distinguish himself as an explorer in the Congo. He became an authority on Pygmies, one of few white men to gain their trust. When he died, he left what may be the greatest collection of Pygmy artifacts ever collected.

Jean-Pierre had little use for sport hunting. On the other hand, he knew well the trails in the Ituri Forest. He studied the plants and animals that defined it, and published books about them. His pioneering spirit, his courage and resourcefulness had shown up years before on the American frontier in Crockett, Carson and Cody, in Lewis and Clark, and, later, in the great conservationist Teddy Roosevelt.

It was Roosevelt who wrote: "Far better is it to dare mighty things... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat."

The hunt without adventure would have held little interest for these men. But the spirit of adventure once endemic to hunting is leaking from it. These days, many hunters value product over process. Success trumps adventure. Ownership of the trophy seems to matter more than how we get it. So when we ask young people or spouses or coworkers who have never hunted to join us in the field, what are we offering them? "Fun?" A "new experience?" The "chance to kill game and eat it?" We say "we're helping them get in touch with nature."

One thing we rarely peddle is "adventure." In its traditional form, hunting is an open door. You get a license not just to kill, but to explore, risk, probe your physical limits. And fail. There's no sure connection between the effort applied and your chance to shoot.

Adventure is what you get when no one can predict what you'll get. It separates real hunting from video games. Alas, we seem increasingly loath to admit that on a real hunt the outcome is unpredictable--that we can be uncomfortable or even imperiled. We feel compelled to make sport hunting into what adventurers dislike most about it.

Killing to collect specimens can soon lose its appeal. That's why hunters who've logged many kills eventually look to the record books and for accolades from their fellows for gratification. There's nothing wrong with this; it just strikes me as an unnecessary shift away from the primitive, visceral appeal of the hunt. Days that offer adventure need provide nothing more.