It's winter. I am wrapped in a blanket facing the fireplace, counting the licks of flame on the log. Submerged into "the why" of it all again, I have come up with a morsel to chew on. It is an old morsel and I look to the past for solace, always the past, for growing older is learning to develop disdain for Development and Progress.

Let's listen to [Saxton] Pope:

"The ideal way for an archer to travel is to carry on his shoulders a knapsack containing a light sleeping bag and enough food to last him for a week. With me this means coffee, tea, sugar, canned milk, dried fruit, rice, cornmeal, flour and a baking powder mixture, a little bacon, butter, and seasoning. This will weigh less than ten pounds. With other minor appurtenances in the ditty bag, including an arrow repair kit, one's burden is less than twenty pounds, an easy load."

Of course, Pope also carried a wood bow and arrows.

Contrast the good Dr. Pope's prescription with the equipment checklists for modern hunting. These, I suppose, have their place. What I want, however, is to eventually enumerate a checklist for the soul of the hunter, an ethical checklist, if you will, which may guide us in our sorting of our priorities. But let's begin with the basics, a head check for what it is that we do out there.

Predation - hunting - is a biologic function, is it not? We share this function with the lion, the wolf, the grizzly bear. They have teeth and claws. We have . . . technology.

But what kind of technology and to what purpose? Hunting tools have a purpose: to make us more efficient. More efficient? What for?

As traditional hunting archers, we purposely and deliberately seek a more primitive means of applying our trade. Contrast this with the general trend of hunting technology from the beginning of time: Weaponry made us more efficient as killers of game, and it has become easier and easier to learn to use more deadly weapons. Anybody may, within ten minutes of scant instruction, place the crosshairs of a modern hunting rifle on a kudu at 100 yards and squeeze a trigger. Chances are good the kudu, if standing still and broadside, will fall (in contrast to the significant apprenticeship required for learning to launch an accurate arrow with a traditional bow). This has obvious benefit in the realm of business and warfare. But we are hardly at war with wildlife, and the interests of the marketplace and the ethics of the hunt have few intersecting lines.

We hunt in order to place ourselves in a more primitive and basic relationship with nature's beasts. A too efficient weapon contradicts this endeavor.

I promised you a checklist of ethics in this essay. I will try not to use too much space as I feel I must set an example. My advice is Thoreau's advice: simplify….

Simplify your food, clothing, shelter, and weapon to that which redefines you as more a biological entity, a predator of the oldest sort. Think of the Ancestors. What did they need in order to survive by hunting? If we are to fully engage our atavistic notion to hunt, let's allow free reign to the atavism. Let the primitive one, Ishi-inside-us dictate our gear list. He cannot tell you what we should or should not do. He will, however, give you suggestions. He will say:

Get off the ATV, out of the SUV, down off the tree stand and sit on mother earth, or walk...and think. Ford rivers, challenge the hills, paddle the swamps, creep among pines, splash across streams, climb their banks, lay under sumacs, look with your eyes, use your muscles, hone your senses, think...and walk. Leave the gizmos, the motors, the batteries, and the electronics at home; carry a conscience and walk. Make a bow, use a bow, use the minimum, wear your plaid shirt. Buy an ATV and a Godzilla-pickup — if you must — but for God sakes don't use them! Lose the booze, lose the greed, lose the potbelly by walking, lose the machines and use the quads God gave you. Lose the techno-crap, lose the piggishness, lose the braggadocio. Take a book, take your boots, take notes, take a camera, take walks, take time, especially to think. Leave footprints, make memories, get mosquito bites, frostbite, trench foot, tired. Be honest, be reasonable, be rational. Get common sense; get closer to your game, closer to nature, closer to the game, closer to the deep-inside-you. But by all means, get out and walk! And if we must kill something, let us do it only because we will eat it.

That Ishi! He can rant!