From childhood on, we are taught and encouraged to seek control — over our bodies, minds, and behavior; over our environments, futures, and fates; over our personal and professional relationships and, via the metaphysical belief system of one's choice, we even try to control what happens to us after we die. Most of us, most of the time, struggle through life seeking control as a matter of course, without even thinking about it.

Regrettably, in the hunting arena as well, where the greater parts of our pleasures and rewards derive from purposely testing ourselves against things we can't control — wild animals, wild weather, wild country, our own limitations, luck — many among us doggedly try. Up to a point, this is good and even necessary. But beyond the ambiguous boundaries of "good and necessary," inappropriate attempts to control the hunt can side-trail us onto ethically shaky terrain while eroding our hunting pleasures, satisfactions, personal growth, and pride of accomplishment … and empty our wallets to boot.

Consequently, I have come to our hunter's campfire council today to propose that the less stuff we clutter our hunts with in pointless pursuit of counter-productive control, the happier hunters we will be.

What do we really need (as opposed to merely want) in order to successfully challenge wild country and wild animals, and to hunt, kill, field dress, and transport meat and trophies in relative comfort and safety? Look at photos of the early icons of North American hunting. They carry unadorned weapons. They wear rugged, individualized clothing, often wool pants and plaid shirts. And they pack gear to fit the season, terrain, and game, including a belt knife and a frame pack suitable at once for hunting, subsisting, and hauling meat. A pair of binoculars may dangle from the archetypal traditional hunter's neck, and tucked away in pockets are compass and map.

A few more essentials — you know the list as well as I do — and that's all she wrote.

In order to hunt safely, comfortably, with dignity and success, we don't need a $6,000 ATV perched on a $2,000 trailer pulled by a $40,000 SUV to get us there. We don't need "scent-proof" designer camo clothing, electronic trail-timers and motion-sensitive infrared cameras, automatic game "feeders," optical range-finders, cell phones, night vision optics, a pharmacopoeia of chemical scents and scent-killers, Taj Mahal portable ground blinds and tree stands, on and on el barfo. Perusing the ads in most hunting magazines and outdoor gear catalogs today is enough to make serious, old-style outdoorsmen and women laugh out loud … and then break down and weep for what our beloved sport has lost.

Certainly, I don't condemn all of the stuff enumerated above, though I sure condemn some of it. Nor am I saying it's all useless junk. I am saying that none such expensive toys are necessary for a good, safe, and successful hunt, and that often such stuff serves primarily to encumber us, slow us down, steal our traveling money, and generally interfere with achieving happy and satisfying ends.

A hunter is rich in relation to the amount of stuff he or she can afford to hunt without.

The root problem with contemporary hunting is that too few among the hunting ranks today are old-style outdoorsmen and women — hardy folk who take pride and find joy in expanding "just hunting" into an ever-richer outdoor experience, an ever-growing personal adventure. Most nimrods today are mere dabblers and pretenders, uncommitted to fair chase and frantic to make a kill with the least effort and then scurry home to a warm den with unearned "trophies" on the walls, cold beer in the frig, and poisonous outdoor pabulum on TV. Why work to develop a woodsman's skills and patience, strive to know the game and its big wild world, endure prolonged discomfort and resist applying maximum purchasable control over the hunt … when it's so very easy and socially acceptable to "challenge nature" with a fortune in stuff, rather than with spine, grit, dignity, and all-around respect?

Why, indeed?