Remember this: Nothing like a bushy red tail.
I was watching two people in the act of hunting, but then I realized there was a big difference in the actual habit/mentality the two hunters seemed to have. Mind you, this is what struck me in my brain pan.
There is a difference in sitting, hiding, and lurking when compared to walking, looking and stalking. When you apply this to high and low altitude hunters, the separation is pretty wide.
Most stories you read or hear are about the animal and how it either fraught the hunter, or the hunter got him. You might hear some version of the tracking technique or mental shenanigans the hunter recounts. I've never seen or read and article on this. Compare and contrast.
Take sitting, hiding, and lurking into consideration (as it pertains to a scenario of duck hunting). You sit in a blind on land or a boat. You wait for these little winged torpedoes to whiz by then jump up and shoot. This is one of those times when the phrase, "idle hands are the devil's workshop", applies. If bird are not to be had, you get the idea to drift to another spot where you wait some more.
I doubt there are a lot of calories being burned in this kind of work. Boredom, unless you're with someone who can spin a yarn, will probably get you. I usually take a book.
I would think this is excrutiating to someone who is a hunter on the move. He can't really move; he has to sit still. Hunters that possibly do this kind of sport, unless they are well rounded, don't foresee potential problems. They are not going to get mangled by a pin tail duck unless it flies straight into his eyeballs like a Kamikazi Daffy Duck. At this, the person hunting, could change his/her name to match that eye patch they willl be sporting. The lack of stress is evident because most is from the disappointment of no-show birds. If this low altitude hunter is with a high altitude hunter, he/she may not even suspect that the other has worms in their pants that is making him squirm around in his mind. Out of politeness the roamer never says a word at least to them. He probably complains quite a bit in private and vows never to do that again, unless in X amount of time. Probably when he's old and walks with a cane; or an old rusty gun he made into a cane.
A low altitude hunter, after something such as this, has to wait on the prey. Even if its like shooting water into that game at a carnival, knowing someone probably fixed it for failure. I am not opposed to migratory fowl hunting, this is just something I noticed that interest me. Unconscious hunter behavior.
The issue with this low altitude hunter is: the hunter will never have the mind set of the bird. The hunter doesn't migrate with the fowl. The hunter just waits for their return like women wait on men that go to sea on Spanish Galleons, never to return because quite frankly, they met Betty Lou the Tavern wench. Then deciding not to returen home due to finding bigger boobs.
To a high altitude hunter or someone who looks down from the rock, I could see where this wouldn't be near a good time. This hunter is a mover that gets caught up in the physical landscape of contemplating the unknown. He must figure things out from what he can see and the mindset of the beast he stalks: what its going to do, where it will appear or any manner of likely scenario that pops up. He learns its habits and becomes its habits.
Both hunters are opportunistic but not in the same way. One has to become what it hunts the other does not. With animals its more like reading body language because they have their own set physical functions right down to pissing over their hocks.
Hunters, close to the thing they follow, somehow have the creatures cycling around in their dreams. Some are scary; some are not. Others morph into non-animal types. Once they tap that for lack of a better word, unworldly or supernatural, is stretching it. Here they will never be the same till the days of their life's end. That's a truer gift of hunting. It's something you can't see unless you've been warped in the same way. Warped is a negative word here but I'll use it all the same. People of a like mind will know the other is the same way without saying a word to them. You can hide a lot of things but that you can't hide that. Its unconciously displayed.
I had one dream where a herd of caribou moving to stave off danger, were turning into shadows. They hid as shadows amoungst the trees while the wolves were trying to pull one of them down.
I use to dream of being in the body of an animal while I slept. It would be different things; not always hierarchy animals that are the nouveau trend. I don't understand this predator animal type totem business. It was always the smaller mundane things that were the strongest like birds, plants, or something as simple as a bug. How did people get so off track, I wonder? People don't have a personal totem, those things come in droves through out life. If you're open to it and sometimes even when you're not. They're like messengers not personal butlers. Whoever thought that crap up must have been doing dope in the 70s, sporting a big daisy on their Scooby Van. Back to my dream.
I would see whatever it would see out its eyes. Go wherever it would go. You can do crap like that in dreams. Its when the people show up that it gets really interesting.
One such dream, as the dream picked up, I was running with my unseen head, bobbing over this green forest landscape. I couldn't see myself but I finally came up to these two wolves: one was black the other was dark grey. The black one turned its head around like it knew I wasn't what I looked like and showed me its teeth. I can't remember the rest because I wrote it in the many journals of weird things I see while sleeping. (Note here: I spent a lot...and I mean a lot of time reading animal behavior but people are the most disappointing. You can pretty much nail them on the head in the way they are going to end up, as it pertains to their regard of you or life in general.)
I never became one of those crazy animal people who didn't like other people. I saw people like that all the time. They would snatch up a dog rather than a baby, if they thought it was going to get hurt. Priorities? I can't speak for other people on that but I think it's messed up. Not to say I do not think the animal should not be saved as well.
I even wondered, if while someone was awake in a different time zone and you were asleep, if you couldn't find yourself moving around in the body of an animal as a secondary spirit. Indigenous people thought deer where spirit people that would curse you during your hunt if you slighted them.
These spirits always arrive at the oddest of times like they can read your mind.
Back to the high altitude hunter before my swerving off topic.
After you take so much of the animal you stalk into yourself, you are no more a normal human being. You are not necessarily killing the animal. Don't feel justified in killing something because you think you are going to take it into yourself. You are not. When it is alive brings the most sense and knowledge of a thing; not death.
Mind you, this is not the same as people you see on TV. The new age hippy types or activist that think they can talk to a bear, be one with a bear but get eaten by a bear. The bear will eat you and defecate you out all the same to him. That is a physical bear not a spiritual bear, if that is what you want to call it.
Only a person that knows what I mean and say will ever understand it. Otherwise, I'd be wasting my time trying to make sense of it to someone that will never get it. Please don't find this some romantic notion of mysticism or magic. Maybe its the culmination of eons of DNA strands and all those partial memories, right back to the rock tosser relative you had back before Christ. I don't know.
Once I had this well meaning inquisitive guy ask me, "What's it like to turn into an animal?" I think he must have been thinking in terms of people that turn into werewolves, at the full moon. Bad girl that I am, I pulled a couple of jokes on that guy for asking me that. I was writing a story a out a form of lycanthropy. I wrote a lot of weird creative crap back then. I don't think he knew. He just thought I was ape shit crazy. Or maybe that was when I was doing that research on the Popal Vuh? Everything in that story morphed into something. He truly believed me insane and that I was a werewolf. He was lying to though, so I felt we were even by the time he deleted me. I kind of like him to.
I'll probably reread this and think it insane in the morning because I'm not feeling so great. I would think after reading this something else will come to mind. It is what is it. Maybe tomorrow I'll pull out a thought that's swirling around in my head. Now it'ss competing with a headache. My bed is calling and there are muffled threats coming from my oversized pillow.
Before I stray and I do stray......
Here's another example. Say you're crusing along in your life for fair or foul. Some totally unexpected situation or person shows up out of nowhere. I mean NOWHERE. They have some profane effect on your life even if it's the briefly. They go away...you forget. Then one day. BOOM! They're back again.
I would say this to you:
Pay close attention, for there is something that person is to give you or you will give to them. It may not be something physical. Something you need or sends you down some path you wouldn't have traveled otherwise. Maybe you're suppose to do something for them or they you? The universe means business when someone is being pushed all up in your face, over and over, so you'd better be figuring it out. Its not going to go away and if it does because you-- well meaning person--- chooses NOT to act on it. You refuse to believe. You will have to suffer the consequences or be deprived the very thing that was sent to you in the first place. If you transgress against it with contempt or no feeling at all, then life after life, you will walk by it like it were nothing. One day, the universe will deprive you forever more, from that thing that will make you whole. You will be a rootless, compassless wanderer searching for something that will never be......... because you passed it by.
Written by: W Harley Bloodworth
~Courtesy of the AOFH~
