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woodsman. He died a few years back.

3
    There was a lack of discipline, by and large unexamined, when I was young. I began to hunt squirrels as a kid, back behind the pulp fields in the woods beyond home. I used a slingshot or a pellet gun. It is something young boys did that they shouldn’t do.
    We took the tails, saying we were going to sell them for squirrel-tail flies, but at times we didn’t, and killing for a while became simply a luxury. I knew tough boys (tougher than most) who could shoot a bird out of the air with a pellet gun. And the first partridge I killed was with a pellet gun, and out of season, when I was fourteen. There were many partridge broods in the dark spruce groves in behind our little cottage along the Miramichi Bay. Most times, of course, we missed completely, which in hindsight is a good thing. In the woods you suddenly became the chief law-giver to yourself. And when you are a kid, certain things are very tempting to do.
    Most people I know come of age and grow out of this. There are those who do not, and I have met more than myshare. Still, imposing laws against poaching or taking game out of season means little if people cannot or will not regulate themselves.
    This is an unconsidered factor in recent stricter laws. The laws have changed in relationship to gun ownership, and rifles have become much more numbingly sanctioned. So much so that law-abiding men and women have not only grumbled and complained but in a real way have faced down these laws, and on occasion have disobeyed them. “The hell with them—I’ll shoot everything if they tell me not to,” one man once said to me. Of course he did not want to shoot everything. He simply wanted to be able to hunt deer as he once had, and no longer could. Yet this was not such a blind statement—or at least, to be fair, it came from an actual philosophical point. The point was that the government, in its tedious resolution to stop gun crime, was now parenting people with gun laws and registration that were useless to stop anyone who disobeyed laws in the first place. The man’s philosophical point was that he would disobey the laws now, when he was law-abiding before, out of principle. He would not register his rifle.
    His stance was the strange by-product of laws that are both insincere and useless. The government either does not feel this or know it, or is unconcerned about it. They do not know, or care to know, much about rural life, and they listen to urban concerns about kinds of guns the rural people themselves rarely own. That is not to say that deer rifles have not been used in crime. It is not to say that hunters are not at times willing to use rifles to commit crimes. But I am making a case that most hunters never use a rifle in this way.
    The point is not that we shouldn’t have laws to regulate guns, the point is that these laws will not regulate in the way the law intends.
    Relating this does not make me a champion of the unlawful death of animals. I have always disliked men who have made animals suffer for their peculiar sense of enjoyment, or in rebellion against an unwise law.
    I have seen grown men kill animals for sport, chuckling at their own actions like misbehaving children. It is a different breed of human who allows himself to do this. But let me say this: no ban on hunting would stop the cruel misuse of power. And a ban on hunting in a “fair chase” sport would do nothing but stop those men and women who refuse as much as most to be pitiless, while allowing the pitiless to roam in self-proclaimed rebellion against unenforceable laws.

4
    I was still very young when I shot my first deer. However, not as young as some.
    The year before this hunt I had seen a deer far away in a back field as I was leaving the woods on a raw, cold evening, thinking only about warmth and supper. I was cold and my hands were frozen, in pain. The deer I saw, just a sudden dark spot at the edge of the wood, jumped and flashed its tail and