Bloodties: Nature, Culture, and the Hunt

At heart the author, a columnist for Sports Afield , is a hunter-gatherer who finds that eating from the wild--meats, berries, roots--fosters an intimate relationship with nature. Here he discusses two distinctly opposite approaches to hunting and then describes his own. In a remote village in Greenland he examines a community that has always depended on the hunting of seals for its survival. He contrasts that life with the goals of a group of American trophy hunters whom he accompanied to Siberia on an expedition to bag snow sheep; in their pursuit of a coveted award, some of these men engaged in hunting practices of questionable ethics. Back home, Kerasote exchanges opinions on hunting with Wayne Pacelle, the head of the Fund for Animals, who is vehemently opposed to hunting. While his own feelings about the hunt border on the mystical, Kerasote's accounts of the subsistence and trophy hunters are superb reporting. (Aug.)