Free of Summer

The trees are still drinking from the rain that fell yesterday, the first hard rain in months. The ground, which had been dust interspersed with the dried twigs of grass and horseherb stems, has become a single coherent thing again. Everything underground is changed. No longer a loose pool of dirt, rocks, and tree litter, now everything is connected. Beetles are swarming a meter off the ground everywhere under the trees. They were carefully buried gristle a day ago. The bees, who have sustained themselves on some lavishly irrigated landscaping nearby, are no longer the only ones in the air. Yellowed leaves which had dessicated and died on the tree for lack of water now fall from the weight of moisture on them. Things swing back and forth, but still trend towards Fall, which is really just a transition to Winter. But Summer in Texas does not let go easily and this renaissance will dry up and die again before we are done.

Up at Granger, the pigs are moving. The upper fields are now soft and not so hot, they will turn over large patches in search for grubs, roots, and things only they know are there. Dry dusty logs will now be soft and filled with swollen larvae. The soil protects itself in summer by becoming cement with a layer of dust, but now it is swelling and softening, erupting with seeds and eggs and fungus. Its a great time to be a pig. 

I’ve been meaning to get up there for an evening hunt, but its the worst time for traffic and the hottest ass-end of the day. Still, I’m thinking of a particular spot, the one Costa showed us. Just off the road, you walk slowly across the meadow and wait in the treeline or the creekbed for the evening commuters to come up from the impenetrable riparian mass and take a shot that might be far away and almost certainly will be moving. Most carefully considered hunting ethics requires restraint from taking shots beyond one’s ability to make a certain kill. This is to avoid suffering, the underlying assumption being that it is worse than death. You don’t take a shot that is too far, or when the animal is at the wrong angle, or when the animal is moving. Many hunters pride themselves on turning down such shots and many wring feel a lot of anguish after tracking a meagre blood trail that peters out. The story is not over, but the hunter is written out of the script. Bowhunting hogs at granger is not like that. Here, you take what shot you can get. 

Pressure is put on ethics here from multiple directions. First, its hard to hunt pigs here. The local wisdom is you see a pig once out of every seven visits to the WMA, you get a shot half of those times, and you might hit something half of those times, so that’s 28 days of hunting for your arrow hitting somewhere on a pig. If you wait for the perfect shot, you might as well just leave your bow and go hiking. The second pressure is the perspective that other pig eradication projects gives you. Every year, sounders are gunned down from helicopters and left in the field to rot. They take hundreds in a day sometimes. No one uses the meat, no one cares if they are ethical shots, and they hardly make a dent in the pig numbers. Poisoning methods are always being debated with ranchers wanting to use Warferin, which conservationists oppose because of downstream ecosystem concerns and hunters oppose for obvious reasons. There are many debates about what to do about feral hogs, but not much about ethical shot placement. But take the same hunter to the Rockies with an Elk tag and he will drive himself crazy walking the line between waiting for the right shot and missing the game. Are Elk more sensitive than pigs? Surely not. They just pissed us off. I drove through an intersection yesterday while a wounded Grackle flapped on the hot pavement with one wing down. Had it been a Barred Owl, someone might have risked a traffic accident there on Bee Caves and Rollingwood to get it in a towel and to a veterinarian who would have treated it and posted the rescue on youtube, generating a lot of good feelings. What if we learned Grackles are more intelligent than other birds? I’m not sure this is relevant. Grackles are on Texans’ bad list, along with wild hogs, fire ants, and Cedar (Ashe Juniper).

Its important to have ethics, but also important to realize how aribrary a game they are. This is why concepts like Fair Use, which are directed at the sustainability and shared nature of game as a resource, are more useful than Fair Chase, which focus on the personal experience of the hunter.