Thoreau on the Moose, Paul Theroux

[Thomas P Lynch <tlynch2@unlnotes.unl.edu>]

Thoreau on the moose

LA TIMES:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-theroux14-2008sep14,0,4501486.story

The great American writer found nothing heroic in hunting the gentle
creatures. Rather, he saw their killing as a great tragedy.
By Paul Theroux

September 14, 2008

All this talk about moose hunting! It is as though, because of the animal's
enormous size and imposing antlers, bringing one down is a heroic feat of
marksmanship. Nothing could be further from the truth. As Henry David
Thoreau wrote in "The Maine Woods," killing these big, gentle, myopic
creatures is more "like going out by night to some woodside pasture and
shooting your neighbor's horses."

Thoreau's descriptions of the moose he saw in Maine are inspired and
fanciful. "They made me think of great frightened rabbits," he wrote, and
he alluded to the moose's "branching and leafy horns -- a sort of fucus or
lichen in bone."

In all his descriptions there is affection and awe. The killing of a moose
is, in Thoreau's view, always a tragedy. He witnessed one being shot, and
"nature looked sternly upon me on account of the murder of the moose." In
another passage, Thoreau grudgingly acknowledges that moose are hunted by
Indians out of necessity -- for their meat, for their hides, as part of
Indian custom and tradition. This was in 1853.

American politicians seldom take notice of American writers, especially the
boldest ones, such as Thoreau, whose every word is at odds with their
groveling and grandstanding and their sanctimonious cant. Think of the
average politician today and then reflect on how Thoreau had no time for
organized religion, how he mocked clergymen and jeered at missionaries,
warmongers and Bible-thumpers. He was a defender of John Brown and the
rebellious spirit in American life, a proponent of human rights.

He hated the thought of the wilderness being opened to development; he
wrote scathingly of lumberjacks and logging operations. He would have
cheered the demonstrators outside the Republican National Convention in St
Paul, Minn. He would have mocked the people inside. He would have denounced
the prison at Guantanamo. He wrote against injustice; he despised
politicians and hunters.

And yet hunting seems to define a certain species of American politician.
It's nothing new. When Teddy Roosevelt left office, he traveled to Africa
and -- in the role of evil twin to the biblical Noah -- hunted and killed
two (and sometimes 18) of every species of animal that could be found from
the Kenyan coast to the swamps of the southern Sudan: total bag, 512
creatures. In his account of the safari, "African Game Trails" (1910), he
wrote, "The land teems with beasts of the chase, infinite in number ... ."

"Infinite" is credulous hyperbole -- many of those animals are now extinct
or severely endangered. Take the bongo, a large African antelope -- nearly
as large as a moose -- now almost gone because of hunters and poachers. In
Uganda, where it roamed in sizable numbers when I lived there, it has been
wiped out. Maurice Stans, the Nixon administration Commerce secretary and
Watergate defendant, helped to eradicate this gentle animal when, in the
1960s, he sicced his dogs on them -- the conventional way to corner a bongo
-- then presumably gestured to his gun bearer ("Here is your bunduki,
bwana") and shot two of them as trophies. It was not an incidental act:
Maurice Stans defined himself politically as a big-game hunter.

You would be forgiven for believing that the Menendez brothers gave Dick
Cheney lessons in handling a shotgun -- still, he is by all accounts a keen
hunter. But who knew that Justice Antonin Scalia also hunts ducks? Perhaps
it is not odd that someone who advocates physical harm to humans would not
shrink from blowing a small bird apart. Earlier this year, asked about
torture, Scalia said: "It seems to me you have to say, as unlikely as that
is, it would be absurd to say you couldn't, I don't know, stick something
under the fingernail, smack him in the face. It would be absurd to say you
couldn't do that." Cheney agrees, so it is no surprise that these men are
hunting buddies, huddled in the same duck blind, torturing animals to death
with buckshot.

A lot can be told from the animals that people choose to kill. The French
shoot the most melodious larks and turn them into pate. Many English people
are still indignant that restrictions have been placed on the hunting of
foxes, bongo style, chasing them with dogs, which tear them to pieces.

There is hunting for sport, and hunting for the pot, and of course hunting
for votes. The name of Teddy Roosevelt, the hunter, the moose skinner, was
invoked just the other day at the Republican National Convention, in Fred
Thompson's praise of Gov. Sarah Palin. This mother of five is now
celebrated as a moose hunter and, more than that, moose skinner, moose
eater and perhaps hanger of moose-head trophies. As Palin was delivering
her acceptance speech, an immense photograph of Alaska was projected behind
her on the giant screen where, in the foreground, a moose could be seen,
placidly staring at its reflection in water. And on the following day, in
the video that encapsulated her life, Palin was described as having risen
early on cold mornings with her father to go moose hunting.

Moose hunting is now seen as a possible Republican vote-getter, especially
as the moose hunter in question is a slightly built and bespectacled mother
of five. This casting against type presumably has the same effect on the
public imagination as the revelation that defensive tackle Roosevelt Grier
found relaxation in needlepoint.

I have no strong views on hunting, only the usual disgust when I see a
creature senselessly slaughtered at no risk to the hunter. Thoreau called
the moose "a fabulous animal," and in a book Palin probably has not read,
he remarked on how moose sometimes weigh 1,000 pounds and how they "can
step over a five-foot gate in their ordinary walk."

While people cheered, Palin was lauded for knowing how to "field-dress" a
moose. Thoreau, who watched such an operation, wrote, "Joe [his Penobscot
guide] now proceeded to skin the moose with a pocket knife, while I looked
on, and a tragical business it was; to see that still warm and palpitating
body pierced with a knife, to see the warm milk stream from the rent udder,
and the ghastly naked red carcass appearing from within its seemly robe." I
read that and somehow am not provoked to cheer.

In one of the great passages, in the chapter "Chesuncook," Thoreau writes
how the moose and the pine tree are linked in his mind. "A pine cut down, a
dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man." He
continues, "Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and
pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve life than
destroy it."

Paul Theroux is the author of many books, including "The Great Railway
Bazaar," "The Mosquito Coast" and, most recently, "Ghost Train to the
Eastern Star."


--------------------------------------
Tom Lynch
Associate Professor
Department of English
202 Andrews Hall
P.O. Box 880333
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Lincoln, NE  68588-0333
(402) 472-1833

Faculty webpage
http://english.unl.edu/faculty/profs/tlynch.html

Personal website
http://www.unl.edu/tlynch2/Homepage.htm

Forthcoming book
Xerophilia: Ecocritical Explorations in Southwestern Literature
http://www.ttup.ttu.edu/BookPages/9780896726383.html

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where I weeded
yesterday
weeds