Wedding the Wild Particular

Abstract

Wedding the Wild Particular Robert Benson (bio) When I moved to Sewanee, Tennessee, to teach at the University of the South, I was excited about my new job and had thought little about finding colleagues who were also hunters. Even in the South in the 1970s there were few fans of blood sports on college faculties, but a good number of students hunted and were happy to share their game with professors in exchange for kitchen access. No one I had spoken to at Sewanee seemed opposed to hunting in principle, and several people admitted they welcomed the occasional venison roast or brace of ducks and the opportunity to help students cook a game dinner. Someone reported that the academic dean who hired me shot pigeons from his office window, but none of the members of the English department had expressed any interest in hunting, and my hopes of finding field companions were slim. I had no enthusiasm for shooting anything from my office window. At the University of Georgia my interests in hunting and in literature had connected in my friendship with James Kilgo. By 1979, when I moved to Sewanee, I worried, as hunters do when they move to another state, about not having either a place to hunt or the company of other hunters, people I could talk to without apology about shotguns, dogs, duck calls and rifles, about the game and the woods and swamps those animals called home. But even before I moved, Kilgo and I had planned to hunt together in the fall. In the summer of 1979 I was in the process of moving into my new office, and I had parked my old Jeep-style Land Cruiser near the door to Walsh-Ellett Hall so that I wouldn’t have to carry boxes of books too far. My office was on the second floor, near the elevator, and I had made two trips, one box at a time, when a man, who introduced himself as Jerry Smith, offered to help and produced a dolly from somewhere. He helped me the rest of the morning, and by the time we had unloaded all the books, I had learned that Jerry, a religion professor, had grown up hunting, had spent a lot of time in the woods of Virginia as a boy, and had real enthusiasm for rifles and shotguns. He had been moved to offer to [End Page 292] help me with my books in part because he was curious about what sort of academic character would drive a Land Cruiser. He found out—and for years we were hunting companions and spent many afternoons riding the back-roads and jeep-trails of the county and trying not to get the Land Cruiser stuck. Mostly we succeeded. On the way to the duck blind or back from turkey hunting we talked about everything: about teaching and hunting, about men we had hunted with, books and teachers we loved, students we had both taught or tried to teach, and places and days afield that remained vivid after the passage of years. The conversation wandered freely from woodcraft to the academy, from sighting in a new rifle to the hunting sequences in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and always we took for granted a connection between these seemingly disparate activities. Hunting and the intellectual life were both about curiosity and pursuit, about terrain and game, literal or metaphoric. The hunter enters the natural world, and the writer or teacher tries to lead readers and students to see the imitation of nature that is art. Without knowledge of the primary world—the world of trees and animals, of sunrise and arrowheads, children and unruly grandfathers—hunting is aimless and literature indecipherable. Occasionally details in the woods—the sound of acorns dropping from a chestnut oak, a spot of blood on a brown leaf—were helpful in explaining a line of thought or even a line of poetry. Seeing what was there and learning to read it correctly works as well for the book of nature as for other books. In a famous passage near the end of Meditations on Hunting, the philosopher José Ortega...