The Hunter, Wind and the Literate Forest

I have been planning a hunt. My plans may have to change according to the operations of a bodiless and tangibly motile power only partially under my control. Some of this power is mine (or pertains to me, at least). It is the active form of literacy a kind of dispersed capacity at large in the forest, detectable when transcribed by the needles of the pines. They broadcast the sound of simmering water as it moves between them. The very rst decision I make, tomorrow morning, will be determined by this movement.

We are camped, sheltering from the cold north wind, at the foot of a wooded hill. The pines on the hill belong to a forest of beech, birch and red pine that grow on deep black soil about boulders between masses of granite. The forest continues to the sea, which is a days walk or so from our camp and will soon be frozen. Its the end of the Pleistocene, but Im wrapped up warmly in a musk ox. Tomorrow morning I must decide where I should enter the forest. This is the lie of the land. If I walk to the west along the deer-track that leads down to the foot of the hill, I nd the marsh at the foot of a steep-sided valley. The wooded slope of this valley, on my right as I look along it to the north-east, is forest, which will be at a simmer; the western slope has been partially cleared through the co-operation of storms and gigantic mammals and then turned by the boar that left shallow pits of very black earth between the broken trees. Boar would be easy to hunt if they didnt smell so much like human beings. They change back into people when the sun is up, anyway, so must be hunted at night and this is dangerous, given the intelligence of highly-literate carnivores that live among the trees.

If I leave the camp and walk to the east, I ascend to a at and gritty brow populated by sparse beech trees and young birch trees. The ground is broken granite, and smells of sour berries, bitter leaves and soft black beech nuts. The view from here is very useful indeed. You can see the tops of very tall pines. These nod their heads to tell you that there are deer coming.

Ill decide which way to go according to a very careful reading of the wind.

The wind, especially on the brow, has a tangible weight and is very intelligent; it brings intelligence from the eld. Your sense must be equal to its, if it is to be properly understood. It can tug at you if you dont listen. Speaking of an animals scent, however, Im speaking of something classied in the catalogue of wild literature beside hoof-prints and the translatable wind. Closely related to wind, scent is a story that never pauses to take breath. Speaking of stories, scent is a particularly incautious species of independent spoor, being a story that sometimes comes to the hunter to tell itself. Or else a thread that comes to the hunter to tie itself: ask anyone. And speaking of smelling, hunting, wind and sense, deer have superior noses to human hunters. So if the wind is blowing up the valley, Ill either go into the forest and sit on the east bank to shoot as the animals walk south, down along the marshes, or sit in a vortex in the lee of a certain granite mound and ambush the thoroughfare there. If the winds blowing east across the valley, Ill climb the hill and sit in the trees to shoot as the animals walk up the trees to the open brow. _______________

Now weve nished with the constellations and stories about how stupid lions are, let

me make the obvious observation that all tracks, including the wind and all the useful things on it, are, of course, stories. Every single story is a cord taut with attention. So the story is a model of the hunt. The hunt is not reducible to the acts of waiting and shooting an arrow: it is the supremely careful reading of the unfolding events related by these depressions of soft, warm pads inscribing the black soil, and of being sensible of this north wind, which will oblige me to creep to the marshes to hide. The substance of the hunt, its matter, is (like any story) the attention produced by the contiguous acts of speaking and listening. We say that that the herds were created as a consequence of the rst successful kill, an event which divided men and women and the game. A youth is initiated after his rst kill in ritual that, recreating this myth, recreates him as a man. This is why we also say that the very rst story told was the story of a hunt. If thats true, then the rst story told was a model of itself. While Im tracking, there is a cord between the animal and me. Its the same for every hunter. This cord, increasingly taut, is as invisible as the words itll become when Im asked which way I went, which way the does were walking, how many young boar I read and where the sun was when I shot. Ill remember everything, maybe for years, on account of the kind of attention the hunt demands. But the hunting ground is, of course, as attentive of me as I am of it. Im part of it. My simple presence in the forest, with my tracks, scent and active purpose, contributes to the forests narrative capacity. Ritual, here, to the aid of the hunt, is an attempt to impose authorial intention in a place so

full of the passage of sense that production of signs and the interpretation of signs are the same act. Ritual is the trained understanding and manipulation of a dispersed power we might call literacy. Its conducted through symbolic actions requiring the active tending of those myths that offer themselves as means to make sense of the tracks, smells and intelligent winds in this cold forest at the end of the Pleistocene. Myth and story refer to different orders of sense. I suppose ritual is the border between the two. My visible breath, the smell of a red deer cut at the belly, the steam that escapes I suppose these blow through both. __________________________

Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, Specimens of Bushman Folklore (London: George Allen, 1910). Mathias Georg Guenther, Bushman Religious Belief and Cosmology, in Tricksters and Trancers: Bushman Religion and Society (Indiana, University of Indiana Press, 1999). Tim Ingold, Earth, Sky, Wind, and Weather, in Elisabeth Hsu and Chris Low, ed., Wind, Life, Health: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007). Tim Ingold, Lines: a Brief History (Routledge: London, 2007). Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000). Chris Low, Khoisan Wind: Hunting and Healing, in Elisabeth Hsu and Chris Low, ed., Wind, Life, Health: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007). Alfonso Lingis, Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1996). Thanks to Adam Carsten Pedersen for the hunt. Thanks to Greg MacLaren for his comments.