by David E. Petzal
The title of this post is a question I’ve heard only in the South. It’s the Confederate way of asking “Did you get anything?” It equates “good” with killing something, but as I’ve found out, you can do good without pulling the trigger.
In 1978, I hunted in Botswana under the guidance of PH Ian Manning. Ian drove a yellow Toyota truck that looked suspiciously like Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel’s command car, which the Desert Fox called “Mammut.” It was top-heavy and unwieldy, and we found out just how much so on the drive from the boulder-strewn field on which our plane had landed to our camp.
I and a fellow hunter rode with our heads and shoulders sticking out a hatch in the top, and quicker than you could say “Tell mother I died game,” we had tilted almost completely over. Ian, who had hunted elephants on control in addition to presiding over the deaths of who knows how many creatures on safari, had swerved violently to avoid running over a tortoise. Ian did good.
Susan Casey is a Canadian writer and editor who has won American Society of Magazine Editors Awards in three different categories, which is like winning Oscars for Best Actress, Best Writer of an Original Screenplay, and Best Director. She is also very brave, and once sailed to the Farralon Islands to study great white sharks up close from a dinghy that was smaller than they were. Oxen and wain ropes would not hail me thence.
In 2005, she and Sid Evans, who was then Editor of Field & Stream, got to arguing about big game hunting. Sid made her an offer. “We’ll set up an elk hunt for you, everything. Dave Petzal will get you a rifle and teach you to shoot. You hunt and write about what you find for us.” Susan agreed.
When we met, I made her the following speech, which I here recreate:
I told her: “What I’ll do this summer is teach you to shoot. I can do that, but I can’t teach you to kill. You won’t know until the moment comes whether you can or not. If you want to stop the shooting lessons, that’s fine. If you don’t want to kill the elk you’re aiming at, that’s fine, too.”
So Ms. Casey endured a summer under a scorching sun getting beaten up by a Dakota Arms .300 Winchester Short Magnum, and became a highly proficient shot. She went off to Colorado and rode up into the mountains with an outfitter who got her in range of a decent bull. She put the crosshairs on him and started to squeeze…but she was unable to shoot. This is wrong, said her conscience. Later, she regretted not shooting. But I think she did the right thing, and so did her readers, overwhelmingly. Susan did good.
The previous year, I had gone on an elk hunt in Colorado, and the outfitter gave us a choice of guides. Being then in my 60s and lazy to boot, I asked for the oldest, slowest-walking guide they had, which turned out to be a retired Colorado game warden named Joe Gerrans. Joe was six months younger than I, and not long previously had been in a terrible car wreck which he narrowly survived, and which left him with a bad limp.
Our walking speeds matched and, as we talked, we realized that, because of our ages and his brush with death, we had also reached an understanding about the fragility of life.
In due course, we found ourselves atop a coulee that ran for a couple of miles from a plateau, where we were, down to the open prairie. We could see a little band of elk, a young bull and four cows, running like hell up the bottom of the coulee, trying to get away from a party of hunters following them on foot.
The elk reached our end of the coulee, ran up its side, and stood on the plateau, huffing and puffing, with no idea Joe and I were 200 yards away. I put the crosshairs on the bull’s chest. It was an easy shot, but I couldn’t take it.
“Joe,” I said, “I can’t kill him. He thinks he made it.”
I don’t remember what Joe said exactly, but it was something like, that’s all right, we’ll find another. And of course we didn’t, and when I went to tip Joe at the end of the hunt, he refused my money.
“I didn’t get you an elk,” he said.
“You got me a shot. You couldn’t do more than that.”
Joe would not budge. And I know the real reason he declined the tip.
I’d like to say we hunted again and this time I got one, but I never saw him again. In January, 2005, he died of a particularly ferocious cancer. I take consolation, albeit very small, in the fact that I did good, and that I had a witness who understood.
I’m not the hero of the next episode, which took place in the early 1980s. I had booked a black buck hunt with Finn Aagaard, a Kenyan professional hunter who had moved to Texas after his native country ended its safari business.
In our black-buckless travels, we came upon a tank, which is a man-made pond or wood tank, adjoined by a creaky water tower. Livestock drink from tanks and this one, which was of the pond variety, was crawling with snapping turtles. I don’t like snapping turtles, having had the wits scared out of me by one, and got in the kneeling position so I could remove the head from one of the multi-million-year-old relics.
“NO!” said Finn, and I stood down right away. He didn’t say another word. In fact, he scarcely spoke the rest of the day.
Finn, you see, was a complex guy. He hunted and wrote about it for a living, but he would not kill a bear because he regarded bears as our fellow apex predators. He had killed elephants himself, and had guided clients to them, but he was all the while haunted at the thought of destroying something so intelligent. And he would not stand for a client shooting something simply for amusement. Finn did good that day.
Pulling the trigger is strictly optional.
Dave Petzal did not shoot one critter that he wanted to send a bullet after, and this was a cow moose named Hermione, who pissed at him and missed by inches. Laugh if you will, but getting hosed down by a lady moose is no joke.
