Review by Ken Wright
Wildlife – November 1998 – Colorado Central Magazine
Elkheart: A Personal Tribute to Wapiti and Their World
by David Petersen
Published in 1998 by Johnson Books
ISBN 1-55566-224-2
DESPITE THE POPULARITY of “nature writing” these days, it seems only a few authors can make it palatable, and even fewer seem willing or able to give natural history the deeper context, perspective, and reflection needed to make it relevant and meaningful.
David Petersen’s Elkheart is thus a needed and welcome addition to the natural history of elk and their Western habitat, and to natural history writing in general. This is a rare gem of nature writing: a book that is unusually informative, entertaining and articulate thanks to Petersen’s crafty ability to weave quality research with personality, philosophy, humor, and a fearless point of view that is sometimes refreshingly furious.
There are and have been many voices for wilderness, but here’s one for wildlife — and therefore wild country, for as Petersen constantly points out, the two are inseparable. For Petersen, wapiti are not just a hobby or an interest or even a passion. For this hunter, woodsman, and “hard-core, out-and-amongst-’em … serious wildlife watcher,” elk are a religion.
That is to say, for Petersen elk are not like a religion; in Elkheart we see wapiti become an actual source of meaning and perspective that define Petersen’s worldview.
And this is also what makes Elkheart a rare treasure of a wildlife book: It’s novel enough that Petersen lets his natural history reporting move into point-of-view, but he is also bold enough to discuss what motivates him, and what might motivate society, to make the necessary changes to save wildlife in the face of our profit-driven wildness-killing culture: the spirituality of the Hunter.
This is not new turf for Petersen. Best known, perhaps, as the editor of Edward Abbey’s journals, Petersen has written four other books of natural history, including the excellent Ghost Grizzlies, a report on Colorado’s possible remnant grizzly population, and a collection of essays. He also edited A Hunter’s Heart, a controversial anthology on the ethics of hunting that earned him national recognition as a “hunting ethicist.”
Elkheart may be Petersen’s best and most personal work yet. The essays here range from interesting to esoteric, but Petersen somehow manages to make it all work. Even a topic as obscure as whether or not elk like artificial salt licks becomes pleasant feet-up, fire-side reading because Petersen never keeps you too long in the library. All his essays are couched in stories from his outdoor forays and are salted with information that is verified, amplified, or demonstrated with more stories and experiences.
But Elkheart doesn’t stop there. Going beyond this informative story telling, Petersen includes some hold-on-tight literary rants against what he considers offensive and dangerous threats to wildlife and wilderness. Here Petersen unleashes his strongest tirades in defense of big predators, and in attacks on road building for the timber industry, and on the exploding elk-ranching industry — which in Colorado alone has grown fifty-fold since the mid-1980s.
Elk ranches are “disease and genetic contamination factories” that work “against the long-term interests of wildlife and democracy,” Petersen charges. In states that have elk ranching, wildlife agencies report problems with disease and parasites, the privatization and poaching of public wildlife to stock herds, habitat loss due to fencing, and a tarnishing of hunting’s image by the ranches’ unethical and unchallenging trophy hunting. After wildlife departments have reported these problems, though, several states have transferred control of elk ranching to much more compliant agriculture departments.
Petersen also worries that the privatization of wildlife will lead to America becoming just another Europe, “where only the wealthy and powerful have hunting privileges.” And Petersen — despite his love for antlered animals, or more accurately, because of that love — defiantly defends the hunting of those wild animals.
Here — yea! — is probably Petersen’s finest and most-needed contribution to Western nature writing: not only is he a quality naturalist, but he’s a writer, philosopher and storyteller for ethical hunters.
“No one, biologists notwithstanding, knows or cares more about the natural histories and daily dramas of animals in the wild, no one is a more attentive student of animal spoor, no one more deeply and honestly loves wildlife and wild lands and freedom and dignity, than the hunter. The true hunter, that is, as opposed to the legions (lesions) of dilettantes, poseurs, gadgeteers, privateers and profiteers infesting and infecting the sporting ranks today.”
It is this hunter’s spirit that drives Petersen. And ethical hunting is his sacrament. If books had to have subtitles that reflected their deeper messages, Elkheart’s might be, A Neanderthal Runs Through It.
“For all but the last ten millennia or so of our multi-million-year run as Homo, hunting and gathering were all we did. Hunting filled our days with challenge and action, our nights with story. Hunting inspired our dreams and art and myths and religions, helping significantly to shape what we are today, for better and for worse.”
And this spirit, for better or worse, is the best hope of saving wildlife and the wild habitat they need to survive, he argues.
“Through four decades of intimately personal experience, I’ve evolved an unshakable belief that the essence — and thus the moral justification and greatest reward — of so-called `sport’ hunting lies in challenge, in woodcraft, in humility, in respect (if not love) for the animals we hunt and the country we hunt them in, evidenced by an eager willingness to protect and propagate both.
“…Hunters, after all, historically have provided a whopping 80 percent of the funding for all wildlife programs in America. (While, to my knowledge, no hard-core `animal welfare’ group has ever given one thin dime to benefit wildlife or wildlife habitat.)”
Spirit is what saving wildlife boils down to, Elkheart argues, for only a love for and kinship with wildlife can overcome the profiteering that threatens their habitat. And “Elkheart” is a good place to get a foothold in that spirit.
— Ken Wright