Predator Hunting Quotes

Don't you know not to run away from predators, sweetheart? We like the hunt.

If we act like prey, they’ll act like predators

Fear and rage are not very different when you think about it, two hungry animals that often hunt the same prey—emotion—and hide from the same predator—logic.

You're the predator right up until you're prey.

There was something delightfully intimate about the relationship between predator and prey.

Nice,' I say, realizing only afterward that I've mimicked her, a bad habit of mine; I'm like one of those animals that imitates its predators to survive.

When you hunt predators, the best camouflage is weakness.

She was a predator - a creature of the night who rejoiced in the thrill of the hunt.

Australian Aborigines say that the big stories — the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life — are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting their prey in the bush.

Only the cruelest hunters set their traps with terror and trepidation.

We cannot hunt for love. We can only surrender and become love’s prey.

Let me guess. You think we’re going to live happily ever after, like some stupid fairy tale?” “Why not?” His stare dared me to laugh or, worse, to argue. “Because the whole thing is ridiculous,” I said. I despised the bitterness in my own voice. I sounded so damaged. Good. If he thought I was his soul mate for some mysterious reason he wouldn’t let on, let him see the worst of me. “It’s not ridiculous to me. Perhaps that’s the difference between predators and prey, love. I’ll never stop hunting. But I expect that one day, you’ll stop running.” “Because I want to die?” “Because you want to live.

A shepherd’s crown, not a royal one. A crown for someone who knew where she had come from. A crown for the lone light zigzagging through the night sky, hunting for a single lost lamb. A crown for the shepherd who was there to herd away the predators.

If you seek for supreme predator, go find God. He hunts the prime killer of mankind, the Satan.

You look absolutely divine dressed in wolves’ clothing, but don’t think I won’t tear them from your body the second he’s dead. Enjoy your hunt, little mouse. You won’t be the only predator on the loose.

And so the wolf lay with the lamb.

When you are being hunted, set your mind as the predator.

Wildlife, we are constantly told, would run loose across our towns and cities were it not for the sport hunters to control their population, as birds would blanket the skies without the culling services of Ducks Unlimited and other groups. Yet here they are breeding wild animals, year after year replenishing the stock, all for the sole purpose of selling and killing them, deer and bears and elephants so many products being readied for the market. Animals such as deer, we are told, have no predators in many areas, and therefore need systematic culling. Yet when attempts are made to reintroduce natural predators such as wolves and coyotes into these very areas, sport hunters themselves are the first to resist it. Weaker animals in the wild, we hear, will only die miserable deaths by starvation and exposure without sport hunters to control their population. Yet it's the bigger, stronger animals they're killing and wounding--the very opposite of natural selection--often with bows and pistols that only compound and prolong the victim's suffering.

A slow-motion hunt so gradual that the prey didn’t even realise it was being pursued, and would eventually just lie down to be mauled. ~Jane

A lion will never be afraid of sheep, no matter how many outnumber it.

Adventurers and loners, romantics and desperadoes, eccentrics and slow suicides—the luxuriousness of the place, its seduction and savagery, calls to the wildest among us. Alaska, the land of black moons and midnight suns.

You are not a man as ordinary men are. They think they have a right to all beasts; to hunt them and eat them, or to subjugate them and rule their lives. You know you have no such right to mastery. The horse that carries you will do so because he wishes to, as does the wolf that hunts beside you. You have a deeper sense of yourself in the world. You believe you have a right, not to rule it, but to be part of it. Predator or prey; there is no shame to being either one.

Senkovi’s personal theory was that the pressure of being in the middle of the food chain was an essential prerequisite for complex intelligence. Like humans (and like Portiid spiders, had he only known), octopuses had developed in a world where they were both hunter and hunted. Top predators, in Senkovi’s assessment, were an intellectual dead end.

Lions are neither predators nor killers. They just go for hunting like kings; because they are the kings!

A lone wolf sees the wisdom in guarding the sheep and hunting their predators.

When rehabilitation works, there is no question that it is the best and most productive use of the correctional system. It stands to reason: if we can take a bad guy and turn him into a good guy and then let him out, then that’s one fewer bad guy to harm us. . . . Where I do not think there is much hope. . .is when we deal with serial killers and sexual predators, the people I have spent most of my career hunting and studying. These people do what they do. . .because it feels good, because they want to, because it gives them satisfaction. You can certainly make the argument, and I will agree with you, that many of them are compensating for bad jobs, poor self-image, mistreatment by parents, any number of things. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to be able to rehabilitate them.

Make up your mind. Is Death a friend? Then go joyfully to hunt with it, as I did. If it's an enemy, then fight it. But don't sag here like a wounded cow waiting for predators to finish it off. You are not prey, nor I! If we must die, let us die as wolves!

Sig is like that. She tends to have an “it takes a village” attitude toward monster hunting. I have mostly hunted supernatural predators alone, partly because I had no choice and partly because I’m an idiot.

Because predators tend to eat the weakest of a species, they keep the remaining population strong. Without predators, herds become weak and disabled. In contrast, when humans hunt animals for trophies, they kill the strongest of the species, thereby weakening the herd.

A lot less energy to convert animal into animal than vegetable into animal. And the brain boost we got from that bonanza. Tools, language, cooperation. You can see the incentive for all the advances that make us human. More meat. Bigger brains. Bigger brains. More meat. I wonder what it looked like, when we first tasted fresh blood. What did we think? What did we feel? That moment when everything changed. From scavenger to predator. Hunted to hunter.

Predators never expect to be hunted.

Man is the only predator who hunts his own.

This is a key to understanding our history and psychology. Genus Homo’s position in the food chain was, until quite recently, solidly in the middle. For millions of years, humans hunted smaller creatures and gathered what they could, all the while being hunted by larger predators. It was only 400,000 years ago that several species of man began to hunt large game on a regular basis, and only in the last 100,000 years – with the rise of Homo sapiens – that man jumped to the top of the food chain. That spectacular leap from the middle to the top had enormous consequences. Other animals at the top of the pyramid, such as lions and sharks, evolved into that position very gradually, over millions of years. This enabled the ecosystem to develop checks and balances that prevent lions and sharks from wreaking too much havoc. As lions became deadlier, so gazelles evolved to run faster, hyenas to cooperate better, and rhinoceroses to be more bad-tempered. In contrast, humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump.

There’s also the truth that 70 percent of serial killer victims are female. You better believe that knowing you’re prey heightens your interest in the predator. You find yourself desperate to make sense of largely random acts of serial murder, believing that if you can understand motivation and hunting patterns, you can protect yourself.

Among wolves, when the bitch leavers her pups to go hunting, the young ones try to follow her out of the den and down the path. She snarls at them, lunges at them, and scares the bejeezus out of them till they run slipping and sliding back to the den. Their mother knows that they do not yet know how to weight and assess other creatures. They do not know who is a predator and who is not.

That’s it, Skyco. That is the way to be a hunter. Never be in a hurry, never rush things. Wait until the prey is within your grasp, then strike swiftly and strike hard. Don’t miss or it may be a long time before another opportunity appears.

The rat population thrived in such a horrible mess. Ironically, cats were believed to be the consorts of witches in those days, so they were killed. Persecution of cats during the Middle Ages nearly eliminated populations of the rat's natural predator, just when Europeans could have used the cats' hunting skills the most.

It's natural. Nature is dark and light, birth and death. Everything and its opposite. And in nature there are predators and prey. The hunters and the hunted. The heartbreakers and the heartbroken. The beautiful thing is that Nature lets us choose which we want to be, most people never make the choice though because they don't even know they have it.

A lion is born knowing how to hunt, but has to learn how to hunt well.

To track prey, you must first know it as you would a brother.

I've got lots more stories to tell.

#MeToo is about the myriad ways straight men are failing us—not just by being predators like Harvey Weinstein, but also by ignoring our consent in seemingly smaller ways too. It’s about men disregarding our boundaries in intimate situations because they’ve been taught every dick move is fair in the search for a mate, like we’re all just exotic fauna on their hunting safari.

We are both caught in its tangles and knots, sometimes the hunter, sometimes the hunted. And sometimes, we are so lost in love's magic that we neither know nor care whether we are predator or prey.

What Keyes was describing was the textbook progression, from childhood, of a sadist and a psychopath. Torturing and killing small animals, pets especially, is experimentation in controlling and killing another living thing for pure pleasure. It is practice, the last step before graduating to humans. Even as an adult,

Evolutionary biologists have identified a rule they call the life/dinner principle. A predator puts less effort into the chase than its prey: if the hunter fails it loses only its dinner, if the hunted fails it loses its life.

When I was a little girl my uncle Was a veterinarian And I was a little girl who loved animals I had a cat and a dog And once I asked my uncle (who was a veterinarian) Why does my dog love belly rubs But they make my cat attack? I showed him scratches up and down my arms. He said the thing about cats you have to understand Is they are predator and prey They can hunt and pounce and kill But they’re small and light and probably Delicious So they take some things very very seriously I was a little girl when he said this But when I became a woman in this world I understood what he meant.

Think about it, mate: How could a species like that develop the massive technology you need to achieve faster-than-light interstellar travel, yeah? All they do is hunt and eat. They’re just stupid murderlumps or killbots supreme with a side of zombie-mayonnaise. Where’s the nerdy shy Predator scientist who figured out how to build a spaceship while all the big jock Predators were down the pub ripping one another’s spines out, eh? Nowhere, because she don’t exist.

FEAR OF DEATH LEADS TO two kinds of fears as it transforms all living creatures either into predator or prey. The fear of scarcity haunts the predator as it hunts for food; the fear of predation haunts the prey as it avoids being hunted. Nature has no favourites. Both the lion and the deer have to run in order to survive.

One of the key defense mechanisms of a phoenix is to shine so brightly, their predators are temporarily stunned and unable to pursue.

A lion looks different when it isn't hunting you. Sleek and stealthy, every move instinctual, bewitching and beautiful.

Like many predators, boys hunt in packs.

I’m walking this over to you, I’m talking to you, which means this is important.

Studies of twins have shown that psychopathy may be a trait more heritable than environmental, yet good children can thrive despite bad parents, and vice versa.

Don’t build a cabin near a termite colony. Don’t rear rabbits near wolves. Don’t attack a cub in front of its mother. Don’t stone a bird you want to catch. Don’t pick a flower before it blooms. Don’t pick fruit before it sweetens. Don’t count game you have not caught. Don’t hunt with a blunt spear. Don’t fish in poisoned waters. Don’t close your eyes near a predator.

I wonder,' Trull said as he watched the momentary stand-off, 'if this is how domestication first began. Not banding together in a hunt for prey, but in an elimination of rival predators.

Language that I used, not language that used me. A language in which I could describe my multilingual world to myself. I knew even then that language was outside me, not inside me. I knew it would not come to me on its own. I needed to hunt it down like prey. Disembowel it, eat it. And when I did, I knew that language, my language, would ease the way blood flowed through my body. It was out there somewhere, a live language-animal, a striped and spotted thing, grazing, waiting for me-the predator. That was the law of my jungle. It wasn't a non-violent, vegetarian dream.

And while investigators didn’t necessarily think Keyes was responsible for all of the missing kids on his computer, their inclusion was disturbing. Who reads about missing children and babies for kicks?

Tristan 'The Predator' Caine. They called him the predator. His reputation preceded him. He rarely went on the hunt but when he did, it was over. When he did, he went straight for the jugular. No distractions. No playing around. For all his unruffled attitude, the man was more lethal than the knife cutting into her thigh. He was also the reason she had come to the party. She was going to kill Tristan Caine.

Yet Alaska remains the “Great Land,” as James Michener called it: the closest we have to a time before man, unsullied terrain, nature so titanically overwhelming it’s impossible not to be awed and a little afraid.

We assume that a large brain, the use of tools, superior learning abilities and complex social structures are huge advantages. It seems self-evident that these have made humankind the most powerful animal on earth. But humans enjoyed all of these advantages for a full 2 million years during which they remained weak and marginal creatures. Thus humans who lived a million years ago, despite their big brains and sharp stone tools, dwelt in constant fear of predators, rarely hunted large game, and subsisted mainly by gathering plants, scooping up insects, stalking small animals, and eating the carrion left behind by other more powerful carnivores.

There are individuals out there that were born to hunt humans. When you realize you're being hunted, you either break down, or you fight. The fighters are the ones who have an unflinching belief and faith in themselves.

didn’t come for a loan,” Mitch assured him. “In every species of animal, the primary obligation of parents is to teach self-sufficiency to their offspring. The prey must learn evasion, and the predator must learn to hunt.

the most ethical option is not to stop hunting animals, but to re-enter the food chain and replace the predators that we displaced. To be good stewards of such ecosystems, we have an ethical obligation to become surrogate predators.

Having to kill. That was an odd thought to me. Civilized people like to think they don’t have to kill, but I don’t know of any sentient species that didn’t evolve from predators. Hunting and killing are very difficult, much more so than fleeing death. They require complex instincts that eventually lead to the development of intelligence. In a way, all of man’s highest creations—from art to literature to science—only came about because of his basic need to kill.

Humans are predators by nature. This instinct may have been bleached out by the cleansing power of civilization, but it cannot be taken away from us completely. The thrill of the hunt and the pleasure of the kill lie dormant in each of us.

This is a key to understanding our history and psychology. Genus Homo’s position in the food chain was, until quite recently, solidly in the middle. For millions of years, humans hunted smaller creatures and gathered what they could, all the while being hunted by larger predators. It was only 400,000 years ago that several species of man began to hunt large game on a regular basis, and only in the last 100,000 years –with the rise of Homo sapiens –that man jumped to the top of the food chain.

Breaking apart his cell phone and removing the battery was something the team hadn’t seen before either. For Kat Nelson, those dark spots in his history, the hours that his phone gave off no signal, would be a tell. That’s when Keyes was doing something.

the Spartan right fall upon the defenders of Antirhion, not in frenzied shrieking rage, lip-curled and fang-bared, but predator-like, cold-blooded, applying the steel with the wordless cohesion of the killing pack and the homicidal efficiency of the hunt.

Unprotected by the army, the Mexican peasants were helpless to resist the Apache raiders, with scores carried off into captivity and hundreds more slaughtered. The desert now reclaimed the untilled fields. Cattle, sheep, mules, and goats wandered free only to fall prey to the great packs of wolves and coyotes that trailed the Apache raiding parties just as the raven shadows the predator on his rounds. Skeletons lined the roads, littered the burned haciendas, and were picked clean by scavengers in deserted villages. It was a perfect reign of terror.

They looked like a group of models in a Versace ad, all big muscles and tousled hair and that lazy sexiness they seemed to embody, like they were comfortable in their own skin, a den of wolves lazing in the sun, fully aware that they were the alpha predators in the food chain.

The truth is a kind of prey – a creature that has to be pursued and dragged into the light. But I think of it more as a predator. I think, given time, the truth will take up the hunt itself. All we have to do is wait – because, Daniel, sooner or later, it will come and find you.

The trouble is that we are seldom aware of the protection afforded by natural enemies until it fails. Most of us walk unseeing through the world, unaware alike of its beauties, its wonders, and the strange and sometimes terrible intensity of the lives that are being lived about us. So it is that the activities of the insect predators and parasites are known to few. Perhaps we may have noticed an oddly shaped insect of ferocious mien on a bush in the garden and been dimly aware that the praying mantis lives at the expense of other insects. But we see with understanding eye only if we have walked in the garden at night and here and there with a flashlight have glimpsed the mantis stealthily creeping upon her prey. Then we sense something of the drama of the hunter and the hunted. Then we begin to feel something of the relentlessly pressing force by which nature controls her own.

BORN TO RUN In his book Racing the Antelope: What Animals Can Teach Us about Running and Life, biologist Bernd Heinrich describes the human species as an endurance predator. The genes that govern our bodies today evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago, when we were in constant motion, either foraging for food or chasing antelope for hours and days across the plains. Heinrich describes how, even though antelope are among the fastest mammals, our ancestors were able to hunt them down by driving them to exhaustion—keeping on their tails until they had no energy left to escape. Antelope are sprinters, but their metabolism doesn’t allow them to go and go and go. Ours does. And we have a fairly balanced distribution of fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscle fibers, so even after ranging miles over the landscape we retain the metabolic capacity to sprint in short bursts to make the kill.

These men may be skilled in hunting, but what they don't know is that I've been hunted by a far scarier man. I was a mouse caught in a trap before, scared, and helpless as I was taken between the teeth of an apex predator. But I'm not their little mouse, and they are not Zade. And I will never succumb to them.

They do not so much as hesitate in their actions, and I realize they cannot see my slick dark coat in the unlit room. Nor can they scent me with their clumsy human noses. They are indeed foolish predators, not only to hunt on another’s territory, but to hunt where their limited senses are useless. And they are very foolish to hunt my Lady.

If the FBI hadn’t been informed of this interview, it was highly unlikely the Department of Justice had—and DOJ was the final word, the lone authorizing agency on federal death-penalty cases. Investigators and prosecutors had to do everything—everything—by the book. And Kevin Feldis was pissing all over it. Nor was this an isolated example.

He said that a killer comes to hunting humans gradually. The appetite builds from a young boy’s undifferentiated anger and morbidity of mind to a search for ever more violent pornography, the visual and written material that Ted believed had shaped and focused his fantasy world. Then comes the window peeping, followed eventually by crudely conceived and unsuccessful assaults. In Ted’s case, these gave way, over time, to a sophisticated taste for the chase and its aftermath: the selection of what he called “worthy” victims, pretty and intelligent young daughters and sisters of the middle class, nice girls whom Ted desired to possess, he said, “as one would possess a potted plant, or a Porsche.

Keyes had told investigators that there were two texts that he studied closely, both written by pioneering behavioral profilers in the FBI: Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide, and the Criminal Mind by Roy Hazelwood, and Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit by John Douglas, in turn the model for Jack Crawford in The Silence of the Lambs.

Dexter did not kick the can. And now Dexter is It. Again. You may wonder, how can this be? How can Dexter's night hunt be reduced to this? Always before there has been some frightful twisted predator awaiting the special attention of frightful twisted Dexter—and here I am, stalking an empty Chef Boyardee ravioli can that is guilty of nothing worse than bland sauce.

Tristan 'The Predator' Caine. They called him the predator. His reputation preceded him. He rarely went on the hunt but when he did, it was over. When he did, he went straight for the jugular. No distractions. No playing around. For all his unruffled attitude, the man was more lethal than the knife cutting into her thigh. He was also the reason she had come to the party.

What was the human animal in the midst of the siege? An herbivore that crawled on all fours, browsing on dirty grasses. A predator that hunted alone or in packs. A social animal that spoke of noble art and wound violin strings from the guts of dead sheep and pigs. A creature with canine teeth for tearing, but with a tongue for speaking. A mouth that could devour or sing.

Then there was the driving, the ability to stay awake without the aid of drugs, just his Americano coffees and soaring adrenaline, moving through five states in as many days. Until Samantha, Keyes had left no digital trail, no cell phone or credit card activity. Until Samantha, he swore he’d never killed in his own backyard. Decades of mayhem, geographical boundaries unknown.

Before beginning Samantha’s recovery, Chacon had his team gather in one of the tents, where they were invisible to cameras and agents on the ice. They observed a moment of silence, and as they exited, they saw an enormous bald eagle circling overhead. Chacon took it as a sign that Samantha was watching over them. The divers looked at each other, nodded, and silently went to work.

You hunt and catch your own food. Am I correct?" "We are fierce predators of the night," DeChevue said proudly. Edwin tried again, "You hunt and gather your own food?" DeChevue still didn't get it. "Yes, M'sieur. We hunt, proudly." "You know, there is a special name for people who have to catch and kill everything they eat." "And that name has been the terror of the night from the dawn of man. Which name would you like? I can supply many. Nosferatu? Das Vampire?" "Peasant," Edwin said. "A person who has to provide all his own food is a peasant. How is it that you have lived all this time and are still ignorant of the division of labor?" DeChevue's mouth opened and closed several times. Each time he seemed on the verge of saying something, yet each time words failed him.

Before his death in 2016, Hazelwood spoke about Keyes. Hazelwood’s decades of service had left him with a cynical view of the FBI’s truthfulness in general, and he believed stranger abductions are far more common than the Bureau insists. He was convinced that the proliferation of hard-core pornography, so easily and anonymously accessible online, has contributed to increasingly sadistic crimes and murders.

Vulnerability--not hunger, not anger, and certainly not spite--is the key to predator-prey relationships. The skill and viciousness of the hunter matters less than the size, speed, strength, health, and ferocity of the hunted. Vulnerability explains why large predators tend to kill the old, young, and sick members of prey populations. Predators eat the mild and weak because those are the animals they can catch and kill.

Another passage nailed Keyes: “The sexual offender is never fully inactive,” Hazelwood wrote. “He may not be acting out against a specific victim, but he will be making plans, selecting new targets, acting out against other victims, or gathering materials. He is never dormant.” Keyes was a cluster bomb. Investigators were learning that some of his tactics were borrowed from different predecessors, reconstituted for the modern age.

But humans enjoyed all of these advantages for a full 2 million years during which they remained weak and marginal creatures. Thus humans who lived a million years ago, despite their big brains and sharp stone tools, dwelt in constant fear of predators, rarely hunted large game, and subsisted mainly by gathering plants, scooping up insects, stalking small animals, and eating the carrion left behind by other more powerful carnivores.

I decided to go back to my old stomping grounds,” he said. “Back east.” Another clue. Had Keyes killed more on the East Coast than the West? They could tell he was getting off on telling investigators things they’d never heard nor had ever known to fear. It could be difficult to tell how much he was exaggerating, but so much of what he had told them bore out. They were inclined to believe him. “I have hundreds of plans,” Keyes said, “and a grand plan.

The Predators The African lion makes a kill only twice out of every ten hunts. Leopards do better, catching their prey twenty-five percent of the time, and cheetahs do best of all the big cats, with a kill ratio of nearly fifty percent. The deadliest four-legged African predator is not a big cat. It cannot be outrun or outdistanced, its pursuit is relentless, and it captures its prey nine out of every ten hunts. The most dangerous predator in Africa is the wild dog.

Once the region’s apex predator, the Asiatic lion almost went extinct during the British empire’s colonization of India, when no viceroy could visit a maharaja’s palace without a hunt in the local forest. Even today, the Asiatic lion still ranks among the rarest of the large feline predators, rarer even than its neighbor to the north, the snow leopard, which is so scarce that a glimpse of one padding down a jagged Himalayan crag is said to consummate a spiritual pilgrimage.

True, in modern society, we are not hunted by predators as our ancestors were, but in evolutionary terms we’re only a fraction of a second away from the old scheme of things. Our emotional brain was handed down to us by Homo sapiens who lived in a completely different era, and it is their lifestyle and the dangers they encountered that our emotions were designed to address. Our feelings and behaviors in relationships today are not very different from those of our early ancestors.

Various human species had been prowling and evolving in Afro-Asia for 2 million years. They slowly honed their hunting skills, and began going after large animals around 400,000 years ago. The big beasts of Africa and Asia learned to avoid humans, so when the new mega-predator – Homo sapiens – appeared on the Afro-Asian scene, the large animals already knew to keep their distance from creatures that looked like it. In contrast, the Australian giants had no time to learn to run away.

What do you know about the life cycle of the common octopus?" Margot asked. ... "After the female lays her clutch of eggs, she devotes herself entirely to cleaning and protecting them for months. She stops looking for food, unable to leave them even for a short time. She begins to waste away - senescence, it's called. It's as if she's used up all her life force hunting, outmaneuvering predators, finding a mate, arranging her den, and then, finally, caring for her eggs. By the time they hatch, she's starved herself to death, or nearly. Her skin, once capable of rapid changes in color and texture, goes pale and develops lesions that never heal. Her eyes go cloudy. She begins to pick at herself. Her decomposing body sometimes becomes a source of food for her young...That's the best she can do for them." ... " Don't worry," Margot added in a more lighthearted tone. "I'm well aware that I'm not an octopus. I just find it useful to remember that there's no reason for me to behave like one.

I was on one of my world 'walkabouts.' It had taken me once more through Hong Kong, to Japan, Australia, and then Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific [one of the places I grew up]. There I found the picture of 'the Father.' It was a real, gigantic Saltwater Crocodile (whose picture is now featured on page 1 of TEETH). From that moment, 'the Father' began to swim through the murky recesses of my mind. Imagine! I thought, men confronting the world’s largest reptile on its own turf! And what if they were stripped of their firearms, so they must face this force of nature with nothing but hand weapons and wits? We know that neither whales nor sharks hunt individual humans for weeks on end. But, Dear Reader, crocodiles do! They are intelligent predators that choose their victims and plot their attacks. So, lost on its river, how would our heroes escape a great hunter of the Father’s magnitude? And what if these modern men must also confront the headhunters and cannibals who truly roam New Guinea? What of tribal wars, the coming of Christianity and materialism (the phenomenon known as the 'Cargo Cult'), and the people’s introduction to 'civilization' in the form of world war? What of first contact between pristine tribal culture and the outside world? What about tribal clashes on a global scale—the hatred and enmity between America and Japan, from Pearl Harbor, to the only use in history of atomic weapons? And if the world could find peace at last, how about Johnny and Katsu?

We long for an intimate connection, but that longing makes us feel vulnerable. Therefore, we guard our hearts for self-preservation, which barricades that intimacy we are longing for. Casual sex is a very sad cat and mouse game. The man is entrapped in his role as the sex-driven predator constantly on the hunt for new conquests, while the woman is the prey that must find her perfect combination of sexual allure and virtue, with the sexual allure being what attracts him and virtue what keeps him.

Chacon retired in July 2014, and at his going-away party said the one thing he’d never miss was pulling another dead child out of the water. He meant it as a joke, but it left his colleagues stunned. To this day, he suffers from post-traumatic stress. He will probably have it the rest of his life. He sometimes thinks that the reason he and his wife were never able to have children despite years of trying, specialist after specialist offering no solution, was so he’d never have to know a parent’s grief.

Even in the coldest weather, the harbor, the fields, the woods, all are alive. Blue jays fly, and brown winter wrens; finches feed on birch seed. Tiny, unseen things crawl, hunt, live, die. Lacewings hibernate under the loose bark on the trees. Caddis-fly larvae carry houses made from plant debris on their backs, and aphids huddle on the alders. Wood frogs sleep frozen beneath piles of leaf mold, and beetles and back swimmers, newts and spotted salamanders, their tails thick with stored fat, all flicker in the icy waters above. There are carpenter ants, and snow fleas, and spiders, and black mourning cloak butterflies that flit across the snow like burned paper. White-footed mice and woodland voles and pygmy shrews scurry through the slash, ever-wary of the foxes and weasels and the vicious, porcupine-hunting fishers that share the habitat. The snowshoe hare changes its coat to white in response to the diminishing daylight hours, the better to hide itself from its predators. Because the predators never go away.

You cannot deal with grief, not really. It is not a monster you can slay and be done with. Grief is an ambush predator, and we are the prey. It stalks us our entire lives, hiding in smells and sounds, in solitude and in crowds. It waits in items and in thoughts. Memories are the hunting grounds of grief, and when it pounces, its bite is venomous. It inflicts sadness or rage or sometimes despair. But grief is not an adventurous predator. Always it stalks old memories, not new. And that is how we move on. New memories where it is not welcome.

In agricultural communities, male leadership in the hunt ceased to be of much importance. As the discipline of the hunting band decayed, the political institutions of the earliest village settlements perhaps approximated the anarchism which has remained ever since the ideal of peaceful peasantries all round the earth. Probably religious functionaries, mediators between helpless mankind and the uncertain fertility of the earth, provided an important form of social leadership. The strong hunter and man of prowess, his occupation gone or relegated to the margins of social life, lost the umambiguous primacy which had once been his; while the comparatively tight personal subordination to a leader necessary to the success of a hunting party could be relaxed in proportion as grain fields became the center around which life revolved. Among predominantly pastoral peoples, however, religious-political institutions took a quite different turn. To protect the flocks from animal predators required the same courage and social discipline which hunters had always needed. Among pastoralists, likewise, the principal economic activity- focused, as among the earliest hunters, on a parasitic relation to animals- continued to be the special preserve of menfolk. Hence a system of patrilineal families, united into kinship groups under the authority of a chieftain responsible for daily decisions as to where to seek pasture, best fitted the conditions of pastoral life. In addition, pastoralists were likely to accord importance to the practices and discipline of war. After all, violent seizure of someone else’s animals or pasture grounds was the easiest and speediest way to wealth and might be the only means of survival in a year of scant vegetation. Such warlikeness was entirely alien to communities tilling the soil. Archeological remains from early Neolithic villages suggest remarkably peaceful societies. As long as cultivable land was plentiful, and as long as the labor of a single household could not produce a significant surplus, there can have been little incentive to war. Traditions of violence and hunting-party organization presumably withered in such societies, to be revived only when pastoral conquest superimposed upon peaceable villagers the elements of warlike organization from which civilized political institutions without exception descend.

The other night I had dinner with a good friend, a woman writer whom I’ve known for about ten years. Though we’ve never had a romantic relationship, I love her dearly and care about her: she’s a good person, and a talented writer, and those two qualities put her everlastingly on my list of When You Need Help, Even In The Dead Of Night, I’m On Call. Over dinner, we talked about an anguish she has been experiencing for a number of years. She’s afraid of dying alone and unloved. Some of you are nodding in understanding. A few of you are smiling. The former understand pain, the latter are assholes. Or very lucky. We’ve all dreaded that moment when we pack it in, get a fast rollback of days and nights, and realize we’re about to go down the hole never having belonged to anyone. If you’ve never felt it, you’re either an alien from far Arcturus or so insensitive your demise won’t matter. Or very lucky. Her problem is best summed up by something Theodore Sturgeon once said: “There’s no absence of love in the world, only worthy places to put it.” My friend gets involved with guys who do her in. Not all her fault. Some of it is—we’re never wholly victims, we help construct the tiger traps filled with spikes—but not all of it. She’s vulnerable. While not naïve, she is innocent. And that’s a dangerous, but laudable capacity: to wander through a world that can be very uncaring and amorally cruel, and still be astonished at the way the sunlight catches the edge of a coleus leaf. Anybody puts her down for that has to go through me first. So she keeps trying, and the ones with long teeth sense her vulnerability and they move in for the slow kill. (That’s evil: only the human predator destroys slowly, any decent hunting animal rips out the throat and feeds, and that’s that. The more I see of people, the better I like animals.)

Sometimes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are presented as a hunting expeditions (“As British close in on Basra, Iraqis scurry away”; “Terror hunt snares twenty-five”; and “Net closes around Bin Laden”) with enemy bases as animal nests (“Pakistanis give up on lair of Osama”; “Terror nest in Fallujah is attacked”) from which the prey must be driven out (“Why Bin Laden is so difficult to smoke out”; “America’s new dilemma: how to smoke Bin Laden out from caves”). We need to trap the animal (“Trap may net Taliban chief”; “FBI terror sting nets mosque leaders”) and lock it in a cage (“Even locked in a cage, Saddam poses serious danger”). Sometimes the enemy is a ravening predator (“Chained beast—shackled Saddam dragged to court”), or a monster (“The terrorism monster”; “Of monsters and Muslims”), while at other times he is a pesky rodent (“Americans cleared out rat’s nest in Afghanistan”; “Hussein’s rat hole”), a venomous snake (“The viper awaits”; “Former Arab power is ‘poisonous snake’”), an insect (“Iraqi forces find ‘hornet’s nest’ in Fallujah”; “Operation desert pest”; “Terrorists, like rats and cockroaches, skulk in the dark”), or even a disease organism (“Al Qaeda mutating like a virus”; “Only Muslim leaders can remove spreading cancer of Islamic terrorism”). In any case, they reproduce at an alarming rate (“Iraq breeding suicide killers”; “Continent a breeding ground for radical Islam”).

Approaching the trail, he broke through the thicket a short distance ahead of the Empath. Causing the Empaths horse to startle as the surprised rider jerked on the reins. Cap was equally surprised to find a young girl before him instead of an older, experienced male Empath. Cap brought his horse to a quick halt. The young girl pulled a small knife from her boot and cautioned him. "I don't know where you came from, but I'm not easy prey.” Her voice shook slightly with fear as she raised the knife. Not sure how to proceed, they stared silently at each other. Cap had always believed that Empaths didn't carry weapons. This pretty, chestnut haired girl couldn't be more than 18 years old. Her long straight tresses covered the spot on her jacket where the Empathic Emblem was usually worn, causing Cap to doubt she was the one he sought. Not wanting to frighten her any more than he already had, Cap tried to explain. "I'm Commander Caplin Taylor. I’m looking for an Empath that is headed for the Western Hunting Lodge.” "My name is Kendra; I am the Empath you seek.” She answered cautiously, still holding the blade. A noise from the brush drew her attention as a small rodent pounced out, trying to evade an unseen predator. Cap was just close enough to lurch forward and snatch the dirk from her hand. Her head jerked back in alarm. "Bosen May has been mauled by a Sraeb, his shoulder is a mass of pulp." Cap spoke quickly not wanting to hesitate any longer. That was all Kendra needed to hear. She pushed her horse past him and headed quickly down the trail. "Wait!" Cap called after her, turning his horse around. Reining in the horse, she turned back to face him annoyed by the delay. "Are you a good horseman?" Cap asked, as he stuffed her dirk in his jacket. "I've been in the saddle since I was a child." She answered, abruptly. "Okay so just a few years then?" Cap's rebuke angered her. Jerking the horse back toward the trail, she ignored him. "Wait, I'm sorry!" Cap called after her. "It's just that I know a quicker way, if you can handle some rough terrain." "Let’s go then." Kendra replied, gruffly, turning back to face him. Without another word, Cap dove back into the brush and the girl followed.

The evolution of conscious intelligence is one of the greatest mysteries in nature. We may never fully understand how or why it occurs. What does seem clear is that it is an evolutionary adaptation, just like sight or thermoregulation. Different animals have different senses and physical traits; they have different intelligences as well. For some, nothing more is needed than the ability to tell the difference between food and not-food, predator and not-predator. But for those with complex intelligences that lead to behaviors such as solving puzzles, teaching hunting strategies, and adapting to new circumstances on the fly, it is typically easy to hypothesize as to which environmental factors made such an expensive adaptation advantageous.

As always, the dead will be made to pay the moral debt born of their killing. At the start of this campaign, one oft-parroted justification was the nonsensical contrivance that Palestinians in Gaza were subject to a collective guilt on account of their voting for Hamas. It is somewhat pointless to note that most Gazans are too young to have voted for Hamas in the most recent election, or that collective punishment of a civilian population for their electoral choices would be subject to a far higher standard of scrutiny if that population weren’t a politically powerless contingent of Brown people, or that the very same terror group had long received support from the Israeli government as a matter of strategy so as to keep an entity in power that at least partially shared the government’s disdain for peace or a two-state solution, or that the occupation and terror inflicted on Palestinians long predates the creation of Hamas. It is pointless, even, to make the obvious analogies, to imagine the response had almost any other country on earth killed hundreds or thousands of civilians on a hostage rescue mission, or flattened every hospital in a city on the hunt for a terror group, and then bragged about its success. Pointless because such things assume a conversation anchored in facts or reason or even the thinnest presupposition that the people being killed, like those killed on October 7, are human beings, their loss an utter indictment of the systems and leaders and world that allowed

After the female lays her clutch of eggs, she devotes herself entirely to cleaning and protecting them for months. She stops looking for food, unable to leave them even for a short time. She begins to waste away—senescence, it’s called. It’s as if she’s used up all her life force hunting, outmaneuvering predators, finding a mate, arranging her den, and then, finally, caring for her eggs. By the time they hatch, she’s starved herself to death, or nearly. Her skin, once capable of rapid changes in color and texture, goes pale and develops lesions that never heal. Her eyes go cloudy. She begins to pick at herself. Her decomposing body sometimes becomes a source of food for her young.” She smiled a sad, thin-lipped smile. “That’s the best she can do for them.

There’s just no owning any success you achieve and stacking it in your win column. The force just won’t let it happen. What happens when imposter syndrome has you in its grip? You become terrified you’ll be found out. Despite all her acclaim and success, this is what Maya Angelou feared. “I have written 11 books, but each time I think, ‘Uh-oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.’”1 You might be surprised to find out how many accomplished people think to themselves they’ll be “found out,” then ostracized and ridiculed. However, it’s irrational. It would only happen if you actually did have no skill, no ability, or no knowledge, but that isn’t the case for most people. This is the ultimate fear, isn’t it? Being found out and kicked out of our tribe? By nature, we’re tribal. Humans survived through the millennia because we were part of a tribe that hunted, gathered, sheltered, and protected one another from the elements, from predators, and from other tribes. You couldn’t be out hunting and watching the fire simultaneously. You needed other people if you had any hope of surviving through the night. If your tribe finds out you’re a fraud, it triggers that primordial “Uh-oh, they’re going to kick me out! I’m going to be caught in the wilderness alone!” When plagued by imposter syndrome, people don’t take themselves, their abilities, or their accomplishments seriously. If you don’t take yourself seriously on any Field of Play, you most likely won’t be getting the results you want.

And everywhere, just as there were animals on land, were the animals of the sea. The tiniest fish made the largest schools- herring, anchovies, and baby mackerel sparkling and cavorting in the light like a million diamonds. They twirled into whirlpools and flowed over the sandy floor like one large, unlikely animal. Slightly larger fish came in a rainbow, red and yellow and blue and orange and purple and green and particolored like clowns: dragonets and blennies and gobies and combers. Hake, shad, char, whiting, cod, flounder, and mullet made the solid middle class. The biggest loners, groupers and oarfish and dogfish and the major sharks and tuna that all grew to a large, ripe old age did so because they had figured out how to avoid human boats, nets, lines, and bait. The black-eyed predators were well aware they were top of the food chain only down deep, and somewhere beyond the surface there were things even more hungry and frightening than they. Rounding out the population were the famous un-fish of the ocean: the octopus, flexing and swirling the ends of her tentacles; delicate jellyfish like fairies; lobsters and sea stars; urchins and nudibranchs... the funny, caterpillar-like creatures that flowed over the ocean floor wearing all kinds of colors and appendages. All of these creatures woke, slept, played, swam about, and lived their whole lives under the sea, unconcerned with what went on above them. But there were other animals in this land, strange ones, who spoke both sky and sea. Seals and dolphins and turtles and the rare fin whale would come down to hunt or talk for a bit and then vanish to that strange membrane that separated the ocean from everything else. Of course they were loved- but perhaps not quite entirely trusted.

It takes no skill to find a bald eagle. You look for flat rabbits on country roads. Wait a while and the national emblem will appear, menace anything that got there first, and plunge his majestic head deep in a mass of entrails. Alternatively, you can follow some industrious hawk through swamp or bottomland forest until he dispatches a squirrel; an eagle is likely to descend, savage the smaller bird, and steal his prize. The eagle can hunt, of course; he just prefers not to. Benjamin Franklin called him a bird of bad moral character. It takes no skill to find the nest, either. Look for a shipwreck in a tree, layered in feces . . . The likeliest impediment to (the eagles’) reproductive success was a human observer bungling around twice a day, but their welfare was almost incidental anyway. The point was for patriotic human hearts to swell with pride on outdoor weekends, and convincing replicas would have sufficed; the compulsive monitoring was not good husbandry, just an expression of national guilt. I did what I was paid for. Privately I sided with the furred and feathered residents of the area who must have wondered why humans were loosing winged hyenas in their midst . . . They’re glorified vultures. An apex predator that never hunts. Absurd.

Genus Homo’s position in the food chain was, until quite recently, solidly in the middle. For millions of years, humans hunted smaller creatures and gathered what they could, all the while being hunted by larger predators. It was only 400,000 years ago that several species of man began to hunt large game on a regular basis, and only in the last 100,000 years – with the rise of Homo sapiens – that man jumped to the top of the food chain. That spectacular leap from the middle to the top had enormous consequences. Other animals at the top of the pyramid, such as lions and sharks, evolved into that position very gradually, over millions of years. This enabled the ecosystem to develop checks and balances that prevent lions and sharks from wreaking too much havoc. As lions became deadlier, so gazelles evolved to run faster, hyenas to cooperate better, and rhinoceroses to be more bad-tempered. In contrast, humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump.

Suddenly, I caught a glimpse of something moving behind me. When I turned, I saw two coyotes standing in an ambush positon. They were watching my brother Jep, who was working as our cameraman and was positioned to the right of us. The coyotes saw Jep moving, but because he was so camouflaged, they apparently didn’t realize he was a human. Our guide in Nebraska had warned us that he’d seen several coyotes jump from the top of the bluffs to the ducks below for a quick meal. The landowner was having a lot of problems with the coyotes, which were suspected of killing some of his farm animals. He even feared a few of them might have rabies. Evidently, the coyotes heard us blowing our duck calls and believed we were actual ducks. Now they were ready for their next meal. We had accidentally called in two predators using our duck calls and in essence became the hunted instead of the hunters! The two coyotes were licking their chops and were about to attack the only unarmed member of our hunting party! It was like a scene out of a bad horror film called Killer Coyotes. I looked at Jep and realized he was oblivious to what was going on behind him. I jumped out of our makeshift blind and ran toward the coyotes. One of the coyotes took off running, but the other one ran about twenty feet and stopped. It turned around and started growling at me. It looked at me like, “Hey, you want some of me?” I raised my shotgun and shot it dead. I had planned on shooting only ducks, but it’s a bad move when a coyote decides it wants to fight a human. Once it stood its ground and said, “You or me,” I wasn’t going to take a threat from a wild scavenger. It was a prime example of what happens when animals become overpopulated and lose their fear of humans. The lesson learned: don’t bring claws and teeth to a gunfight.

Do you ever think of the number of men that go out and kill women? I do. And when they are caught (if they are caught) and interviewed, sometimes they say that their mom used to beat and belittle them, or they couldn't live up to their fathers standards. Their first girlfriend cheated on them, or their dick is just so, so small. It's all bullshit. Nothing gets them as hard as curating fear, of terrifying something innocent, of peeling the wings off flies and tearing the legs off spiders, of drowning kittens, of putting a woman in her place. Demons are said to be most attracted to our fright. The energy of our terror let's them be something. I don't think men are that different. It's our fear and their force that keeps them in power. They say "not all men", and I say they're right. I've never known a trans man who's fed off my fear. I've never known a gay man to leer at me as if I'm little more than a meal. Just these heterosexual cis men who this world was built for, who it was built by. They don't seem to need a reason to hate us. As a society, we accept that there's a little murderous rapist in most of them. Something he just needs to get out of his system, like that thigh clenching need to come. It's why we tell our daughters to cover up, to keep an eye on her drink, to call when she gets there, to smile, to watch her mouth. But we tell our sons they can be whatever they want to be, as long as it's something masculine. Men are hardwired to spot vulnerable women, knowing just what to search for. They've been conditioned since birth, like wolf pups watching and observing how to be a predator. Social structures that reveal how to hunt with the greatest ease and practicality. They seem to sense these girls no one will realize are missing. These women who society already views as a lost cause, destined for turmoil. As if she was just put on this earth to satisfy a man's bloodthirsty need.

By the time Jessica Buchanan was kidnapped in Somalia on October 25, 2011, the twenty-four boys back in America who had been so young during the 1993 attack on the downed American aid support choppers in Mogadishu had since grown to manhood. Now they were between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-five, and each one had become determined to qualify for the elite U.S. Navy unit called DEVGRU. After enlisting in the U.S. Navy and undergoing their essential basic training, every one of them endured the challenges of BUDS (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) training, where the happy goal is to become “drownproofed” via what amounts to repeated semidrowning, while also learning dozens of ways to deliver explosive death and demolition. This was only the starting point. Once qualification was over and the candidates were sworn in, three-fourths of the qualified Navy SEALS who tried to also qualify for DEVGRU dropped out. Those super-warriors were overcome by the challenges, regardless of their peak physical condition and being in the prime of their lives. This happened because of the intensity of the training. Long study and practice went into developing a program specifically designed to seek out and expose any individual’s weakest points. If the same ordeals were imposed on captured terrorists who were known to be guilty of killing innocent civilians, the officers in charge would get thrown in the brig. Still, no matter how many Herculean physical challenges are presented to a DEVGRU candidate, the brutal training is primarily mental. It reveals each soldier’s principal foe to be himself. His mortal fears and deepest survival instinct emerge time after time as the essential demons he must overcome. Each DEVGRU member must reach beyond mere proficiency at dealing death. He must become two fighters combined: one who is trained to a state of robotic muscle memory in specific dark skills, and a second who is fluidly adaptive, using an array of standard SEAL tactics. Only when he can live and work from within this state of mind will he be trusted to pursue black operations in every form of hostile environment. Therefore the minority candidate who passes into DEVGRU becomes a member of the “Tier One” Special Mission Unit. He will be assigned to reconnaissance or assault, but his greatest specialty will always be to remain lethal in spite of rapidly changing conditions. From the day he is accepted into that elite tribe, he embodies what is delicately called “preemptive and proactive counterterrorist operations.” Or as it might be more bluntly described: Hunt them down and kill them wherever they are - and is possible, blow up something. Each one of that small percentage who makes it through six months of well-intended but malicious torture emerges as a true human predator. If removing you from this world becomes his mission, your only hope of escaping a DEVGRU SEAL is to find a hiding place that isn’t on land, on the sea, or in the air.

THE ORIGIN OF INTELLIGENCE Many theories have been proposed as to why humans developed greater intelligence, going all the way back to Charles Darwin. According to one theory, the evolution of the human brain probably took place in stages, with the earliest phase initiated by climate change in Africa. As the weather cooled, the forests began to recede, forcing our ancestors onto the open plains and savannahs, where they were exposed to predators and the elements. To survive in this new, hostile environment, they were forced to hunt and walk upright, which freed up their hands and opposable thumbs to use tools. This in turn put a premium on a larger brain to coordinate tool making. According to this theory, ancient man did not simply make tools—“tools made man.” Our ancestors did not suddenly pick up tools and become intelligent. It was the other way around. Those humans who picked up tools could survive in the grasslands, while those who did not gradually died off. The humans who then survived and thrived in the grasslands were those who, through mutations, became increasingly adept at tool making, which required an increasingly larger brain. Another theory places a premium on our social, collective nature. Humans can easily coordinate the behavior of over a hundred other individuals involved in hunting, farming, warring, and building, groups that are much larger than those found in other primates, which gave humans an advantage over other animals. It takes a larger brain, according to this theory, to be able to assess and control the behavior of so many individuals. (The flip side of this theory is that it took a larger brain to scheme, plot, deceive, and manipulate other intelligent beings in your tribe. Individuals who could understand the motives of others and then exploit them would have an advantage over those who could not. This is the Machiavellian theory of intelligence.) Another theory maintains that the development of language, which came later, helped accelerate the rise of intelligence. With language comes abstract thought and the ability to plan, organize society, create maps, etc. Humans have an extensive vocabulary unmatched by any other animal, with words numbering in the tens of thousands for an average person. With language, humans could coordinate and focus the activities of scores of individuals, as well as manipulate abstract concepts and ideas. Language meant you could manage teams of people on a hunt, which is a great advantage when pursuing the woolly mammoth. It meant you could tell others where game was plentiful or where danger lurked. Yet another theory is “sexual selection,” the idea that females prefer to mate with intelligent males. In the animal kingdom, such as in a wolf pack, the alpha male holds the pack together by brute force. Any challenger to the alpha male has to be soundly beaten back by tooth and claw. But millions of years ago, as humans became gradually more intelligent, strength alone could not keep the tribe together.

You are so stupid.” Astonishment broke through his pain. Could I still undo what I had done? “I lied!' I spat my whisper at him. “I knew you read my journal. I knew you read my dreams. I wrote there what I thought would hurt you most! I lied to hurt you. For letting him be dead while you lived. For being loved by him more than he loved me!” I took a breath. “He loved you more than he ever loved any of the rest of us!” “What?” His mouth hung open after that word, his eyes wide. He made a stupid face of astonishment. As if he hadn’t always known he was loved the best. That he was Beloved. “Stupid again! Asking stupid questions. Go with him. Go now. It’s you he wants, not me. Go!” When had my voice risen to a shout? I did not know, I did not care. Let it be a spectacle, let all the camp be roused and folk stare at me. For that was what was happening. Dutiful had come to his feet, a sword in hand, looking around for an enemy. They were all half-awake, roused by my shouts. Hap was staring with his mouth hanging open. Nettle’s hands clutched her face in horror at the truth I had shouted. And my father lifted a hand. His face was so ravaged, it was like looking at death itself. Except for the smooth, silvered part of it. By creeping degrees, his human hand lifted. He turned it over, showing a bloody palm. His cracked lips moved. Beloved. He could not say the word, but I knew it. So did his Fool. He rose, the blanket that had draped his shoulders falling to the earth. He pulled the glove from his hand and let it fall. He walked uncertainly, like a puppet with his strings pulled by an apprentice puppeteer. He reached my father. So tenderly, he set his hand into my father’s. Then he leaned down until he lay upon the wolf, his face turned to my father’s face. He put his arm across my father’s bony back. He drew him close and set his silver fingers to the wolf. For a moment all was still. Then I saw Beloved’s fingers stir the soft fur of the wolf’s back. The firelit bodies of my father and Beloved softened and merged. I felt something I could not describe. Like the whoosh of air when a door opens, and then closes again, but it was in the Skill-current, and so strong that I saw Nettle flinch at it, too. Briefer than an instant, I saw light striate out from them. A nexus, a node on the path of fate. Then it was finished. Something finally complete, as it should have been. Their colors dimmed and the wolf’s eyes gleamed. It was slow and it was sudden, that they were gone and only the wolf remained. The snarl faded. The wolf’s ears pricked and swiveled. His broad head turned slowly. He lifted his muzzle and snuffed the night air. Such eyes he had! They were a darkness full of the brilliance of life. For one brief instant, light caught in them and glowed green. We were all motionless, as if a huge predator faced us. Then, like a wet dog, the wolf shook himself and tiny fragments of stone flew in all directions, as if he had rolled in them. His slow look roved over us, pausing at each in turn. His gaze lingered on me the last. His eyes were both hard and amused. Those we’re astonishing lies, cub. And the very last one the most inspired of all. You have your father’s talent for it. He have one final shake of his coat. I go to the hunt!

America had not done that. Its influence had fallen to a seventy-year ebb under Bush, and the inspirational rhetoric of Obama could not revive it. Promoting democracy and pushing back against Putin were not in the first rank of the new president’s priorities. He now was in charge of the war machinery of the Pentagon and the CIA, the lethal weapons of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, and as Obama sent more troops into Afghanistan and deployed a barrage of Predators and special-operations forces to hunt and kill America’s enemies abroad, the greatest part of the foreign policy of the United States was not executed by diplomats and democracy advocates but by soldiers and spies.

Aldo Leopold’s land-ethic philosophy to how it manages the land, an ethic that involves living sustainably on the land, coexisting with large predators, and “utilizing resources, such as game, hunting, ranching . . . so the landscape benefits, the wildlife benefits, and humans benefit, and future generations of people benefit as well.

the children could set themselves on fire," Mark said. He didn't sound like he was joking. "Ty and Livvy are fifteen," said Ema. "They're nearly the same age you were when you joined the Hunt. And you were-" "What?" Mark turned his odd eyes on her. "I was fine?" Emma felt herself flush. "An afternoon in their own home is not exactly the same as being kidnapped by cannibalistic faerie predators." "We didn't eat people," Mark said indignantly. "At least not to my knowlege" Julian unlocked the driver's side door and slid inside. Emma climbes into the passenger seat as he leaned out the window and looked sympathetically at his brother. "Mark, we have to go. If anything happens, have Livvy text us, but right now Rook is the best chance we have. Okay?" Mark straightened up as if redying for battle. "Okay." "And if they di manage to set themselves on fire," "Yes?" Mark said. "You'd better find a way to put them out!

So where did we go wrong? When did we become the aggressors, the bullies? When we think about it deeply, it’s easy to conclude it must have been when some humans decided to do planned hunting. Up to that time we still would have been living naturally, as the herbivores we are. When we made the conscious, sadistic, ideological choice to not leave others alone to live their lives and attack them for no reason, we became an unnatural herbivorous “predator”. We didn’t need to kill or eat other animals. We wanted to.

Did he see?” I wondered because, if they fought, then Apollo would have had to see the cowardly thief Artemis talked about. “He did,” she said now, sipping on her tea slowly. “He saw. And once we get to him down there, we’ll know exactly who’s behind all of this. I’ll know exactly whom to hunt down.” The grin on her face was downright scary. Easy to see that she was a predator, even with a soft beauty like hers. So easy to see how she would rip you apart piece by piece—not only without hesitation or an ounce of guilt, but she would enjoy it, too. “Why haven’t you gotten him out yet?” I wondered. If this had happened a thousand years ago—give or take a couple hundred, she said—why was Apollo not out of the portal yet? At that, Artemis flinched, then put the cup down on the table. “Because we can’t get through the daemons,” she told me.

the way it mixes huge numbers of people with predatory animals. That’s something we deal with every single day. Yellowstone is like the Serengeti: predators prowl here. They hunt, they kill, they eat. It’s the real deal.

Micah’s smile was hideous. “She made no secret that she kept an eye on the synth trials, because she was keen to find a way to help her weak, vulnerable, half-human friend. You, who would inherit no power—she wondered if it might give you a fighting chance against the predators who rule this world. And when she saw the horrors the synth could bring about, she became concerned for the test subjects. Concerned for what it’d do to humans if it leaked into the world. But Redner’s employees said Danika had her own research there, too. No one knew what, but she spent time in their labs outside of her own duties.” All of it had to be on the flash drive Bryce had found. Hunt prayed she’d put it somewhere safe. Wondered what other bombshells might be on it. Bryce said, “She was never selling the synth on that boat, was she?” “No. By that point, I’d realized I needed someone with unrestricted access to the temple to take the Horn—I would be too easily noticed. So when she stole the synth trial footage, I had my chance to use her.” Bryce made it up another step. “You dumped the synth into the streets.” Micah kept trailing her. “Yes. I knew Danika’s constant need to be the hero would send her running after it, to save the lowlifes of Lunathion from destroying themselves with it. She got most of it, but not all. When I told her I’d seen her on the river, when I claimed no one would believe the Party Princess was trying to get drugs off the streets, her hands were tied. I told her I’d forget about it, if she did one little favor for me, at just the right moment.” “You caused the blackout that night she stole the Horn.” “I did. But I underestimated Danika. She’d been wary of my interest in the synth long before I leaked it onto the streets, and when I blackmailed her into stealing the Horn, she must have realized the connection between the two. That the Horn could be repaired by synth.” “So you killed her for it?” Another step, another question to buy herself time. “I killed her because she hid the Horn before I could repair it with the synth. And thus help my people.

Hunting a predator was the supreme challenge: It forced the predator to admit that it too was hunted. A true survival of the fittest, he thought. From «A Lion Roars in Longyearbyen»

And then there is the Löwenmensch – the Lion Man of the Hohlenstein-Stadel. In the hills between Nuremberg and Munich in Swabian Germany there are caves that have yielded one of the most important works ever crafted by an unknown artist. Around 40,000 years ago, a woman or man sat somewhere in or near that cave, with the detritus of a hunt scattered around. They took a piece of ivory, a tusk from a woolly mammoth, and carefully considered that it might be the right material, shape and size for something that they had been pondering. Now extinct, cave lions were fierce predators at that time, posing a threat to people, and also to the animals that people would hunt and eat. That person thought about the lions, and how formidable they are, and maybe wondered what it would be like to have the power of a lion in the body of a human. Maybe this tribe revered the cave lions out of fear and awe. Whatever the reason, this artist took that mammoth ivory, a flint knife, and patiently carved the tusk into a mythical figure. It is a chimaera, a fantastic beast that is made up of the parts of multiple animals. Chimaeras exist throughout all human cultures for most of history, from mermaids, fawns or centaurs, to the glorious monkey-man god Hanuman, to the Japanese snake-woman nure-onna, to the Wolpertinger, an absurd and mischievous Bavarian part-duck part-squirrel part-rabbit with antlers and vampire teeth. Today, we have reached the ultimate manifestation of a 40,000-year interest in hybrid creatures in genetic engineering, where elements from one animal are transposed into another, and hence we have cats that glow in the dark with the genes of deep-sea crystal jellyfish Aquorea victoria, and goats that produce dragline silk from the golden orb weaver spider in their udders. The Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel

Many kinds of prey had perfected the art of hiding sickness or injury to avoid being singled out when predators were hunting.

I have no plans to fuck you over. Either of you.” She faced Hypaxia, who was giving Bryce that more-than-princess look, too. “We’re allies. Not only politically, but … as females who have had to make some shitty, hard choices. As females who live in a world where most powerful males see us only as breeding tools.” Hypaxia nodded again, but Celestina continued to stare at Bryce. A predator surveying the best place to strike. Hunt rallied his power again. Bryce continued, “I’m no one’s prize mare. I took a gamble with this idiot”—she jerked a thumb toward Hunt, who gaped at her—“and luckily, it paid off. And I just want to say that”—she swallowed—“if you two want to make a gamble with each other, say fuck it to the arrangements with Ephraim and Ruhn, then I’m with you. We’d have to go against the Asteri, but … look what I did tonight. Whatever I can do, whatever clout I have, it’s yours. But let’s start by walking out of this closet in one piece.

At the desk in the showroom, Bryce removed Tharion’s letter from the top of the pile, while Hunt began to leaf through some of the pages beneath. The blood rushed from her face at a photograph in Hunt’s hand. “Is that a body?” Hunt grunted. “It’s what’s left of one after Tharion pried it from a sobek’s lair.” Bryce couldn’t stop the shudder down her spine. Clocking in at more than twenty-five feet and nearly three thousand pounds of scale-covered muscle, sobeks were among the worst of the apex predators who prowled the river. Mean, strong, and with teeth that could snap you in two, a full-grown male sobek could make most Vanir back away. “He’s insane.” Hunt chuckled. “Oh, he most certainly is.

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas in the Earth's atmosphere that traps the sun's heat. The amount of carbon dioxide in the air has risen steadily since the nineteenth century and is now at it's highest levels in 800,000 years. As a result, global temperatures are also rising: 2020 was one of the hottest years on record. But the planet is not warming evenly. The polar regions are heating up five times faster than anywhere else on Earth. As a result, polar habitats are changing dramatically. Snow covers the Arctic for fewer days each decade, and the glaciers over Greenland and Antarctica are melting away. Sea ice is changing, too, getting thinner and covering less ocean. Polar bears depend on Arctic summer sea ice for hunting and traveling, but within a few decades, there might be none left. Changes in climate and habitat have other consequences for polar animals. Some adaptions that supported survival are becoming unhelpful or even harmful. For example, blubber keeps marine mammals warm in cold water (see page 13). As temperatures continue to rise, the same blubber could cause those animals to overheat. When days get longer, ptarmigan turn brown for camouflage when the snow melts (see page 20). If warmer spring temperatures melt snow before the days lengthen, birds that are still white will be more visible to predators. As climate chance continues, these and other polar species may find it harder to persist.

This clever piece of equipment transforms you from prey to predator, though the very best predators are those who understand how the hunted are likely to act. Predators who have felt the fear of prey are those with the best chance of survival.

It is an unpleasant surprise to discover that in the treatment of animals raised for slaughter, of fur animals and farmed fish the level of cruelty has reached an all time high, and yet such practices continue to be tolerated. I am not referring here to the most excessive among excessive practices: things like accelerating the growth of cattle with hormones, the use of artificial light night and day or the artificial swelling of livers in geese. These matters are too repulsive — "over the top" — and I do not wish to write about them. A simple order would suffice to deal with similar practices: death penalty for those responsible! (…) The cruelty involved in rearing caged [animals] differs from any other form of hunting, even the worst — in one fundamental respect: hunting affects animals that have lived a full life according to their own needs, perhaps for decades; when death arrives, it is sometimes painless, sometimes agonising — just as in nature. When hunting, man is a predator in the food chain, one cause of death among others… By contrast, caged animals spend their whole lives, from birth to death, in unnatural anguish, not like animals but like objects. In this case, the very character and pride of the animal has utterly been devastated. Nothing could be worse than this.

I couldn't move, couldn't escape. I could only lie tangled in the arms of my predator. My hunting wolf had caught his prey, and I was at the hunter's mercy.

A hunter's unbridled passion for his victim pulsed in time with a swelled vein on his temple. Even when sated, a cat will pounce on a bird with a broken wing because that is how the cat and all her ancestors were made: the bird acts like a victim and the sweetness of harsh punish- ment for the victim is, for the hunter, stronger than hunger and more demanding than lust.

You must become a prey to know the hunter. Yes. That’s true. You must endure the pain to know what others unknown to you must have felt. ‘No cause can be causeless,’ a wise man once wrote. We need that jolting moment to arouse us from slumber. Henceforth, the pages in history will be written in different fonts and colours. The words shall be Bolder! Stronger! Fearsome! The prey has woken its killer instinct, or as they say—the hunters become the hunted.

You should never forget who you’re dealing with. I’ll always be the predator who will hunt you, mo chreach bheag. You will always be the only prey I will chase.

I was a monster succumbing to the hunt, a predator out for a kill. The world had let me starve for too long, and eventually, the hungry stop caring what we eat so long as we’re fed.

Tristan 'The Predator' Caine. They called him the predator. His reputation preceded him. He rarely went on the hunt but when he did, it was over. When he did, he went straight for the jugular. No distractions. No playing around. For all his unruffled attitude, the man was more lethal than the knife cutting into her thigh. He was also the reason she had come to the party. She was going to kill Tristan Caine. ***

men don’t want something that’s offered to them freely. They’re predators. They need the hunt.

Remember, son, hunting is not for the fainthearted; a hunter never gets scared of blood or any animal, as he is an apex predator in the food web with heart and soul, loving the world and this taiga’. Around noon, he fixed me a quick lunch, and we waited for the bison hunt. For hours and hours, we waited for a lone bison when we spotted a herd of bison in Taiga.

. An infamous hotel and finally abandoned spooky military base which was now used as a hunter's resting fireplace. As a seasoned hunter, my father patterned each kill. Most kills happened around the vicinity of the base along the tributaries between the 7-mile road and the edge. As an instinctive hunter, he identified the bungalow to be a hideout of the devil. Finding human bones and carcass remains. He felt it must be the perfect place to kill the amur predator

Sawing off all trace of a Midwestern accent from his anodyne English he is exacting in his deception; he refuses the moniker of America’s heartland and jeers at any hint of the provincial. No sense about him that he could unload and clean a hunting rifle in the dark without shooting his finger off nor that he has hunted geese knee-deep in brackish water a shorthaired pointer crashing into the lake after him. No sense at all that he has known the thrill of an apex predator vanquishing all manner of animal before him. Greyhounds with no table manners bloodying the foyer of his grand house with gore. That was the Nick of his childhood. Now he is a different man, an impostor.

Here and there Samuel could see secret movement, for the moon-feeders were at work—the deer which browse all night when the moon is clear and sleep under thickets in the day. Rabbits and field mice and all other small hunted that feel safer in the concealing light crept and hopped and crawled and froze to resemble stones or small bushes when ear or nose suspected danger. The predators were working too—the long weasels like waves of brown light; the cobby wildcats crouching near to the ground, almost invisible except when their yellow eyes caught light and flashed for a second; the foxes, sniffling with pointed up-raised noses for a warm-blooded supper; the raccoons padding near still water, talking frogs. The coyotes nuzzled along the slopes and, torn with sorrow-joy, raised their heads and shouted their feeling, half keen, half laughter, at their goddess moon. And over all the shadowy screech owls sailed, drawing a smudge of shadowy fear below them on the ground. The wind of the afternoon was gone and only a little breeze like a sigh was stirred by the restless thermals of the warm, dry hills.

The hunt has been a fundamental part of the natural order since life first emerged. The prey knows this as well as the predator.

Tonight’s game is predator and prey. You’ll be hunted down by the club’s founding members. That will be five to ninety, so you have the upper hand. If you manage to reach the edge of the property before they hunt you down, you’ll be a Heathen. If not, you’ll be eliminated and escorted out.

There is a growing consensus that a major factor in developing larger brains was the banding together in social groups, which made hunting and gathering more efficient and also provided protection from other predators.

Burning books. Like the Christians. Like the Nazis. Like the Communists. Burning knowledge. Eliminating. History. Rewriting. No life under such circumstances. “F…g (bad) people.(sex)” “Making friends” out of our enemies. Danger. Chaos. Life. Death. Life in Spain. Pain or Death. “Suffering or Boredom.” “Love or Power.” Dead born ideas. Stillborn. Unborn. Unholy. Unjust. Unpredictable. Juicy. Unforgiving. Crimes. Like Space. Like Nature. Somehow, they are right, in their own means. But. Barbarians. Their crimes are unforgivable. Therefor, their ideology cannot be considered: Excuse. It is Black Magic. It is considerably, overwhelmingly: Nazi. Instead. Evil. Being a Nazi (predator, psychopath, criminal, murderer, thief…) cannot be your defense speech. Sorry. “Sorry we are “Natural beings” being nazis. We were only “testing” Tomas. Hunting.” Criminals respect no laws, no person, no holy, no god, no life. They respect only the Evil Eye. “Performing.” Acts. Inhumane methods. Inhumane. Reptilian people. Sacrifice. Blood. Vultures. Nazis. And I have to respect their “Human” “Rights.” Imagine. Not telling you their exact names or how they tattoos exactly look like. I cannot defend you from precisely these specific people, vultures, hyenas. But they are part of a bigger thing, so keep your eyes open. The World: Upside. Down.

Let’s now turn our attention to the predator. The predator, too, can make two types of error: It can commit itself to killing prey that turns out to be too dangerous or too large or too fast (type I error), or it can refrain from attacking prey that it could easily have killed (type II error). Which error do you think a predator makes more often? A cheetah is the fastest mammal on Earth and routinely achieves speeds of eighty to one hundred kilometers per hour while chasing prey.6 It sacrifices size and bulk for speed. A cheetah typically weighs 34 to 54 kilograms (75 to 120 pounds), which is significantly less than a lion, whose weight typically ranges from 170 to 230 kilograms (375 to 500 pounds). Hence, a cheetah usually preys on smaller animals like birds, rabbits, and small antelopes. A cheetah will never attempt to kill an adult water buffalo, a favorite prey of lions. The cheetah is simply trying to avoid getting hurt. Committing a type I error will lead either to death—water buffalos can turn on their hunters aggressively—or wasted energy—when a cheetah chases an antelope that was too far away to begin with. These mistakes, in turn, will lead to hunger and poorer hunting performance.

Tristan 'The Predator' Caine. They called him the predator. His reputation preceded him. He rarely went on the hunt but when he did, it was over. When he did, he went straight for the jugular. No distractions. No playing around. For all his unruffled attitude, the man was more lethal than the knife cutting into her thigh.

As it prowled through the forest, the Dogman felt a surge of exhilaration coursing through its veins. There was a thrill in the hunt, a dark pleasure that pulsed with each beat of its heart. It relished the anticipation of the chase, the moment when prey and predator collided in a deadly dance.

People and animals come together in herd-communities with their own kind exclusively to a single end. Each individual strives to preserve their own genes but achieving that alone can become extremely difficult or even impossible. It is easier to find a partner for the realisation of the basic instinct as a member of a herd and so ultimately, the prime principle in play is still the Law of Gene Preservation. It is easier to defend oneself from a more powerful enemy as a member of a herd. A pack of hyenas, for example, can face down a powerful predator like a lion, whereas an individual hyena would have no chance. In a herd it is easier to hunt and gather large sources of food, which it would be impossible for a lone animal to find. This is the case for lions, wolves and all other herd predators, including mankind. The unification of human beings into ever larger communities, beginning with tribes and clans in prehistoric times, then nations and states in the Middle Ages, continues today in the process called world globalisation. The reason for globalisation is the same as it was a thousand years ago. It provides the best conditions for preserving one’s own gene.

Our earliest ancestors were descended from primates who thrived for millions of years in a treetop environment, and who in the process had evolved one of the most remarkable visual systems in nature. To move quickly and efficiently in such a world, they developed extremely sophisticated eye and muscle coordination. Their eyes slowly evolved into a full-frontal position on the face, giving them binocular, stereoscopic vision. This system provides the brain a highly accurate three-dimensional and detailed perspective, but is rather narrow. Animals that possess such vision—as opposed to eyes on the side or half side—are generally efficient predators like owls or cats. They use this powerful sight to home in on prey in the distance. Tree-living primates evolved this vision for a different purpose—to navigate branches, and to spot fruits, berries, and insects with greater effectiveness. They also evolved elaborate color vision.

Ah, my mistake,” she said. “They are all there but they are hiding. The Void of the Hunter hangs over them. The animals of the Waste will not dare the ambient until it has passed.” The Void was a hunting skill perfected by the apex predators of the Highreaches. It was a psychic trick, an emptiness meant to entrap the unwary or ensnare the weak-minded.

Thus humans who lived a million years ago, despite their big brains and sharp stone tools, dwelt in constant fear of predators, rarely hunted large game, and subsisted mainly by gathering plants, scooping up insects, stalking small animals, and eating the carrion left behind by other more powerful carnivores.

That's what I thought I was. A stalker of stalkers. A predator preying on predators.

Nor did Yellowstone’s early managers understand what would happen to an ecosystem without predators. Once the wolves were gone, the ungulate population in the park exploded, and the quality of the range quickly began to deteriorate. Overgrazed hillsides eroded, and stream banks denuded of woody shrubs began to crumble, damaging prime trout habitat. Elk browsing at their leisure, undisturbed by predators, decimated stands of young aspen and willow. Too many animals on the landscape brought starvation and disease, and the elk population followed a boom-and-bust cycle. By the 1930s, Yellowstone officials had no choice but to do what they had done with the wolves. They started quietly culling the park’s enormous elk herds, shooting thousands of animals in an average year (usually in the winter, when few visitors were around to see the carnage). This continued until the 1960s, when hunters in areas adjacent to the park pressured their elected officials to intervene. Fewer elk in Yellowstone, they knew, meant fewer elk migrating out of the park in winter, which in turn meant fewer hunting opportunities. The elk population was once again allowed to grow untrammeled.

Predators preserve an echo of the isotopic ratios of their prey, so they can be included in the calculation, too. Carbon-isotope studies have shown, for example, that some very early human relatives were quite likely eating more meat than had been suspected. Similarly, the further up the food chain you are, the greater the ratio in your bones and teeth will be between the stable nitrogen isotopes 15N and 14N. On this basis, it has been suggested that our close relatives the Neanderthals were highly carnivorous: that, indeed, they may have specialized, at least regionally, in hunting extremely large-bodied prey, such as woolly mammoths and woolly rhinos.

grasslands, grazing mammals, and pack-hunting predators evolved together. So if domestic herbivores can be managed such that their behavior mimics that of their wild counterparts, the grasslands—the African savanna or the U.S. prairies and plains, terrain that represents about 45 percent of all land world-wide—will regain the state of wild land: healthy, diverse, and resilient.

He imagined the world without men. Cities would be reclaimed by nature and overgrown until, hundreds of years hence, they would look much like the mysterious ruins sticking out of the jungles of Asia and South America. Ruins, relics, no more. He honestly did not believe the entire race would be exterminated, just the lion’s share. What was left would be very little different from Neolithic man—hunters and scavengers. Beasts that would rob from each other, rape, murder, and hunt each other down as prey. Essentially, what men were now, but without anything but the most rudimentary tribal traditions to support them and absolutely no laws to prevent them from acting like the slavering beasts they indeed were. Hunters and killers, apex predators that would abandon their churches to worship in the forest and give praise to the cycles of the moon. Given time, things like ethics and morality and even higher culture itself would be forgotten.

Predation is so fundamental to nature that it seems absurd to demonize it for any animal, including humans.

Psychopaths are social predators who are born without a conscience and without the ability to feel love, compassion, fear or remorse. Psychopaths experience the lack of these abilities and emotions as indication that they are superior, and they consider us nothing more than prey to be hunted to fulfill their own needs. The psychopath considers life a game to be played and "won" at the expense of others. Inflicting harm, whether it be psychological, spiritual, physical or financial, is entertainment to them. Self-gratification is the only thing that motivates them and all that they live for. Psychopaths play their game primarily to fulfill their insatiable desires for power and control.

A stuffed-up voice over the PA announced preboarding for Jane’s flight. The brunette made an audible moan of disappointment. Martin struggled to his feet with a hand up from Nobley, and they both stood before Jane, silent, pathetic as wet dogs who want to be let back in the house. She felt very sure of herself just then, tall and sleek and confident. “Well, they’re playing my song, boys,” she said melodically. Martin’s tall shoulders slumped as he sulked, and his long feet seemed clownish. Nobley had no trace of a smile now. She looked at them, side by side, two men who’d given her Darcy obsession a really good challenge. They were easily the most scrumptious men of her acquaintance, and she supposed she’d never had so much fun pursuing and being pursued. And she was saying no. To both of them. To all of it. Her skin tingled. It was a perfect moment. “It’s been a pleasure. Truly.” She started to turn away. “Jane.” Nobley placed a hand on her shoulder, a desperate kind of bravery overcoming his reserve. He took her hand again. “Jane, please.” He raised her hand to his lips, his eyes down as if afraid of meeting hers. Jane smiled and remembered that he really had been her favorite, all along. She stepped into him, holding both his hands down by her sides, and lightly pressed her cheek against his neck. She could feel him sigh. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Tell Mrs. Wattlesbrook I said tallyho.” She sauntered away without looking back. She could hear the men calling after her, protesting, reaffirming their sincerity. Jane ignored them, smiling all the way back through security, to the gate, down the jetway. Though pure fantasy, it was exactly the finale she’d hoped for. She liked the way it had ended, had enjoyed her last line. Tallyho. What did that mean, anyway? Wasn’t it like, the hunt is on, or something? Tallyho. A beginning of something. She was the predator. The fox had been sighted. It was time to run it down. Okay, Aunt Carolyn, she said in a little prayer. Okay, I’m ready. I’m burying the wishful part of me, the prey part of me. I’m real now.

we have already discussed, being bipedal had other highly consequential costs and benefits for hominin bodies. The biggest disadvantage to being upright is the inability to run fast by galloping. The australopiths must have been slow. Whenever the australopiths ventured down from trees, they were easy pickings for such carnivores as lions, saber-toothed cats, cheetahs, and hyenas that hunt in open habitats. Perhaps they were able to sweat and thus could wait until midday to move about when these predators would have been unable to cool down as effectively. In terms of advantages, tramping around upright makes it easier to carry food, and a vertical posture exposes less surface area to the sun, which means that bipeds heat up less than quadrupeds from solar radiation.33 The final major advantage of being a biped, emphasized by Darwin, was that it freed the hands for other tasks, including digging. USOs often

Evolved to Run Walking long distances is fundamental to being a hunter-gatherer, but people sometimes have to run. One powerful motivation is to sprint to a tree or some other refuge when being chased by a predator. Although you only have to run faster than the next fellow when a lion chases you, bipedal humans are comparatively slow. The world’s fastest humans can run at 37 kilometers (23 miles) per hour for about ten to twenty seconds, whereas an average lion can run at least twice as fast for approximately four minutes. Like us, early Homo must have been pathetic sprinters whose terrified dashes were too often ineffective. However, there is plentiful evidence that by the time of H. erectus our ancestors had evolved exceptional abilities to run long distances at moderate speeds in hot conditions. The adaptations underlying these abilities helped transform the human body in crucial ways and explain why humans, even amateur athletes, are among the best long-distance runners in the mammalian world. Today, humans run long distances to stay fit, commute, or just have fun, but the struggle to get meat underlies the origins of endurance running. To appreciate this inference, try to imagine what it was like for the first humans to hunt or scavenge 2 million years ago. Most carnivores kill using a combination of speed and strength. Large predators, such as lions and leopards, either chase or pounce on their prey and then dispatch it with lethal force. These dangerous carnivores can run as fast as 70 kilometers (43 miles) per hour, and they have terrifying natural weapons: daggerlike fangs, razor-sharp claws, and heavy paws to help them maim and kill. Hunters

Casual sex is a very sad cat and mouse game. The man is entrapped in his role as the sex-driven predator constantly on the hunt for new conquests, while the woman is the prey that must find her perfect combination of sexual allure and virtue, with the sexual allure being what attracts him and virtue what keeps him.

Dragons that, like butterflies, have two stages to their lives. They hatch from eggs into sea serpents. They roam the seas, growing to a vast size. And when the time is right, when enough years have passed that they have attained dragon size, they migrate back to the home of their ancestors. The adult dragons would welcome them and escort them up the rivers. There, they spin their cocoons of sand – sand that is ground memory-stone – and their own saliva. In times past, adult dragons helped them spin those cases. And with the saliva of the adult dragons went their memories, to aid in the formation of the young dragons. For a full winter, they slumbered and changed, as the grown dragons watched over them to protect them from predators. In the hot sunlight of summer, they hatched, absorbing much of their cocoon casing as they did so. Absorbing, too, the memories stored in it. Young dragons emerged, full-formed and strong, ready to fend for themselves, to eat and hunt and fight for mates. And eventually to lay eggs on a distant island. The island of the Others. Eggs that would hatch into serpents.

It was only 400,000 years ago that several species of man began to hunt large game on a regular basis, and only in the last 100,000 years – with the rise of Homo sapiens – that man jumped to the top of the food chain. That spectacular leap from the middle to the top had enormous consequences. Other animals at the top of the pyramid, such as lions and sharks, evolved into that position very gradually, over millions of years. This enabled the ecosystem to develop checks and balances that prevent lions and sharks from wreaking too much havoc. As lions became deadlier, so gazelles evolved to run faster, hyenas to cooperate better, and rhinoceroses to be more bad-tempered. In contrast, humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump.

Just as woodpeckers specialise in extracting insects from the trunks of trees, the first humans specialised in extracting marrow from bones. Why marrow? Well, suppose you observe a pride of lions take down and devour a giraffe. You wait patiently until they’re done. But it’s still not your turn because first the hyenas and jackals – and you don’t dare interfere with them – scavenge the leftovers. Only then would you and your band dare approach the carcass, look cautiously left and right – and dig into the edible tissue that remained. This is a key to understanding our history and psychology. Genus Homo’s position in the food chain was, until quite recently, solidly in the middle. For millions of years, humans hunted smaller creatures and gathered what they could, all the while being hunted by larger predators. It was only 400,000 years ago that several species of man began to hunt large game on a regular basis, and only in the last 100,000 years – with the rise of Homo sapiens – that man jumped to the top of the food chain. That spectacular leap from the middle to the top had enormous consequences. Other animals at the top of the pyramid, such as lions and sharks, evolved into that position very gradually, over millions of years. This enabled the ecosystem to develop checks and balances that prevent lions and sharks from wreaking too much havoc. As lions became deadlier, so gazelles evolved to run faster, hyenas to cooperate better, and rhinoceroses to be more bad-tempered. In contrast, humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana-republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump.

The simple fact is that domestic dogs and wolves are different animals, adapted to different environments, and cannot live (well) in the other’s niche. Wolves are consummate predators, but it’s rare to find a dog that can hunt down and kill a moose for food. Dogs will track deer or chase wild hogs as they “hunt” with humans for sport, but it’s highly doubtful they could ever earn a living by hunting on their own. For their part, wolves rarely become tame enough to get by in the household dog’s world of human hearth and home. They may occasionally live on their own in or near human habitation, but they tend not to be able to eat in the presence of people. Whereas even free-living dogs that are raised in garbage dumps or just outside town are able to dine in the company of humans.

Crocodiles have been on the planet for some sixty-five million years, looking just about like this one. They’ve evolved to be the most complex apex predator in their environment. They have a life expectancy similar to ours, and their physiology is surprisingly similar to ours as well: the same basic type of four-chambered heart, and a cerebral cortex. I marveled at the sixty-four long, very sharp, peg-like teeth. Here was an animal able to capture and kill animals much larger than itself. How ironic, I thought, that this-top-of-the-food-chain animal needs our help. As we motored up the river, I restrained the croc on the floor of the boat. I could feel Steve’s reverence for her. He didn’t just like crocodiles. He loved them. We finally came to a good release location. We got the crocodile out onto a sandbar and slipped the ropes and blindfolds and trappings off her. She scuttled back into the water. “She’ll be afraid of boats from now on,” Steve said. “She’ll never get caught again. She’ll have a good, healthy fear of humans, too. It’ll help keep her alive.” Forever afterward, Steve and I referred to the Cattle Creek rescue as our honeymoon trip. It also marked the beginning of Steve’s filming career. He was gifted with the ability to hunt down wildlife. But he hunted animals to save them, not kill them. That’s how the Crocodile Hunter was born.

Boyfriend #11 Clark Barnyard, Age Twenty-Three Still not over boyfriend #9 and humiliated by #10, Jane declared she would shed her victimhood and become the elusive predator--fierce, independent, solitary!...except there was this guy at work, Clark. He’d made her laugh during company meetings, he’d share his fries with her at lunch, declaring that she needed fattening up. He was in layout at the magazine, and she’d go to his cubicle and sit on the edge of his desk, chatting for longer than made her manager comfortable. He was a few years younger than her, so it seemed innocent somehow. When he asked her out at last, despite the dark stickiness of foreboding, she didn’t turn him down. He cooked her dinner at his place and was goofy and tender, nuzzling her neck and making puppy noises. They started to kiss on the couch, and it was nice or approximately sixty seconds until his hand started hunting for her bra hooks. In the front. It was so not Mr. Darcy. “Whoa, there, cowboy,” she said, but he was “in the groove” and had to be told to stop three or four times before he finally pried his fingers off her breasts and stood up, rubbing his eyes. “What’s the problem, honey?” he asked, his voice stumbling on that last word. She said he was moving too fast, and he said, then what in the hell had they been building up to over the past six months? Jane sized up the situation to her own satisfaction: “You are no gentleman.” Then Clark summed up in his own special way: “Hasta la vista, baby.”

Tigers don’t hunt in groups. They attach solitary. Hence however realistic this dance is, it is still faulty as they failed to understand the apex predator they are imitating.

GOLF (Men’s Journal, 1992) The smooth, long, liquid sweep of a three wood smacking into the equator of a dimpled Titleist … It makes a potent but slightly foolish noise like the fart of a small, powerful nature god. The ball sails away in a beautiful hip or breast of a curve. And I am filled with joy. At least that’s what I’m filled with when I manage to connect. Most of my strokes whiz by the tee the way a drunk passes a truck on a curve or dig into the turf in a manner that is more gardening than golf. But now and then I nail one, and each time I do it’s an epiphany. This is how the Australopithecus felt, one or two million years ago, when he first hit something with a stick. Puny hominoid muscles were amplified by the principles of mechanics so that a little monkey swat suddenly became a great manly engine of destruction able to bring enormous force to bear upon enemy predators, hunting prey, and the long fairway shots necessary to get on the green over the early Pleistocene’s tar pit hazards. Hitting things with a stick is the cornerstone of civilization. Consider all the things that can be improved by hitting them with a stick: veal, the TV, Woody Allen. Having a dozen good sticks at hand, all of them well balanced and expertly made, is one reason I took up golf. I also wanted to show my support for the vice president. I now know for certain that Quayle is smarter than his critics. He’s smart enough to prefer golf to spelling. How many times has a friend called you on a Sunday morning and said, “It’s a beautiful day. Let’s go spell potato”? I waited until I was almost forty-five to hit my first golf ball. When I was younger I thought golf was a pointless sport. Of course all sports are pointless unless you’re a professional athlete or a professional athlete’s agent, but complex rules and noisy competition mask the essential inanity of most athletics. Golf is so casual. You just go to the course, miss things, tramp around in the briars, use pungent language, and throw two thousand dollars’ worth of equipment in a pond. Unlike skydiving or rugby, golf gives you leisure to realize it’s pointless. There comes a time in life, however, when all the things that do have a point—career, marriage, exercising to stay fit—start turning, frankly, golflike. And that’s when you’re ready for

personal theory was that the pressure of being in the middle of the food chain was an essential prerequisite for complex intelligence. Like humans (and like Portiid spiders, had he only known), octopuses had developed in a world where they were both hunter and hunted. Top predators, in Senkovi’s assessment, were an intellectual dead end.

Chacon retired in 2014, and at his going-away party said the one thing he'd never miss was pulling another dead child out of the water. He meant it as a joke, but it left his colleagues stunned. To this day, he suffers from post-traumatic stress. He will probably have it the rest of his life. He sometimes thinks that the reason he and his wife were never able to have children despite years of trying, specialist after specialist offering no solution, was so he'd never have to know a parent's grief.

A lone wolf doesn’t tread paths its ilk leaves; it makes its own footprints in the snow. Most of its kind lives in packs, but it is an army in itself. As quiet as it is fierce, it hones its own skills in the wild - building its lair, hunting its prey, sharpening its claws and facing its predators – no hurdle too big to cross in its passionate pursuit of a quest. It loves with similar ferocity too, a loyal protector and provider when it crosses paths with its mate for life – a true soulmate. Above all, however, it is a survivor. When the conditions get harsh, it will do what it has to, to make it out alive. No, a lone wolf would not go down without a fight.

Mina made me feel like a predator. I wanted to hunt her, capture her, then make her irrevocably mine. Fuck. I was in deep.

In 2012, when Amanda Melin, a scientist who studies animal vision, met Tim Caro, a scientist who studies animal patterns, their conversation naturally turned to zebras. Caro had become the latest in a long line of biologists to wonder why zebras have such conspicuous black-and-white patterns. One of the earliest and most prominent hypotheses, he told Melin, was that the stripes counterintuitively act as camouflage. They mess with the eyes of predators like lions and hyenas by breaking up the zebra’s outline, or by helping it to blend in among the vertical trunks of trees, or by causing a confusing blur when it runs. Melin was dubious. “I had a look on my face,” she recalls. “I said, ‘I think most of the carnivores are hunting at night, and their visual acuity is going to be so much worse than humans’. They probably can’t see the stripes.’ And Tim went, ‘What?’ ” Humans outshine almost every other animal at resolving detail. Our exceptionally sharp vision, Melin realized, gives us a rarefied view of a zebra’s stripes. She and Caro calculated that on a bright day, people with excellent eyesight can distinguish the black-and-white bands from 200 yards away. Lions can only do so at 90 yards and hyenas at 50 yards. And those distances roughly halve at dawn and dusk, when these predators are more likely to hunt. Melin was right: The stripes can’t possibly act as camouflage because predators can only make them out at close range, by which point they can almost certainly hear and smell the zebra. At most distances, the stripes would just fuse together into a uniform gray. To a hunting lion, a zebra mostly looks like a donkey.[*10]

I was a mouse caught in a trap before, scared, and helpless as I was taken between the teeth of an apex predator. But I'm not their little mouse, and they are not Zade. And I will never succumb to them.

Dean Koontz’s Intensity.

Dart initially echoed Darwin’s theory that bipedalism freed the hands of early hominins to make and use hunting tools, which in turn selected for big brains, hence better hunting abilities. Then, in a famous 1953 paper, clearly influenced by his war experiences, Dart proposed that the first humans were not just hunters but also murderous predators.18 Dart’s words are so astonishing, you have to read them: The loathsome cruelty of mankind to man forms one of his inescapable characteristics and differentiative features; and it is explicable only in terms of his carnivorous, and cannibalistic origin. The blood-bespattered, slaughter-gutted archives of human history from the earliest Egyptian and Sumerian records to the most recent atrocities of the Second World War accord with early universal cannibalism, with animal and human sacrificial practices of their substitutes in formalized religions and with the world-wide scalping, head-hunting, body-mutilating and necrophilic practices of mankind in proclaiming this common bloodlust differentiator, this predaceous habit, this mark of Cain that separates man dietetically from his anthropoidal relatives and allies him rather with the deadliest of Carnivora. Dart’s killer-ape hypothesis, as it came to be known, was popularized by the journalist Robert Ardrey in a best-selling book, African Genesis, that found a ready audience in a generation disillusioned by two world wars, the Cold War, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, political assassinations, and widespread political unrest.19 The killer-ape hypothesis left an indelible stamp on popular culture including movies like Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange. But the Rousseauians weren’t dead yet. Reanalyses of bones in the limestone pits from which fossils like the Taung Baby came showed they were killed by leopards, not early humans.20 Further studies revealed these early hominins were mostly vegetarians. And as a reaction to decades of bellicosity, many scientists in the 1970s embraced evidence for humans’ nicer side, especially gathering, food sharing, and women’s roles. The most widely discussed and audacious hypothesis, proposed by Owen Lovejoy, was that the first hominins were selected to become bipeds to be more cooperative and less aggressive.21 According to Lovejoy, early hominin females favored males who were better at walking upright and thus better able to carry food with which to provision them. To entice these tottering males to keep coming back with food, females encouraged exclusive long-term monogamous relationships by concealing their menstrual cycles and having permanently large breasts (female chimps advertise when they ovulate with eye-catching swellings, and their breasts shrink when they are not nursing). Put crudely, females selected for cooperative males by exchanging sex for food. If so, then selection against reactive aggression and frequent fighting is as old as the hominin lineage.22

On the one hand, Meepsheep tells me worss on the Internet never hurr anyone. On the other hand, hecsays, 'At around age sixteen, I did do a lot of stuff that I now regret that I know had real-life impacts in people.

He is my quarry, my partner, my love.

This is no hog. This is the Bael Quey.” “Bael Quey?” Anna Mary asked. “Chief of Evil Spirits,” Limping Wolf answered. “According to Indian Legend, Bael Quey is the ancient spirit of the predator. Tales of its savagery are as old as my people. It lives for the taste of blood. It hunts for the pleasure of killing. It feeds on terror. Throughout the ages it has taken the form of different animals, grizzly bears, mountain lions, wolverines, even men and now this terrible hog. Bael Quey brings death and destruction until the rage and fury burns itself out like a fiery meteor, blazing downwards to explode.

The predator's dread of scarcity haunts it while it hunts for food, and the victim's fear of predation haunts her as she tries to escape being hunted.

It may not have been a true skinwalker that was haunting the Gorman ranch, but something certainly manifested itself, again and again, over a period of several years. Something gave rise to the bewildering plethora of anomalies. Something manifested itself as a black cloud in the trees, from which a telepathic voice reached out to the NIDS scientists. Something appeared as an opaque “Predator” creature that roared loud enough to make a grown man cry. Something moved through water but could not be seen. Something generated voices from the sky. Something floated in the sky as glowing orbs, Stealth-like craft, disc-shaped UFOs, and even a flying recreational vehicle. We saw them. Either a single “intelligence” was responsible for conjuring up this amazing variety of ephemeral events, changing its appearance and form as well as its tactics and strategies, or a “family” of anomalies was sharing the rent in some kind of paranormal fraternity house. Skinwalker or not, it could be argued that the ranch, for unknown reasons, functioned as a one-stop supermarket for all manner of bizarre activity.

Today, birds’ biggest threat, especially in Western countries, isn’t from hunting or predation. Their greatest foe is unrelenting, intensive agriculture. Fertilizers, pesticides, modern seed varieties,

Those gunshots summoned a predator that seemed to hunt the entire neighborhood constantly. When the block was in war, you had to first evade flying bullets. Then, if you were still alive, it wouldn’t be long before the cops showed up.

Native hunters have sometimes had a more sensible, more spiritual, closer-to-truth view of wolves (and other predators, including lions and tigers). Recently, Native American groups have tried to block the opening of wolf hunts. When Wisconsin opened hunting for wolves in 2012, Mike Wiggins, chairman of the Bad River Ojibwe Tribe, responded, “Is nothing sacred anymore?” Ma’iingan, the wolf, is sacred to the Ojibwe. “Killing a wolf is like killing a brother,” said tribal member Essie Leoso.

theory as to where these creatures come from - I think humanity influences the world more than we realize.  I wouldn’t say we create these things, but I do think they adapt to us.  A supernatural evolution, if you will.  Just as a predator adapts to better hunt its prey, so these creatures adapt to our shifting beliefs and values.  And sometimes, just as evolution will spit out something novel, so too will our collective subconscious produce a new entity.

Another UAP video to hit my inbox involved a Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) drone conducting surveillance of a nuclear facility in a particularly hostile country when its camera picked up three luminous objects. Just three dots. Unexplainably, the dots began to fly in a regimented formation. A perfect triangle.

I’ve been researching dark magic,” Tory said, subtle as a bull, like always. “Old magic. The kind that predates the Awakening of our kind.” “Si. The Nymphs have been servants of the dark for a long time,” Miguel said, nodding. “Though it was only ever called dark by your kind. At least it was once the shadows were tainted.” “Tainted how?” “La Princesa de las Sombras.” “English, please,” I grunted, and his eyes flicked to me, a flinch of fear coating my tongue as his emotions shifted once more. “Sorry.” Miguel dipped his head. “They were tainted by the Shadow Princess. Lavinia. When she was banished to their realm and her curse bled into it.” “So you’re saying that before she entered the shadow realm, things were different? How?” I asked. Miguel hesitated, fear and uncertainty wrapping around me like a silk glove stroking its way down my cheek. “I want to be honest with you,” he said. “But…there is more than just my life at stake here. There are others who I need to protect.” “Others who don’t wish to follow Lavinia?” Tory asked, scooting forward on her stool, and I could tell she’d guessed right by the shift in Miguel’s emotions. He nodded. “Do you swear you won’t hurt them? They have never hunted Fae, never stolen magic. The few of them who have any of your power were gifted it just as our kind were in the days of old. By willing Fae already at death’s door, those waiting to walk beyond the Veil, ready to part with their power.” I frowned, wondering why even a dying Fae would ever agree to a Nymph taking their magic from them, but Tory spoke before I could.

It didn’t take long for Steve Payne to find out about Feldis’s secret interrogation, and when he did, there was, finally, a confrontation. A friend of Goeden’s had first heard about the interview down at the courthouse, and when Goeden was told she didn’t believe it at first. This stuff just didn’t happen, especially with such a high-value suspect. Goeden had to make several phone calls to find out: Yes, it’s true. The prosecutor on your case is totally out of control. The potential damage could be incalculable.

Finally, complaints about the federal prosecutor were made through the proper channels, and these went all the way through chain of command to Washington, DC. Word came back to Feldis: Your behavior is unacceptable. And yet, incredibly, Kevin Feldis remained in the interrogation room, often leading the charge. To this day, no one will say why that was allowed to happen.

The Anchorage Correctional Complex, the Alaska Department of Corrections, and state attorneys are so corrupt that in 2016 these attorneys advised prisons not to keep records and not to document causes or circumstances of inmate deaths. In January 2018, the Anchorage Daily News reported that ACC had secretly wired visitation rooms Keyes used, and that these rooms remained wired ever since, illegally recording attorney-client conversations.

Meanwhile, the FBI had gone through the hundreds of images on Kimberly’s computer and were able to identify forty-four people using facial recognition software against all the images on NamUS, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons website. Eleven of those were teenagers. Ten were small children. The two youngest were each one year old. One thing I won’t do is mess with kids. Now investigators had even more reason to doubt this credo.

If an Israel Keyes existed, someone even more diabolical would follow. They needed to understand the forces that built Israel Keyes, the first sui generis serial killer of the twenty-first century.

Some agents, like Steve Payne, stuck to traditional investigative methods: the interviews Gannaway was conducting with Heidi; searches through financial records, computers, datebooks, and journals; interrogations with Keyes himself. For other agents—Jeff Bell, Jolene Goeden, and now Ted Halla and Colleen Sanders, two FBI special agents who were starting to research Keyes down in Washington State—the few serial killers Keyes referenced were a source of fascination and, they hoped, insight. These agents began reading and watching every book, film, or TV show Keyes had consumed, building little libraries in their respective field offices and comparing notes.

Ted Bundy, who Keyes called his great hero, killed all over the country. James Mitchell “Mike” DeBardeleben, the basis for Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, kept at least one kill kit. John Robert Williams was a long-haul trucker who killed in one state and left bodies in another. Dennis Rader, the BTK (“bind, torture, kill”) Strangler, posed at least one of his victims in the basement of his church, tied up in sexually degrading positions.

Hunting serial predators was what Caitlin did. The more challenging and urgent the case, the more dangerous the UNSUB, the hotter her blood sang. The clearer her vision became. The wider awake she grew. The work was important. It kept people alive. It put killers in prison.

Another thing: In searching Kimberly’s house, police recovered a piece of paper with random numbers listed: 5, 79, 105, 633, 1.5, 5, 5. Bell Googled them. Up came “Police frequency, Stephenville, Texas.” He pulled up a map of Stephenville—5 was the highway coming into it; 105 was the highway out. Then Bell Googled “1.5-5-5, Stephenville TX.” Up came the scanner frequency.

were married. We hadn’t been together long enough for me to explain, or demonstrate, to her that every hunting trip is not a killing trip—and that more often than not you don’t get anything. Nope, I intended to show her that I was a predator machine. So I didn’t feel sad at all when the deer simply disappeared from view at the crack of the rifle. I am certain that it did not feel a thing. When I hiked down to it, I learned that I was still a decent shot, at least. I had aimed for a spot right between the buck’s eyes, and that’s where I had placed the bullet. It took me ten minutes of rooting around in the brush to find the three-point side of its antler, which had been separated from the rest of the skull by the 180-grain Silvertip. Before I started field dressing the deer, I sat down next to it in the brush, with my feet pointed straight down the hill and my hand holding my Buck knife resting on the buck’s gray coat. I needed to do some introspection for a second, on a deep level, to consider and ponder why and how I am able and supposed to kill deer, and on a more pragmatic level, to remember how to gut one of these things out. In my more-or-less educated opinion, it’s morally acceptable and