Thermal Hunting Quotes

The world she lives in is not mine. Life is faster for her; time runs slower. Her eyes can follow the wingbeats of a bee as easily as ours follow the wingbeats of a bird. What is she seeing? I wonder, and my brain does backflips trying to imagine it, because I can’t. I have three different receptor-sensitivities in my eyes: red, green and blue. Hawks, like other birds, have four. This hawk can see colours I cannot, right into the ultraviolet spectrum. She can see polarised light, too, watch thermals of warm air rise, roil, and spill into clouds, and trace, too, the magnetic lines of force that stretch across the earth. The light falling into her deep black pupils is registered with such frightening precision that she can see with fierce clarity things I can’t possibly resolve from the generalised blur. The claws on the toes of the house martins overhead. The veins on the wings of the white butterfly hunting its wavering course over the mustards at the end of the garden. I’m standing there, my sorry human eyes overwhelmed by light and detail, while the hawk watches everything with the greedy intensity of a child filling in a colouring book, scribbling joyously, blocking in colour, making the pages its own. And all I can think is, I want to go back inside.

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 world she lives in is not mine. Life is faster for her; time runs slower. Her eyes can follow the wingbeats of a bee as easily as ours follow the wingbeats of a bird. What is she seeing? I wonder, and my brain does flipflops trying to imagine it, because I can't.I have three different receptor-sensitivities in my eyes: red, green and blue. Hawks, like other birds have four. This hawk can see colours I cannot, right into the ultra-violet spectrum. She can see polarised light, too, watch thermals of warm air rise, roil, and spill into clouds, and trace, too, the magnetic lines of force that stretch across the earth. The light falling into her deep black pupils is registered with such frightening precision that she can see with fierce clarity things I can't possibly resolve from the generalised blur. The claws on the toes of the house martins overhead. The veins on the wings of the white butterfly hunting its wavering course over the mustards at the end of the garden. I'm standing there, my sorry human eyes overwhelmed by light and detail, while the hawk watches everything with the greedy intensity of a child filling in a colouring book, scribbling joyously, blocking in colour, making the pages its own.

It’s getting-up time,” Alessandro declares. “Today is the day.” “What day?” “The release date.” “What are we talking about?” “Daa-add. The new XBOX game. Hunting Old Sammie.” Armand opens his eyes. He looks at his son looking at him. The boy’s eyes are only inches away. “You’re kidding.” “It’s the newest best game. You hunt down terrorists and kill them.” Lifting his voice, “‘Deploy teams of Black Berets into the ancient mountains of Tora Bora. Track implacable terrorists to their cavernous lairs. Rain withering fire down on the homicidal masterminds who planned the horror of September eleven, two-thousand-and-one.’” The kid’s memory is canny. Armand lifts Alex off his chest and sits up. “Who invented it?” “I’m telling you, dad. It’s an XBOX game.” “We can get it today?” “No,” Leah says. “Absolutely not. The last thing he needs is another violent video game.” “Mahhuum!” “How bad can it be?” says Armand. “How would you know? A minute ago you hadn’t heard of it.” “And you had?” “I saw a promo. Helicopter gunships with giant machine guns. Soldiers with flamethrowers, turning bearded men into candles.” “Sounds great.” “Armand, really. How old are you?” “I don’t see what my age has to do with it.” “Dad, it’s totally cool. ‘Uncover mountain strongholds with thermal imaging technology. Call in air-strikes by F-16s. Destroy terrorist cells with laser weaponry. Wage pitched battles against mujahideen. Capture bin Laden alive or kill him on the spot. March down Fifth Avenue with jihadists’ heads on pikes. Make the world safe for democracy.’” Safe for Dick Cheney’s profits, Armand thinks, knowing all about it from his former life, but says nothing. It’s pretty much impossible to explain the complexity of how things work within the greater systemic dysfunction. Instead, he asks the one question that matters. “How much does it cost?” Alessandro’s mouth minces sideways. He holds up fingers, then realizes he needs more than two hands. Armand can see the kid doesn’t want to say. “C’mon. ’Fess up.” Alex sighs. “A one with two zeros.” “One hundred dollars.” Alex’s eyes slide away. Rapid nods, face averted. “Yeah.” “For a video game, Alex.” “Yhep.” “No way.” “Daa-add! It’s the greatest game ever!” The boy is beginning to whine. “Don’t whine,” Armand tells him. “On TV it’s awesome. The army guys are flaming a cave and when the terror guys try to escape, they shoot them.” “Neat.” “Their turbans are on fire.” “Even better.” “Armand,” Leah says. “Dad,” says Alessandro. He will not admit it but Armand is hooked. It would be deeply satisfying in the second-most intimate way imaginable to kill al Qaida terrorists holed up along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border—something the actual U.S. military cannot or will not completely do. But a hundred bucks. It isn’t really the money, although living on interest income Armand has become more frugal. He can boost the C-note but what message would it send? Hunting virtual terrorists in cyberspace is all well and good. But plunking down $100 for a toy seems irresponsible and possibly wrong in a country where tens of thousands are homeless and millions have no health insurance and children continue, incredibly, to go hungry. Fifty million Americans live in poverty and he’s looking to play games.

The idea of duck hunting is to get up about the time that people who are having fun go to bed and get dressed in dirty flannels, itchy thermal underwear, muddy hip boots, clammy rain ponchos, and various other layers of insulation and waterproofing, then clamber, trudge, wade, paddle, stumble, flounder, and drag yourself miles into a swamp while carrying coolers, shell boxes, lunch buckets, flashlights, hand warmers, Buck knives, camp stoves, toilet paper, a couple of dogs, and forty or fifty imitation ducks, then sit in a wet hole concealed by brush cuttings and pine boughs until it’s dark again and you can go home. Meanwhile the weather will either be incredibly good, in which case the ducks will be flying in the clear sky thousands of feet above you, or incredibly bad, in which case the ducks will be landing right in front of you but you won’t be able to see them. Not that any actual ducks are required for this activity, and often none are sighted. Sometimes it’s worse when they are. The terrible thing about duck hunting is that everyone you’re with can see you shoot and see what you’re shooting at, and it is almost impossible to come up with a likely excuse for blasting a decoy in half.

three years longer at home or till the age of sixteen, when I struck out for myself, pretty much on my own hook, resolved to hunt for furs with some company, or hunt Indians, or do any thing else that would pay. While working on my father’s plantation I had become familiar with the rifle and shot gun, and indeed had to provide nearly all the meat for the family; but game was plenty and that was an easy task, much easier than pleasing the mistress who took no pains to give me any educational advantages. Though young, I was nearly full grown when I found an excellent chance to join a fur company that had just started out from St. Louis, under the lead of Charles Bent, and were going out to a fort and trading-post called Bent’s Fort, some three hundred miles south of Pike’s Peak on Big Arkansas river. The party consisted of about sixty men. The more prominent hunters were Charles Bent, Guesso Chauteau, William Savery, and two noted Indian trappers named Shawnee Spiebuck, and Shawnee Jake. Some of the party were agents of, and interested in, the Hudson’s Bay fur company, having their head-quarters at St. Louis. This was in 1835. As I shall have considerable to say of some of this party, a brief description of them may be of interest to the reader. Charles Bent, the leader of the party, and a manager of the fur business at Bent’s Fort, was a native of St. Louis, Mo., and a brother of the famous Captain Bent who originated the theory called the “Thermal Gateways to the Pole.” |At the time I joined his party, he was about thirty-five years of age, light complexioned, heavily built, tending to corpulency. In all my acquaintance with him I always found

Roughly speaking, the period when bevies of bobwhites were found in great abundance over a goodly portion of the American landscape embraced a period from early in the 20th century into the late 1950s or early 1960s. In retrospect, we can readily perceive the circumstances that produced an incredible bounty of the saucy little patrician of peafield cormers and briar-infested fencerows. All were, in one way or another, habitat related, and all have vanished like milkweed spores caught in September thermals. It was a time of sharecroppers and small farmers, folks who worked the land by hand and with teams of horses or mules. The concept of “clean farming” was both impractical and unknown, and these staunch sons of the soil were also practical conservationists who routinely left field edges and ditch banks in an overgrown state. They allowed worn-out land to revert to broomsedge and pines, and the practice of leaving peafield corners unharvested was commonplace. Raptors were shot on sight, with every hawk being deemed a “chicken” hawk. Furbearing nest predators—'’possums, ’coons, skunks, and foxes—were trapped and hunted for food or fur. Serpents, except for black snakes, which were prized because they kept rodent populations under control around corncribs, were not only killed; they were displayed on fences as a sort of message. Coyotes were at that point unknown over most of the South, the heartland of the noble quail and home of the strongest traditions associated with the bird, Foxes weren't just hunted; they were exterminated. In other words, an area encompassing tens of millions of acres was overseen by an army of unofficial, unpaid, unheralded, yet highly effective gamekeepers.