Here is something from a book called "A Listening Walk", a collection of essays by the late Gene Hill.

This does not necessarily belong in "Africa Hunting" but it strikes at why we hunt, wherever we hunt...

The Hunter : Real and Rare
By Gene Hill

There ain’t anybody up in this high country but me and some elk and some muleys, each of us a little bit wild from the time of the year and the sense of being full of ourselves.

The elk and the muleys are thinking about finding a lady to dance with, mostly, but I am here, mostly, just to think. I listen to the whispered gossip of the popples as I climb up searching for the quiet of the black timber. I want a place to mull about some big and little things. Like where did most of my life go when I wasn’t paying close attention, and what am I going to do with the little bit that’s left; you know, the same things you think about, give an inch or a day here and there.

I’m taking some time to empty the wastebasket in my head and turn a little animal, primitive, basic; lean a little harder on my senses—instinct instead of logic. Try to find out if the mountains that are real and underfoot are as steep as the ones that we have to climb, back home, in our imagination, everyday. Time to see what’s real and what isn’t. Time to work out what’s worthwhile and what isn’t. Time to find what I am and what I’m not. Time to go it all alone.

Up here, well away from manmade things, you can get a sense of what it must have been like when Jim Bridger and his like cruised this country. And if the day is soft enough and you’re felling good enough, you can believe that this might be exactly what you were made for – running a few traps, learning a little Indian talk – just seeing if you could make it, man against come-what-may.

You sit there and strip everything down. You see yourself with everything you own rolled up in something you can carry on your horse, a rifle across the saddle and your wits and know-how taking the place of money in the bank. At first you’ve got to cope with the fears that come with being what passes for civilized. You wonder “what ifâ€, and go down the list: “what I break a leg, get sick, run out of food, get lostâ€, and all the rest of the little everyday nightmares. And after a while, you figure you can handle the few that are real, you feel that growing sense of strength that breeds freedom to go where you want, when you please.

You find you can walk a little softer and a lot stronger. You’re becoming part of the high country – another animal that can make it about as well as the elk. You take note that you can see better, your hearing is sharper, and the shifting winds have a smell of their own. That it takes a little time to make the slide from being just a man carrying a rifle to being a hunter.

I’ve always leaned toward the idea that most of the important things happened when the man they happened to was sitting still. Really sitting still, when your body seems to go away and all that’s left is reason and instinct. I have no doubt that it was a time like this when Galileo came to grips with the stars and Newton with gravity. This is when you can see farther than your eyes will let you and hear things imperceptible to the ear. This is when the moment of discovery will come, this is when the answers to the questions will arrive.

What the hunter hunts is complex indeed. He is there because the elk is there, but this not all he seeks. He is looking for that essential freedom, that moment of revelation of who he is in relations to his society. He is testing himself and finding the answers to the mysterious questions.

To the non-hunter, all this seems overly complex and often unbelievable – an excuse or a rationale. To the real hunter it may be Unspoken, but all this is as much a part of why he’s there as any quest for food or trophy. Wherever wild game has existed, hunting has a major part of the ritual of growth from child to man. The ability to provide for others, to not only exist but thrive, physically and emotionally, has marked the quality that man looked for in leadership. There can be no denying that the hunter, then and now, understands such things and finds both motivation and personal satisfaction in them.

I most of us were to sell our hunting rifles, more than likely we could afford to buy enough meat for our needs. But economics, or any one-on-one food/hunting relationship, misses the point completely. Such arguments from the non-hunter are listened to in disbelief by the woodsman. To really understand, you have to experience the secret things that only the hunter has felt.

The non-hunter asks us, “Why don’t you race cars, fly planes, or some other excitement?†The real hunter can only answer that his challenges and thrills are more basic, more private and personal; we go to escape the machine-worship and the outside world, not to perform in front of it.

I picked mountains for my place to be as a hunter, not out of any effort to extend a masculine image, but because I have always separated my great loves of big-game hunting and shotgunning into a personal equation of hunting and shooting. A small point perhaps, and one that you don’t necessarily have to agree with, but I approach them with a different philosophy myself and find the challenges and rewards to be different as well.

A hunter uses different skills, much more so than a shotgunner/bird hunter. He has to be skilled in tracking. He must learn to think like his quarry and know its routes and lifestyles. He is coping with an animal capable of some reason, with complex instincts and physical resources. We do not look for a specific quail or pheasant or duck. But more often than not, we have an ideal in mind when we are in sheep country, a certain personal standard of satisfaction when it comes t taking a deer, elk, or moose. No small part of the personal challenge is this factor of selectivity, a personal standard of self-imposed difficulty. Perhaps we seldom achieve it for one or more reasons, but I’ve yet to meet a hunter whose idea of the perfect hunt didn’t incorporate a difficult or idealistic trophy to bring home.

The competent hunter is a complex of skills. He knows how to build a fire, make a camp, and be comfortable under all kinds of conditions. He has a serse of geography and an instinct for weather. He understands his equipment, its limitations, and how to fix what needs fixing. He is self-reliant in an advanced yet basic way that no non-hunter would ever understand. He is challenging himself and the environment and knows very well all the odds, be he on his home ground, on the ice pack, or in the desert. His coming and going is as natural and unobtrusive as that of any wild creature. His presence is minimized by his carefulness not to intrude. He takes nothing he does not need and uses everything completely. He is as innocent of harm to his world as the wind.

Am I idealizing? Of course I am. But a hunter ought to set increasing levels of accomplishments for himself as well as set his levels of desire for what he takes from the wilderness. Perhaps the time will come when most of what we have left to lure us to the hills will be the exercise of these timeless skills.

No, we don’t have to bring all the skills of a Green or Bridger to our few days of high-country adventure. But we can bring more than most, or more than we had in the past. It’s not always enough in today’s world of 7mm magnums and 300 Weatherbys to roll over a deer at 300 yards: not enough of the satisfaction that hunting can offer or the kind of experience we ought to look for and find in our sport. I know this is more than a little idealized, but the pulling of a trigger ought, in its finest tradition, to be the ultimate result of what has been a true hunt – a chase in the classic sense. One animal singled out, tracked, and stalked, come what may. I don’t think many of us will do it; some will never consider it and others would never consider anything else. But it’s some sort of adventure worth thinking about, when you weigh all that it will mean and prove to you. After all if the only thing important about hunting is what we can nail up on the wall, then we’re not really hunters and we will bring little honor to ourselves or to what we hunt, or why.