“To him who is in fear everything rustles.” Sophocles
What are you afraid of? The dictionary tells us that fear is a feeling induced by a perceived danger or threat which occurs in certain types of organisms. This feeling causes a change in metabolic and organ functions and ultimately a change in behavior such as fleeing, hiding, or freezing from perceived traumatic events. This is a pretty good definition but I’m not sure we think about any of that when we are afraid of something, we just know that we are scared.
I got to thinking about fear and how we deal with it affects those of us who claim to be sportsmen and outdoorsmen. Just consider that for a moment. All manner of tales and traditions in the outdoor world have a basis in fear. Maybe all this stems from the times when our ancestors sat around a big fire roasting a hunk of mammoth tenderloin and hoping the saber tooth tigers and cave bears would take the night off.
So here are a few of the best known outdoor related fears. This list is by no means complete, feel free to add some of your own.
Fear of being in the woods. Sounds kind of strange but I think this is maybe the greatest fear many of us have today. We live in a world these days where we are rarely alone. We are often in a crowd, in what we consider a safe environment, and usually with some form of electronic device in our hand. When hunters who have problems with this area finally get to the woods it can be intimidating. There is a lot of talk about going back to nature, solitude in the forest and so forth, but when it comes down to it (sadly) many of us are not accustomed to being alone in a remote place for very long.
Over the years, being associated with a lot of hunters both at work and hunting on my own I would think about what are people really afraid of out there? It was always a little strange to me that a big he man hunter loaded for bear with a large caliber rifle, maybe a sidearm, a knife that Crocodile Dundee would lust after and other goodies would be afraid of anything!
A few hunters that I ran into over the years would actually tell you about some of their fears said things like snakes, bears, coyotes, wolves, mountain lions, and Big Foot (OK, I made that one up but I would bet that someone out there believes in Sasquatch and is fearful of them).
Fear of the dark. This is an old one that most of us have to admit to at one time or another. Again, maybe it goes back to when we were sitting around the fire knowing we were not at the top of the food chain. Usually our modern day hunter deals with this fear in the pre-dawn darkness, often getting to a tree stand.
Just to let you know I am an advocate of the “nothing is there in the dark that ain’t there in the light” thinking. I don’t believe in ghosts, werewolves, Big Foot, zombies or whatever it is that some people seem to fear. The thing about the dark is this, everything is different. Mostly you can’t see and the things you can see don’t look the same as they do in the daytime. All of our survival instincts (left over from back when we were sitting around that fire) go into hyper drive.
I will share one little experience with you about traversing the woods in the dark. Once I was dropped off on a back road during a spring gobbler hunt. This was in a mid-western state and I had never been in this place in my life. (This is an old tradition in turkey hunting, take visiting out of state hunters, drop them off in the middle of nowhere and then tell them “there is no way you can get lost”) Anyway as I was making my way out of there that evening, in the dark of course, I suddenly heard as plain as day and very close the long drawn out howl of a wolf.
I mean a wolf, like a gray wolf, not a mangy little coyote or a dog. Now I had heard wolves before and knew what they sounded like, but I certainly did not expect to hear one in Ohio while turkey hunting. It turns out a local resident was actually raising timber wolves in an enclosure and my hosts had somehow neglected to tell me this. (Oddly enough they thought this was amusing)
Fear of getting lost. This is another classic and has haunted hunters since the first mammoth hunter left his house in Siberia and wound up in downtown Nome, Alaska. Daniel Boone is generally attributed the quote “I never was lost but I was mighty turned around for three days once.”
All hunters think about getting lost but I believe less so than we used to. Why? I think many hunters these days do not really venture far enough from the truck to have much of a chance of getting lost.
For many of us hunting is a short walk from the truck or the ATV and then we climb into a treestand, now I am not saying there is anything wrong with that, this is just what some hunting is like now. There is less traveling over large expanses of country than back in the day, and that is pity.
Go somewhere this fall and take a walk over the country, make it somewhere there is a chance of getting turned around like Dan Boone. If you can work it in to sit somewhere and stare into a fire, all the better, don’t fear what rustles.
Larry Case