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Stalked by Greed
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12122 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1994 |
1,900 Words |
| Author
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G. Travis Regier
G. Travis Regier, professor of English at the University of
Central Florida, has written for various publications,
including Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, and the American
Scholar. |
THE LAST HUNT
Horst Stern, translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider
New York: Random House, 1993
155 pp., $18.00
Like the wild game they pursue, hunters are a vanishing species. Animal-rights activists paint them as bloodthirsty barbarians, or alternatively, as juvenile gun-fetishists. Signs on the sides of buses in New York City blare You Should Be Ashamed to Wear Fur. In literature, hunters don't fare much better. For every Theodore Roosevelt or Ernest Hemingway who takes up pen to defend the hunter, there are authors such as Cleveland Amory, who in ManKind? Our Incredible War on Wildlife collected hundreds of anecdotes designed to expose hunters as fools and knaves. In Kent Nelson's All Around Me Peaceful, a Colorado woman defines hunting as "drinking with guns." Even some anthropologists have begun to question the stereotype of the prehistoric hunter, suggesting that Stone Age people may have spent more time gathering berries and digging roots than pursuing the beasts of the field.
But for a literary coup de grace to hunting, we must turn to Horst Stern's novella The Last Hunt, a best-seller in Germany that has just become available in English. Stern is well known in Europe as a writer and as a producer of television documentaries on environmental subjects, including the problem of human encroachment on wildlife habitats.
This story, we are told, is true, though the names have been changed. In an unnamed Eastern European country, sometime in the latter days of the Cold War, an aging bear of record-setting size returns to the forest of its youth. Though the woods have been made a game preserve, humans are crowding in at the edges, cutting logging roads and building farms. In the opening pages, Stern shows the destruction of the habitat from the bear's point of view, in a vividly described scene more moving than any number of merely factual presentations.
When it awakes from hibernation, the bear is troubled by its claws:
During his winter sleep they had grown into long, ivory-colored curved daggers, and a few short walks up and down in front of his den had not been enough to wear them down. Now they hurt when he trod on a stone or knocked up against an exposed tree root; he felt the pain where they pushed into his flesh.
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