On Trails (22 page)

Larger communities tended to rely more heavily on systematic communal hunts. According to Smith, the Powhatan sometimes hunted deer by surrounding them with wildfires and then forcing them to a central ambush point—a widespread technique. The arrival of the fur trade further encouraged mass killing, as opposed to individual hunting.

According to the anthropologist Gregory A. Waselkov, deer was “the single most important meat resource of post-Pleistocene tribes of the eastern woodlands.” Put simply, the Eastern tribes could not afford to give the deer a “sporting chance”—a notion wholly alien to them. Though recreational hunting existed in numerous ancient empires, the sport as we know it was only codified by European royalty in the last thousand years.

Deer meat was also the single most important meat resource for the European aristocracy, but for different reasons. Venison was a marker of status, a sign of manly virility, and an indication of geographic power. Deer were so integral to the notion of hunting that they became, quite literally, synonymous with it. According to the historian Matt Cartmill, the modern Irish verb
fiadhachaim
, “to hunt,” literally means “to deer-atize.” In English
venison
, which originally meant “meat gotten by hunting,” now means “deer flesh.”

Hunting was meant to serve as a relief from the tedium of the court, so it was ironic, but not surprising, that a baroque system of courtly manners soon arose around the sport. In Elizabethan England, according to Cartmill, “a public spanking with the flat of a hunting knife” was the customary penalty for breaking one of the sport's many rules, “for example, uttering the forbidden word ‘hedgehog' during a deer hunt.” British royals hunted on horseback, attended by brush beaters, bow handlers, and buglers. In France, the parforce hunt, in which the quarry was essentially run to death by dogs and horse-bound riders, became the norm. Nevertheless, some kings, like Louis XV, managed to kill lavishly. Over his fifty-year sporting career, he is said to have run down some ten thousand red deer, an accomplishment Cartmill considers “possibly unique in the history of the human species.”

The royal hunt created a new type of landscape. In 1066, William the Conqueror invaded England, took the throne by force, and began to radically redistribute the land by means of a process called “afforestation,” whereby large tracts of land were declared royal forests. Though prior residents were allowed to continue living on these lands, hunting, trapping, herding, and logging were outlawed. The famous New Forest—an ancient woodland and heath in southern England, which remains largely intact—was the result of William's dictate. At their peak, royal forests accounted for one-third of the land in England.

These protections did not stem from some kind of proto-­environmentalist sentiment, though. Rather, it was meant to protect the king's prized prey: the red, roe, and fallow deer. William's “forest law” showed a rather sophisticated understanding that without a stable forest ecosystem, large game like deer could not thrive. However, the system was explicitly designed to maximize deer populations; predators did not receive the same protection. Wolves had a royal bounty placed on their heads, and by the 1200s they had been successfully hunted out of southern Britain.

The regulations proved onerous for local residents. William prohibited bows and arrows within the royal forests, and he ordered that all large dogs living near his forests have three claws from their forefeet removed—a grisly procedure, called “lawing,” which was performed with a mallet and chisel—to prevent them from chasing his deer. Poachers faced losing their hands, their eyes, or their lives.

As predation of wild deer increased and their habitat shrank, private parks were built by noblemen to protect their stocks of deer, and harsher regulations were passed. Naturally, the common people chafed against these new restrictions. In 1524, three yeomen snuck into a deer park, hacked two young deer to pieces, and ripped two fawns from their mothers' wombs, leaving the carcasses where they lay—apparently, an act of pure, bloody rage. In the oral and written literature of the time, there arose a certain heroic aura around poachers like Adam Bell, Johnie Cock, and most famously, Robin Hood. The famed bandit of Sherwood Forest (a hundred-thousand-acre royal preserve) and his Merry Men represented both rebellion and idyll. They dined on delicacies like venison pasties and sweetbreads. They escaped capture with a superior knowledge of the land, moving, wraithlike, on “derne” (secret) paths. A bounty—called a “wolf's head,” because the reward was the same as for that of a wolf—was placed on Robin Hood's life. The poor championed his fight against (among other things) the excesses of sport hunting, while the nobility derided subsistence hunters like him, now dubbed “poachers,” as uncivilized and unmanly.

The British eventually brought these mores to the New World, judging Native Americans for their “savage” methods. On seeing the popular Native hunting technique called “lead hunting”—where hunters would locate the seasonal migration route of ungulates, like caribou, and then wait for their prey to appear—the famed British hunter Frederick Selous wrote that he felt “thoroughly disgusted with the whole business. In the first place, to sit on one spot for hours
lying in wait for game, is not hunting, and, although under favourable conditions it may be a deadly way of killing Caribou, it is not a form of sport which would appeal to me under any circumstances.”

From these elitist roots—predicated as much on aesthetics as conservation—­arose the so-called sportsman's code, which frowned on the killing of female and young deer, discouraged hunting for profit, and banned year-round hunting. During the late nineteenth century, these values were enshrined in law by hunter-­conservationists like Theodore Roosevelt and Madison Grant, who were instrumental in the formation of many of the earliest national parks and national forests. At the same time, the American sport hunters, in response to the princely diversions of Europe, fashioned themselves as rough and rustic outdoorsmen.

Walker often told me he hunted with a bow and arrow because he was “a strong traditionalist,” a man who enjoyed carrying on the rites of his ancestors. As he sat in that tree—in a national forest, in a region where white-tailed deer had been hunted to a vanishing point and then “reintroduced” on two separate occasions over the last century, once a hillbilly boy of Irish and Indian heritage, now a middle-class man bound both by law and honor, staying his arrow because a buck was too young to kill—he was the inheritor and embodiment of more traditions than perhaps even he knew.

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After our last morning of hunting, when Walker had spared the young buck, he gave me a ride back to the airport. He seemed a bit chagrined that we hadn't shot anything, but overall he was surprisingly equanimous about it. “You aren't guaranteed anything,” he said. “That's the reason it's called hunting, not killing.”

On the long drive to the airport, to pass the time, he tried to list all the animals he had observed making trails. The list was extensive. “Of course, deer make trails like crazy,” he said. “Hogs, that's another
one makes bad trails. When they get in a row, they trot, going from place to place, like a line of ducks. I've had trails of them wore out a foot deep. . . . Snakes leave a trail when they cross a cotton patch. Especially rattlesnakes. We'd track them down and kill them bastards . . .”

This was not the first time I'd heard Walker mention an animal making “bad trails,” but it jarred me nevertheless. Some environmental preservationists I've met frown upon human trails, which they view as blemishes on the land, but they tend to regard animal trails as natural and good. As a lifelong hunter, Walker sees things differently. He seems to make no differentiation between the trails of humans or any other animal—a rut is a rut. And as the last three days had shown, for the hunter or for the hunted, a rut can be one's downfall.

He went on to list various other trail-makers: raccoons, skunks, turtles, muskrats, minks, armadillos . . .

“I reckon nearly every kind of animal will follow a trail, because it's just easier to navigate,” he remarked. “Like the buffalo trails. Most of the time, it's easier walking.”

“But,” he added after a lengthy pause, his voice brightening to a new thought, “I guess people leave the most obvious trails. Like this damn interstate highway here. Shit, if people cease to exist, somebody could come back here ten thousand years later and probably find remnants of this concrete bridge. So we leave the most destructive trails, I think, of any group of animals.”

CHAPTER 4

O
NE FROST-LACED
fall morning, I went trail hunting with a historian named Lamar Marshall. He was slowly piecing together a map of all the major footpaths of the ancient Cherokee homeland, and he had a new route he wanted to inspect. Wrapped in layers of warm clothing, which we would gradually peel off as the day wore on, we walked down a gravel road through the forests of the North Carolina foothills. The sky was pale, cool, and distant. Down the hill from us ran Fires Creek, which slid southward to meet the fat, muddy tail of the Hiwassee River.

Few Americans can say with any certainty that they have seen an old Native American trail. But almost everyone has seen the ghost of one and even traveled along it. For example, Marshall told me, the highway we'd taken to get to reach these mountains had once been a noted Cherokee trail, stretching hundreds of miles from present-day Asheville to Georgia. The next road we turned onto had been a trail once, too. As had dozens of other roads in the surrounding hills.

Marshall estimated that eighty-five percent of the total length of
the old Native American trails in North Carolina had been paved over. This phenomenon generally holds true across the continent, but more so in the densely forested east. As Seymour Dunbar wrote in
A History of Travel in America
:
“Practically the whole present-day system of travel and transportation in America east of the Mississippi River, including many turnpikes, is based upon, or follows, the system of forest paths established by the Indians hundreds of years ago.”

That system of paths is arguably the grandest buried cultural artifact in the world. For many indigenous people, trails were not just a means of travel; they were the veins and arteries of culture. For societies relying on oral tradition, the land served as a library of botanical, zoological, geographical, etymological, ethical, genealogical, spiritual, cosmological, and esoteric knowledge. In guiding people through that wondrous archive, trails became a rich cultural creation and a source of knowledge in themselves. Although that system of knowledge has largely been subsumed by empire and entombed in asphalt, threads of it can still be found running through the forest, if one only knows where to look.

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Marshall did not look like any historian I had ever met. He had leathery skin, gray stubble, and two wide-set, sun-narrowed dashes for eyes. From crown to cuff, he wore mismatched camouflage: a camo trucker cap, a camo backpack, and a camo karate gi over a pair of camo cargo pants. Any time I wanted to hear about a new chapter of his life, I needed only point to a garment and ask if there was a story behind it. His trucker's cap read “Alabama Fur Takers Association,” an organization for which he, a former trapper, used to serve as the vice president. Around his neck, he wore a beaver skin pouch he'd bought while stocking the trading post he used to run. Beside the pouch hung a sterling silver medallion, which depicted a flattened musk turtle. The turtle—an endangered species, long sacred to the
Cherokee—was the symbol for an activist organization he founded in 1996 called Wild Alabama. That outfit later expanded into an influential conservation group called Wild South, whose efforts currently cover eight southeastern states.

The karate gi was an item he had designed for himself many years ago. He'd since quit practicing karate, having finally decided that “if some three-hundred-fifty-pound guy was going to beat me to death, I'd rather just shoot him.” In his former life as a firebrand environmentalist in Alabama, for self-protection he had taken to carrying two powerful handguns everywhere he went. On our hike, to cut down on weight, he only carried a pocket-sized .22 Magnum. “I feel kinda naked with just this,” he said at one point, holding it in his palm.

In an orange waist-pack, Marshall carried a GPS device, a few maps, a black notebook, a pen, and firestarter for emergencies. As we walked, from time to time he pulled out the GPS, consulted his map, and took a few notes in his pocket notebook, which was full of hand-drawn maps. He still wrote in the cribbed, cryptic shorthand he'd learned while working as a plat technician for surveyor crews. On the first page, in a gesture reminiscent of the old explorer's journals, he had written his name, and beneath it, his Cherokee nickname,
Nvnohi Diwatisgi
, which means “the Road Finder.” (The word for
path
and
road
is the same in Cherokee:
nv
nohi,
“the rocky place,” a place where the soil and vegetation have already been worn away.)