Sensing Nature:: Encountering the World in Hunting

Abstract

In this article I explore issues of the embodiment and being in the world of human hunters in pursuit of animal prey in the context of hunting as sport. The focus is on the immediacy and the experience of hunting rather than an exploration of its social and cultural meaning. This is an attempt to evoke how it is to hunt rather than what it means to hunt. I argue that hunting is a fully embodied, multi-sensory and multi-sensual practice that depends on an immersion into a multi-sensory and multi-sensual world. At the heart of such hunting is a contest between humans and animals based on two sets of senses and senses. My attempt here is explore how the human sensing is experienced and the difficulties of capturing and evoking that experience in an anthropological text. Ethnographic experience - in the midst of a fox hunt A cold autumn morning in the countryside of central England. Earthy smells from a freshly ploughed field. A light wind carries other scents and sounds from further away. The rich scent of warm animality rises from perspiring horses at rest. Their riders with flushed faces and their previously immaculate breeches and coats spat tered with mud after the last short gallop, converse quietly. A pack of hounds, still gently panting and creating a light fog of breaths swirling among them, is led to the edge of a small wood by the red-coated Huntsman. As the hounds crash through the undergrowth he encourages them in their search for the scent of a fox by calling to them in repeated, slightly pinched, often high-pitched cries or with drawn out word less sounds. As they move further into the wood he blows on his horn to move them on and to keep them eager. The sound reverberates through the trees. A few birds call in alarm as they flutter noisily out of the wood. One or two hounds whimper and whine excitedly as they begin to find the elusive scent; more of them pick it up as it becomes stronger on a track where a fox passed recently and soon the whimpering, whining and squeaking becomes an excited baying. Echoing the hound chorus with excited calls on his horn the Huntsman gallops in pursuit. Having left the wood the hunted fox has taken a direct line across a grass field and through a narrow opening in a hedge. A little later the hounds, baying in full cry, attempt to scramble through whatever gaps they can find. The ground rumbles with the thundering approach of galloping horses. Their riders push them towards the hedge, some leap safely and gal lop on; there are cries of dismay from others whose horses refuse at the last moment or which crash through the hedge, stumble, and unseat them. The hunt is on but moves off into the distance and the stragglers attempt to reconnect with it. Here the