Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

As you squat beneath a dripping tree, listening for the first clucks of the invisible fowl perched in the countless branches around you, all social distinctions dissolve as you await the lovelorn bird. The call is not only meant to bewilder and fluster his foes, but also to entertain them with the odd, ridiculous mockery of a professional clown. But the peculiarity of the bird is that at the end of his call, he will close his eyes, spin around, and become oblivious to everything. In this trance is the only time you can advance.

As you scramble up the mountains in the dark, it may be necessary to hang a tiny lantern from the tail of your Chetvorah so that he might repeat his lessons en miniature . Once on the weird plateaus of Exiliadesertas, where in April violets and buttercups burst from the earth the instant the snow melts, the stalk commences as soon as it’s light enough to see the end of the gun barrel.

Now we enter the ancient space, between the prey’s apprehension and the predator’s alertness, for during his call the bird cannot hear and the dog cannot see. The dog creeps a few feet, from tree to tree, then stops and waits for the hunter to draw alongside. Then the man takes the lead, creeping a few feet on all fours, and the dog, between stanzas, gauging his steps carefully, reciprocates his crabwise movement, which is not random though it may appear so. We are not between ideas (as those parasitic priests and peripateticizing professors who pass themselves off as the friends and disciples of those whose sufferings they live off, would have it) but between two sets of instincts —which is a finer way of looking at the world, as reason is not a force but only one weapon of the warring instincts.

Nor is this the place for bourgeois hunter lads, for woe to those who are limited to being happy only in the style of their times. Mad with the untold misery of those who hunt regularly but do not like it, they seek honor where none is to be found and pleasure in places where no pleasure lies for them. As the stalk draws nigh, such poor fellows’ delights become vague and still more vague, emptying their flasks before noon, and yet they talk of nothing but their runs, worse than the barrister who talks of nothing but his briefs; most tedious and heavy in hand, such toy histories. For sport requires something more than a Sportsman, as one must see whole the stages by which the hunter becomes the hunted.

This war of two instincts must be mediated by a third, for contrary to conventional wisdom, the instincts of men go to far greater extremes than those of animals, especially when acting en masse. Tack, tack, tackatack a tack . Now the Chetvorah’s time has come, where all models, methodologies, paradigms, and parameters have been abolished, and one must rely upon a love quite distinct from the love one feels for oneself. Man is une bête d’aveu (a confessing animal) and man requires the Chetvorah’s classic firmness and scrupulosité to mitigate our most recent mannered tendernesses.

Presently you will discover how much your dog is like you in action and temperament. For during the short time the bird is in a trance it is possible to take three long steps toward it, then quickly come to a halt before the next stanza, behind a tree large enough to hide. When making this stalk, it is the Chetvorah who picks the next tree, often standing straight up on his hinder legs to conceal himself and beckoning you with a single vibrating ear. (Whilst waiting, take care to neither whistle, whittle, nor munch on bilberries, but occupy yourself only with the plaiting of grasses.)

Prompted by the occasion, we are summoned to the final stage of education, and the hardest. For the dog has, after all, been trained to point, retrieve, and track — yet the bird is too high to give a scent, strong enough to carry away any ball or shot, and is in any case too large to retrieve. To go the final mile, it is necessary to roust out the errors which come from undivided attention. For to succeed in Sport, forgetfulness is the precondition for all action; one must disrecollect the last thing one has learned.

The bird’s antics permit us to advance another three steps into a standoff, where the dog dares not to move and the bird dares not to call. In the gray dawn, the envelope of the real, in a world without premises and presuming, where our duo knows only that they do not know what is going to happen, they must slip the wraiths of reason, fantasy, memory, and education, and lay down the gauntlet of the heart. Submerged in this atrocious confluence of nothingness, wrapped in their solitude, both must exercise a counter- instinct; the Chetvorah realizing that the time has come for the dumber of the two parties to take the lead, straight upstream against the current of their training time together, an impromptu extempore .

For your part, Chasseur , do not allow your sport to consume you. One must not be reluctant to abandon what it has cost so many hours to learn — that is to say, one must give up the role of Master, and in directing movement, do so in a way which does not invite a particular response. No written lesson, no spoken words, no lectures, be they too often repeated, can teach a dog or man to finish the capercailzie chase with a flourish. If there’s an ultimate command, ’tis this: “Don’t look at me; I’ll follow you.”

So if you would not break the hunter’s heart, let the hound be your mark. In all the packs of hounds and herds of hunters that you see, only one is really hunting, the others are just doing what the others do. It is for you to follow the real guide in view, not behind your hound but drawing alongside, keeping your distance but losing no yard, whilst not reminding him of your presence. It should be your honor and glory to so place yourself, and si inter eos ita vives, te vertens sicut se vertuant, sed numguam inter eos verteus (“If thus you live with them, turning as they turn, but never turning among them”) you will have mastered, with the help of your wide-awake wiseacre, the noble artifice of venere , the aim of which is no affected piety, but a sentient society without sanctimony, where the estimable is esteemed and the mediocre ignored, the style of styles. For an alert respect is the highest mood a man can hope for, and the most difficult of all to sustain.

Then that liminal figure who sings and dances suddenly flies up, rising as always with his breast upwind, not from fright but in laughing sadness, to settle on a rock, soft with lichen, where he may better copulate. And one feels that miraculous exhilaration which hunters have experienced from the beginning of time. The world ceases to exist, and nothing else matters but this perpetually alert encounter on the bulge of the horizon — a delectatio nervosa . Thus the sunken world arises.

Black Game forever foresees the hunter and lives forever in the hunter’s eyes. We hunt each other’s favors, but keep score by different rules. And the truth is, man promiscuously hunts whatever crosses his path, so why not devote ourselves to a first-rate quarry? Life is a grandiose torment and something of a joke, but we together, fellow hedonists and fellow victims, may for a moment outwit existence.

As the day wears on and you fail to hold your sights even on a haystack, the sundry violent hisses are repeated as two knives whetting against one another, until further acceleration seems impossible. Finally, often between five and six p.m., the male closes with a distinct smack . (Before the amorous ditty ceases, all must be still as the grave, as the twilight reveals the hunter, his dog calmly backing him, balancing on one leg in the final approach: the anspringen .)

When he emits his smack , the bird is entirely deaf for a moment and his eyes shut for three or four seconds, just time enough for a man to make a large jump toward him. Even the greatest Sportsman will turn away his head as he pulls the trigger in partial disgrace.