Near a Thousand Tables (15 page)

Yet in some ways hunting is a costly and wasteful way of getting food. Even the apparently simple tools of the hunt are harder to devise and costlier to make than the ditches, swiddens, fences, dibbling sticks and panniers which were all that early pastoralists and agriculturists needed. Trained animals can be very demanding. Except for dogs, they are troublesome to acquire and time-consuming to train. And while dogs are, no doubt, worthy of their hire, they still have to be “paid” with food doles. Sometimes, they rival humans for status. This is apparent, for instance,
in the graveyard of a hunting community of the end of the last great ice age. They followed the herds of deer and aurochs north to Skateholm on the Baltic, where their bones now lie. Their dogs occupy adjoining graves: burly, wolflike hunters, buried with the spoils of their careers, including antlers and boars' tusks, sometimes with more signs of honor than attend human burials. These dogs were full members of societies in which status was determined by hunting prowess: dogs who were leaders of men. Today such real-life animal heroes are only encountered in children's storybooks.

Weapons and dogs are the investment capital of hunters. When these ensure worthwhile returns, another set of problems intrudes. Overexploitation is a common hazard of hunting, because hunting cultures tend to be competitive: there is no point in conserving game to be killed by a rival. In any case, even where the need for conservation is pressing, it is hard to calculate the right levels of prey to maintain. Although a popular, romantic and primitivist view of hunting peoples credits them with ecological sensitivity and conservation strategies, these are really rather unusual. In most hunting cultures, the habit of overkill recurs. It is extremely hard to kill just what you need; large quadrupeds with the big fat resources hunters most need only come in one size: big. The hunting methods available at most times and in most places in the course of history have involved immolating large numbers of them in falls or pits. Ironically, the high kill rates are the result of the difficulty of hunting formidable creatures: the harder they are to fell individually, the more likely they are to end up in hecatombs. This generates more food than is needed and wastes the breeding stock of the creatures the huntsman relies on. Whole herds can get wiped out in one swoop. The bones of ten thousand horses lie where Paleolithic hunters drove them over a cliff near Solutré. Remains of a hundred mammoths have turned up in pits at a site in the Czech Republic. Big species are more vulnerable to extinction by hunters because they reproduce slowly and, above all, because they are hard to manage. It is difficult to be selective with creatures so elusive or dangerous that any chance of a kill seems irresistible.

The myth of Native Americans' talent for conservationism before the arrival of the white man is belied by the evidence of the scale of their slaughters. In fact, in much of North America, their methods were outrageously wasteful. Puzzlingly underused kills of American bison lie heaped where prehistoric hunters drove them over cliffs, with only bits and pieces of them butchered for food. This suggests that waste was acceptable to the hunters on a scale so enormous that it might have threatened long-term supply. At caribou hunts of the Hudson Bay Inuit, observed in the late nineteenth century, the hunters deliberately set out to slaughter
whole herds, leaving, on occasion, hundreds of carcasses to rot—presumably with the intention of denying them
to their enemies
. Some tribes, who depended on other, frailer species did adopt self-imposed quotas. The Shoshone conserved their deer stocks. If bison survived, it was not because they were rationally conserved but because they were too abundant to exterminate. They were saved by the hunters' inefficiency and the inadequacy of the available technology: in part, this was because the hunters had no horses, which had disappeared from the New World some ten thousand years ago, during an extinction in which human depredations probably played a big part.

Indeed, in many parts of the world, the disappearance of numerous species which were the prey of man in the “great Pleistocene extinction” probably owed something, at least, to hunters' prodigality: most of the large fauna of the Western Hemisphere and Australia disappeared completely, while the Old World lost its biggest elephants—partly, perhaps, to hunters
hungry for fat
. Remains of mammoths killed in this era are still found with spearheads imbedded—up to eight spearheads to a beast. Numerous kinds of deer vanished, presumably to overkill. Lack of restraint in hunting species to extinction is not a peculiar vice of peoples afflicted with improvidence: it is a human characteristic. In all sorts of environments, the arrival of humans has been followed by species extinctions. The megafauna of Australasia vanished soon after the arrival of human hunters: the diprodont and the giant kangaroo, flightless birds four times as big as a man,
a one-ton lizard
. Later victims include the moa of New Zealand, which the Maori hunted to extinction, the Hawaiian goose, the dodo.

Hunters who forgo the technology of overkill are left pursuing a laborious quest, singling out target animals, tracking them at great cost in time and effort in the manner Barrie imagined for Lady Mary Lasenby. The energy expended by Bushmen in the hunt seems so terrible that it appears impossible that the meal which awaits at the end of the process could be worthwhile: it seems at odds with the “optimal foraging strategy” which hunting peoples are supposed to pursue to minimize the waste of energy on elusive game. Laurens van der Post accompanied a band of hunters in search of eland. One morning, they found the tracks of a herd just after sunrise. By three in the afternoon, after a nonstop pursuit at the trot, they came on the herd and loosed their arrows. The real hunt had not yet begun. To fell large game at a venture is almost impossible with a Bushman's bow. His preferred method is to wound the beast with a poisoned barb and follow it, until it drops with exhaustion and the effects of the drug, before administering a coup de grâce. The arrows are made in two stages: the tip sticks in the target; the haft
falls to the ground to tell the marksman that he has scored a hit, even if no blood is shed. The wound slows the beast down so that the hunters can track it but it may be a long, arduous chase, with the hunters on short rations, before the contest ends. On the occasion van der Post described, the prey ran off so fast that there was no time to check whether a shot had gone home. The Bushmen resumed the chase, this time at a fast run. “Their minds were entirely enclosed in the chase and impervious to fatigue or other claims on their senses.” They ran for twelve miles without stopping “and the final mile was an all-out sprint.” The next time they made contact with the herd, one bull was seen to be tiring. It still took another full hour to harry him to a halt. “Hardly was he dead than Nxou and Bauxhau started skinning the bull. That was the amazing part of the chase: without pause or break for rest they were fresh enough at the end to plunge straight away into the formidable task of skinning and cutting up the heavy animal.” And they still had to trek home before the feast and the
dance could begin
. Bushmen who persist with this taxing way of life to this day are obviously pursuing a commitment which has grown out of generations of invested emotion. Cultural capital is tied down in practices that would be heart-wrenching to change for the mere sake of material gain.

Most hunting communities try to control or eliminate these problems by devising ways of managing their game. A number of means of management fall short of herding. The simplest recourse is to make hunting seasonal, selecting the times when flocks are fattest or most prolific or when breeding will be undisturbed. In some cases, the seasonal rhythm of hunting is determined by the life cycle of the victim: there is little point, for instance, in killing caribou except at the approach of winter when their coats are thickest and their meat most thickly layered with fat. In others, the determining factor is the ecology of the animals' environment: when they are most densely concentrated for feeding the yield from the hunt is likely to be most bountiful. Occasionally, the annual cycle of human activity may be paramount. The Piute of the American West hunt antelope, sheep and deer in the fall, when they gather for the harvest, because their communal hunting methods demand concentrated labor. Commonly, the incidence of rain decides the frequency of the hunt, where grass fires are used to drive and direct animals to the
killing grounds
. The use of fire is a further and frequent method of game control. Fire promotes grazing in places selected for hunters' convenience and concentrates prey in accessible areas. This is not far removed conceptually from herding. Game reserves and, in societies with state organizations strong enough to enforce them, royal parks and forests can be preserved as privileged hunting environments. Here
the kingly and aristocratic hunt was performed, not for food but as a rite of social differentiation, a display of conspicuous consumption and a reminder, perhaps, of the right of dominance of the man on horseback.

Some animals are naturally gregarious and the hunter has no need to become a professional herdsman. All he has to do is follow the flocks. Who, in these cases, is the herder and who the herded? The flocks lead men, not the other way around. The first European invaders of the American prairie found people whose dependence on the American bison was absolute. The inhabitants ate virtually nothing but buffalo, wore buffalo hides tied with thongs of buffalo leather. They sheltered under buffalo skin tents. The earliest surviving account of life on the plains, written by one of the Spanish riders who reached Kansas in 1540, describes a classic meal of hunting cultures. When a buffalo was killed, the hunters slit the belly, squeezed out the half-digested grass and drank the juices “because they say that this contains the essence of the stomach.” When they turned to the flesh they would grip a raw joint between one hand and their teeth and slice off mouthfuls, “swallowing it half-chewed, like birds. They would eat raw fat without warming it, empty a large gut and fill it with blood … to drink when
they are thirsty
.” The only viable way of life was abject transhumance, the only possible culture a highly portable one. Wood was rare and precious and beasts of burden nonexistent; so transport was by light stick frames, piled with belongings and dragged by hand. Many goods had to be bundled and carried underarm.

Yet even the most slavish followers of herds intervene to direct the creatures' paths when it is time for the hunt by driving and stampeding them and channeling their movement, or cutting out specimens for slaughter. As these techniques multiply, the relationship between the species changes and men become managers of the animals' movements. Species with a herd instinct lend themselves to more intensive forms of management. Provided the terrain and other aspects of the environment are amenable, and men have means of keeping up with the herds, huntsmen can become herders and lead flocks of creatures where they wish. This becomes a particularly attractive option if dogs are available to help with the roundup or if lead animals can be trained to marshal the flocks. The most commonly herded species of cattle, sheep and goats are all distinguished from other animals by these qualities. It is not always easy to draw the line between a herding culture and a culture which hunts herds.

A middle case—midway, that is, between hunting and herding, which shows how one can be transformed into the other—is that of reindeer management in
Northern Europe. Like its American cousin, the caribou, the reindeer has been a favored food of man since the archaeological record began» Reindeer hunger drew hunting peoples north into Arctic Europe at the end of the last great ice age. Growth in the importance of reindeer as a resource can be traced over a period of more than three thousand years. In parts of the tundra, taiga and forest edge, men and reindeer between them gradually became so dominant in the ecosystem as to develop an effective duopoly, in which people had little else
to live on
. Various ways of exploiting the reindeer were practiced together for centuries: hunting in the wild was combined with the practice of taming selected individual beasts. At the same time the migrations of certain herds could be regulated.

What one might call controlled nomadism gradually prevailed, or a combination of a normally transhumant life, with excursions into nomadism as circumstances demanded. Like the cattle of America's Wild West, reindeer have a strong herd instinct; so they, too, can be left wild for long periods, rounded up at will and led or followed to new grazing. Compared with the big quadrupeds of the Arctic New World, European reindeer, even in the tundra, rely on relatively short migrations, usually of little more than two hundred miles. A tame male can be used as a decoy to pen an entire herd; and collaboration with man is an advantage in the search for grazing: the reindeer acquire the services of useful scouts and allies against wolves and wolverines. The herders light fires to protect their reindeer from the mosquitoes that plague them in summer. On the ocean's edge, Nenets have even been said to share their fish, for which reindeer can develop
a surprising appetite
. Or, in a less intense form of management, between pennings, the reindeer could be allowed to seek their seasonal haunts for themselves, with their human and canine parasites following. Large-scale herding is entirely an activity of the tundra, where the reindeer are the essential means of life; the forest dwellers breed only small numbers, which they use as draft animals and as supplementary elements in a varied diet; they move camp within only a narrow range—never more than fifty miles or so in a year; and they leave their deer to forage unsupervised, rounding them up only at need. Traditional tundra dwellers, by contrast, are inseparable from their reindeer. They have nothing else to keep them alive.

The practice of reindeer herding was well established by the ninth century
A.D.,
when the Norwegian ambassador, Othere, boasted to King Alfred of his own herd,
six hundred strong
. Since then, the documented rhythms of the herding life have never varied: every year, the first migration, led by a tame stag and policed by dogs, occurs in spring. Summer is passed in breeding grounds; autumn, including the rutting season in October, is spent in an intermediate camp before the cull and the move
to winter quarters
. Herds thousands of head strong have been common
in modern times. Only two or three herdsmen, with the help of dogs, can look after
two thousand reindeer
. As long as they are available in sufficient numbers, reindeer provide virtually all that is needed for life: indeed,
jil'ep,
the Nenet name for them, means “life.” They bear burdens and drag sleighs—the best team leaders are castrated, preferably, according to Sami traditions, by a man who rips off their testicles
with his teeth
. They are slaughtered for their warm skins and their versatile bones and sinews, which make, respectively, tool heads and thongs. But their main role is as food. Their blood and marrow give instant infusions of energy; their spring horns, while young and gristly, constitute a feast. Reindeer meat, which can be preserved with ease by natural drying or freezing, is staple fare. Nowadays, it is one of the luxuries of Scandinavian city restaurants and the foundation of the fortunes of the Sami millionaires of whom stories are told around dinner tables in Helsinki and Oslo.