There is a great article by Charles Bethea in Outside magazine about a group of marathoners who tried using persistence hunting to take down a pronghorn recently. I really recommend the piece.My father, Harry Landers, is a serious competitive marathon runner. He has run Boston three times, New York several times, and he usually places very well for his age group. He's even won some races. A few years ago I showed him some video (from the last episode of David Attenborough's excellent 'Life of Mammals) of a group of Bushmen (or 'San', as they are also called. Some people in Africa consider 'Bushmen' to be a derogatory name but few readers would likely recognize any other term for them) in the Khalahari desert running down a kudu on foot. I was hoping to interest him in getting a pronghorn tag and hitting the badlands, but its just not his cup of tea. I still couldn't get the idea of running prey down on foot out of my head.
Then last fall I had the pleasure of hunting feral pigs with Daniel Gentry in Georgia. I found that the farm we were hunting was also riddled with armadillos and I wanted to add one more invasive species to my list of things hunted and eaten. The pigs in that area tended to disappear for hours at the sound of a gunshot, so we didn't dare to shoot an armadillo for fear of ruining our odds at the main attraction.
Our solution was to run the cute little buggers down on foot. Our second attempt on our second night out was successful. We spotted the pale armored blob in the beam of a flashlight, handed the rifle off to my father-in-law, and took off after it. Flanking it like a pair of wolves after an elk, we worked to simultaneously tire the animal out and to keep it from exiting the field and disappearing into the thick surrounding brush and woods.
It was like a game of soccer with a ball that moves on its own. Absolutely some of the most thrilling hunting I have ever done, probably owing to the fact that I was connecting myself to what was probably the first, aboriginal human hunting experience.
I succeeded on the second night because I had realized what I did wrong on the first chase. On our first chase I hesitated as I closed in. There was that moment of not being sure what exactly to do if I got right onto the armadillo. And in that moment the animal got away. On the second night I had considered that and I approached the chase mentally with the same frame of mind with which I usually hunt deer on my own. That frame of mind being that I have to eat, that my family will go hungry if I do not kill something, and that I must embrace and even crave the act of the kill in order to provide them with food.
This has been literally true many times that I have hunted deer. I had no money for groceries and a family to feed. The instinct that this develops is one that does not hesitate. That is the difference between winning or losing.
With a great leap, I threw myself through the air and landed with one foot on the poor armadillo's tail. In a flash I drew a long knife from the sheath on my belt and stabbed it in hard and quick into the gap in the armor at the base of the armadillo's neck, cutting the spine and killing it instantly. No real hesitation. Figuring out how to butcher it afterward was a whole other problem, but I had a dead armadillo in front of me (thanks also to Daniel's quick reflexes and good instincts for keeping the prey in the cattle field).
This is what most of the marathoners described in Outside's article seem to be missing. The Kenyon, Andrew Musuva, had what it took. He appears to have grown up in a situation where he had to kill or starve. But the others didn't.
Running for a long time and wearing down the prey is a big part of persistence hunting. But that isn't all of it. Successful persistence hunters in America are going to need more than excellent marathon times. Young lions and cheetahs grow up watching hundreds of stalks and chases, mostly unsuccessful, before they need to start succeeding themselves. This gives them a keen understanding of how a given animal will react to varying terrain, weather, wind direction, and the presence of other animals. These marathoners, or those who follow them, need to put in the observation and practice time to develop those instincts.
They describe their hunt as a success, but it wasn't. At 25 yards they got close, but not quite close enough. There is no way that someone who had only held a pistol once before could make a kill shot at 25 yards with open sights and the heaving, shaking body of someone who has just ran so many miles. Nor would a spear or rock thrown from 25 yards have been likely to hit or finish off the pronghorn.
There was no dead antelope, in spite of all of the work and the $985 they spent on the tag for it. That is a failed hunt, though one that they and others can learn from.
What I think that they lacked was the killing instinct. As Bethea wrote:
Now they're within 25 feet of a panting pronghorn buck. It's starting to seem feasible. "For a second, we don't know what to do," Esposito later recalls.
That second, or seconds, is the difference between success and failure when hunting up close with primitive weapons (or a pistol, for that matter). Esposito is a good runner with the right idea about how to go about this, but he lacked that desperate need for the kill that is the difference between hesitation and success.
It is possible to be successful as a hunter without that killing instinct when one is sitting in an ambush shooting the prey from 150 yards away with a scoped rifle. And don't get me wrong -- I practice that type of hunting as well. I have nothing against it. But in that situation at a distance you've usually got time to pull yourself together, establish your resolve and squeeze the trigger. If it takes five seconds to do that then its probably not an issue.
You can't hesitate for five seconds when its time to close the deal on foot, or with a knife, a net or any other up-close tactic on a prey animal.
I am not a serious runner, but if I was helping to coach a group of runners who wanted to succeed at persistence hunting then I would take them way out in the middle of nowhere for a week with little or no food and send them out hunting with .22 rifles for small game. Within a few days I think that the instinct to close the deal would begin to establish its self.
In spite of the fact that they failed, I am still very impressed that these guys went out and tried to do what they did. For a first attempt it was really excellent and I hope that some of them will keep at it.
[Photograph used courtesy of the BBC]
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