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Field Ethos
Guest
By Ethan Denault
“I like killing things.”
That’s how I usually answer people when they ask why I hunt, though I say it smiling so nobody calls the authorities. You have to season every honest statement with irony now like you’re sneaking medicine into a dog’s food. Otherwise, people look at you as though you’ve admitted to keeping human heads in Tupperware containers beneath the basement stairs.
The truth is I do like it, though.
Not the blood. Not the guts. Anybody who claims to enjoy gutting a deer is either lying or belongs on some kind of federal watch list involving neighborhood cats. What I like is the moment before. The narrowing. That electric tightening of the universe where every useless thought suddenly burns away and your body becomes fully enlisted in one task.
Most people never experience that anymore.
The Lives of Doughy Men
They live fragmented lives now. Half inside their phones. Half-inside algorithmically engineered panic spirals delivered between advertisements for sleep gummies and testosterone pellets. Entire populations roaming the earth with wireless earbuds lodged in their skulls like emotional dialysis equipment. Men who visibly twitch if forced to spend 10 uninterrupted seconds alone with their own thoughts.
I’m 46 years old. I spent most of my life in warehouses and machine shops where men occasionally lost fingers and nobody gathered afterward beneath fluorescent lighting so a woman named Caitlin from corporate wellness could facilitate a healing dialogue about workplace trauma while distributing yogurt bars.
Most of the men I grew up with are soft now in this strange modern way that has nothing to do with visible strength. Some still go to the gym five times a week. But they’ve developed those swollen, vaguely larval tech-boy bodies produced by sitting beneath blue light for 14 hours a day while swallowing powdered supplements from matte-black tubs labeled PRIMAL APEX ALPHA FUEL.
Half of them can’t mow their own lawns anymore.
You drive through suburban neighborhoods now and hear nothing but landscaping crews and leaf blowers screaming like dental equipment. Men standing barefoot in driveways watching migrant workers trim hedges for them while they scroll Instagram with the narcotized concentration of chimpanzees hammering cocaine buttons in laboratory experiments. Entire adult lives consumed by doomscrolling, fantasy football analytics, celebrity divorces, and whether some Marvel movie contained problematic themes.
Something lower than the body failed in them.
Some collapse of nerve.
You see men apologizing for occupying physical space now. Men lowering their voices around people who have never physically intimidated anybody in their lives. Men discussing ergonomic desk chairs and hydration strategies with the grim moral seriousness their grandfathers once reserved for amphibious landings in the Pacific.
Animals don’t do that.
A deer hears something shift in the brush and every nerve in its body arrives simultaneously. Immediate citizenship inside the present moment. No philosophy. No podcast vocabulary. No tiny therapeutic tribunal assembling inside its skull to discuss whether aggression is healthy.
Just alive or dead.
No Country for Killers
I started hunting with my father outside Green Bay when I was 11. He was a pipefitter with forearms like bridge cables and a permanent smell of Copenhagen, gasoline, and old coffee. He didn’t talk much unless he was drinking, and drinking made him mean in this exhausted, disappointed way that made you feel sorry for him against your will.
But in the woods, he became almost gentle.
He’d kneel beside tracks like they were sacred text.
“Look there,” he’d whisper.
And somehow the entire forest would reorganize itself around whatever bent blade of grass he was pointing at.
The first thing I killed was a rabbit. I remember being surprised by how small the sound was. Television makes death seem operatic. The rabbit kicked twice in the snow while my father stood behind me breathing steam into the morning air.
“You did good,” he said quietly.
I remember feeling proud.
Not guilty.
People hate hearing that now because modern America has developed this bizarre luxury belief that any relationship with death not mediated through shrink-wrapped grocery packaging is vaguely barbaric. People who couldn’t change a tire if their child’s life depended on it, discussing morality over $14 matcha lattes.
These days I mostly hunt elk. Sometimes deer. Occasionally birds with old friends who are all divorced in that uniquely suburban American fashion where the refrigerator contains mustard, beer, and cholesterol medication while the garage looks prepared for a private invasion of Yukon Territory.
Last November I shot a six-point bull up near the Absaroka right at dawn. Clean shot. Two hundred yards maybe. The animal dropped beautifully. I watched warmth shimmer above the body in the cold and felt that old satisfaction settle into me like good whiskey.
Clarity of the Kill
And then, almost immediately, it dissolved into something quieter.
Not guilt.
And not softness either.
Just the sudden realization that the animal itself had become almost incidental.
When I was younger maybe hunting was partly about proving something. Proving I could still do hard things without apology in a civilization increasingly organized around comfort, supervision, and emotional padding.
But age changes the equation.
After a while the mountains stop feeling like a proving ground and start feeling like one of the last places your brain can still go silent.
You get out there before daylight with cold cutting through your jacket and no notifications arriving, and suddenly all the digital static falls away. Your body remembers something older than performance. Older than branding. Older than the endless humming psychological daycare center modern life has become.
Not violence.
Relief.
That’s what keeps bringing me back now.
Not the kill.
The clarity.
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