Medicine of the Wolf Page #4

a value to kill them, right?

So us naive prairie kids...

I imagine they were in

their 20s, and I was 15...

let's go up north, go look for

wolves, and go hunt them.

So I had a m-1 carbine,

world war ii vintage

that I got from NRA,

but I was a young boy

expressing my cultural norm,

and if I could go up and kill a wolf,

I would be the hero of my town,

it'd be in the newspaper,

there'd be pictures.

So I went up north with

my friends and looked,

walked through the woods, and... scared.

Scared that I'd see a wolf,

scared that I wouldn't.

I was good shot, and if I saw

one, I might have killed it.

Didn't see one, didn't see any tracks.

To me, the ultimate question is,

why do you kill the things you love?

I think it's a primal thing.

It's a male thing.

Uh, we go back 30,000 years

to the cave paintings

in Glasgow and Southern France.

Picasso said it's the most

beautiful art man's ever created,

we can't even equal that.

They love them, but they killed as

many as they could to eat them.

So it's in our genes, I mean, for

thousands and thousands and thousands

and thousands of years, we hunted.

We forget that sometimes,

I think, in this century.

It wasn't that long ago,

we depended upon

the weapon bow and arrow,

atlatl, spear, gun,

to go out and keep our families alive

and keep ourselves fed.

Well we haven't evolved past that,

we still have that strange

kind of an instinct

we wanna quest, we wanna hunt,

it's very powerful.

Most of the stuff of what we do in life

is a gradual slide into a consciousness,

or a point of view.

Some of us reach those points

where something happens

one day and it changes,

and you meet someone,

you read a book, you watch a movie.

This particular day, I was 14 years old,

up in a state park

near Luverne, Minnesota

where I grew up, and I was a

fox hunter at this point.

I killed fox for a living,

and I liked it.

The most... one of the most

exciting times of my life.

Yet, I love fox.

Outwit them.

Not easy to kill a fox,

they're very smart.

You have to be pretty good

at tracking and watching,

and you have to be a good shot.

But there's a certain point you

evolve somehow, you change.

The camera just happened

to come into my life somehow,

as the artist.

I was up in the blue mountains

with my camera, instead of my gun,

and I saw a fox off in the distance.

Well I learned from an old

friend of mine, Jeff Cooney,

10 years older than me,

that did the same thing,

how to squeak like a mouse

to make the fox think

there's a free meal,

so I hid behind a rock and went...

The fox came running, I peeked up,

just as the fox came within

maybe 10 feet,

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