THE HUNTING ANIMAL

by Franklin Russell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 23, 1983

Pungent vignettes of two- and four-legged hunters--from the author's rich memories of 50+ years and five continents. Jonah Campbell, whom Russell met on a 1932 cross-country train trip, was one of the most successful buffalo hunters of the American West in the 1870s; Ralph Stanley-Johnson hunted tiger in the last years of the British raj; New Zealand rifleman Horace Rangiatikaweko, half pakeha (European) and half Maori, did his best to annihilate the plaguey, imported red deer; Blue Diamond still kills kangaroo in the environs of Alice Springs, rocketing through the outback in a four-wheel drive truck powered by a 400-cubic-inch V-8. The non-human hunters, equally d/verse, include: the leopard, hyena, and cheetah of the African plains; the emperor penguin off the Antarctic coast; the wolf of Alaska's Brooks range; the smelt-like capelin of the North Atlantic; the lemming of the Canadian far north. The lemming, of course, is not a hunter--nor is consistency a particular Russell concern. Sometimes he exults in the kill: ""The moment of killing is a lean curve of energy being released, which goes back as long as there has been a hunt."" Sometimes he's pensive, reserved: ""If the hunter kills wrongly, he feels remorse; if the killing is right, he feels only regret."" There is a half-mystical link, he suspects, between hunter and hunted: a ""psychic connection with the victim"" that explains, among other things, the hunting animal's own ""superlative capabilities as an animal watcher."" He also hints, most questionably, that those entirely without the power to kill may also ""lack the base for right action."" For long-time Russell readers, nonetheless, and their spiritual kin: heady, forceful reportage of the natural scene.

Pub Date: Nov. 23, 1983

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1983

Categories: NONFICTION