Familiar words of wisdom: “I’ve taken shots that I’ve regretted, but I’ve never regretted passing on a shot.” I said that to my son, grandson, and other young hunters I’ve mentored. I’ve said it with righteous conviction in serious discussions. I meant it and it was true. But it’s different now—not quite so clear and simple, even though I would still give the same advice to a novice. From now on, I’ll qualify the statement by limiting it to big game.

In northwest Pennsylvania, the autumn of 2007 was seriously weird. During archery season here you’ve always needed a knapsack just to handle the changing layers of clothing required for a full day of hunting: temperatures are a little below freezing when you head out in pre-dawn darkness, fifties by mid-afternoon, and back down into the thirties when you’re hiking out of the woods after sundown. But this year, whether you call it global warming, climate change, voodoo, or liberal conspiracy, the temperatures in the upper forties to lower fifties most mornings and in the high seventies to low eighties in the afternoons were not an illusion perpetrated by biased media. The sweat and nocturnal deer were real.

I was sure the ambushes I had picked out were only a matter of putting in my hours. All I had to do to get my winter’s supply of chemistry-free meat was to make the shot when it presented itself. I’d been acquainted with my primary hunting territory for thirty-five years, with my alternate territory for more than a half-century, plus I had a roster of potential ambushes of more recent acquaintance. I would kill a tasty, young doe in the first week or two of the season and nail the big boy in the final two weeks, when the combination of my accumulated knowledge and his hormonal stupidity would merge into fatality and food. But October brought the longest succession of deerless days in my life. Still, every reprise of my pre-season scouting—scat, tracks, rubs, and, later in the month, the first territorial scrapes—pointed unambiguously in the direction of exactly what I was already doing. There were always fresh tracks in the same places they’d been for decades, but no deer. It was the same story in my alternate hunting areas. Not only had my primary plan failed; all my backup up plans were swirling around the drain as well, and I didn’t have a clue. The only thing I could do was hold onto my faith that the weather would shift into its normal, seasonal pattern and, when it did, so would the deer. My job was to be in my familiar woods silently waiting when that happened.

Opportunity would surely blossom. It was time to hunker down and hunt hard. Sounds good, sounds right and downright logical, doesn’t it? My studio was a mess. I hadn’t balanced my checkbook. The cats had learned to wake me up at 4:30 AM every day. I hadn’t touched a paintbrush in a month. The few houseplants entrusted to my always precarious care were dying. My wife ceased to ask what I was thinking about when my eyes glazed over—she already knew.

I had lost my balance. I knew it, but I hung on anyway. After all, this was a matter of meat, of sustenance for the coming winter. My wife’s job had been “restructured” into corporate non-existence a few months before and, although we were comfortable living a little more frugally, the meat mattered. Standing now on the brink of geezerhood, I wanted my modest accrual of woodsy wisdom to count for something.

An albino skunk frolicking at dusk one evening seemed like a good omen. I slipped into the woods before sunrise the next morning with renewed faith in luck and possibility. I left at day’s end blessed with myriad small wonders, but not the barest glimpse of a deer. I was starting to take it personally, although I had sufficient dignity not to whine too vigorously.

And then the grouse walked by. He came up behind me, passed within five feet, and pecked around within fifteen yards. Grouse season was in, and for most of the ten minutes before he vanished into a weedy thicket the shot would have been as close to a sure thing as a bowshot gets for me.

But I didn’t shoot. It was prime time—the one-hour window when whitetails have tended to pass through that particular place for decades, even though they’d failed to do so on more than a dozen days now. So I let the grouse wander away on his quirky, foraging ramble while I remained still and watchful, yearning for the future hour when I could relax my vigil to pluck my thermos from my knapsack and luxuriate in the warmth of strong coffee. When that time finally came, I drew a notebook and pencil from a cargo pocket to catch the musings accumulated throughout the morning hours and released by comfort and caffeine. As the effort to write sharpened feelings into clarity they surprised me. I didn’t feel merely foolish for passing on that grouse; I felt guilty.

I hunt because we need the meat. We can buy good, local, free-range meat (the only kind one should buy) and doing so wouldn’t compromise our ability to pay the January heating bill, but our need only slightly overlaps the realm of dollars. Wild meat is part of the umbilical connection to the forest of my birth. But for the current momentary aberration of corporate excess and dependency, that connection has always been a constant in human life. I passed on that grouse because I was obsessed with something larger and more about self-image than simple hunger. I had failed to behave as, and to truly be, a hunter.

A good hunter-gatherer would have eaten grouse for dinner that night. A good hunter-gatherer would not have refused the forest’s gift. The combined restraints of game laws, ego, and my addiction to purposeful behavior had coalesced into irreverence for the heritage I had come to the forest to engage and celebrate. I should have shot that grouse, cooked him, and toasted his spirit with an indulgent glass of well-aged cabernet.

I don’t want to make a bigger deal out of this incident than it merits—it was small and certainly not the first time I’ve made such choices in hunting and elsewhere in my life. This was one of those small incidents that serve as a nucleus around which an array of vague thoughts and longings coalesce into full-blown realization.

I can’t recall ever being accused of moderation. But I must admit the accomplishments my habitual intensity has enabled and the sheer pleasure of such intensity itself are counterbalanced by a well-developed ability to transform occasions of pleasure and freedom into labor. I tend to react to a challenge in a realm of cherished, personal skill with downright neurotic single-mindedness. I’m a recovering workaholic; half-century habits die hard. Unlearning can be far more difficult than learning.

The previous hunting year had been very different. Plans spawned by preseason scouting worked well and the surprises were mostly pleasant. I hunted hard, with a clear sense of mounting inevitability as multiple circumstances in which my skills were but one of several components closed in on a doe and then a buck. Between those two kills, an old friend from college days called. I hadn’t seen Jack in a few years, and he was planning a hike nearby. The weather was beautiful, and I had planned to hunt that day. But instead of feeling disappointed or that I was making some kind of sacrifice in the name of friendship, I felt joyfully released from the need for purposeful behavior. The lesson was noted at the time but promptly forgotten—until that grouse walked by and my purposeful behavior subverted the purpose of the hunt. When I got lured into that effectiveness, efficiency, get-it-done paradigm, I put on the blinders and cut off the pleasures; a vital connection was lost. Trust me—it takes more than a stick bow to restore it. Don’t get me wrong, the bow seems more than natural, nearly magical to me, but its magic is only as bright and clear as the awareness it serves.

That’s how I came to think about my day wandering the woods without a bow, the grouse I didn’t eat, hours sitting still in a blind when I longed to wander, and the squirrels I didn’t stalk. All these things merged seamlessly with countless other instances of needlessly suppressed desires and thwarted instincts from all aspects of my life in a flood of realization. Well in advance of the new year, I made a resolution, a promise to myself: from now on I would carry my bow as a hunter-gatherer. I would trust my instincts and set forth into the woods ready and eager to accept whatever the forest offered. I would no longer subordinate the quality of the day to the desire for success. I would take my bow and an assortment of arrows suitable for the day’s assortment of legal possibilities, roam off into the woods, and wing it.

Sounds great, but I also know whitetail deer aren’t going to stand in awestruck stillness before the shining beacon of my enlightenment. It takes something far more prosaic than Zen to cross the twenty-yard line and draw a bow without sending the deer on a headlong flight to parts unknown. My resolution means more than shooting an occasional grouse or squirrel—it means more still hunting, more intuition. It means investing more faith and loyalty in stealth, awareness, and instinct than in strategy and equipment. It is a renewal of the vow I made when I first picked up a bow after growing up with rifles, and a vow made again, decades later, when a similar realization led me back to traditional archery as part of a determined effort to recover satisfactions that had been crowded out of my life by the pressure of multiple careers. I’ll have to sharpen some skills long neglected in favor of stoic patience, and there is also the simple fact that I will be much more likely to finish the archery season without venison in the freezer. As I wrote in Coyote Soul, Raven Heart, the meat does indeed matter.

Here in Pennsylvania, about two weeks after archery season closes the rifle season opens. I’ve taken my bow out in rifle season before, but frankly, in a place with the kind of orange pressure that Pennsylvania deer encounter, it doesn’t work very well. Everything you’ve learned about deer patterns in the previous year of scouting is pretty much irrelevant an hour into opening day. I really don’t have anything against rifle hunting, and it isn’t as easy as we bowhunters, especially after a couple of beers, like to say it is. I grew up with guns; I’m comfortable around them, and truthfully the vast majority of hunters are at least safe in the way they handle their weapons, regardless of their woodsmanship (or lack thereof). That said, I’ll add that we live in very strange times, indeed. When the woods are full of strangers carrying guns, I want one, too. Frankly, I’d rather dust off my little .44 magnum carbine and put some meat in the freezer than be anything less than a hunter-gatherer when I’m carrying a bow. That’s probably downright blasphemous to a fair number of the folks who will read this. It would’ve sounded that way to me a few years ago, but now it’s a decision I’m neither willing to advocate or rule out; it will be made year-by-year based on need and a constellation of deeper hungers rather than a self-imposed rule.

Deer hunting has been a constant in my life, a background preoccupation even during wandering urban years in my hippie twenties when I had no opportunity to hunt. I’ve eaten a lot of venison. But now as the conclusion of my sixth decade bears down on me, when the remaining days of physical vitality sufficient to hunt with the kind freedom that, for me, is part of hunting’s essence are startlingly finite, what I crave most isn’t more success or bigger antlers. It’s more of hunting’s ancient freedom—engaging the wild openness of possibility that is a day in the woods and taking physical and spiritual sustenance from that engagement.

My decision not to shoot that grouse wasn’t a hunter’s decision—it came from the law more than from the land, from legal restriction, not from wild freedom. My choice came neither from nature nor the admitted limits of my hunting skills, but a need to prioritize the way I utilize limited opportunities. It’s a legal matter. The periods of sufficient season overlap to allow the hunting I long for are so brief (totaling only about a month in Pennsylvania) as to reduce the notion of truly integrating our ancient passion into the fabric of our modern lives to a utopian fantasy. We have traded away the hunt in exchange for scoped rifles, tree stands, compound arrow launchers, scent-proof clothing, bipods, etcetera ad nauseum. The trade was made on our behalf long before we were born. We’ve been conned and hoodwinked out of our heritage.

So I’m proposing an alternative, knowing that its political likelihood is right up there in the realm of winning a multi-million dollar lottery. It’s a concept which should serve as a kind of compass bearing for our ponderings, meditations and choices in the realm of hunting practices, true north in navigating toward our opinions. I propose a hunter-gatherer license.

The holder would be barred from purchasing a regular hunting license. Equipment would be limited to traditional bows with wooden arrows and fixed blade cut-on-impact broadheads. No tree stands, portable blinds, scent-proof clothing, bait, ATVs, sights, releases, commercial scents, or electronic devices. The season: the whole year, with a few restrictions to prevent the orphaning of helpless young in the spring. The game: any species that’s edible and not endangered. What I’m proposing is a license to opt out of a rotten deal that was made on my behalf before I was born. Perhaps equipment would have to be limited even further to bows made of wood, bamboo, sinew, rawhide, horn, etcetera—I’m not eager to give up the several masterpieces of laminated bowyer’s craft hanging on my bow rack, but I’d be willing to if I could open the year to the full seasonal cycle of our ancient heritage.  How many hunters would go for it? Would you? Think about it. Meanwhile, pick up your bow and roam. Eat more squirrels and grouse. They’re tasty.