Sounds of Nature and Noise of Man

When the horses are grazing and the company is asleep, who hears them grazing? Don’t nobody hear them if they’re asleep. Aye. And if they cease their grazing who is it that wakes? Every man.
-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

Written by Chuck Boggs

As students of the wild we strive to fit into the natural world. We go to great lengths to wear clothing that match the innumerable hues of nature. Some douse themselves with chemical scent killers in the hope that it will give their prey a few moments of indecision before they realize that man is among them. I have rolled in a fresh elk bed and rubbed the sodden earth into my clothing more than once. Whether or not this exercise helped is open for debate, though it gave me the same joy as a child rolling in a mud puddle. As a noteworthy poet once wrote the child is father to the man. But I gave up trying to hide my scent with something other than the wind a long time ago, about the same time I learned the art of standing still. I can’t put my finger on the moment that I had this realization; that we can never bend the natural world to our will. Regardless of the clothes we wear or the scents that follow us, our presence in the woods is all too often painfully apparent to its full-time residents. We can use natural cover and the wind to our advantage but in most situations, to hunt is to move and to move means you are making sounds, and those are a little harder to hide.

Humans are bipedal, a trait we share with the higher apes, kangaroos, pangolins, ostriches and a mixed bag of rodents. Though we are blessed with a large brain, it’s a package deal that came with large feet and only two legs. No one who has spent time chasing big game hasn’t envied the elk and deer running away from them on four perfectly sculpted legs, their hind ends winking at us through the timber as they head to the next zip code. One might conclude that when one thing is given, another is taken away. Nature has a way of leveling the playing field and we as the apex predator have been pressing downward on the prey animals for a very long time. The deer, the elk, the coyotes, our dogs and horses have a tendency to be looking in our direction when we turn the corner whether the wind is in our face or not. I have had llamas for almost a decade and have been trying to sneak up on them for about ten years. I am rarely successful. They share the pasture with chickens, Muscovy ducks and a couple of frightfully self aware barn cats but my llamas’ radar dish ears invariably seem to be pivoted in my direction when I crest the horizon. How did the llamas hear me over the natural cacophony of the barnyard? There are times when they had perhaps heard my comparatively huge feet striking the ground or the rustle of my clothing. Other times I am convinced they did not necessarily hear me but heard my presence announced by the sounds that were not made. At the risk of sounding like bumper sticker philosophy, they heard the sound of one chicken stop it’s scratching.

This fall I spooked a herd of elk by dragging my foot trying to get in shooting position. I had been sneaking through low brush in the early morning and had been lucky enough to spot a cow before she spotted me. I soon realized I was looking at the rear guard of about fifteen elk that were slowing feeding their way uphill. The thermals were going to switch soon so I looped around and started to climb. I climbed as far as I thought I needed to, mentally reviewed thirty years of hunting experience and decided to climb some more. For once I ended up getting into position above the herd as they fed towards me. The wind was perfect and I was well hidden behind a tree as the lead cow closed. When she was about thirty yards away and made her angle of approach evident I moved slightly and drug my right foot as I shifted my weight. The cows head came up and she looked in my general direction. Something wasn’t right for her, she wasn’t sure what it was but it was enough. I watched with a sinking feeling as the rest of the herd gradually stopped their feeding and raised their heads to look at the lead cow. After a few minutes of staring holes into the underbrush she walked at an angle away from me and the rest of the herd noiselessly followed. I had made the wrong sound and could do nothing but watch as the elk disappeared over the next rise.

On another hunt the a few years prior I had happened to make the right sound without even trying. I had been into elk all morning and had worked two different bulls into almost handshake range but the alders and huckleberries made a shot impossible. It was mid afternoon and I had been up since 4 am and was easily five miles from our spike camp on the wrong side of a very steep ridge. I was whipped and wanted nothing more than to get back to camp, take my boots off and lie down. I was walking a contour back to the saddle where we were camped and stumbled into a patch of huckleberries. Like any sensible animal I started grazing; pick some berries, take a few steps and pick some more. The bull screamed at me from perhaps 70 yards away. He had heard me moving through the brush with the slow cadence of the cow he was looking for. I froze and hastily tried to swallow the mouthful of huckleberries I was working on. I was standing in hip high brush in the bright sunlight; essentially ten feet tall and day-glow orange. I crouched and slowly took a half dozen steps to put the lone Doug fir between me and the bull’s likely location.

Nocking an arrow I peered around the tree and saw his antlers move through the brush when he looked in my direction. I knew cow calling at this distance would bring nothing good so I squared up in shooting position and settled down to see what he was going to do. After a couple long minutes of watching his antlers through the brush, the bull began to pick his way slowly uphill through the downed timber and huckleberries directly towards me. Having been in this position many times before, I was waiting for something to go wrong. A shift in the wind, a deadfall that stopped the bull just short of a shot or another elk spotting me and giving that warning bark we all hate to hear. None of those things happened and like a bow hunter’s dream the bull closed to ten yards and turned broadside still looking for that cow that was feeding through the huckleberries. When I drew the bow the bull turned his head and looked at me and we shared a moment that I will never forget. I got back to camp long after dark as tired as I have ever been but the bull was quartered and hung over a creek a few yards from where he had fallen. I didn’t bugle or cow call that bull into range, he came to me because I had unknowingly made the right sound.

Volumes have been written and an industry built around hunting. I periodically pick up hunting magazines, usually at the dentist’s office or the car repair shop, and flip through the pages searching for meaningful content. There is occasionally some hidden within the advertising and backslapping but mostly the glossy pages are filled with myopic “how to” articles that appear to be generated by a wood chipper fed the unsold prior copies of said magazine. As my father once said to me, some lessons cannot be taught, they must be learned. What I have learned is that we can hide our bodies with camouflage and cover; our scents with chemicals or the wind, but we cannot help but make sounds when we hunt and we cannot control which direction that sound goes. Like ripples in a pond, those sounds go forth and bounce off everything around us, echoing much farther than physics deem possible. We disturb the pond every time we step into it but we have to remember that the surface of the pond is rarely calm. It is full of energy and life that never stops; ripples of sound reflecting to and fro with a low level hum that you can hear if you listen close enough. I cannot quite remember the first moment I heard it or really describe it to you but when I walk into the woods in the grey light of a new morning, I try to become just one more ripple in the pond.

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