I have thought long and hard about what makes us woodsmen. What does woodsmanship have to do with the complexity of work, family, social media, societal beliefs and self-provision. I have for much of my life, lived off of the land. Since I was a boy travelling around the world, I cannot think of a single moment where I wasn’t spearfishing, hunting something or gathering from the land in order to eat and provide for my family. It wasn’t until nearly twenty years ago that social media entered the picture. For many, many years we went out into the wild and did what we did with zero optics on anything other than the goal of finding food and bringing it home for the table. There was no such thing as ethics police or what was right or wrong, other than what our parents or grandparents taught us about a quick clean kill. A common saying I feel most men my age have heard of before would be “One bullet, one kill.” Today, we have everyone, along with their opinions at our fingertips on a little screen that influences decisions and defines critique with a fine-tooth comb. There are often times more opinions than solid advice and much more judgement than there is evidence to support most claims that run wild like a fire across unchecked landscapes.
The reality is that in my heart, I believe that the pursuit of wild game in wild places is a highly personal experience and literally none of it has to do with media, social media or any other sort of press. Hunting is purely human and beyond hunting as a means to provide food for our table, we must set aside our differences to realize that hunting means different things to different people from around the world. Woodsmanship in my eyes is the culmination of what your grandfather and father taught you in conjunction with learned experience, most akin to “Mountain Wisdom.” Our ability to endure and survive hostile, albeit challenging conditions and elements defines our ability and effectiveness as woodsmen. Woodsmanship in general is quickly becoming a lost art. Where one can ditch the app on their phone, don minimal equipment and go out into the woods to thrive without the assistance of outside influence.
There should be a happy medium here somewhere though. A place where a man can test himself in the wild, do it responsibly and in a way that allows him to become a better version of himself without outside applause or critique. So many of us are born with an innate curiosity of what the wild unknown has in store for us and the proposition of matching wits with a wild beast is even more intriguing for those of us whom have never done so before. I suppose in so many ways, not all of us can be born into it and not all of us enter the arena with a mentor that can help us understand what woodsmanship should look like. To be fair here, I do not think that many people honestly look in their own mirror and even think about whether or not they are a good woodsman. Being a woodsman vs. being a hunter in my opinion are two different things altogether. In my primitive brain I think of a hunter as being a visitor and I see a woodsman as a very skilled craftsman of the outdoors, a survivor who can thrive due to his wisdom, knowledge and his instinct.
Social media has skewn all of these things into a big mess of opinions. Where a majority of folks can be good hunters due to apps and electronics but fail to see the importance of solid woodsmanship. Inversely, true woodsmen don’t care about societal norms and social media. The die-hard woodsman is in my eyes someone who homesteads and lives off of the land. While there is a vast delta in between the two, I believe there is room for a modern-day man to also be a hunter who desires to have strong woodsmanship abilities without the need to live every single breath on the mountain but enough so that he is not just a visitor.
The woods demand our respect. There is no HR department, there is no such thing as fair or unfair.
Most importantly, the woods demand our respect. There is no HR department, there is no such thing as fair or unfair. As many of us are fully aware, Mother Nature simply doesn’t care! For many of us, the fact that Mother Nature doesn’t care is precisely the reason why some of us are so drawn to the wild. It is that uncertainty in what will happen or what could happen that has us coming back for more. Almost as if we need the exhilaration of the unknown pulsing through our very existence!
I would like to say I am a little bit of everything, and I aspire to learn more and more with each adventure that I embark upon. I try to soak in each moment and learn as much as I can from people who genuinely know more than me. Afterall, all knowledge is passed down, and a strong tribe is the only tribe capable of creating a village. I suppose the reason I write all of this is that we live in complex times and with these complex times we have more pressure on us than we ever have before. With so many people coming at us with so many opinions, it can be very challenging to decipher what tribe to belong to. Many of us gravitate to those who we feel most drawn to, largely due to what we put out into the world on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok or Instagram. It sounds funny to think that our opinions can be swayed one way or another because of the way that folks think on an electronic platform hidden behind a bright screen that draws out our most primal of feelings.
Back before social media when I got my first bow, the internet was still full of forums. Back beyond 20 years or so ago, forums were the nearest place that we could go to see what was going on in the hunting world besides watching TV. There was so much hidden allure to all of it. There were no companies to weigh draw odds, put you in for your state-by-state draw strategy. There honestly wasn’t much more than a good topo map. Maybe a little word of mouth and a metric ton of curiosity to get you into somewhere unknown. I do miss those days if I am being honest. I miss getting an idea and filling up the fuel tank and simply going to see for myself!
There is no doubt that technology has changed the game. Technology has given a lot of false confidence to every single one of us, including myself in some scenarios. Whether it be letting us know exactly where we are, how far in we need to hike to get to a waypoint or having Starlink to check in with family. Technology is becoming so integrated with the hunt in so many ways that now make it relatively safe for most people to go outdoors. In some scenarios there are now situations where people are far too dependent on these gadgets that provide this safety barrier to people that they have unknowingly placed themselves in danger as a result of a lack of woodsmanship. This is where I believe that we as a community and culturally need to lean back into learned wisdom and promoting a deeper-rooted responsibility in self-reliance as well as building ourselves to be much more aware outdoorsmen.
As a whole the outdoors community is one of the most connected, passionate groups of people I have ever experienced in all of my many adventures. Whether we call ourselves woodsman, outdoorsmen, sportsmen or hunters, we are all one in the same bloodline seeking greater and purer connection to what is closest to the truth. I believe that within the fabric of each is a purist who alternatively believes more to one way than another, however there are so many examples everywhere we turn that allow us to see we are all very common with our universal beliefs.
I do not think there are many of us that do not desire to learn as much as we can about the quarry we chase or the mountains that they call home. I also do not believe that any of us from any particular group desire to wound or cause pain to any of the animals we pursue but rather train and practice for a quick ethical kill. Arguing about how far is ethical, whether it be a bow or a rifle or whether a photo was taken to make an animal look bigger than it is, whether the hunter should have waited for the animal to grow for another year, whether you shoot out of a tree stand, ground blind or sit water… none of that really matters in the grand scheme of things. In my opinion, it should always be left to the person in that situation to decide if what they are doing is right for them.
I believe that the internet has complicated the act of being a woodsman in general. We would be served well by ourselves and one another to step back from our preaching podium and understand that the pursuit that fuels our wild is a personal one as old as time itself. We should honor and revere the reality that hunting and woodsmanship go hand in hand and that we are best suited to become the best that we can be in all arenas. My personal quest is that I never think I know too much. My hope is that I continue to grow and learn for as long as I step forth onto the mountain. That with each piece of information that I garner, I become closer and closer to what it is that I identify with greater than anything on earth. Being a connected, passionate woodsman is the highest form of self-love in my eyes. A place where we as men test our mettle, we galvanize our very beings and see what we are made of. On top of it all, to outsmart a beast of the mountains and bring his flesh home to nourish the ones we love is the ultimate price and the ultimate sacrifice in the eyes of surviving on this earth. We are all interconnected and deeply rooted with a passionate purpose, we really ought to start acting that way — it’ll serve us well to do so in the future.
