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The thrill of the hunt: what's the appeal of squeezing off a few rounds into a defenseless animal? We commie liberals may never understand, but that didn't stop me from heading into the woods with my right-wing-nutcase friend.

Article Excerpt
As part of my continuing education in the mysteries of red-state Texas, I decided in December to visit my right-wing-nutcase friend, Dr. Robert McFarlane, at his 7,500-acre ranch in the Trinity River bottom, near the community of Tennessee Colony. I wanted to understand why hunting--or "blood sport," as he terms it--is so basic to his kind. Doc doesn't mind my calling him a right-wing nutcase. He introduces me as his "commie liberal buddy," and this arrangement of agreeing to disagree has served us well for better than a year now. If all conservatives were as smart, generous, witty, aghast at vanity and hypocrisy, and true to their beliefs as Doe, I'd probably be one. [paragraph] I wrote once that Doe is a Falstaffian figure, to which he took sharp exception. Let's just say that he is a man of large appetites and boundless pleasures, an honors graduate of Harvard Medical School who practices cardiology at Palestine Regional Medical Center by day and morphs into a river rat at night, a great mass of a man who is normally dressed in patched overalls and a grimy cap, his hair gone thin and his beard gray at 52. Medicine is merely his profession; his passion is the deep woods where he composes poetry and essays in his head and, with a few exceptions, kills only what he can eat. The woods are the one place he feels complete. "By definition," he wrote in an unpublished essay, "successful hunters are inescapably conversant with the life's final instant ... they take comfort in the reality that a leaden bullet will salve, for [a] while, their primal atavistic drives." So great is that drive that he has sacrificed everything, including his wife and children, to remain here.

Doe was a pretty good basketball player at Palestine High School in the late sixties until he got kicked off the team because he thought the opening of hunting season was more important than practice. As he tells it, he applied to Harvard "almost as a lark." Four years...

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