The hunter-philosopher
BY GEOFF COLLETT
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A Nelson hunter has set out to break tradition with his debut as a hunting writer.
It might look like a hunting book the title sort of gives that away, not to mention the picture of a bloke with a gun standing on the tops somewhere, surveying the epic landscape for unwitting critters.
It might sound like a hunting book, too, launching as it does straight into a hardy tale of a small group of mates slogging their way through inhospitable terrain as they set out on their latest adventure.
So OK, it's a hunting book. But his debut as an author is not, Greig Caigou would like you to know, just another book "about how many kills and how many trophies", as the back cover blurb puts it.
Leaf through it a bit more, and you might get the message. One chapter is titled, "Thoughts on Hunting"; another, "What Will My Children's Heritage Be?". There are ruminations on the majesty of the mountains, and humble reminiscing about lessons learned after ending up in dicey and dangerous situations.
Caigou, a Mapua resident with a lengthy career focused on the New Zealand outdoors, is looking for answers or at least, he's asking questions of the sort that go deeper than those for which hunters are more renowned. Particularly, he's after the big one "why hunt?".
He hopes the time might be right for his philosophical take: after all, the tried and true style of hunting book has been with us for decades. There could even be an apt piece of symbolism in Caigou's book appearing at the same time as the 50th anniversary of what is surely this country's classic collection of hunting yarns, Barry Crump's A Good Keen Man.
Crump's often tall stories about the deer culler's life helped to set the standard for a certain breed of Kiwi outdoorsman and the manner of writing about the hunter's lot, which has survived down the decades.
That Caigou feels the time is right for a new sort of hunting book should not be mistaken for disdain for the former approach far from it. He identifies the pioneers of deerstalking and writing about it as his personal role models; he admires and quotes at length from the memoir of Nelson's Gordon Atkinson, Red Stags Calling. But he hopes his contribution to the genre will help to move things on at least a little, to help overcome some of the stereotypes to bring, perhaps, a bit of humanity into a sport that can be smothered by marketing-inspired machismo.
For example, "I'm anti young people in any sport being told they need to dress a certain way, act a certain way, speak a certain way to be acceptable and to succeed. I would argue you don't need to have top-of-the-line gear that the marketers say; I'd argue that you don't have to talk ... the kind of lingo that goes with a certain breed of hunters, certainly driven by that `kill 'em and stack 'em' kind of attitude `Whack 'em and stack 'em', somebody said once.
"I think there comes a point where older hunter role models need to pass on a set of behaviours and ethics that make these younger hunters think about why they do what they do."
So who is Caigou to be setting himself up as such? Well, he says firstly, "I'm a hunter", although not the most accomplished of the breed "I'm an ordinary guy; I haven't shot anything that's going to blow my ego out the door".
He has, however, had an adult lifetime of seeing the profound effects the outdoors can have on people, and has experienced first-hand since his youth the incomparable lessons that come from heading into that wilderness with the express purpose of finding and killing a wild animal.
He taught at Waimea College in the 1980s, where he set up one of the first outdoor education courses for the then-Sixth Form Certificate. He went from there into adventure tourism, and then into the corporate world; throughout, he has tapped into the outdoors experience to help people learn and develop, be it schoolchildren, corporate warriors, even mental health patients.
He has been closely involved with Outward Bound and become active in the New Zealand Deerstalkers Association; he has learned much about others and more about himself through his experiences in the outdoors.
"I'm someone at the other end looking back and saying, `This has been great for me, I've learned all sorts of things, I've made a long career out of working in the outdoors'." His many hours spent dwelling on the "why" question have given him, if not definitive answers, certainly some fully-formed theories. It has also, as he writes in the book, led him to a spiritual awakening and a Christian faith.
The deeper questions about hunting may not have been a popular theme for Kiwi hunting writers and Caigou admits he's anxious about how his contribution will be received but that's not to say it's ignored.
He's an active participant on the popular fishnhunt.co.nz forum, and discussions there flow through into the book, as well as ideas "pitched around" among a smaller group who discuss the philosophical questions.
It is not meant to be pointy-headed or indulgent. For Caigou, much of it boils down to providing his fellow (and increasingly his sister) hunters with some sort of framework to develop their personal principles and ethics. Such ethics are important for more than just the individual, he argues: hunters need to pay attention to how they are regarded by other outdoors enthusiasts (which is often with suspicion, he suggests).
While winning over the anti-hunting lobby may be a lost cause, "it's the non-hunters who we have to give positive messages to, particularly the non-hunters who are outdoors enthusiasts. They're interested in wild places, preserving those places as well. A lot of them are tossed around by things like 1080. We have a lot of common ground, and we don't do ourselves any good by alienating ourselves from this big force of people who like and treasure the wilderness".
So he's doing his bit, and will continue to do so. While publishers HarperCollins may have taken a punt on an unknown author offering a new sort of take, he is well advanced in his planning for a second book, about the essence of the hunting experience down the generations.
He is hopeful that Hunting Adventures won't be the last the hunting world hears from Greig Caigou. First-timer's nerves aside, he's confident New Zealand hunters are ready to take a look at a departure from the "whack 'em and stack 'em" school of thought.
Hunting Adventures True Tales of a Kiwi Hunter, by Greig Caigou, HarperCollins, $29.99.
- © Fairfax NZ News
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