The Heart of Hunting

A first hunt reveals the strange mix of joy and sorrow that can accompany a bird in hand

BY JOE SIGURDSON

I missed the first time I shot at a duck—should’ve been an easy one, too, especially for an adult. I was 24 then, living in rural Kalskag, Alaska, and had only just begun hunting, teaching myself because I had no kin who hunted either. I had taken a job as a teacher up there, and it seemed to me only right to try my hand at hunting in such a country, where the old ways still stood close. The locals told me the little forest ponds almost always held ducks. Mallards and scaup, mostly. And pintails. Sometimes a goldeneye. They said to go out at dawn and I’d be sure to find some. The advice was given like talk about the weather, yet it carried with it a weight, as if they were telling me how to step into the place itself, telling me how to step into the place itself, how to be a man among them.

So I set forth for those ponds with the four dogs I had at the time, all girls by chance and taken in by me one winter. More squirrel dogs than anything, but they followed me faithfully, fanning out through the trees while I hunted. I carried my Stevens over-and-under and came to a pond set quietly among the timber. Ducks lifted as I approached, wings flashing green, brown, white. 

I set up a makeshift blind and waited. In time a drake mallard veered and hovered low—an easy shot—but I fired wild and the bird vanished into the timber, untouched. The water rippled and stilled. The dogs ran to me, then fell quiet, and I walked home with nothing but their shadows weaving at my side.

What I felt was not relief, but regret, sharp and bitter. A hunger that surprised me. As if in missing I had failed some trial, and the only cure was to return and make good, to prove I could. I had a love and respect for the ducks, yes, but the emotion also contained a desire to pursue it, to master it. I went to bed restless, knowing I would walk the edge of the ponds again.

Not long after I awoke, I found myself back on the same trail, same hour. Gray outside and cold. The dogs went ahead, sniffing the brush, tails cutting the air. The frost was heavier and the spruce boughs hung with it, bending low, the woods hushed as a chapel. I stepped through the trees and again saw the pond. A small raft of mallards floated there as though waiting. It was so symmetrical. So familiar. Like God was giving me a second chance, letting me relive yesterday.

I approached, stepping like a crane, waiting for the birds to explode skyward. This is it. Here we go. When they flushed, the shot cracked through the cold and one bird veered strangely amidst the flurry of wings, then folded and fell with a splash. The other ducks rose higher and were gone.

I waded out into the pond, the water cold around my legs, pushing through the reeds toward the still form. As I went, one of the dogs, Barbara, threw herself into the water after me. She thought I was drowning or abandoning her and swam hard at my side, panting, splashing, eyes wild with worry. I pushed ahead and lifted the mallard from the pond, its feathers warm and soft, body yielding against my grip. Blood streaked the water on its breast, small and precise, like marks from a pen. I stood there holding it, Barbara circling me in the water, the others dancing frantically from shore. 

Then something knotted in me. A sorrow I could not deny, but also a strange exaltation. My heart beat wild. I wanted to do it again, but I also felt … bad, somehow.

The bird was beautiful. Green-capped head, blue-accented wings, a breast layered with burgundy, silver, and white. Still, I felt I had trespassed against it. Yet in that trespass there was a sweetness, a joy in taking the duck that called me back to more pleasant feelings. I had loved the duck even as I killed it, and killing only deepened the feeling, twisting it into something more complicated, more human. I walked home with the bird light in my hand and the dogs weaving at my side, caught between regret and triumph, knowing both were real and present.

I reflected for a long time about what had happened in me. The guilt and the thrill, both true at once. Where does that contradiction come from? I think it begins with empathy, that natural human pull to see ourselves in other people and, sometimes, creatures. Empathy helps us survive—it’s good for the tribe. But C.S. Lewis argued in “Mere Christianity” that such empathy may even have divine roots, a gift breathed into us. Maybe so. But for the purposes of this story, it doesn’t really matter whether it comes from God or the slow patience of evolution or both. What matters is that it’s there, whether you’re taking your first mallard, 50th teal, or hundredth Canada goose.

That empathy does not erase another force in us: the will to hunt, old as time. Our ancestors needed that for survival, too. The chase, the kill, the taste of meat kept them alive. Those drives don’t just disappear, even after supermarkets exist—they sit down deep, humming quietly, but demanding action of those who hear them. 

And, so, you can love the animal and still want to hunt it. The two urges do not harmonize, yet they coexist. In fact, it’s as if the clash is what bonds the emotions, like how hunger can spark anxiety, and anxiety can kill hunger. However, it’s still a confusing experience when emotions work against each other in one’s own body. That was what I felt with that drake mallard in my hand—two forces pulling hard in opposite directions.

I’ve come to believe that this “Hunter’s Paradox,” as it’s often called, does not need to be resolved but, rather, it should be carried with us. It is good that the heart pulls in both directions! Without empathy, the hunt would risk cruelty. Without the hunt, empathy could become overly sentimental, untouched by the hard truths of life and death. Together they keep us honest. They keep us respectful. We not only honor wildlife through supporting Delta Waterfowl, buying Duck Stamps, and other means, but in the way we take them. Honor, respect, and love mean doing our best to ensure quick, humane kills, treating each bagged duck as a gift from the birds, and making use of every morsel of meat. 

Later in the same season that I’d shot my first duck, I again walked to one of the region’s wooded ponds. The air was knife-cold, spruce branches heavy with frost, the sky a pale sheet behind them. My boots crunched on the frozen ground. The dogs ranged out, but even at a distance, I could see the rise of their steaming breath.

A pintail circled, hit the brakes with its wings, and seemingly hovered above the water—slim-necked, long-tailed, white and brown and flashing olive against the steely sky. It was a beautiful scene, perfect in its silence, testing me just as those first mallards had. Causing those same conflicted emotions to duel to a stalemate within me. I reasoned this was just the way of things, that the paradox would never leave me. 

I raised the gun and fired. 

Joe Sigurdson reflects on the hunting experience in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. 

 

Article originally published in Delta Waterfowl's winter 2025 magazine. 

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