“I understood almost nothing about the woods until it was nearly too late. And that is strange because my ignorance was based on knowledge.”

As children grow up, they learn how to navigate their world—family, group, lifestyle, the rules for safety and survival—but rarely understand their own environment deeply. Knowledge and skills take years to acquire, but perspective and understanding often take much longer.

“I lived in innocence for a long time. I believed in the fairy-tale version of the forest until I was close to forty years old. Gulled by Disney and others, I believed Bambi always got out of the fire. Nothing ever really got hurt. Though I hunted and killed it was always somehow clean and removed from reality. I killed yet thought that every story had a happy ending.”

The author grew up with guns, bows, and arrows and lived primarily outdoors; sometimes, he hunted simply to feed himself. None of this bothers him until he witnesses a pack of wolves catch and devours a deer. At that moment, he understands that the fantasy we have about the wilderness is wrong and that the violence of nature is real and bloody.

“Wolves don’t know they are wolves. That’s a name we have put on them, something we have done. I do not know how wolves think of themselves, nor does anybody, but I did know and still know that it was wrong to think they should be the way I wanted them to be.”

As he watches the wolf pack eat a deer while it stands, still alive, he sees all at once that death in the wild is something so alien to most people’s experience that it can barely be imagined, much less judged. Animals do what they do, and pretending they don’t slaughter their prey—or protesting when they do—bespeaks a total misunderstanding of the reality of life in the wild.