Confessions From My Recent Bowhunting Journey…
The Hunter Archetype That We’ve Forgotten…
There’s something about returning from the mountains with empty hands that makes you question everything.
I've just returned from the High Country, chasing the elusive sambar deer through dense gullies and steep mountain slopes. Snow capped ridgelines marked the horizon, while foggy frosty mornings amplified the challenge.
Some of you have expressed disdain for my bowhunting journey. And a lot of people in general have issues with hunters. To be fair, there haven't been many stand out role models. The typical archetype is the beer-drinking, swearing, trophy hunting yobbo. Killing for sport. Killing for fun.
Where's the sacred hunter archetype? The ones who revere the animals they stalk, like the old ways taught - where hunting wasn’t just about food, but about ceremony, initiation, and responsibility to the land and people.
What about the ones who want to connect more deeply to the true wild of nature? Who whisper prayers to the land, practicing day-in day-out for that one crucial moment to ensure a merciful harvest?
Modern hunting has largely lost connection with these pathways of sacred initiatory responsibility. But the sacred hunter archetype still exists, quietly remembered by those willing to walk that path with humility.
For something that was once so natural, it's become so taboo.
Vegans and vegetarians aside, people will happily purchase meat from the store, yet scorn the ones who gravitate toward this ancestral land-based way of harvest.
I haven't killed all that many animals with my bow over the years. But the ones I have were all honoured in a good way. Their pelts remind me. Their fur adorns feather fans. Their body fuelled my own. Their remains returned to garden beds to feed soil, microbes, and vegetables, from one season to the next.
And what about the modern critiques?
"You can't say you love nature or animals while killing them."
As uncomfortable as it might sound, nature actually thrives on death. Every ecosystem is sustained by the consumption of life by life. Loving nature means loving the whole cycle, not just the parts that make you comfortable.
"We're not designed to eat meat."
Strange. Tell that to our ancestors. Evolution seems to disagree.
"We don't need to eat meat when we can get alternatives from stores."
We also don't need to climb mountains or sit by campfires under the stars. And yet there are some ways of living that stoke the wild primal animal embers within, particularly in a disconnected world that tries to sterilize all of that out of us.
"Eating meat blocks your spiritual development."
I understand why people say this. The commercial meat industry is built on needless suffering, unconscious consumption, and separation from the sacredness of life - all elements of spiritual depletion.
But when hunting is done with reverence, humility, and direct participation, it becomes both spiritually confronting and expanding. It demands presence. It demands the courage to look death in the eye, and to honour life in its full spectrum - birth, growth, decay, death, and regeneration.
Hunting requires deep ecological understanding, skill, presence, patience, humility. It's not spiritual bypassing. It's the spirituality of the earth itself. Blood, bone, decay, rebirth. Spirit woven through matter. A far cry from buying factory-farmed chicken that never felt sunlight and lived a horrible life.
"Killing is murder, and murder is a lower consciousness act driven by primal survival, not spiritual growth."
Is it true that higher consciousness would choose non-violence and respect for all life? The harsh truth is, non-violence in principle still results in death in practice. All life feeds on life.
While seemingly morally noble, even vegetarians and vegans cause death through agricultural participation, habitat destruction, and harvesting practices.
The difference is intentionality, scale, and relationship. With prayer, we ask for guidance from spirit. We descend into soul and acknowledge death directly, building relationships with the animal and the land.
It's higher consciousness in action.
The Ecological and Spiritual Truth of Predation & Prey
Taking a life consciously is a spiritual responsibility.
And while this might upset a lot of people, killing and murder aren't the same when done within the natural order.
Murder is an act of unjust killing within one’s own species. Predation is the act of life feeding life - it's ecologically necessary, spiritually humbling, and evolutionarily woven into the fabric of existence itself.
Predation is natural order.
Without predation, ecosystems collapse.
Hunters, especially in modern contexts where apex predators have been removed, serve an ecological role. Overpopulation of deer, for example, leads to ecosystem degradation, plant species extinction, soil erosion, and the collapse of biodiversity.
Calling hunting murder is anthropocentric moral projection misapplied to nature's laws.
Understanding the role of healthy hunting and natural predation helps us reconnect back to the land. Participating in this cycle can aid the redevelopment of our spiritual understanding and our place as ecological stewards.
When you spend too much time on the screens and in cities, away from farms and wilderness locations, people become disconnected from these natural laws.
People forget that we too are nature.
Consciously taking a life with prayer, honour, and humility is a profound act of spiritual integration.
Remembering Who We Are in the Great Web of Life
There'll always be an argument to be made on either side of the equation.
What's true for me is that spending time out in the bush reminds me of what we truly are – animals in a web of life, not floating enlightened beings above it.
Whether it's through hunting, or fasting in solitude during Vision Quest, wilderness immersions force us to confront the raw truths of life - that death is an inseparable part of existence, and we're part of that cycle, in more ways than one.
I don’t hunt because it’s easy.
It's not.
It's incredibly difficult. It's humbling as heck.
The chance of a successful harvest with a bow is probably around 10% or less. Hunting invites patience, discipline, presence. It sharpens my senses and slows my breath. It makes me acutely aware of each twig underfoot, the shifting wind currents, the concentric ripples of energy that move throughout the forest. It makes me aware of myself as a predator, and as prey, all at once.
When I walk through mountains, bow in hand, I’m not there to conquer anything.
I’m there to remember.
To remember what it means to earn my place in the cycle. To feel the weight of the responsibility that comes with taking a life. To let the gravity of that moment shape me into a better man.
Because it’s easy to buy meat wrapped in plastic, disconnected from blood, bone, and sinew. It’s easy to outsource death. It’s much harder to meet it face to face. To pull back the string, knowing that if I release it, I can’t take it back.
To carry the weight of failure or the reverence of success.
Into the Vic Alps: A Story of Humility
I’m aware of many of these themes when I head out.
Debates, theories, opinions.
But much of that dissolves when your boots are soaked, your shoulders ache under the pack, and you’ve spent days in silence with only the forest for company.
On my first evening scouting the land, I made my way up a steep elevation, following a game trail through chest high bracken fern to have a sambar deer croak at me through the scrub. It was about 70 metres away, quickly shouldering it's way into dense terrain.
Realistically, a distance of 40 metres is where my confidence levels reside. I practice shooting my bow out to 60 metres, as that's my max distance with my current bowsight that I have. It's close range hunting that's required. Track and stalk. Or ambush. But putting in the leg work and moving like a ghost through the forest increases the chance of finding them, and ultimately, success.
As twilight bled out of the sky, shadows merged into an indistinct blackness. I realised I wasn’t going to make it down without my headlamp. Unknown terrain left me confused on an appropriate way off the mountain, and I ended up bushwhacking my way down to the creek. only to realize I needed to scale back up the slope to make my way back around.
The scrub was too thick to penetrate in a direct route, and I quickly realized I needed to scale back up the slope to make my way back around. Up and over I went, eventually arriving back at camp safely.
The next day was full of deer sign.
Game trails, rub marks against trees where they leave their scent, deer scat, pruned foliage, fresh hoof prints. It's difficult to determine how old some of the sign is, and just how easy it is to lose track of it when found.
I ended up taking a slight fall down a steep ravine while making my way into a dense gully. My bow crunched beneath me, snapping it's legs off and scuffing up my skin. I was frustrated but it wasn't a big deal. My bow was still perfectly functional. More of a bruised ego thinking about the price of replacement more than anything else. Not to mention, this forest was schooling me big time.
As I descended the gully, I eventually found deer scrapes underneath towering trees, signified by circular patches of bare earth. A couple of wallabies fed on the scrub, unaware of my presence. I even came across scattered bones picked clean from the alpine dingoes, but still - no deer.
A full day of scouting, as silent as possible through the forest, wind in my face, thermals in my favour, with no luck.
I waited beside a fresh wallow in the afternoon, wondering if a sambar might bathe in the thick stench of urine-soaked mud. I sat up beside a bedding area into the dark of evening, waiting for them to cruise on by.
Again, no luck.
The following morning was a different story.
Two deer grazing in the dim morning light, mid way up a slope. I could barely see them, and quickly lost sight as they moved further up the mountain. I decided to curve up and around to get a better vantage point, inadvertently bumping another deer midway up. It was bedded down about 50 metres away in such thick scrub, I would’ve had no idea it was there if it wasn’t for legs scurrying away through the brush.
It was a promising start, but as I trailed those deer, it was as if they vanished into thin air.
Ghosts of the forest.
Sophisticated sensory apparatus developed over millennia, designed to evade predators. I continued on throughout the afternoon, but it was fruitless.
I felt humbled. Deflated. Defeated.
I thought this would be my success for the season. But my time was up. Duty called back home and I had to return with tail between legs. But the frustration that lingers isn't the kind the makes me want to throw in the towel. It's the kind that builds grit and perseverance.
It cultivates the wild and primal animal within me.
And despite the adversity, fatigue and suffering, you could call me a masochist, because secretly (not so secretly) - I like that.
Returning Empty-Handed, But Not Empty-Hearted
It's true that we don't have to hunt and forage for survival anymore. If it's an unsuccessful attempt, the fridge at home remains stocked.
Survival isn't a good-enough motivating factor anymore.
Something else must become the substitute.
Perhaps it can be found. Perhaps it’s innate.
Truthfully, it's easy to romanticize all things "wild" on social media. People wax lyrical about it all the time. But the boots-on-the-ground kind of wild doesn't care for poetic musings shared on a fancy background on instagram.
There's a different kind of threshold crossing that exists out there, at the precipice of deep wilderness immersion for days and nights on end, coming face to face with the true wild of nature. I'm not sure you can really touch that place without stepping beyond the comforts of civilization.
I began this by saying I returned from the mountains empty-handed.
But truthfully, I came back carrying important things that matter. Sure, there's no meat, and my large freezer remains empty, but my spirit is brimming with grit and determination. I come back with humility, frustration, patience, commitment, and a deep respect for the mountains and the creatures that call them home.
Hunting success is great, but it's not all about that. It’s about staying in the process, returning again and again, and becoming part of the landscape until one day, the land chooses to offer its gift.
Until then, I'll keep walking, learning, and remembering the deeper currents of who I really am. Because remembering our place in the web of life isn’t a philosophy. It’s a practice.
And ultimately, hunting isn’t about the kill. It’s about remembering our place as stewards and participants in the great web of life - a responsibility we’ve forgotten in our comfortable, sterilised, supermarket-fed lives.
