On the hunt

When I was young, my dad, my two brothers and I would pile into the station wagon on Saturday afternoons, drive south of Sioux Falls 15 miles or so and hunt pheasants. We always hunted the same places – a couple of shelter belts, a few ravines, some corn and soybean fields – although sometimes my dad would swing the station wagon into a farmyard and disappear inside a pale farmhouse or the shadows of a barn. He often would reemerge minutes later shaking the hand of the farmer who lived there, and then he, my two brothers and I would hunt a place we never had before.

Those days are gone, and their return is more unthinkable than unlikely.

When the South Dakota pheasant season ends 11 weeks from now, there will have been more hunters who do not call South Dakota home than ones who do. We have turned hunting into a business, and while a part of me regrets that and a part of me resents that, I suppose this change is not so bad.

It's not like South Dakota doesn't need the money. We do. And as businesses go, the hunting business has some better qualities: It doesn't pollute. It fosters conservation. It attracts a well-heeled clientele.

A good number of people and places get a cut of the action as well: landowners, motels, restaurants, gas stations, sporting goods stores, bars and, of course, the state of South Dakota.

The South Dakota Department of Game, Fish and Parks estimates nonresident pheasant hunters spent $117 million in South Dakota a year ago – $70 million more than what residents of the state spent. Nonresident pheasant hunters have exceeded resident hunters in number in the state since 2002. Barely a generation ago a person could hunt an entire season and never once bump into someone from out of state. Now the fields are full of them.

To its credit, the Game, Fish and Parks Department has made a considerable effort to provide public land on which to hunt pheasants, and much of it is quite good. For the most part, however, if South Dakotans want to hunt in the state that is their own, they now must have family or friends who own land or the financial wherewithal to lease or purchase land themselves. Competition from outsiders has made it so.

It is understandable that some South Dakotans are disappointed by what has happened to hunting. They spend all week competing. Against other businesses. Against co-workers. Against time. When the weekend comes, they are weary of competition. They have had enough. Turning hunting into a business, I fear, will lead to fewer South Dakotans who hunt. There is evidence, in fact, that that is happening.

In the 20 years before 1985 – a year some point to as the one when commercial pheasant hunting in South Dakota started to take wing – the state issued an average of 104,000 resident pheasant licenses a year. In the 20 years since 1985, the number of resident pheasant licenses has averaged 78,000 a year.

We hunt our state less. Others hunt it more. In 1970, when my dad's station wagon was kicking up clouds of dust on the gravel roads of Lincoln County, the state sold 18,000 nonresident pheasant licenses. In 1985 it issued 35,000. Ten years later it issued 65,000. This year the number of nonresident licenses could top 100,000 for the first time in South Dakota history.

For some South Dakotans, without the business of hunting, there would be no business at all. There would be no motel, no restaurant, no farm. The income out-of-state hunters provide is the tipping point between solvency and for-sale signs.

I must admit I never have hunted pheasants at one of these commercial operations. These days my dad, my brothers and I hunt 15 miles west of Sioux Falls at the home of a friend. It is a grand place with wide swaths of grass and running water and heavy strips of corn and pine trees so dense only the dogs can pass. When we go there, it is the four of us, our friend and perhaps one or two more we know. No others are met.

When we turn hunting into a business, we turn pheasants and geese, ducks and deer into commodities, into commercial goods for which a price can be paid. That is not, of course, what they truly are, and every true hunter whether from South Dakota or somewhere else recognizes that.

What concerns me most, however, is what this change to hunting will do to the culture of our state and to the relationships between us.

Hunting is both history and heritage for us South Dakotans. It is the land of South Dakota that gives us our sense of place, and it is from that sense of place that we begin to forge our identity, to define and to discover who we are.

Hunting brings us to the land. It also binds us to each other. It binds fathers to sons and brothers to brothers. And it binds the South Dakotans who dwell in our towns and cities to the ones who do not.

There is, it seems, a distance, an absence of understanding between farmers and the rest of us. In its purest form, hunting has the power to bridge that gap and build deeper empathy. When the father and his three sons swing into a farmyard one Saturday afternoon and the father disappears into the barn or the farmhouse only to reemerge minutes later shaking the hand of the farmer who lives there, that is an event authentic and shared and which business can never duplicate or approximate.

It is an event without comparison or competition.