The Hunter Man

I

For you who like your heroes lean

And hard and handy with a gun,

Smelling of work and weather, clean

With wind and simple in the sun,

Daniel Boone was such a one.

Who want your heroes brave with beards

And proud almost as they are poor,

But picturesque in proper words,

Not here, and knocking at the door,

Daniel Boone was such a one-

Dangerous and dead and gone.

We would not need to celebrate

Who simply walked erect and good,

But Boone, because his greed was great,

Is symbol of a herohood

We take for granted-greed and gun,

Hunter man and hunted one.

u

Smug in our heritage of what the hell?

We'll take our history butter side up.

The midnight raid, the sanguinary yell,

Disease and storm and drouth and failing crop,

Indians descending on the lonely cabin

To leave a chimney leaning on the wind-

These, we reckon, must have had their reason,

And throw the cat of conscience out of mind.

Nobody gives a damn if old Dan Boone

Awoke at midnight in a singing mood,

Because the world was O-God-green

And life was by-God-good.

(Over the havoc of our fathers' fight,

The mute and meaning pity of the night;

Above the dry sounds of their living, laughter,

Like a stone skipped over water.)

'Washed in the weather of a hundred years,

Only the biographic bone remains.

We'll do no weeping in our beers

Because our fathers had their aches and pains.

Nobody really gives a damn. The wind

Has winked a logic into what was tragic;

The sun has muscled under that red weather;

The grass has sewed the loudest lips together.

Il

Descending from a mountain, Daniel Boone

Leaned on his rifle with a three weeks' beard,

Beheld a hallelujah of horizon

All wonderful and west of where he stood.

Now it is strange that one so wise in warnings,

Above the great pulse of those seas of trees,

Could hear a squirrel drop a nut, but not

The thunder under all that mountain morning-

A thunder of small noise, the march of men

Who followed by their separate ways together,

Pursuing with their furniture and fuss.

They overtook him like a change of weather.

The storm within a cloud of covered wagons

Broke with a terrible temper on his head.

Boone overlived the symbol of himself

And kept a home made coffin under his bed.

Datum and dates confuse our sense of climax.

Only the facts that we endear endure

To help us say, as though ourselves had found

The few bones in the hollow sycamore:

Here is your hero, handy with a gun,

Erect and humble and American.

The birds are nesting in his powder horn,

The hunter men have found the Hunter Man.

Iv

Must we descend again

Into the ultimate woods,

Disguised as hunter men,

Explore the latitudes

Of loneliness, drink blood,

Discover the salt spring

That some call God, or Good-

Or can we now forgive,

Forget the greed, the gun,

That in our love outlive

The dried skin of those heroes

We strop our courage on?

Shall we again trespass

The innocent wilderness

(Our trigger fingers crooked

In question marks), apprise,

Conquer and civilize,

And all that that implies?

We'd better call the dogs,

Put out the fires, be gone,

And half way down the mountain

Before the night comes on.

Howard Nuts