Cowboys Of The Colonies By Amos Gilbert

[FIELD ETHOS]

Cowboys of the Colonies | Field Ethos

By Amos Gilbert There is mythology around the American cowboy and when it’s genuine, you know it. The…

fieldethos.com

• There is mythology around the American cowboy and when it’s genuine, you know it. The only thing genuine about Chuck’s look was his ostrich leather boots and beaver-felt hat but in a lot of ways the highest form of flattery is cosplay. Chuck was on his own on the longest commercial flight in the world, New York to Singapore at a time of 19 hours, for his connection to New Zealand. Meanwhile, Will, a muscle-bound Florida boy, was sitting next to me as we flew somewhere over the Pacific to join Chuck on a mission in the South Island. The trip had grown from cans of PBR in a Vermont dive bar into reality, a true culmination of hours of bullshitting, YouTube research, and a determination to do cowboy shit.
  
  I once heard Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard lament that he felt New Zealand was losing its “culture,” he was not referring to the native Maori culture, but rather its English roots. Years after this, when I arrived in New Zealand for the first time, I walked down the streets of Dunedin, having beans and a long black with breakfast the morning after getting into the pints at a rugby match. I know Yvon was in New Zealand long before I got there, but you’d have a hard time convincing me English culture is dead or dying after that experience. Tucker Carlson wrote a piece in 2016 for The Spectator observing something related, which praised “the aesthetic merits of British colonialism.” Carlson offered that “the first thing you notice about every place the British once occupied… is how much of themselves they left there”.
  
  In my opinion, the best thing the British ever built and left is the sportsman’s paradise of New Zealand. You could not count the number of exotic species that have been introduced to the Islands for the purpose of sport—everything from trout introduced from Tasmania to moose donated by Teddy Roosevelt to some 29 species of upland birds from around the world. Hunting the South Island today feels maybe as close as you can get to what I imagine American frontiersmen felt. A land like Daniel Boone experienced as they pushed across the Cumberland Gap into the American West. Just like Boone and his contemporaries, you would have a hard time going hungry. On the South Island, there is abundance of game, freedom from the rules and regulations of North American wildlife management, and endless public access opportunities for those willing.
  
  Feelings were mixed as Chuck and I rolled out of the cabin before sunrise eager to glass the tops for red stag and chamois. My thoughts though were on Will, who put himself on mandatory bedrest in our small tin shack after two days of walking up a river and then trekking an unmaintained relic of a trail. The hike-in had taken more from us than we could’ve fathomed. It was wet, bags were heavy with 11 days’ worth of supplies and we were seemingly always on the verge of being lost following directions skimmed from a blog post. Day One in camp had proved a learning experience for us all. It was everyone’s first true western-style hunting experience and a long way from the tree stands we’d grown up in or grouse shoots Chuck had been on in the Scottish moors. In spite of all the inexperience, no one was discouraged, like the British SAS say: “Who Dares Wins.” I’ve always believed in that specific brand of karma, the kind that results in Hail Mary touchdowns or tough casts with a fly rod being rewarded with a filling meal. The long of the short is: we were due.
  
  It was the whispered scream of “Deer, deer, deer at 12 o’clock!” from Chuck that snapped me out of my lamentations on Will’s condition. In a flurry of action, we dropped to our knees, bolted one in the chamber, shot, then a follow-up shot. The red stag dropped and tumbled from where it stood in the grassy tussock above the tree line. I often see folks in hunting shows have a deep reverent experience when they kill an animal, a sort of religious unburdening; this has never been my experience. Often it looks and feels to me more like winning a state championship, whoops and cheers, chest bumps and hugs—it feels good to be a winner. With big smiles across our faces, Chuck and I drew our knives and cameras, examined shot placement, and quickly got to work butchering. Will surely would’ve heard the gunshots and cheers and would be waiting with bated breath for our return.
  
  As backstrap cooked on the open fire for a late breakfast and I sawed the stag’s antlers from its skull, it was hard not to look back on the significance of our present situation and ask the question: What would my younger self think of this? I can say with absolute certainty that if 14-year-old me could see himself 10 years later sitting around camp with two of his best friends 60 miles from a trailhead on a do-it-yourself New Zealand hunting trip with 34 days left in the country he would lose his mind. Imagine what he would think when I was hunting hogs with new friends from the pub a week later or riding in a helicopter to chase Himalayan Tahr a couple weeks after that. So thank you to the British Empire and all of its colonial merits.
  
  
  

 

[leslie hetrick]

some have very different thoughts about the brits of old. taxes- prison ships-impressed labor amoung other sins. not a rant, but history.