BOOKS: A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1993:
A View to a Death in the Morning:
Hunting and Nature Through History, by
Matt Cartmill. Harvard University Press (79 Garden
St., Cambridge, MA 02138-1499), 1993. 331 pages,
hardcover. $29.95.
A traditional fox-hunting song, “D’ye ken John
Peel,” gave Matt Cartmill his title; it appears in a stanza in
which the hunters follow their dogs “from a find to a check,
from a check to a view, from a view to a death in the morn-
ing.” Despite the title, Cartmill spends little time on fox-
hunting, boar-hunting, bear-hunting, wolf-hunting, bad-
ger-hunting, coon-hunting, fishing, fowling, and falconry.
The theory, practice, myths, and effects on its practition-
ers of deer hunting are the focus of his chapters about hunt-
ing, from the ancient Greeks to Bambi . Those chapters
which concentrate on nature are more diffuse.