This is almost the end of the book, and I speed up to finish it. In this chapter, the author shared his experience hunting with another guide in the forest. There are a few sentences impressed me a lot.
Predator and prey alike move according to their own maps of this ground, their own forms of attention, and their own systems of instinct, systems that evolved expressly to hasten or avert precisely this encounter...
The hunter instinctively becomes more like the animal, straining to make himself less visible, less audible, more exquisitely alert to approach his target. It's not easy to be a hunter at all.
For me it is all about the eating. Not the "sport". I am not what you call a trophy hunter. I take what I need, enough to make a nice dinner for me and my friends, maybe some salami, a prosciutto, but then: That's it, I go home.
This is what the guide told Michael, and I believe he's right. There's no meaning of being a trophy hunter. You can get nothing from hunting other than showing off.
I keep records of what I had every meal these days, in order to reflect in the future whether or not I treat responsibly with my food. And I've been always wanting to start my own eco-farm. Time will prevail.
Given the nature of hunting, not to mention me, I understood this is as less a prediction than a prayer.
This is the thoughts came to the author's mind that after being told by Angelo "You are going to kill your first pig today". I found really it interesting to say so.
It was as if I'd dialed up the gain on all my senses or quieted myself to such an extent that the world itself grew louder and brighter.
During the period of losing his guide, the author pulled all himself together. I totally understand the felling of the whole world becomes bigger and bigger and it seems that you are vanishing from it, especially when you climb the mountain or go scuba-diving.
For perhaps his most outrageous claim is that the hunt is the only such return available to us --- we can't ever, as he points out, go back to being Christian in the manner of St. Augustine, say, because once history begins it is irreversible.
Once history begins it is irreversible.
Even though the hunt takes place during a brief "vacation" from modern life, what occurs in the space of that electrifying parenthesis will ever and always be, in a word Ortega never shrinks from using, "authentic".
shrink from 退避，在……前退缩
v. avoid (one's assigned duties)
If I were the author, I would definitely value the experience as he did. It's authentic.
He was trying hard not to sound like the disappointed father; even so, I couldn't help feeling like the disappointing son.
I believe you don't have to know what actually Angelo told him! Have a wild guess. It's so fun!
