Whitetail Tracks
Pro-hunting Calgary Herald Article about V. Geist
"It is fitting, then, that Whitetail Tracks and the series ends with a long chapter, Closing the Circle, and a short Epilogue, which together are Val Geist's personal testament and tribute to hunting and hunters. They should be read by all hunters, might-be hunters, and even those who think they have some reason to oppose hunting. In a late October e-mail interview Geist told me this of the whole series: I hope the books will serve in moral re-armament of hunter-conservationists as they face the future."
Date: 1/3/2002 Publication: The Calgary Herald
Mule Deer Country fine finale to series (Bob Scammell - Outdoors page E4)
It is hard to believe that it is now only 12 years since I got the first shock of great pleasure from Dr. Val Geist's Mule Deer Country.
Now Geist, from his home on Vancouver Island, tells me that, with Whitetail Tracks, he has now completed the series of seven books that started with Mule Deer Country, each dealing with a single big game animal (the others are Antelope Country, published earlier last year, Moose, 1999, Buffalo Nation, 1996, Wild Sheep Country, 1993 and Elk Country, 1991) and all written for the general public.
That last comment is important, because Geist is a professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Calgary, one of the world's foremost mammal behaviourists who has done a lifetime of research on the behaviour, ecology and ice age history of large mammals and also the ice age history and biology of early humans.
Most scientists have grave difficulty conveying their fascinating discoveries in a manner the rest of us will tolerate, let alone understand, but Geist has become better and better at this as the series has progressed.
Occasionally, Geist now lightens the prose load much more than he did in many of his earlier books as, here, he describes early meetings of whitetails and sea-faring man along the coast of what is today southern Mexico: "Paddling close to shore, the sea-farers saw a dainty deer flash its tail and dive into coastal shrub without giving them a chance to take a closer look. Well, what else is new?"
The author has been assisted in explicating sometimes difficult concepts by his unique partnership for six of the seven books with Montana wildlife photographer Michael H. Francis, who Geist calls an inspired colleague par excellence. Certainly the photography is superb and has been selected and coupled with cutlines fraught with such meaning that they could almost be a book in themselves.
Each book reveals amazing things: how the moose got its nose and bell and narrowly escaped domestication, how bison were transformed by humans from giants into dwarfs, why pronghorn eyes are larger than those of elephants . . . In Whitetail Tracks, Geist tells how the whitetail became the evasive runner it is today, why American culture adopted it so passionately and how an animal so scarce and insignificant in the prehistoric past now outnumbers all large animals. He pays the species what, for Geist, is the ultimate tribute: Ancestral humans could not survive North America's late-ice-age predators. White-tailed deer could. They outdid us, for they survived North America's predator hell hole.
The only disappointment for me in this last book is that Geist is not nearly as anecdotal as he is, for example, in Mule Deer Country, relating his personal experiences -- including hunting -- with the species. Near the end of Whitetail Tracks, and the series, Geist tantalizes readers who also love the Whitetail enough to hunt it by stalking and still-hunting afoot with just one sentence about the three racks that hang on his wall: One was taken at 15 paces, one at less than 12, and one -- my best buck -- was taken at seven paces after I missed him at 10.
It is not generally known that, not so many years ago, Geist favoured the European and Texan concepts of private ownership of game, game ranching, in effect, even paid hunting. Gradually he was persuaded, and persuaded himself, that the general North American concept of public ownership and participation by the common man in stewardship and management has been the salvation and success of our huntable and hunted species and frequently calls our North American system of wildlife management the finest in the world. He now travels and testifies widely as an expert witness in defence of that system and in opposition to game ranching and paid executions of penned animals.
It is fitting, then, that Whitetail Tracks and the series ends with a long chapter, Closing the Circle, and a short Epilogue, which together are Val Geist's personal testament and tribute to hunting and hunters. They should be read by all hunters, might-be hunters, and even those who think they have some reason to oppose hunting. In a late October e-mail interview Geist told me this of the whole series:
"I hope the books will serve in moral re-armament of hunter-conservationists as they face the future."
In that interview Geist divulged the great news that my own favourite of all his books, Mule Deer Country, was republished in 1999 in an upgraded second edition. Now I have to find out how to get that one, if only to see if a man as fond of mule deer as I am, but who knows a great deal more than I do about them, has altered his chilling view from the first edition that the mule deer is doomed by its susceptibility to takeover by whitetails.
Whitetail Tracks is available through Krause Publications,
P.O. Box 5009, Iola, Wis. 54945-5009
$34.95 US, plus $4 shipping.
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