The Happy Hunter

Sports journalist hopes newest book will reveal what's underneath camo By [James Lobo ] Pete Bodo has man-paws. One of them wraps around a Guinness and the other lies flat on a table, in the back room of Dublin House on West 79th street, just blocks from his apartment on Riverside Drive. The outdoorsman is talking about his new hunting memoir. "One of the great things about this country is that any knucklehead can go out there and get a hunting license and have the opportunity to engage nature," said the author and senior editor at Tennis magazine, who periodically escapes to his 150-acre property in the Catskills to get his wildlife fix. Whitetail Nation: My Season in Pursuit of the Monster Buck, released Nov. 15, is Bodo's own story. He zigzags the country, from New York to Montana to Texas, with rifle, bow and doe urine in tow, chasing the giant deer of his fantasy and craving a set of record-breaking antlers to hang over his mantle. Bodo hopes that his story-published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt-will not only reach his camo-wearing compatriots during hunting season (Nov. 20 through Dec. 12 for southern New York state), but also the rest of the country, whose closest contact with a deer was watching Bambi. "What I was hoping to do was write a book that anybody can pick up and enjoy if they have even the slighte st interest in the outdoors and interest in why people still hunt," he said. Bodo, 61, hunted critters as a kid in the woods of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. When he was 12, he went deer hunting for the first time with his father, who shot and wounded a huge buck but lost it after tracing its blood through the woods for hours. He discovered his passion for writing in the 8th grade, when he won a composition contest. Around the same time, he abandoned hunting, jarred by guilt after shooting a woodchuck that he discovered was pregnant. After attending Seton Hall University, he moved to New York, where he started covering tennis. It wasn't until his buddy invited him to go on a hunt that his love of the outdoors reignited. Today, he frequents the woods upstate, a leafy contrast to the concrete of the Upper West Side, where he lives with his wife Lisa, 8-year-old son Luke and a red-tick hound (incidentally named Buck). A self-described contrarian, Bodo takes pleasure in being the lone, orange-capped hunter in a city full of urbanites, where camouflage is worn as a hipster fashion statement. "I smile every time I see some girl on 28th Street," he said. "Some little model going off to one of her look-sees and she's got sequined camo pants on." Not everyone understands his weekend hunting getaways upstate, where he helps keep the deer population in check. Especially here, in a city full of environmentalists and animal rights activists, people just don't get it. His son gets quizzical looks from kids at school when they hear his father has guns, something that would be commonplace in North Dakota or rural Pennsylvania. "Some people really think that what you're doing is wrong," Bodo said. "Morally wrong. 'It's indefensible.' 'It's cruel.' The cruelty thing is pretty tough. Who likes to think of themselves as a cruel person?" Bodo says some people don't agree with his view of the human-animal relationship. "I don't feel that animal life is sacred per se," he said. "I just don't believe that. I think our job is to manage animals and to treat them as humanely as possible." Ryan Huling, from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals-an animal rights organization with over two million members and supporters-represents this opposition. "Although it was a crucial part of human survival 100,000 years ago, hunting is now nothing more than a violent form of recreation," Huling said. "It's a cruel, insensitive act." In view of such attitudes, Bodo hopes the book will help alleviate the conflict between environmentalists and hunters. He wants people to understand what drives him to shoot deer: the oneness with nature, the meditative way your mind wanders in the woods, coming home to a hot fireplace after a day alone in a tree in a snowstorm. Not to mention the sustainability of killing your own dinner. That key word, sustainability, is something that hunters and environmentalists both agree on. "If the economy tanks tomorrow and your family is pretty hungry, you'd go out and kill a deer without thinking twice," he said. He argues that shooting his own deer to eat is more sustainable than buying mass-produced meat in the refrigerated section of Stop & Shop. He tries, with varying degrees of success, to nudge his son Luke out into the wild yonder, a place that has grown completely foreign to youths in today's urban society. "He's caught a couple of fish," Bodo said, grinning. "He kisses them on the head before we put them back."