What's Up With The Lack Of Peasants Here?

Some call hunting a vile blood sport and think it should be banned. I think that’s an ignorant argument, which shows that those opposed to hunting haven’t spent much time in the woods and they’ve probably never been hungry. I wonder, as they are chowing down on their New York sirloin, what they think happens in a slaughterhouse. Perhaps they should visit one sometimes, if they think hunting is barbaric.

Let’s get this straight, hunting is not a sport. If you want sport, try skeet or trap shooting. Hunting is about putting food on the table. If you can’t eat it, don’t shoot it, unless it’s a fox or coyote skulking around your chicken coop. Then, by all means, let ‘em have it. Hunting is pretty much the same the world over. The only major difference I’ve found is that there is a total absence of peasants in North America. I don’t know why this is so. I was brought up to believe that for a successful hunt, you needed peasants. And the peasants needed the money this job paid.

The closest thing to peasants I’ve seen here are migrant workers. But they never seem to be around when you need them. Maybe this is a matter of timing. Hunting season is usually in late fall and by then the itinerant workers have returned home. Maybe there’s a lack of trust and they’re not comfortable with a bunch of white guys blasting away at anything that moves in the bush. Or it may be a language problem, a lack of understanding. I’m stumped.

The job of the peasants was to push whatever game there was before them through the bush towards the hunters, by whistling and yelling and beating on trees with sticks. The hunters were posted on the edge of the woods blocking egress. The trick was to shoot the rabbits and stags and, sometimes, wild boar, without hitting the peasants. My father, who organized countless hunts in Germany over the years, never lost a peasant to gunfire or any other hunting mishap. In Germany, a hunting party consisted of hunters and peasants. The peasants got paid for this job and got to partake of the feast served on the evening of the hunt in the local pub, paid for by the hunters. You never had a hunting drive without peasants.

I tried to persuade my friends here to try this system of division of labor, but they felt it wouldn’t work here due to the total dearth of peasants and they also brought up the issue of liability. Peasants seem to be a European phenomenon and I never heard of a peasant suing. That was just not done.

Here, half the hunters act as pushers, while the other half blocks. Unlike in Europe, the pushers here carry guns and can blast away at game in the bush. This can lead to disoriented wildlife running in all directions rather than straight at the blockers and bullets flying everywhere. You have to be careful out there. To me that’s an inefficient use of manpower and it can be hazardous to your health.

During and after the war we pretty much lived off what we grew in our garden and what my father brought home from his hunting excursions. You have to keep in mind that our money was worthless and the store shelves were empty. If you wanted to eat, you had to go out and find food. Nevertheless, we lived fairly well. Our routine changed for a while after the end of the war, because Germans weren’t allowed to possess firearms. The Americans would shoot you on sight, if they caught you with a gun. This meant that my father couldn’t hunt anymore. My father went by the rules and if the rules prohibited him from hunting, so be it.

My older brother, Willi, had no such scruples. He was 19 and a veteran of three years of war. Starting in the summer of 1945, once he was back on his feet from his ordeal as a POW of the Americans, he went out every night to hunt – or to poach, if you want to put a fine point to his activities. He hunted at night, because it was safe, since the Americans didn’t come out after dark. They stayed in their barracks and waited for daylight, before they ventured out into the countryside. My brother supplied our house with meat, usually venison or rabbit, sometimes wild boar and the odd time a calf that he claimed was a stray that had crossed the border from the East. We lived within walking distance of the border between the American and Soviet zones of occupation.

The American occupiers also liked to hunt. Several army officers came to my father’s place in the fall of 1945 and asked him to organize a hunt for them. He, of course, didn’t have any choice in the matter. Their interpreter explained to him that accommodating the Americans could be advantageous for us. My father obliged. Organized hunting is much the same everywhere. There was lots of game, including deer, and the Americans shot a number of them or at least they thought they did. They were sure of it. Yet the downed deer could never be located.

What happened was that my father had instructed my brother and me to find whatever the Americans shot and spirit it away, so it would end up later on our table. This could get hairy sometimes, what with bullets whizzing about and the necessity to remain invisible. It helped that the Americans were leery of crawling around the bush. They saw crazed Nazis behind every tree. We were pretty good at this job. We hid the game under water, in fox and badger dens, in old tree stands. Even my father’s dogs couldn’t find them, but that’s not saying much, because those dogs only listened to my father. The Americans were vexed. They couldn’t understand what was happening with their downed game. Maybe they knew what was going on, but they couldn’t prove anything. They just kept coming back and trying. We gave them an “A” for effort.

Finally, after several weeks of this, their interpreter suggested that their success rate might improve, if the Germans had weapons and were allowed to hunt with them. Of course that was highly illegal at the time, but the interpreter, who had been a police constable and was a friend of my father’s, assured them that my father was trustworthy and wouldn’t rat them out to the MPs. Their desire to bag a stag prevailed. The next time they came, they showed up with boxes full of food, real coffee, chocolate and American cigarettes, all goodies we hadn’t seen in years and more valuable than cash. They also brought Army-issue M-1 carbines for my father and his friends and invited them to hunt along with them. My father wasn’t too impressed by a carbine, but it had a 30-round magazine to compensate for its lack of accuracy. He gave them credit for trying. As of that day, the Americans’ hunting success improved dramatically. No more missing deer.

Besides the hunting, they liked the hunting customs and the parties that followed in the evening, where hunters and peasants would get together in the local pub for ragout of rabbit with dumplings, washed down with lots of beer. The Americans always picked up the tab. Until my father’s changed status from observer to participant, the ragout for the Americans consisted of what we called “Dach-hasen,” literally roof rabbits – cats. Everyone was in on the joke, except, of course, the Americans. They loved it all, nevertheless. This continued until my father was allowed to carry a rifle and to hunt again. After that, the local cats were once again safe from persecution and it was rabbits for everyone.

The Americans were impressed with the German hunting traditions, like the bugle calls before and after the hunt, the green hunting uniforms and hats with their whipping stag beards, the discipline of the shooters and the pushers and the camaraderie at post-hunt get-togethers. Keep in mind that this all happened at a time when fraternization with Germans was strictly forbidden by order of General Eisenhower. These guys were taking major chances. They continued to come to our house for years to hunt. One of them, a colonel in Military Intelligence – an oxymoron, if ever there is one, I later found out – became my friend and later sponsored my move to the U.S. He thought I had potential and I was too impressed to question his motives.




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