humanlike - feb 2025
originally written for a writing course. thank you college for providing a discreet way for me to discuss my cultural humanity and animality. i refer to myself as human here a lot. because this was for a course, know that i was trying to avoid being sent to counseling/therapy and that i do not ordinarily see myself as human.
My dad and I are quiet people. I step out of the truck and into the mud. My boot nearly suctions off my foot. It’s a bleak 5 degrees Fahrenheit and nine o’clock at night. We hardly speak while we unload the truck. Silently, my dad hands me a loaded .22, gesturing to me that the safety is on. We don’t speak again until our scopes are sighted in and I smell the chemical of a hand warmer permeate the air.
He stays in front of me, pausing every couple yards to scan the tree line. We near the deer feeder, and he finally speaks to me again:
“Get behind me just in case,” He says as he lifts the butt of his .45 to his cheek, and fires four times. I don’t yet know what he saw.
“Hog. Ran off that way.”
I follow his finger into the woods and see the glint of eyes, watching me. They look like stars. The animal scampered off and was not seen for the rest of the evening. I think about what this nonchalance about hitting our target would have meant to humans living even a hundred years ago.
I think back to my first night at the deer lease. When I started going hunting with my dad, I was ten years old. The first night, a screech owl reminded us of its namesake. We had just settled into our sleeping bags, me and my brother. Its gut wrenching alarm scared the tar out of us. It even scared my dad, who soon after let us know it was just an owl and not a woman like we were thinking. Playing this memory back I think about how many humans before him had to soothe their children after a scary noise in the woods.
He was also the instigator of some of this fear. Before hunting we had gone camping in varying terrain and he would create myths related to the area. When we visited the swamps of east Texas, it was a giant alligator who ate a school bus full of children my age. When we visited the panhandle, it was giant cave spiders. I think about how many humans before him performed the same ritual of oral story telling.
What I don’t know is how many humans before him put in the level of effort. When we visited Mineral Wells, he concocted a story about the not-so-elusive Mineral Man: a man who sat in the mineral pools for so long that he calcified like a stalagmite. He would wander the campgrounds, red dirt stuck to his heels, looking for cold drinks in hopes he could return to humankind. One morning, we woke up to find an open and half drank Dr. Pepper atop our cooler. We were so ecstatic and mystified, it might as well been Christmas.
My dad has always pushed for me to leave the nest, so to speak. I was always allowed to wander the lease, provided my dad scoped it out for hogs first. He always satiated my curiosities, and treated me like an adult. I was never too young to watch him process game, to carry the discard out to the field where we’d leave it for coyotes. I think about how humans likely domesticated the dog, how they followed us looking for scraps and how eager we were to feed them.
One of the first few times I went hunting with my dad, he got a whitetail deer. I was interested in watching him process it. It stank not unlike a biology class dissection. I was curious how similar it looked to humans but the ways in which our bodies differed were vividly apparent.
“Why is this the case?” echoed my anthropology professor before describing how the chimpanzee, the animal we share the most of our DNA with, loves the act of hunting. To them, it is stimulating.
Her shared inquiry is one I often turn over in my head. Beyond bipedalism, how are humans different? What cognitively differs between us and nonhuman animals? It can’t be our capacity for language, as every animal can communicate with members of its own species. It can’t be adaptations like tool making, a skill shared by modern primates. Is it our capacity to recognize and create patterns and symbols?
I may never get a clear answer to this question, but I can look for the rhythm myself. Humans look for any sense of meaning everywhere we go. I see it in the light bouncing off the birds’ oily sheens as I walk to class. I hear it in their calls. What may be a hobby for me now most certainly aided in our species’ survival. Humankind’s ability to pass the time not just by merely searching for food, but taking in the world around us in the process must be it.
I think about all the time I spent outdoors, hunting, looking for food. What was I really doing? I know the majority of my time was not spent processing game, nor was it spent wandering. Instead I looked to the ground for tracks, or listened to the direction of the wind. To be human, to me, is to observe patterns and repeat them.