Sublime

Until the moment I became a father, I never felt truly and absolutely responsible for anyone. Becoming a parent is an epiphany: You’re up! As part of my responsibilities to my children, I knew that I was wholly responsible for teaching them everything I knew about being a human who feels at home in nature.

Like it or not, nature is out there. It cannot be ignored. You can live in fear of it, which is no fun and does little good. Or you can respect and admire it, which opens you up to glimpses of magic.

In the rest of America, hunting was dying. Rates of participation had been declining for decades—only 6 percent of Americans still hunted. But in the Northern Rockies, it remained integral to the culture—Montana had the highest number of hunters per capita, and Wyoming wasn’t far behind. Women hunted, kids hunted, even wildlife biologists hunted. F

our kids need to understand that they are not above, outside, or apart from their physical environment—they are completely intertwined with it, and it with them.

When I want meat, I make a call, or I give my sous-chef, my butcher, or my charcutier a look and they make the call. On the other end of the line, my version of Rocco, Al Neary, or Lucca Brazzi either does the job himself or calls somebody else who gets the thing done. Sooner or later, somewhere – whether in the Midwest, or upstate New York, or on

It’s 20 May 2008 off the coast of the Bahamas. I am a trainee shark wrangler and currently have over a hundred of them circling me as I float on the ocean bed watching my mentor feed, study and inspect each one. His name was Jeremiah Sullivan and, fortunately for me, he was one of the world’s leading shark experts.