The Freedom Of Werewolves

I am a hunter. I hunt and kill animals for food. There’s all sorts of reasons for it. When the kids were little we lived out bush remote in the sticks, had a go at living semi-self sufficiently, and had zero money. Meat from the bush was free, and our kids were raised on fresh kangaroo, duck, goose, wallaby, rabbit. You know your tucker is guaranteed to be free-range and untainted by chemicals like preservatives and antibiotics when the animals you eat spend their entire lives running around doing what they want. You can’t get more free-range than a kangaroo.

I also do it because I like it. There’s a special quality to the experience that I have been trying to define for a very long time. I get up in the dead of night, drive to my hunting ground under cover of trees hanging over me by the light of the moon or the stars, and move in silence through the world. I hunt on foot, by myself, with a single shot bolt-action rifle. I used to use a bow and arrows, but the ratio of food brought home versus time and effort spent was not optimal. Too many times I stalked an animal for two hours, face on the ground, only to see it run away, or hop away anyway, with my arrow sticking out of it. I’d lose both my arrow and my prospective food source, and while I went home empty handed the animal would take a long time to die in misery. Better on all fronts to use a gun.

I like it because, as I crawl over the ground, advancing one centimetre at a time, moving in slow motion, very deliberately and carefully, I become part of the country, of the land, of the natural world. There is nothing pre-arranged or orchestrated about the situation, no safeguards or back-ups, no guarantees, and the interaction between myself and my quarry is determined by the wind, the star-or moonlight, the condition of the forest floor, the alertness and behaviour of the animal, and, most of all, by my wits. It’s an experience where, for a brief and isolated period of time, I become a creature that solely lives by its own ability, judgement, and actions, in a dance to the death with another wild entity. There is a particular state of mind that comes over me when I prepare to deal death, a veil that descends upon me, something that hones all my attention to the one thing. There have been times when I have been so tensed up with hyper-alertness and acuteness of sight and hearing that, with the adrenaline of a chase pumping, I have almost been overtaken by bloodlust and have had to restrain myself from taking more than I needed.

Because I am a respectful and ethical hunter. I cull selectively from populations that can sustain the loss, I eat the whole animal, everything that is edible about it, and I tan the skins and use them. I always hunt on an empty stomach, and eat the heart and the kidneys fresh from the animal, lightly grilled. I went to my university graduation dressed in kangaroo skins and covered in traditional paint. All the other people there were wearing suits and dresses and make-up and all their greatest finery. They refused to let me in. I got kicked out. I added it to the long list of places and institutions I had gotten kicked out of, and banned for life. We don’t like your kind around here. Move on.

I am also a surfer. And much like when I hunt for food I venture out by myself in the dark. The trees lock in an overhead roof as I drive out, the shadows of the paperbark swamp I drive through watch me in silent companionship. I follow the guiding light of the moon all the way down to my favourite break, and I paddle out by myself, into the moonshine and the swirling of the black water around me. The situation is identical to my hunting setting: it is just me and the wide world. Just like when I am hunting I am solely reliant on my senses, my ability, my skill and wits to deal with the conditions around me. Instead of trying to catch an animal I try to catch a wave. The experience is very similar. The jumping to my feet at the exact right moment is akin to pulling the trigger, and the rush from dropping into the hole is very similar to the headlong rush of racing over to an animal that has just gone down to the ground, to get to it before it gets away, if need be.

But there is something that goes far deeper than that, something that goes way beyond the mere superficiality of engaging in a high-adrenaline activity.

At those times when I lose myself into the wild world around me, the unrestrained, untamed and unorganised country, I taste true freedom. The freedom of facing the world head-on, without restrictions or limitations other than the limits of my ability, wits and skill, and the repercussions my actions may sollicit from the world. And I have finally, after years of contemplating these things, identified what it is that makes it so.

There was a day when I had paddled out by the light of the moon by myself. My friends and I share the fascination with surfing by the moonlight, and we don’t usually miss the turn of the month when they come around. On this day I happened to be out first, ahead of the others, and I found myself alone on the water for a good half hour. It is peaceful, quiet, harmonious, and full of pent-up energy and promise of action, potentially violent and destructive. I caught one wave after the other. The swell was running nice and thick, the lines were clean and open, and the rides were long and joyful. The waves walled up around my waist, sometimes up to my shoulders, and I rode into the light of the moon hanging on the opposite end of the bay like I have now done hundreds of times before. Because the moon sits at the other side of the bay, floating over the mountains, it casts its light in front of us, and we can see where we are going, what the wave is doing. It is an eerie, beautiful experience. I rode a long perfect wave out halfway across the bay into the night, and then paddled back up to my take-off point. As I was doing so something clicked in my mind, and I finally identified the one thing that allows for uncompromised engagement with the natural world, of pure and unfettered freedom: the absence of human agency.

Whether I caught a wave or not depended solely and exclusively on my ability to interpret the heaving of the water, the working of the wind, the sub-surface shifting of the sand, the position of various rocks. On my judgement, my ability to read the conditions, my application of such skill as was required to catch the wave I had selected. By myself there was no human interference with this process. Just like out in the bush with my rifle there was no people in the mix. And this is the single biggest and most important factor enabling true freedom. Freedom is not, as Janis Joplin used to sing, “just another word for nothing left to lose”. That is not freedom, that is desperation. Freedom is choice, the process of choosing, and having the ability to make your own choices, informed by your own judgement, with the caveat that any potential negative outcomes or consequences are part and parcel of the deal. When I wade waist deep into a billabong where I know for a fact crocodiles live, to shoot magpie goose, I know full well what the consequences could be, and I accept that.

Desperation, on the other hand, is the complete lack of choice, the death of options. The back against the wall, the true prison. Having nothing left to lose means being just one step away from the plunge over the precipice, where the only choice left is the final one. Maybe it is a saying grown from the western world’s obsession with possessions and property. Nothing left to lose means that once something was had and now it’s gone. It seems to be the ultimate nightmare of our civilisation: to be possessionless. We heap great suspicion on people who, for whatever reason, live without many possessions. We call them vagrants, hobos, tramps, bums. In a fit of romantic and time-removed delusion, we call them swaggies. People cross the road when they see them, and police harass and arrest them. To be without possession is to be suspect. Homelessness is seen as a crime. Maybe poor old Janice Joplin bought into that notion a little bit too much, and maybe an edge of desperation lay at the foundation of her last fatal indulgement. Maybe.

In the absence of human agency the whole world is wide and open, and full of potential and possibilities. That potential is reduced in exponential proportion to the amount of human agency, which in some situations is the same as the amount of people present. How much can freedom be shared before it succumbs and collapses under the terminal division of itself into too many parts, much like homeopathic remedies. A 100 ml bottle of water containing 1/millionth of a substance contains, for all intents and purposes, just water and nothing else. A homeopathic remedy will be the most expensive water you’ll ever buy anywhere. The practitioners and theoreticians of the field counter this by invoking “the memory of water”. ‘Even though there is no discernable trace of anything at all in that water’, they say, ‘the water contains the *memory* of what was once in it’. And a cure is affected by that memory. Good luck with that.

Does freedom, once divided in multiples of thousands and millions so it’s no longer perceptible, also have a memory? Or is it rather a ghost, a haunting of a passing and a loss?

After I had caught waves by myself for half an hour by the light of the moon my mate the Snake Catcher comes out and joins me. We have shared moon surfs for years now, and we know perfectly how to negotiate the waves in the dark. The freedom bubble opens up and splits in two, and then sticks together again: the only human agency present is the other person, and that person knows exactly how not to exercise agency on the other one. So we surf and catch waves, one after the other, and sit on our boards between sets and shoot the breeze. The absence of human agency is also the absence of human companionship, and the value and worth of freedom is only counterbalanced by the value and worth of company, banter and laughter.

We discuss the world and all things metaphysical, and we contemplate our lot. In times past we have often compared ourselves to cockroaches and vampires, only coming out in the dark when the world is asleep. But it seems to me that the commanding presence of the moon is a decisive factor, and that, therefore, really we are more like werewolves. Maybe weredolphins. We come out at night to pay allegiance to the moon and to the dark quiet sea, and we relish the solitude and the peace and quiet. We metamorphose from stressed-out modern humans to creatures of the moon and night, expanding our physical bodies and our psyches in the increased living space determined by the absence of other humans. We breathe the briny air, smell the workings of the tide, and roll in the salty water. There have been times in the past when I’ve had to restrain myself from howling at the moon; and there’ve been other times when I’ve gone ahead and done it anyway. Who knows what any people around on dry land must have thought.

After a little while another bloke came out. He’s a recent addition to the team, Japanese of origin. He used to have dreadlocks down his arse, and so obviously we called him Rastaman. Then he got a haircut for the first time in sixteen years, and with a short ponytail we called him Bob. As in Marley, and as in the hairstyle. Not long after that he went the whole hog and got a number one all around, so inescapably we resolved to calling him Sean. As in Shorn. We were in stitches for weeks over that one.

Shorn was nervous that day. He wasn’t an adept at moonlighting, and, in truth, we strongly suspected he had only paddled out because he knew we were there. We considered it unlikely he would have done so by himself. People are always scared of sharks in the dark. They may have a point. A lot of sharks are by nature nocturnal, and they are at their most active at night. They appear to follow a circadian rhythm that is opposite to that of humans, and will either go inactive or dive deep down to the dark depths after sunrise. Nevertheless, at least some of this fear I think must go right back down to that ancient primordial human fear of the dark: if the fire goes out at night the sabretooth tiger outside the cave will come in and eat you. Don’t let the fire go out, and don’t leave any food scraps out.

Personally I don’t worry about sharks. They don’t hunt people. The vast majority of shark attacks are mistakes: they think we are something else, palatable to them. So they bite of a leg, chew on it for a bit and then spit it back out again, not finding it to their liking. Must be all those preservatives, colouring agents and growth hormones we stuff our faces with. Not free-range enough for them. However, even though they don’t go on to eat us because we taste like shit, by the time we’ve lost a leg we’ve bled out and we’re dead, so that’s cold comfort.

Rastaman came and sat close to us, right out at the furthest point, looking out over the open ocean beyond the bay. He was fidgety, and we noticed that he was taking great care to keep his legs and feet out of the water.

All of a sudden, out of nowhere, three sharp triangular fins broke through the water not a metre in front of us. Rastaman screamed ‘Aaaarrrgghh!’, tried to pull his legs even further out of the water, lost his balance and fell sideways off his board. We pissed outselves laughing.

It was three dolphins. They stuck their long snubby snouts out of the water and pointed them at us, stared at us curiously, blinked as if to say ‘goodday’ and then cruised up and down around us for a while, staying very close. Keeping dead straight faces we treated Rastaman to a few select stories and urban myths about how dolphins will hang around humans and shield, protect and defend them if there’s any danger around. His complexion, normally orientally brown, faded to the tender hues of an unripe mango, and he shuffled over a bit closer to us. Safety in numbers. What would we do if he, sitting on the outside edge of our group of three, was attacked by a shark? It would have to be a toss-up between trying to heroically intervene, or, alternatively, pushing him closer to the shark while we turn tail and bail out as fast as possible. We will never know.

But, in the absence of life-threatening wildlife interaction, eventually human agency asserted itself in all its ugliness.

As time wore on more and more people paddled out and joined the fray, eager for a wave, and our peace and harmony started to evaporate. On one of my next waves a bloke that I had vaguely seen around before somewhere dropped in right in front of me, snatched the wave and took off without looking back. I watched and took note, and started planning the end of the session. Ten minutes later he did the same thing to another fella. This fella, unlike me, took high offence and called him out. The bloke who dropped in rounded on him, threw his board out of the way, said “are you talking to me?” and punched the fella in the head. Then he retrieved his board, caught a wave and rode off.

Human agency indeed. So that’s where freedom ends. My freedom ends where yours starts.

There’s no call and no room for behaviour like that in the surf. The moon was gone, the sun was out and the crowd was buzzing, so we paddled in and got out.

The freedom of werewolves only lasts as long as the moon.