Literature Review: Call of the Mild: Learning to Hunt My Own Dinner by Lily Raff McCaulou

Reviewed By: Joseph Andreasen

Being a book cover judger, I looked at Call of the Mild and thought that it would be a short story about how a person picked up hunting with a lot of food anecdotes and recipes. What I found was a tangle of intellectual and ethical spiderwebs. Throughout the book, Lily takes this messy tangle and turns it into a masterful tapestry of experience and meaning. No other book has inspired me more to hunt and promote hunting than this one.

Call of the Mild tells the story of a non-hunter becoming a hunter and coming to terms with life, death, and our place in them both. It is so incredibly important to learn of controversial topics from a perspective that provides unbiased information from both sides. Whether Lily wants to be unbiased or not, her journey highlights how an incessantly informed person might honestly tackle an incredibly controversial topic with real intent to change or adapt her life to fit her findings. Her intellectual journey is inspiring because of the pervasive strong-willed intent she has to do what is right despite her upbringing, fears, pressure, or political sway.

This book sits in the middle ground of the hunter and the anti-hunter. Both parties could find an excuse to not read the book. The hunter could write it off in preference for more experienced hunters that share their own background. The anti-hunter could write it off saying they couldn't be convinced to think outside of their convictions. Both groups need to read this book to better understand each other.

Lily's ability to capture what it means to hunt is nearly unmatched. As she is dipping her toes into the world of bird hunting she recounts the following experience after sharing a pheasant she hunted with friends.

"As Scott [her husband] and I wash the dishes, I reflect that this is what eating meat should be. The animal was the centerpiece of the entire meal and the entire evening, really... We marvelled at its place on our dinner table, and we felt grateful. We did not take it for granted, like we would a hen raised in cramped quarters...."

This, to us at Forgotten Outdoors, is one of the great upsides to harvesting meat by hunting. Hunting generates complex emotions in hunters. Joy, guilt, excitement, nervousness, pressure, and camaraderie all run side by side through a hunter's soul toward the final result: a meal shared with people.

Read this book and let us know what you think!