He has been sitting in the tree since late afternoon. Suspended high above the forest floor and its crisp brown leaves, he listens. It’s dusk now: the Magical Hour. His bow is behind him—he shifts and tries not to make any noise at all. Otherwise, what would be the point of his camouflage? He hopes that the wind won’t shift and move his scent down into the valley where they come from. Otherwise, what would be the point of all the hours spent up there alone in the cold? And it is cold. Even with his brown and green layers wrapped tight around him, it’s the kind of cold where it becomes difficult to move your fingers around on the glass of your phone. That bothered him a while ago when it was still afternoon. When he wasn’t paying as much attention. They don’t usually like to emerge that early. Instead, he was texting his friends, thinking, anticipating, hoping. But now his eyes are stuck on the brush of the forest floor, and his ears are stuck on everything.
Everything changes at the Magical Hour. The light shifts gradually until it is sudden. He stares at the incandescent bark, dappled with warmth and sunlight, watching the shadows grow. So quick he could miss it, the shadow oozes around the corner of the tree and spreads itself over the light until all he can see is the cold.
The wind is different, the squirrels stop chattering, the birds go quiet, the leaves crunch, and he can imagine it is one of them. He turns inch by inch by inch, drawing his bow back. But it is just a squirrel. The string returns. He watches and then again and again and again the same. Every crunch, every groan, every gust becomes one of them in his imagination. He has been listening for decades, but every time, he still hopes.
He is Brad Arndt, Jeff Edwards, and so many others—the hunters of Western Massachusetts. Brad and Jeff spend countless hours in the woods during deer hunting season. Both men have been hunting since childhood, having learned the sport from their fathers. They have their own reasons for returning to the woods every autumn. And yet, they describe the experience of being in the forest similarly: anticipating, listening, and hoping for a deer.
Jeff and Brad kindly spoke with us at length about what it is like to hunt, providing us with vivid descriptions that served as the basis for our ethnographic and documentary work. They brought us into the woods with them, where we could shoot not with bows and guns but with cameras and microphones. Being still for hours in the woods, surrounded by the forest sounds and recalling Brad and Jeff’s words, we hunted by listening.
Both hunters described the importance of listening and being quiet. Deep listening is paramount to a hunter’s spatial awareness. They listen for footfalls, shifts in the wind, and times when the birds stop singing. A hunter’s own sounds—shifting in tree stands, coughs, moving equipment—can easily betray their presence. In the woods, sound has immense power. It can conceal, deceive, reveal, and augment reality. Our documentary places listening viewers in the boots of Western Massachusetts hunters. Towards an imaginative mode of viewing and listening, we hope our audiences can lose themselves in the reality we represent, expanding their conceptual horizons for what it means to hunt and to listen.