Who Owns These Hills?

A hunter stakes his claim to a treasured landscape—an inherent bond rooted in naturalism, conservation, and our ancestral past.

by Richard Collins

The horizon grows out of a formless night. To the northeast, the Sierrita Mountains are haloed by a thin reef of clouds, ignited by the sunrise like the coals of my campfire. A curvebilled thrasher rouses me, musically protesting my intrusion into his territory along the sand wash. The dawn air in late September is cool with the promise of fall. Here, in the “sky island” mountains of southern Arizona, it’s time to start scouting for the elusive Coues white-tailed deer. I am here only to locate deer, not to kill one. Not yet. That will come in November during hunting season—if I am skillful and lucky, and if my favorite hills are still as I remember them.

Long ago, while driving the southwestern slopes of the Sierrita Mountains, fifty miles from my home near Tucson, a marble quarry on top of the hills winked back the setting sun. That was my first encounter with the hills; since then, I’ve returned again and again. Their contours and life forms—giant saguaro cactus, mesquite, paloverde, and ocotillo, all typical of the upland Sonoran Desert—have etched themselves in my psyche and are now as familiar to me as the veins and sinews on the back of my hand. Because I come to these hills to hunt, they also have become a place of reflection. One cannot write seriously about hunting without also thinking about killing and death.

In his 1942 book of essays, Meditations on Hunting, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote that “one kills in order to have hunted,” suggesting that hunting is more than an act. The quest for game is a dynamic exchange between humankind and its environment, he wrote, and at its heart is a code of ethics. It’s a hunter’s interpretation of “biophilia,” a term popularized by the eminent biologist Edward O. Wilson in the 1980s. Because humans evolved in intimate contact with nature, Wilson suggests, we have an innate sensitivity and need for other living things. Even though this affinity was implanted by the cold, statistical process of natural selection, we react emotionally and spiritually to nature. Whether or not we hunt, contact with natural landscapes and their life forms has psychological benefits; it lifts our spirits and makes us glad.

Life for our ancestors was an intense dialogue with their environment that, over thousands of years, implanted a sense of connectedness with nature. In order to scavenge or kill enough game to feed themselves, they had to learn firsthand, the hard way, the habits and habitats of the animals they hunted. Hunting is a way for me to get back into that conversation. American essayist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau took the matter of motivation one step further. We kill, he wrote, in order to eat. Nowadays, we have sources of food, including meat, that do not require the consumer to kill. Most Americans feed themselves by going to the supermarket, falsely believing that food comes from money rather than from plants, animals, and the land. But my family, along with many others, likes deer meat. We prefer its tangy flavor and chewy texture to the bland meat of domestic animals. Yet my compulsion to spend days walking the hills does not begin or end with a plate of fried venison backstrap. Each time I go out, I learn something new; the pursuit of game, among the oldest human interactions with nature, gives purpose and structure to my inquiries.

Time spent hunting is, for me, a means of self-renewal, an acknowledgement that our world is built and administered by forces beyond our control. The hunt takes place on the highest hilltops, where one looks into the far beyond with an acute sense of personal singularity. I stand out in the clear desert air like a very small exclamation point from which all distances are measured.

Shouldering my pack frame and binoculars, I start walking toward the hills up the bajada, the long, sloping alluvial plain that extends from the edge of the mountains to the valley floor. Viewed from this distance, the hills are modest and unimpressive. On the map, they cover a mere three square miles. But maps can only hint at how the hills rise up sharply from the plain to create the wrinkled landforms of peaks, ridges, and rock outcroppings. High saddles link the hills together in a semicircle around an interior basin that drains southwest to the Altar Valley.

Two species of deer—the Coues white-tail, named for frontier army surgeon and naturalist Elliot Coues, and the desert muley, distinguished by its large ears and body size—inhabit this general area. The smaller white-tail occupy the rugged terrain on the highest, north-facing slopes of the hills and surrounding mountains. Here, their favorite browse plants— mimosa, silk tassel, Ceanothus, and fairy duster—are plentiful, as are oak trees that nestle in the heads of the highest canyons. Bed grounds under the trees are softened by gramma grasses, and from these high perches, the white-tail can see danger approaching from any direction.

The bajada and the broad sand washes draining the hills and mountains toward the valley floor are the favored habitat for muleys. While white-tails and muleys both drink from a rancher’s well at the base of the hills, each species returns to its favorite haunts. Each also attracts its own type of hunter. For the most part, muley hunters lumber, like huge land snails, into a campsite in their recreational vehicles and road hunt the lowlands, driving the sand washes in jeeps and all-terrain vehicles. Whitetails, though, are not to be taken this way, and hunters must climb as high as possible and then hunt upward, ringing around the highest peaks and bluffs. Most white-tail hunters go for the larger Sierritas or the Baboquivari Mountains across the valley.

The hills, surrounded by the bajada, are a seldom-noticed island of white-tail habitat in the middle of mule deer country. For years, I had the hills to myself and came to think of them as my own. I became territorial and possessive, as defensive of them as a sage grouse is of its stamping ground.

Then, several years ago, I mentioned them casually to a distant relative from Phoenix, pointing them out on a map. The next season, he and his crowd of six other hunters combed the hills with laser range finders, radios, hearing aids to magnify sound, and masking scent, and decimated the deer population by positioning a hunter in each saddle while the others drove up the lower hillsides. After I informed him of a cardinal rule of hunting and conservation ethics—that only one buck from a small habitat should be taken, so that a healthy population is left—he was offended. He said it was up to the Arizona Game and Fish Department to regulate deer populations. The hunting licenses he and his group had bought, he said arrogantly, gave them the right to use the hills as they chose, to use them up and move on.

That heart-to-heart sent me to the Pima County Recorder to find out who really did own the hills. Turned out that the state of Arizona owns most of that land, along with the surrounding desert, while a wealthy industrialist has legal title to the rest. When I asked the clerk who owned the hills in the past, he showed me to a shelf of ledgers full of handwritten entries, and I spent the rest of the day tracing the chain of historical ownership.

When Arizona became a state in 1912, it received title to the land; today, the state leases that land to the industrialist, who uses it for grazing cattle. Leases on state land were also responsible for the marble quarry, but, fortunately, the miners did not find copper, and it was abandoned. Today, on the east side of the Sierrita Mountains, copper companies are gouging out huge open pit mines, utterly destroying the landscape.

The land owned by the industrialist includes the confluence of the canyon that drains the hills and the broad sand wash, a vital location because it has water near the surface. An abandoned adobe house with mesquite corrals and a windmill is tangible evidence of his claim. The books do not say who built the house, but the first record is a homestead entry telling of a parcel of land given by the government to the first settler willing to live there and work the land. The homesteader probably built the house and fenced the hills, then discovered that the desert was too dry, the soil too poor, or the ranch too small to support a family. A cemetery behind the house, fenced and overgrown with snakeweed and mesquite, marks the demise of their claim with rounded piles of stones.

The books, of course, make no mention of my claim or that of the Coues white-tail to its habitat—nor the claim of any other plant or animal that makes its living there. The homestead law recognized only that the settler was entitled to the land because it provided him with a living for a few years. He had claim to it legally as well as ecologically, as habitat supplying food and shelter.

Unlike the homesteader, the industrialist, who received the legal rights to the land when he bought it, does not live on or work the land. While he also uses the hills for grazing, what he receives from the land is quite different. The ranch is not essential to his livelihood, but only a place to visit and a big tax deduction. His cattle diminish the land for others who use it. Today, the fence dividing the hills from the lower desert runs on like a jagged suture, grassy and vegetated on the hillsides, bare and eroded on the bajada.

And what, one may ask, is my entitlement to the hills? And from what authority does it arise? The simple answer is the same as that of my ignorant relative: I am a citizen of the state and have purchased a hunting license. But the deeper answer is more complex and is located, I believe, somewhere near the core of the modern conservation movement and the heart of biophilia. My feeling of entitlement is nourished by the taproot of an ancient family tree. When our ancestors first walked upright over the plains of Africa a few million years ago, the ones who formed family groups had a better chance of surviving than did loners; those who homesteaded a territory and stayed put were more likely to survive than were those who wandered. Our forebears had to become clever enough to obtain food and to avoid being killed, both by the game they pursued and by larger, stronger predators. Occupying a known territory and kinship bonding increased the chances of passing genes on to future generations, and so a strong attachment to place was engendered by evolutionary selection. This sort of bonding with place resonates with me and throughout the conservation movement: There is an instinct to protect and preserve, as well as use, the land that sustains us.

Having discovered the hills, I feel especially responsible for their preservation. They have worked on me in quiet and subtle ways. I was born and raised in the Sonoran Desert and still watch impatiently on summer days for the arrival of the monsoon and the miraculous renewal that comes with rain. I can recall a frosty morning in late January, after hunting season had closed, watching a heavily antlered whitetail climb toward its bed ground in the highest saddle, its breath flaring like small white flowers. I know if I approach from the canyon, he will sneak around the peak, drop down low, and disappear. If I instead come around the peak from behind, he will trot down to the canyon and cross over to the next ridge. I know a small cave in one hillside with a seep spring where the javelina bed to avoid the summer heat, and I know a patch of agave where they will be feeding at dawn; I know of a shaded slope covered with grasses—sideoats, spruce top, and blue gramma—where I can curl up and take a nap.

If our sense of place dwells in our memory, then our attachment to a place is reinforced by shared memory. Nowadays, I share the hills only with my wife and son and a friend, all of whom follow the principle— more that of conservationist than sportsman—of killing only those animals they intend to eat. For my son, hunting has been a way to learn respect for the landscape, to come to know its plants and animals, and to see firsthand from where our food comes. Just as he knew, before he became a hunter, that the plants we eat come from the soil and our work in the garden, he now sees that meat also comes from the land and that our skill as hunters can give us food for which we are grateful. Firsthand experience of nature does not guarantee my son will never abuse it, but fostering an ignorance of it would certainly increase the odds.

It’s my first visit since spring, and I’m anxious to check my memory against reality. Walking up the wash to the old house, I see the tire tracks in the sand have been erased by the monsoon. The house is still standing and the windmill is still working. As I approach the canyon, five muleys trot over the near ridge and skyline in the reddening dawn, stop, and look back at me with large, syrupy eyes; four does and one late fawn, their ears forward in quiet attention, motionless. I climb past the marble quarry to the highest saddle and look northeast to the top of the Sierritas. A faint rumbling of ore trucks drifts over the mountain; the ground shakes from a blast in the open pit mine.

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Sixty million years ago, the hills and the Sierrita Mountains were linked to a large chain that extended deep into Mexico. With infinite persistence, wind and water have eroded them to their present form, depositing the residue as the bajada. Perhaps in another 60 million years, the land will be flat where I am standing, the valley will be filled, and there will be no hills or mountains. A quiet voice in the logical part of my mind says these hills exist independent of any outside claim. Yet, right now, they’re mine.