The Gun That Shot Photographs

Walking home to Walden from fishing in the dark, Thoreau sees a woodchuck and is half tempted to seize it and eat it raw. That confession opens Higher Laws, where he takes the hunting instinct seriously instead of apologizing for it. Kaag grew up hunting birds with binoculars because his grandfather built him a gun that shot photographs, and he thinks that contraption holds the whole chapter. The episode follows the hunter as he grows into the naturalist and the poet, watches Audubon at his unsettling work, and lands on a claim about hunters that most nature lovers refuse to believe. Then the strangest turn: these higher laws point down, not up.