Throughout his distinguished career as a writer-cum-hunter, David Adams Richards has encountered members of Canada’s literati who deride hunting as “deplorable” and “beneath them.” According to the author, too many self-satisfied urbanites who have never held a gun deny out of hand the cultural, economic, or conservational impulse to hunt. To them, it’s simply a lowbrow, barbaric activity, akin to NASCAR or ultimate fighting. With Facing the Hunter, this two-time Governor General’s Award winner offers a polemical response to the ambivalence many feel toward gun-toting men and women in camouflage gear and orange vests.

Centrally, he argues that “those who eat meat should, at least once in their lifetime, kill that which they eat.” He admits that “hunting, or the terrible reputation it has among ‘civilized’ men and women, is and can be its own worst enemy,” but he attempts to complicate popular perceptions through a series of circuitous, almost impressionistic anecdotes set in his native New Brunswick. Recollections about his uncles, brothers, and friends stand in contrast to those of non-resident game hunters and poachers. The former hunt as a way of life; while they enjoy the pursuit, they do not take pleasure in killing. At their core, they are unassuming stewards of the land and custodians of a threatened tradition. The other group doesn’t hunt for sustenance, but rather for bragging rights and an aggrandized sense of power.

Richards’s reflections make a compelling, if not entirely convincing, case that challenges “the kind of propaganda that satisfies urban sentiment” about woodsmen. Unlike Steven Rinella’s 2008 American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon, this book doesn’t delve deeply into the ecology, biology, or anatomy of the targeted game (mostly moose, deer, and partridge). And at times, Richards goes too far in his corrective: he risks romanticizing his uncles’ generation of New Brunswickers, for example, and his metaphors about yesteryear trivialize the cultural impact of European invasion on Indigenous peoples. He also fails to acknowledge that opinions about killing one’s own food are already changing among city dwellers, as evidenced by a nascent DIY slaughtering and butchering movement.

Nonetheless, Facing the Hunter is a powerfully structured work that demands an intellectual and readerly patience evocative of an ethical hunter’s forbearance. Richards pushes all of us — omnivores, vegetarians, and vegans alike — to nuance our thinking the next time we drive past a six-point buck in the back of a Ford four-by-four.