“Maybe firecrackers don’t mean anything but a hell of a good time.”

We all know that hunting is a major theme in American literature. Think about Melville and his whale, Faulkner and his bear, Hemingway and his lions. For these writers, like the ancient heroes of mythology, hunting is more of a spiritual quest than an exercise in grocery shopping. One of the requirements of a spiritual quest is that there have to be rules to your hunt and penalties for breaking them. If you’re hunting for Grendel or the like, you can’t just dynamite the lake—it isn’t sporting and your success doesn’t prove anything noble.