THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER

"You're not going to hunt elephants with a compressed air rifle. If you're going to catch big waves, carry a big gun."
Buzzy Trent

On one night of those wonderful nights, of vans, guitars and tiredness after hours on the water, we had gathered a fairly diverse group of surfers. There were Italians, Spaniards, Germans and even Australians and the beer, in cans and bottles, circulated as smoothly as the anecdotes. As we were getting tender we began to overflow on the intimate nature of surfing. Not about surfing as a world, as a lifestyle or nothing like that, but directly about the art and technique of surfing.

The Italian, Simone, who was a sort of useless addiction, maintained that it was dangerous, because even if you realized you were an addict, it was very difficult to escape. As Kelly Slater had said,"Surfing is like the mafia: once you get in, you don't go out anymore".

The Australians laughed at us and said that we complicated our lives too much, that it was just fun and that's why you got hooked. The good thing hooks.

As I was carrying a few more and I was the oldest of the group (a constant that would be repeated over and over again since then) I launched a theory that, however, I maintain despite its unpopularity: surfing engages because it links directly to our hunting instinct.

The silence in the group (and some grunt) gave me the impression that I didn't like it very much. We were not a few vegetarians, and even some of the German girls were vegan: it wasn't hard to see that my popularity rating had just dropped several integers. Since I'm this smug, and as I was drunk, I decided to expound the theory further.

We may or may not like it, but our brain wiring is very, very old. From the days when we lived in caverns, we used to louse our teeth and believe that fire was a god who protected us at night. From the time we used to collect what we found to eat, and we went out to supplement the diet with some animal that we found.

That wiring's there. It continues by mere evolutionary indifference: as we did well (and certainly benefited us when it came to thriving as a species) nature has never been responsible for erasing these tendencies from DNA. As with aggressive tendencies or our ability to see faces everywhere, it may no longer be necessary, but when it was, those who had it ate more, saved themselves from predators and fucked more, and passed the genes on to their children.

Every time I hear surfers talking about surfing (which is 90% of their usual conversations) the same thing happens to me: if we changed the terms "wave" to "prey" and "board" to "rifle", the result would not be very different. Like hunters, we study our prey. We are obsessed with knowing it, with describing it, with anticipating its movements. As hunters, we strive to have the right weapon for her. As hunters, we are able to travel miles and miles, and to wait with infinite patience until he appears. Like hunters, we take great care to reveal the places where hunting is assured, and prefer to keep them for ourselves.

Already in the water, we wait a little longer, we study the patterns of their movements, we lurk and at the moment we consider appropriate attack. Most of the time, we even put the rest of the hunters in the equation to get ahead of them and charge more (and better) waves. There are almost no differences, except that, once hunted, we change the blood for the wall and everything reveals a game, pure fun.

I wasn't the most popular guy that night. We were already very old when we finished the day (the next day the swell disappeared, and most of us would disperse). People left a little fly with me, but in a corner, between empty cans of Estrella, a boy from Madrid, Edu, laughed under his nose.

You know what? I liked your theory, man. I don't know if I agree, but I liked your theory.