THEODORE “TEDDY” ROOSEVELT, soldier, president and outdoorsman, once summed up his vision for America as a “doctrine of the strenuous life”. Hunting lay at the heart of that doctrine: the virile business of learning to shoot straight, to track beasts through brutal heat or cold and to master “buck fever”—a nervous excitement felt in the face of prey that must be suppressed by effort of will. Years before he declined to blast a bear tethered to a tree by his hosts on a 1902 hunt, spawning admiring newspaper cartoons and the worldwide teddy-bear industry, Roosevelt crafted and promoted a “credo of fair chase”. In addition to encouraging sportsmanship, his vision of the American hunt was democratic. Though he crossed oceans to shoot lions and scaled mountains to hunt bears, Roosevelt deplored Europe’s elitism, with its royal forests and aristocratic estates wherein lisping sons of privilege chased their father’s deer for sport. Closer to home Roosevelt and his allies were dismayed by the near-extinction of the buffalo and other species, driven by such forces as gun technology and competition for land.

In time they developed a radical new philosophy: the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. The model is strikingly egalitarian. To this day America’s wildlife belongs to the public, not landowners. Wild animals are supposed to be killed for food or population control, not mere trophy collection; their harvest is regulated by state and federal authorities. Wildlife officials are mostly funded by hunters through licences and game stamps, and are guided by scientific advice.

To the founders of the modern American hunt, frivolous killing could not be ethical, let alone sporting. Drawing on biblical codes of morality, they declared that the role of hunting was to feed a young nation and—in Roosevelt’s phrase—“to keep men hardy, so that at need they can show themselves fit to take part in work or strife for their native land.”

It is as well that Roosevelt never saw a modern hunting superstore. These are crammed with technology designed to let even the idlest woodsman bag a large animal. True, there are nods to the prosaic business of turning a deer into a freezer-full of venison. But despite the old injunction against extravagance, the real action is in trophies—in the slaying of mighty bucks with 10- or 12-point racks of antlers, or of predators large enough to be skinned and hung on the wall of a basement man-cave. On every aisle there are products endorsed by stars from TV hunting shows, big men with imposing facial hair and far-off gazes, with record-breaking animals dead at their feet.

Stores sell high-powered rifles that can be mastered by a novice within a day: thanks to telescopic sights and a handy gun-rest, your correspondent, a classic urban duffer, hit a bullseye with a deer gun on his second shot. They offer laser sights that paint an assassin’s red dot on distant prey, rangefinders that work at 1,000 metres and night-vision scopes so advanced that they are covered by federal arms-export restrictions. There are hand-held GPS units for hunters who get lost, carbon-lined camouflage clothes to trap human scents and baits that promise to attract the largest deer. If that still feels like too much work, hunters can buy electronic calls and life-size decoys to bring animals into range (an extra $49.99 buys a motorised tail, which can be told either to twitch or wag).

Purists have lost a fight over the ethics of shooting from fixed tree stands. Hunters with access to private land now typically leave several of these platforms bolted permanently to trees, allowing them to whack unsuspecting animals from six or seven metres up. The priciest are topped with well-padded seats with footrests and safety rails, and resemble a toddler’s high chair reached by a fireman’s ladder; a popular trend is for heated seat cushions and overhead canopies in case of rain. Another boom involves motion-activated digital trail cameras. These are left strapped to trees, at $100 or $200 each. By collecting their digital cards before a hunt, sportsmen can survey the area without the chore of long scouting trips. A subculture has arisen of trail-camera pictures: hunters brood, Captain Ahab-like, over an especially fine buck snapped in their woods.

The ladies all hollered

American spending on hunting trips, weapons and gadgetry has soared to $33.7 billion a year, according to the latest census data, up from $25.5 billion in 2006. But this torrent of cash comes with a catch. The number of individual Americans buying hunting licences—especially the most common, for deer-hunting with a gun—has been in long-term decline for a decade.

The greying of the baby-boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, helps explain the paradox of a market that is shrinking yet growing more profitable. Boomers have made up the biggest single cohort of hunters in American history. They grew up in a golden age for field sports. Conservation schemes built up wildlife populations, post-war prosperity generated jobs with decent salaries and time off, cars were plentiful and new highways opened up the country. The generation is still active: a third of all hunters are over 55, according to census data. And they are willing to dig deep to maintain their hobby. Sales of ground blinds—some of them quite elaborate affairs, resembling camouflaged garden sheds—are rising as boomers lose their taste for climbing trees.

But overall, a pastime dominated by older, white, rural men is on the wrong side of demographic forces upending so many aspects of American life, from pop culture to politics. And it is not just grey hair that worries those in charge of the sport.

Wisconsin, a hunting-mad corner of the Midwest, makes a good case study. Wildlife officials there joke that folk in their state revere God, the Green Bay Packers football team and deer-hunting, and not necessarily in that order. At the peak of the season, on the weekend before Thanksgiving, 100,000 white-tailed deer may be killed in Wisconsin’s woods. The state offers ponds thick with duck, soft southern dairylands full of game, and—in the north—wilder woods where bear and wolves prowl.

Yet even in Wisconsin there has been a 10% drop in licences to hunt deer with guns since numbers peaked in 2000. Worse is to come. A recent state-sponsored demographic analysis predicts a 27% fall in gun-licence sales over the next 20 years.

The trend that most troubles Wisconsin officials is a sharp loss of interest among middle-aged, male deer-hunters. They used to be the bedrock of hunting, recruiting their children into the sport and heading into the woods for an annual “deer camp” in autumn: they would meet up with fathers, brothers and cousins for a week of shooting, beer-drinking, card-games and tall tales round the campfire. In 2012 the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) commissioned an academic study of Wisconsin hunters who had stopped buying gun licences, involving thousands of questionnaires and multiple focus groups. Behind its unpromising title—“Why fewer middle-aged gun-deer hunters bought licences in 2010 and 2011”—lurks a novella’s worth of familial angst and male soul-searching.

A divorced father sees his children every other weekend: he is not about to park them with a babysitter just to go hunting. The economic and social power of wives is much discussed: the days are gone when men could head to the woods for a week without a qualm, confident in their supreme authority as breadwinners. The anonymous quotes ring with hurt, guilt and bafflement: the sound of men struggling with a world that has turned maddeningly complex and touchy-feely. Hunters describe Chekhovian family rows—pitting young against old, insiders against newly arrived in-laws—over who got to shoot which deer, one mournfully reporting that at the end, “The ladies all hollered at me.”

The DNR’s Kevin Wallenfang cites another factor: the TV-driven mania for giant antlers, which has raised expectations and made hunters covetous. “Big antlers make people crazy,” he says. “We call it ‘horn porn’.” When a big male is spotted, some landowners stop admitting outsiders to their woods; everybody worries about pushing prized animals onto a neighbour’s land; deer are moved around less, so hunters see fewer animals.

The response from much of the industry, as well as from pro-gun lobby groups such as the National Rifle Association (NRA), is simple. Their plans to save hunting rely on more technology and more firepower: after NRA lobbying, deer-hunters may now use such things as silencers and handguns in many states.

But an opposite approach is gaining ground. In several important hunting states, a counter-movement is under way towards simpler, even primitive forms of field sports, with a Rooseveltian focus on all that is strenuous, challenging and unfrivolous.

In Madison, Wisconsin’s capital and a hotbed of Subaru-driving, kale-munching liberalism, the DNR runs “hunting for sustainability” schemes aimed at members of the “locavore” or local-food movement, promoting an urban version of an old idea: killing to eat, and eating what you kill. Neal Kedzie, a Republican who chairs the Wisconsin state Senate committee that oversees hunting, approves. As a boy a half-century ago, stepping off his rural school bus, Mr Kedzie would grab a gun, head into the surrounding country and hunt until dusk. His grandparents, cheesemakers like so many rural Wisconsinites, had no electricity supply until after the second world war, and would shoot and preserve their own meat. “Things go full circle,” he observes.

The waiting game

The greatest success of the primitivist movement features an even older tradition: hunting with a bow and arrow. To understand its appeal, your correspondent joined Mike Brust, a retired credit manager and president of the Wisconsin Bowhunters’ Association, on a trip into the woods near Wausau, Wisconsin.

The route to his hunting ground passes farmhouses and red-painted barns straight from a children’s book. But as the truck leaves the road, bumping onto a rougher track, it seems to cross an invisible line into the wild woods. There is the creek where wolves gather and howl (Wisconsin wolves have been known to kill hunters’ dogs). Here is the log on which Mr Brust watched a bobcat stalk and devour a squirrel, oblivious to his presence. Fresh bear droppings smatter a central clearing as Mr Brust and his guest, clad in head-to-toe camouflage, climb up trees some 20 metres apart. Talking is not encouraged. The vigil begins.

It is quite an odd business. After an hour or so of sitting silently in a tree, stock-still, the heart pounds at the sight of a squirrel, or the song of a sparrow. In general deer are not rare animals: they frequently pop into Mr Brust’s backyard at home, where they nibble his shrubs with impunity, Mrs Brust having declared the garden a sanctuary. But here they assume a sort of fantastical stature. Every leaf-crackle or twig-snap might be a deer—but is not. It is hard for a guest to know what to do, other than gaze about helpfully and keep quiet, in a form of stylitic meditation. Heavy rain rather precludes bowhunting, it is a relief to hear. Deer can run quite a long way with an arrow in them: rain prevents a hunter from following blood trails to the place where the animal drops.

It is possible that a bear might turn up. It would not be shot: bear permits are distributed by lottery and are strictly enforced. A bear does not turn up.

At length a faint creaking sound reveals Mr Brust packing up and climbing to the ground. “That rustling a while ago, was that a deer?” he asks mildly. No, The Economist informs him. Oh, he says, apparently quite content. Archery is about the experience more than it is about killing animals, he explains. Even at the height of the bowhunting season, when lust-befuddled bucks seek out mates during the autumn rut, Mr Brust may see only a single deer in a day.

Ishi’s way

American bowhunting traces its modern roots back to Ishi, who was declared the last uncontacted Indian in North America when he emerged, alone and half-starving, from remote hills in California in 1911. Ishi (meaning “man” in his language: tradition frowned on revealing real names) was taken to live at the University of California’s anthropology museum. He taught Indian bow- and arrow-making, his “noiseless step” and other stalking techniques to a clutch of enthusiasts led by his doctor, Saxton Pope, before dying of tuberculosis in 1916.

Bowhunting traces its roots to Ishi, who emerged, alone and half-starving, from remote hills in California

After trundling along for some decades, archery made a technological leap in the late 1960s with the invention of the “compound bow”. These use pulleys and levers to reduce greatly the force needed to hold a bow at full draw, making it possible to aim without a lot of agonised wobbling. They prompt sniffs from hardline “Trad Guys”, who like to debate the merits of centuries-old longbow designs and knap their own flint arrowheads. But compound bows are not so much easy to use as more efficient, offering higher arrow-speeds to the relatively scrawny. Many months of practice are still required to become proficient. Even experienced hunters must be within 20 or 30 metres of an animal to take a clean shot (a point that anti-hunting types stress, denouncing archery as cruel and too likely to wound but not kill). Handed his first compound bow, your correspondent struggled to hit a target five metres away.

Recently archery has been popularised by “The Hunger Games” books and films—dystopian fantasies about a future in which young people, among them a winsome female archer, Katniss, are forced to hunt one another. The overall result is that, even as gun-licence sales decline, bowhunting is breaking records.

Archery was a marginal activity 40 years ago, taking fewer than 10,000 deer annually in Wisconsin (it was then reckoned to take the average archer six to seven years to kill his first deer). In 2012 more than a quarter of a million Wisconsin bowhunters killed nearly 100,000 deer, as well as 770 black bears. For comparison, about 630,000 bought gun licences.

Bowhunting is an escape from the “craziness of the world”, suggests Matt McPherson, founder and CEO of Mathews, the world’s largest bow-maker, based in Sparta, Wisconsin. His firm turns out nearly 300,000 bows a year; the top models—scary machines carved out of aluminium and finished with a camouflage coating—sell for as much as $1,000. Alongside profit the firm has a mission to restore rigour and self-discipline to America, one archer at a time. With modern rifles, “you can shoot dimes all day at 100 yards,” Mr McPherson sniffs. “That is not very much of a challenge.” A man of vocally conservative Christian views, he supports youth archery schemes that train more than two million children a year. One, Centershot Ministries, is based in churches and combines archery with Bible studies: there is much emphasis on straight shooting, and sin as a missing of the mark.

The pastime appeals to a certain sort. Paul Ryan, the Republican vice-presidential nominee in 2012, is a Wisconsin congressman and devoted to hunting deer with a bow. The Secret Service code-named him “Bowhunter” during the campaign, a moniker that matches his cultivated image as a fierce spending hawk and fitness-fanatic. Alongside meditation and self-discipline, bowhunting in Wisconsin does offer more practical advantages. Archery’s deer season is long, lasting more than three months and including many mild, fine autumn days. The main gun-hunting season for deer lasts just nine days in late November—guaranteeing both crowded woods and frigid temperatures.

But archery is now drawing the attention of the same commercial interests that dominate gun-hunting. In state after state, manufacturers and pro-gun lobbies have called for archery seasons to be opened to crossbows: weapons with gun-like stocks, sights and triggers, which require little training. Taking a break from its usual work of fighting gun controls, the NRA pushed hard in 2013 for Wisconsin to loosen its rules on crossbows, which previously were reserved for use by the disabled or over 65s. Many bowhunters fear that crossbows will kill a lot of deer, provoking gun-hunters to demand that the languorous bowhunting seasons be shortened.

In the crosshairs

The Pope and Young Club (named for two of Ishi’s archery students), which keeps bowhunting’s record books and issues its rules of fair chase, calls crossbows “a serious threat to the future of bowhunting”. It sternly discourages such innovations as electronic rangefinders mounted on conventional bows, deeming such gadgets unsporting. But the purists are under pressure.

Crossbows will be legal in Wisconsin in the 2014 hunting season. Lobbying by the NRA was decisive, says Terry Moulton, a Republican state senator who owns Mouldy’s Archery and Tackle, in the west of the state. After consulting dealers in states that have legalised crossbow-hunting, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, Mr Moulton predicts a period of surging crossbow sales, matched by a slump for conventional bows. (After three years of liberalisation, Michigan has 119,000 crossbow-hunters.) In the longer term Mr Moulton worries that crossbows appeal to those seeking instant gratification. Once the initial rush is over, what then?

“The argument is that crossbows will get more kids into the sport, more women into the sport,” Mr Moulton says. “My own opinion is that many in the NRA would like to hunt in the longer season with a weapon like a gun,” he says. Mr Brust tried out a crossbow and found it dismayingly easy. “If you had a golf club that could shoot the ball from the tee onto the green every time, would that be good or bad for golf?” he asks.

American hunting has thrived because it shuns the elitism and snobberies of the Old World. With each passing year, market forces have delivered weapons and gadgets that allow anyone to play Teddy Roosevelt, big-game hunter, further democratising the hunt. Yet to advocates of primitive hunting, those same forces—faster, easier, bigger—weaken the sport’s Rooseveltian values, and help explain its slow decline. Thanks to bowhunting, recent trends have been on the primitivists’ side. The juggernaut of commerce is now catching up. A very American contest looms.