You might consider me a pretty straight-edged guy.

I wear button-up shirts to work tucked into my pants and I need my morning double-double if I ever hope to get out of bed.

I put on what my co-workers affectionately call hipster Ray-Ban glasses.

Like you, I live for the weekend.

But once the first whiff of November wafts around the corner, everything changes.

Hunting season is here, and like the Siren’s song, I can’t resist it.

Overnight, the thin veneer of corporate responsibility I’ve cloaked myself in all year long sheds away like a python’s skin.

I trade my H&M skinny jeans for baggy camouflage pants with far too many pockets.

For two weeks, I forget I even own deodorant; deer can smell it for miles.

I stay up at night making little piles in the basement — my compass, shotgun shells, touque and gloves.

Only the essentials are coming with me.

I convince myself waking up at 4:30 a.m. to crunch through frost-bitten grass and climb up into a tree for five hours is a genius plan.

It’s a lifestyle that clashes so distinctly with urban living.

Hunting is part of the great divide — it pits rural living against downtown dwelling.

The average mocha-sipping, power suit-wearing men and women living in the core scoff at the hobby.

“How could you kill Bambi?” they ask. “It’s so primal, so animalistic.”

But on the flip side, longtime farmers and landowners on Ottawa’s outskirts sigh and shrug their shoulders at their indifference.

I’ll be the first to admit very few people need to hunt to survive.

Hunting is a throwback to a long-extinct era, when men went out in packs to find meat for their families while the women collected herbs.

Society has come a long way from that, and it’s only a good thing.

But nor can we ignore the fact that nearly all of our food is a farce.

Genetically modified, infused with salt and MSG, shrink-wrapped and shipped to your local supermarket. Where’s the sense in that?

Most are happy to turn up their noses at hunting, shrug it off as boys being boys (when in fact more women are joining the fold every year) and go on eating meat whose origins they haven’t a clue.

Likely raised in an enclosure two times too small, surrounded by thousands of beasts in its exact predicament.

At least when I hunt, and I bring something home, fry it up, put it in a soup or lather it in sauce on the BBQ, I know where it came from.

I know it was felled by my hand in its natural habitat.

That we are repulsed by that, shy away from it, shows a lot about our culture.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an exhibitionist.

Hunters I know take no pleasure in strapping a dead deer carcass to their roof and guffawing at the looks of shock and disapproval they get driving past non-hunters.

Nor are we Duck Dynasty cast-offs, blasting away on our shotguns like drunken buffoons.

We have a meticulous appreciation for the law, gun control and hunting safety, and any hunter who doesn’t tarnishes our good name and should be persecuted to the full extent of the law.

All we ask as hunters is an open mind.

Listen to my point of view, and if you respectfully disagree, I’ll have appreciated the discussion.

I’m not here to convert anyone.

Hunting is a passion, an infrequent distraction from ordinary life.

Don’t destroy it with ignorance.

mike.aubry@sunmedia.ca

Twitter: @ottawasunmaubry

BY THE NUMBERS