The "great ape" thing is just wild speculation on our part-- we haven't got an example to study in a lab setting. Not much can be said definitively about an animal, if it hasn't been properly examined by experts.
I personally don't know anybody around here who overestimates game animals. Everyone I talk to here thinks their prey is "dumber" than it really is (underestimation). Overestimation of the quarry just means to me that the hunter leaves no stone unturned in his persuit. They wear expensive commercial camo, use fancy new rifles in wierd magnum calibers and expensive scopes/binoculars, they use laser range finders instead of guestimation, and when they score with their X Zone premium tags, they hire horsepackers to retrieve their animal. Recent California big game regs have banned the use of manned or unmanned surveillance drones! In short, overestimators stack the deck so far in their own favor, that the animal has very little sporting chance of surviving an encounter with a hunter. Jose Ortega y Gasset in his book
Meditations on Hunting discusses this sporting balancing act. I think every hunter needs a copy of this classic work.
Further, I simply won't concede the point that he can see in the dark like a cat. Lots of animals are somewhat nocturnal. Eyeshine is a good indicator of this ability. I don't really want to go further into this. You should just believe what you want. Yes, I have a basis for my belief, which I won't go into here. I'm not ready to talk about it, yet.
In terms of the Colorado elk hunters and their "bad feeling"... This is an interesting subject which is seldom covered in hunting literature. In this vein, I happened to be at a work barbecue, talking to a Viet Nam veteran who had become a college professor. As we ran the grill together, he mentioned to me that he served in the infantry there.
Over lite beer, he mentioned that once they selected him as Point Man, they made this job permanent, since he demonstrated a knack for it. "You know, no squad I scouted for was ever ambushed(!)" he mentioned to me.
"How was that," I asked.
"Well, anytime I looked at the terrain ahead and got a bad feeling, I just went around it, or avoided it. So, they never got us," he replied.
This conversation made some things make sense to me, that I had experienced over the years, backpacking in the hunting fields. I suppose this tidbit began to help me understand what it is to be fully aware in the wild places. I don't think we need to invoke metaphysics or the supernatural to explain his interesting and useful abillity of his to avoid ambushes. It may be that he subconsciously noticed faces peering at them from the leafy jungle, or that something was out of place in the terrain, or possibly a faint smell, or half heard quiet little sounds of enemy fidgeters. I'm not ready to explain his ability by defaulting to mystical pseudo science explanations, but I don't know enough to completely discount them, either. At this point, I just find them uncompelling [because I can't explain the mechanism with naturalistic methods]. Were you ever bone tired and looking at something you were working with and you said to yourself, "somethings not right with this, but I can't figure out what it is." That might be your subconscious trying to make its opinions known to the conscious mind.
I've walked into bits of forest and had a bad feeling, myself. I'm willing to say that I no longer ignore or rationalize this feeling away. Just because the people who have it cannot explain it, doesn't mean it (this unexplained sense) is not legitimate. Gavin DeBecker delves into this area in his book
The Gift of Fear. I don't know if everybody has this ability, but I somehow got my hands on it, after a few decades of hunting. I suppose when people in war are actively sneaking around trying to kill you, you develop the ability at an accelerated rate, just out of pure survival. "Nothing concentrates the mind, like the prospect of your own hanging the next morning."
Here's a good recent vignette for you people:
Two weeks ago, I took my Chessadors out to Indian Wells Canyon, in persuit of chukkars. We drove into the canyon as far as the chain link fence of the tiny weather station. Somebody else had beaten us to the gentle closed off mine roads which climb the southern wall in a zigzag. So, we instead went straight up the southern canyon wall. Not a very fun way up to the chukkars, but also unused and effective-- so be it.
We climbed a few thousand feet up the steep, loose wall, so that we hit either the Pacific Crest Trail, or a feeder trail for it. I was so winded by this time, that I couldn't retain what a few scant signs told me. (so what, get on with it!)
Well, it's early season for the PCT, so there was almost no hiker traffic on it, and NO hunter traffic on it. We headed West on it, rounded a corner at 7K' and stood looking at an extra steep portion of scrubby oak forest overlooking and overlapping the trail. Here's the good part:
I had a bad feeling upon viewing this portion of the trail ahead of me. However, in keeping with the spirit of skepticism, I suppressed this feeling, and said nothing to my dogs. We then proceeded up this trail, in pursuit of chukkars. Just as we get to the bend in the trail that's giving me the bad feeling, my hunting dogs stop and point uphill. Clearly, there's something hiding in ambush just uphill of the trail [probably waiting for lunch to go walking by]. My hunting dogs either heard, saw or smelled something waiting there, long after I just glanced at the terrain from almost 200 yards, and got a bad feeling.
So how did I know in advance?! I state from the outset, that I consciously neither saw, heard or smelled anything.
Did I subconsciously notice something, and the only way my subconscious could communicate with my conscious, is with a "bad feeling".
Psychic power? Eh, I guess I just don't buy that.
Did it just look like a likely ambush spot for predators to spring on game? This is the best naturalistic explanation.
So, how did I "know" something was up, before a couple of young hunting dogs could? They didn't alert till we were almost on it's position, but then alerted strongly. They seemed a bit reluctant to charge into the Oak thicket and flush whatever was lurking in there. For my part, I don't blame them, and as the full import of the situation began to dawn on me, I did at least think to recall them, and retreat.
I cannot define the exact mechanism for this impression/ability, but that doesn't mean that it isn't real, or valid. I have experimental proof that it at least sometimes operates.
So, not wanting to find out the hard way what was hiding in the oak thicket, I recalled my dogs, and we retreated almost 200 yards back down the narrow trail. At this point, I'm still basically wavering in and out of denial, and so we stop for lunch. This involves spreading my poncho out on the trail and pouring a small pile of Iams kibbles onto it. As we're eating, Blackie keeps pausing and looking back up the trail, like something is up there, moving around to attract his attention. He stared fixedly a few times, and even woofed a couple of times. I don't recall the other dog saying anything. The thing is, when we're hunting, these dogs don't bark, and they never bark at birds.
As we hurridly ate, Blackie is reacting more and more to the place we just retreated from, like whatever it is has seen us, and is creeping over towards us. I'm not seeing anything. At this point, my attitude is "damn, we've got to get out of here.
I don't want to find out what's over there. And it seems from my retriever's demeanor that it's getting closer."
Whatever it was, it wasn't game birds. We didn't force the issue. Whether cat, bear or bogeyman, we didn't want any of it.
So, again I ask another question, am I the only one who pays any attention when he gets a really bad feeling about some thicket or terrain feature?
I was frightened to get confirmation from my hunting dogs that I was right.
I would just like to say, that in no way do I compare myself to our veterans. It's just that he was the only other guy I ever talked to, who had this same "ability".
