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For many years, I was a vegetarian, an avid anti-hunter, who cursed the arrival of the orange-clad mob in the fall who violated everything that was pure and gentle. I was cheered on by many writers, including Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and Walt Whitman, who urged a gentle alliance with nature, not a violent blood sport.

I was also inspired by Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,”

“I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained…They do not sweat and whine about their condition….”

Amen.

But when I open up the pages of many nature writing books today I find another type of nature writing. Hunting is in, or one could say, hunting is back in vogue. After all, Hemingway made the stalk-and kill an art form through the fictional voice of the “great white hunter” in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and in “Death in the Afternoon,” a classic nonfiction text on the grace and “beauty” of bull fighting.

Even the late iconoclast Edward Abbey, his feisty prose a blistering mixture of redneck truisms and liberal taboos, was known to pick up the deer rifle along with the monkey wrench.

In a raucous speech titled “A Cowboy and his Cow” delivered at the University of Montana in 1985, Abbey said, “Sometimes we even went deer hunting with handguns. Mackie with his revolver, and me with a chrome-plated Colt .45 automatic I had liberated from the US Army over in Italy. Government surplus property.”

Now, while we won’t be seeing a wild game cookbook from Terry Tempest Williams or a manual on dressing out grizzly bears by Doug Peacock on Auntie’s bookshelves anytime soon, there is a trend afoot in the canyons of New York literary circles.

At the forefront of this trend is Ted Kerasote. The Wyoming writer pens the EcoWatch column for the magazine “Sports Afield,” the beacon of the nature writer/hunter that has included recent articles by Rick Bass on pheasant hunting and novelist Richard Ford on hunting with his wife Katrina. Kerasote’s new book of essays from Villard, “Heart of Home,” solidifies his place among the top nature writers in America. Kerasote has eloquently framed many of the hardest questions we can ask regarding our relationship to nature and our responsibility to the many plants, fish and animals with which we share this planet.

“Should the hunter who hunts a deer ten miles from his home be called a consumptive resource user, and his neighbor who flies ten thousand miles to Antarctica to watch penguins be termed a nonconsumptive user of the planet’s resources” Kerasote asks in the essay “A Talk About Ethics.” Hard questions such as this one are at the core of Kerasote’s talent. My own uneasiness in the answers make the asking all the more poignant.

Hunting is a reoccurring topic for Kerasote, a contributor to magazines like Audubon and Orion. His earlier book, “Bloodties,” which examined our culture’s relationship to hunting, helped spawn this new genre of literature within the nature writing canon. This includes the anthology “A Hunter’s Heart,” a collection of hunting-related writings, edited by Colorado writer David Petersen, that includes writers such as Terry Tempest Williams, Barry Lopez, and Jimmy Carter.

Perhaps the most unexpected addition to the literature is Mary Zeiss Stange’s book “Woman the Hunter,” which gives a much-needed voice to the two million women hunters in the United States.

Zeiss Stange writes, “It had begun to occur to me that unless I participated in some way, at the very least imaginatively, in procuring meat, I would feel impelled to give up eating it. I could not let the blood be on somebody else’s hands, the dirt under somebody else’s fingernails.”

Richard Nelson also explores new ground with his book “Heart and Blood, Living with Deer in America.” His reverence for deer is apparent, but he also accepts responsibility for their death as part of a cycle of life. “Death is the rain that fills the river of life inside us all…Nature is not fed by mercy.”

Kerasote himself has suffered many a barb from audiences for his unabashed love of the hunt. “If you are such a man, why don’t you just take a spear and go hunting with that?” challenged a woman during the author’s reading in Boulder last year. But no one writing today is more thoughtful, realistic and critical of hunting than Kerasote. And, unlike many of us lapsed vegetarians, Kerasote is an active participant in those deaths that sustain him. In “Knowing November,” the author sends a freshly killed elk’s spirit on its way with a song. “Fly on, fly on, you who feed us. You who scent our breath, who shape our limbs, who let us see. What can we say of this trade that is no trade?”

Although none of these writers could ever convert me to buy a rifle, or kill an elk, through their prose I’m beginning to comprehend how hunting is another form of connection to the natural world, and even, as odd at it might sound to this lifetime environmentalist, an important step toward preserving the best of what is wild.