HH: In the book, you travel to Colorado to hunt cow elk. Was that really your first big game hunting experience?
Sheridan: It really was. I tried to bring the city slickers’ eye to something you guys already know so well. It opened up a whole new world to me. I had never imagined that there was so much to know, or that hunting could be so powerful. I wrote about being a sailor, and seeing those dolphins at the bow of the ship, and you know they are at home in this huge other world, below you and all around you. Seeing them connects you to something so much larger than yourself, and seeing and hunting those elk does the same thing.

And there’s the irrevocable nature of killing something. Either you get the animal or it gets away. What I found in hunting was what originally drew me to fighting. All the talk is nothing. You tell me how skilled you are. It means nothing. The only thing that means anything is can you do it, or not?

HH: Did all the shooting and tactical training you did help you with the hunting?
Sheridan: The shooting I had done with Tiger was absolutely critical.  When I was younger, I hated high-stress situations.  That’s part of what I’ve worked on for years, putting myself under stress, inoculating myself against stress by learning the skills to deal with whatever situation it is.  On that elk hunt, I did not feel the stress that I expected. I made mistakes, and I did not know enough, but all the shooting I had done either gave me the ability to override the stress, or not feel it as strongly. I made the shot when the time came.

And you asked me about how much shooting I’d done in my life before this. I’d shot maybe ten times. My dad was a Navy SEAL, and he taught me the basics when I was a kid, mostly just the safety aspects. When I got to Tiger’s I started from scratch. Three weeks and 2,000 rounds or so later, I felt like I was starting to understand it. That training was so intense, the repetition, the heat, all that effort and concentration, day after day. I would drive back to my motel room and just lie down and sleep until I had to get up and do it again.

HH: I’d really like to talk about your traveling in the Arctic with the Inuit—it’s one of my favorite parts of the book—but I know you are busy. Can I just ask you if you have a new project in mind?
Sheridan: My next book is about hunting, and so is a lot of what I want to do next in my life. I have discovered something that I did not know existed when I began the research for the Diaries.  Hunting is what men have done forever, living outside, watching animals, reading the weather, all the complexity of a hunting life. 10,000 years or less of farming and living in cities has changed us, maybe, but everything up to that point, all our history, was hunting.  To tap into that is to tap into something vast. Most people who read Field and Stream already know that, but for me it was new, and I want to follow it.