Nature and its confusion

By the time I was a sophomore in high school, my friend and I have spent the last three years studying martial arts and exploring the woods. We practiced archery extensively on a small lightweight bow. On an especially odd summer day, after a session, we wondered what to do, and oddly enough we saw rabbit poop. So as a result, we looked at each other and said, “we are going hunting”.
Nevermind that such an activity is illegal in New Jersey, nevermind we weren’t acting rational, for some reason, the only thing in our mind was that “I want to hunt a rabbit”.
I’ve gotten this feeling before, where I wanted to hunt something, not for the pleasure of killing, but for literally the idea that I wanted to hunt and eat whatever I got. As weird as that idea is, it was the mode that I had as I went into the woods near my local pond. We brought along with water our little tiny bow, a hiking stick and set of katana with us, for some reason thinking they would be necessary. As we immersed ourselves into the woods, going deeper than we’ve ever done before. Looking around the trees, crossing thorned bushes, ducking underneath thick brush overhead, going across streams, we went into a different world.
Everything about the journey seemed to exist within the thick air that our skin touched, humid, dense and intense. What was a journey to find rabbits (stupidly inside the woods) became a journey to figure out where we were and what we were experiencing. As we began to comprehend that, we ran into what seemed like a tool of fate.
As we crossed the stream, we ran into two deer. Immediately my heart began to race. In what seemed like an hour, I moved my bag down and got out my bow. Edging in closer and closer, my thought process started wavering. While half of me still wanted to hunt and eat these deer, the other half of me wondered why I would want to hurt them in the first place. As I faced this battle of conscience, I still moved forward inch by inch. Every time I made a movement, the deer would freeze and look towards me, and I in turn would freeze until they put their head down. This game continued for a long time, and during that duration I ended up realizing I had no desire to hunt the animals anymore. However, when they stuck with their gut feeling and ran away, we chased them until they were far gone. Ironically, we found the same droppings we saw back at my backyard. So it was deer poop then, which is odd considering there are never deer in my house.
I guess when I think about that time and my relation to my environmental studies, I realize that those two sides of me conflict because while I may have those urges, where I was at the time, in the middle of a small piece of woodlands in the middle of an artificial suburbs, there’s no incentive to eat anything but processed foods, and hence this instinct if it is one, is sadly out of place and unnecessary.
As for saving nature, the fact that I don’t really know what nature is, because my environment is completely human sculpted, I want to save it, because the more I live in this planet, the more I feel like I’m living out a science fiction movie, where everything seems fake and eventually, dystopian.