So why does Gr’Zl pursue Syr’Nj, if he’s not really into women? Well, he doesn’t understand that he’s gay, and he does like the idea of being married off, having a girl who loves him and a girl he loves. So even though he finds himself strangely unmotivated about certain aspects of that fantasy, he’s going to go through the motions. And chasing is pretty much like hunting, so these are “motions” he actually enjoys.

Not to blame the victim here, but walking away was a misinformed strategy on Syr’Nj’s part. Had she tried to bore him with talk of her books or “woman things,” she might’ve eventually overcome his tendency to interrupt enough to dull his interest. But she couldn’t have known that.

This passage is based strongly on the following quote from Jose Ortega y Gasset’s Meditations on Hunting:

One does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted. If one were to present the sportsman with the death of the animal as a gift he would refuse it. What he is after is having to win it, to conquer the surly brute through his own effort and skill with all the extras that this carries with it: the immersion in the countryside, the healthfulness of the exercise, the distraction from his job.