The Mindful Carnivore (18 page)

Once, walking along a woods trail near Bird Cottage, Cath and I found a tuft of downy feathers.
Turkey
, I thought,
or grouse
. A few yards farther on, we found another tuft. Then another. Wondering what happened there—what story those clumps of down told—I thought of Chickasaw poet and environmentalist Linda Hogan’s essay “The Feathers.” For years, Hogan had prayed for a feather from a living eagle. One morning she woke from a dream, saw a golden eagle flying toward her window, and ran outside. There, at the edge of the dirt road, lay a feather.

For no reason I can recall, Cath and I turned off the trail at a small brook. Upstream a short distance, we found another downy tuft and I thought of what Hogan had written about the mysterious forces at work in nature, what she called “simple powers, strange and real.” If I ever emerged from the uncertain landscape of agnosticism, it would be as an animist: a movement not out of wilderness, but into it. How, Hogan asked, did the feather arrive just there, at the edge of the road by her house, just before she awoke from dream time?

I looked up, again for no reason I can think of. There, a few feet above my head, cradled by the branch of an evergreen, rested a single feather, russet with a black band and narrow strip of white at the tip. Red-tailed hawk. With a stick, I jostled the feather free and caught it in midair.

To account for such occurrences—even to grapple with the simple fact of being a conscious creature, alive in a world of simultaneous beauty and horror, where death feeds life in a constant, complex flow of calories and nutrients—I needed something more than logic, something more than emotion. Despite my allergy to it, was “religion” such a bad word for that something?

The word’s ancient meanings are debated. Some contend that it comes from
religare
—meaning to rebind or reconnect—“lig” stemming from the same root as “ligament.” Others suggest that it comes from
relegio
(reread),
relegere
(reconsider carefully), or
reslegere
(gather). In these times of alienation, of forgotten connections with nature, what could be more healing than a rebinding with the larger-than-human world, a rereading and reconsideration of our place within it? “For too long we have been away somewhere,” the late Thomas Berry reminded us, “entranced with our industrial world of wires and wheels, concrete and steel, and our unending highways, where we race back and forth in continual frenzy.”

If engaging with the sources of our bodily sustenance helped return our attention to the earth, why should not hunting be part of our rebinding and reconsideration? For some hunters, I knew that the hunt was a kind of Sabbath. In one e-mail, Uncle Mark had described it as “a time to listen to my senses and really
look
at what is there and slow down from our frenzied way of life.” Time spent hunting, like time spent in the garden, was never wasted. And wild meat, like freshly plucked tomatoes and basil, was a kind of sacrament. Again, Uncle Mark: “I look at a deer as a great gift from the Higher Power and always give thanks when I manage to kill a whitetail.”

In the back of my mind, a critical voice remained wary of the hunt as a path to communion. Some hunters might indeed resemble Kheel’s “holy hunter”—reveling in the power to inflict pain and death, disguising it by speaking of earth and animals in soulful terms. Yet I wasn’t at all certain that such clever sadists were found any more frequently among hunters than among the general population.

Listening to Sue Morse talk, or reading Uncle Mark’s e-mails, I could not imagine that their words concealed a secret bloodlust. Their honest attempts to say why they hunted might be unintelligible to people who only ate food from Stop-n-Shop, prepackaged and prekilled, but their respect for nature was no mask.

Their compassion for animals and their concern for the health of the planet were undeniable. They, and others like them, chose hunting as a way of living in accord with the earth. They took to woods and fields, as Stange writes, “for the same inner reasons they always have: for food, of course, but also for connection, and for knowledge about what it means to be human in our complex and increasingly fragile world.”

One week in late October when Cath was out of town, I thawed a hunk of moose steak, a gift from a local hunter. My first attempt at cooking and eating a chunk of wild meat seemed like an oddly private thing. If I was serious about going after meat on the hoof, I had to consider not only philosophical questions, but a practical one as well: How would it feel to cook and eat the flesh of a wild mammal?

After years of veganism, chicken and fish had seemed strange enough. Handling their flesh, I was intensely aware of their origins as living beings. Some of the chickens were ones I had seen pecking away in a friend’s grassy yard. Some of the fish were ones I had caught and killed. Once they had been reduced to food, though, I didn’t dwell on them as individual creatures.

Moose was different. Under my hand, the cool, firm muscle felt odd as I sliced. I sautéed it in a cast-iron skillet and made a creamy sauce with onions and mushrooms. The first bite felt strange, the flavor only distantly familiar. And there was more to it than just the texture and taste of red meat. With a piece of moose between my teeth, the huge, dark animal stood there, vivid in my imagination. Perhaps my awareness of the individual creature stemmed from his sheer size. Perhaps it stemmed from my categorization of moose as part of the local landscape, but—unlike cows or pigs—not part of the modern American diet. With the moose in mind, I took his body into mine uneasily, aware that I was in nutritional relationships not just with mammals in general, but with this one in particular.

A night or two later, I sat down to the leftovers and found that the strangeness was gone. The flesh went down easily, tasting rich and good.

The next week, when I thawed another package the hunter had given me and prepared a venison scaloppine, Cath nodded her approval as well.

By late that fall, two months after completing the hunter-education course, I was seeing the land with new eyes. I noticed game trails with keener interest. When I crossed bobcat tracks—an early-season snow showing a round paw and the feline’s tell-tale leading toe, much like my own middle finger—I was just a curious conservationist, hopeful for the cat’s future in the region. But when I found sign of deer or hare, I became hungrily attentive to details and patterns. Mark had been sending me articles on tracking whitetails and when I came across fresh scrapes—patches where a recent dusting of snow had been disturbed and the leaves beneath pawed up—I looked to see where the buck was headed.

I dug around in a bottom drawer and came up with the well-worn belt mark had Made for me twenty-five years earlier, the leather band encircled by arrows. When he first gave it to me, I had to punch extra holes to snug it around my small hips. Now it was too short. I mentioned it to Mark and asked him for suggestions on how to make a new one for the big brass buckle.

A couple days before Christmas, a cardboard box arrived in the mail. Inside were a deer call and a new belt, decorated with arrows like the old one, but narrower and with its own buckle of polished deer antler bearing the scrimshawed image of a flint arrowhead Mark had scratched there years before. The belt went around my waist right away.

Also in the box was an old hunting knife Mark had found amidst his basement’s bewildering array of tackle and gear. It was secured in a heavy-duty sheath he had crafted for me, a red buck on its front, black deer tracks hidden by the haft. I felt certain the knife would bring me luck.

A week into the new year, I went looking for hare tracks. An inch of fresh powder had fallen overnight, with an extra dusting in the morning. In the woods a quarter mile from home, I found fresh squirrel sign, what might have been old coyote prints, and some old deer tracks, now partially filled holes in the deep snow. I saw one spot where a grouse had roosted: a branch almost devoid of snow and, below it, curved brown droppings the thickness of a pencil. Still hopeful, I headed for a big fallen aspen where, a few weeks before, I had found several snowshoe-hare trails converging. The hares had, it seemed, been taking shelter in a gap under the trunk, safe from the predatory eyes of owls. Today, though, no tracks.

I headed home and, on a whim, checked the woods just to the other side of the house. There I found a set of hare prints, big rear feet set down ahead of the smaller front feet. Even under a thick canopy of spruce and balsam, the tracks were covered with a dusting of snow and could have been many hours old. But I decided to follow anyway. Maybe I would find another spot where hares were taking shelter.

In one stretch, the hare had meandered slowly, making little hops of a foot or so, stopping, changing directions. In the next stretch, it had covered ground rapidly, two and three yards between tracks. Rounding a small knoll, I noted where the animal had paused and stood to nibble the bud of a maple seedling, the toes of each rear foot clearly outlined.

The tracks led into a thick patch of softwood saplings and then, still on the same few acres, started heading roughly back the way I had come. When the tracks intersected and passed close by that same nibbled maple seedling, it occurred to me: I would have noticed this set of prints when I came through here five minutes ago. I leaned over to look more closely. Yes, the edges of the tracks were sharp. The trail was hot.

Not that I had any illusions about my chances of catching up to the creature whose delicate signs I followed. I was no coyote or bobcat. I was no tireless Kalahari tracker or stealthy latter-day Hawkeye. I was slow and loud, my clumsy booted feet propelling my gangly hundred-and-fifty-pound body along, my boots cracking the icy crust and, at every fifth or sixth step, breaking through with a startling crunch. No wild creature could fail to hear me coming, least of all a lagomorph with big, hypersensitive ears.

I slowed, stopped for a minute to survey the woods ahead, galumphed onward, and stopped to look again. I was staring straight ahead into the brushy, dead tangle of a fallen balsam top. And there crouched the hare, its dark eye staring back at me from fewer than ten yards away, confident in its wintry white-coated camouflage. We had come round to within a few dozen yards of where our paths first crossed. The .22 came up, the safety eased off, the sights steadied behind the hare’s eye.

Part of me took the shot and gutted the animal. Part of me watched, digesting the idea.

Seeing this living being transformed into meat, the stain of blood on snow, grief welled up inside. The feeling was stronger than anything I had ever felt in the act of catching or beheading fish. It wasn’t, I thought, just that I had numbed myself through repetition, through killing hundreds of fish over the years. Nor was my mind crowded with images of Thumper; I had, thankfully, been raised on a low-Disney diet. If anything, I would have thought of the rabbits of
Watership Down.
But Hazel, Fiver, and Bigwig weren’t haunting me either. No, there was something more basic at work here, some primal mammalian sympathy. Clumsily, I murmured a prayer of thanks and apology.

Hunting, I had felt compelled by the chase. But why had I killed? I had wanted to succeed in my first hunt, yes. But, having done so, did I need the meat from this particular warm, limp form? Clearly not. My body did not depend on this one for survival. What I did need was the honest confrontation, the reminder of what it means to eat. This one creature’s heart had stopped beating, but its flesh was far from lifeless. It would go on, not as bobcat or coyote or owl, but as human.

Cath had been out that afternoon. By the time she came in the front door, the meat was simmering on the stove top, a recipe Mark said he used for gray squirrel. Curious, Cath sniffed the air.

“What’s for dinner?”

9

Healing Ground

I go to Nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in tune once more.

—John Burroughs, “The Gospel of Nature”

W
illie said the doctors had caught his cancer early. There were no symptoms. It had just shown up during a routine exam and was still highly treatable. The surgery would be no problem. He told me he wasn’t worried.

In September, a couple weeks after his operation, Cath and I headed to the coast of southern Maine for a weekend getaway. Willie was tired, still regaining his strength, but said he felt up to seeing us. We picked him and Beth up, and drove over to one of their favorite restaurants in Portsmouth, crossing the Piscataqua not far from where it flows into the open Atlantic. Though tired—his affect softer than usual—Willie was in his usual “good humor and good spirits.”

At the restaurant, he ordered a pitcher of sangria for the table. I don’t remember what we ate. The food was good, but mattered little. What mattered was the warmth and laughter. Thinking back to that evening, I remember how it felt to sit there beside Willie, and a line of Longfellow’s comes to mind: “Ah, how good it feels! The hand of an old friend.”

I remember, too, the look in Willie’s eyes when he realized I had put one over on him. Toward the end of the meal, I had excused myself to go find the restroom. Walking past the waitress, I passed her my credit card without breaking stride. Later, when she brought the bill already charged, the master poker player looked at me sharply, the surprise on his face mixed with appreciation, not so much for the meal as for the move.

“That was smoothly done,” he said, laughing his high-pitched, full-chested chuckle.

We lingered over the meal until Willie’s eyes started losing focus, his heart still in the conversation but his body demanding rest.

“We’d better get you home,” I said, putting a hand on his shoulder.

Back at their place, we sat in the living room visiting a bit longer. Cath and Beth compared knitting and quilting projects. Willie sat on the couch, I on the floor. I had never thought of him as someone who needed to be taken care of. He was a joyful force of nature, a great rock and the river running round it. That deep strength remained, but now, in his fatigue, there was room for tenderness. Sitting on the carpet in front of the couch, I took off his socks and rubbed his tired feet.