The Mindful Carnivore (20 page)

I could tell Mark admired these two deer, yet I didn’t think he was exactly “proud” of them. I knew he didn’t hunt for trophies. When I first expressed interest in hunting, he told me that he had learned long ago not to rate deer by their weight or antlers. As far as he was concerned, every whitetail he took—big buck or small doe or anything in between—was a gift. If he didn’t appreciate it, then he didn’t deserve it.

When I asked, Mark told me that both of these bucks had simply come his way. He had killed the eight pointer many years ago, there on the Cape. The buck had come within a few yards of where Mark waited with his longbow. The larger nine pointer had been taken just five or six years ago, during a trip he and Jay made to New Hampshire. Mark had killed the animal with a single-shot black-powder pistol at close to forty yards. At the check-in station, people congratulated him again and again, oohing and ahhing over the deer. Mark was mortified: “They treated me like I’d sired the animal.”

Mark valued the buck mounts, I thought, not as proof of his hunting prowess, but as reminders of particular hunts and as symbols of the relationships he cherished—with deer in general, with the specific animals whose paths crossed his, with the land they shared. He must value them aesthetically, too. I wasn’t sure I would ever hang a deer mount in my own house—I thought of a line penned by hunter and author C. L. Rawlins, “those ranks of trophy heads on walls stare down at me like the jury in a capital case”—but I had to admit: Mark’s deer were beautiful.

All these things—the deer, the striped-bass mailbox, the photos and carvings of wildlife, the sculptures and paintings of fish—struck me as altarpieces. Mark had grown up Catholic, but rarely spoke of religion. To the degree that he followed one, I thought it must be rooted in a pantheon of wild creatures and wild places, symbolized by these objects: things he had found, things he had crafted by hand. Perhaps his path was akin to totemism, which French sociologist Émile Durkheim contended was religion’s most elemental form. What creatures might watch over Mark, I couldn’t be sure. But I would willingly hazard guesses at several species of fish, the owls he frequently carved, and the deer he stalked each fall.

When Mark had a loss to grieve, I imagined that he, too, must turn to water and woods. He had understood what a weekend of fishing would do for me, so soon after burying Willie.

That evening, we descended to the basement. The long, low, cave-like room—cluttered with outdoor paraphernalia—reminded me of the first time I walked into Mark’s room as a boy. Fishing rods were racked up on the walls alongside longbows, recurves, quivers, and arrows. Camo and blaze-orange clothing peeked out of boxes stacked up against coolers and tackle bags. On top of one box lay a leather satchel Mark took to the woods whenever he hunted with his muzzleloader. Tucked inside were lead roundballs, patches for seating the balls against a powder charge, a waterproof tin of firing caps, and a gorgeous powder horn, the tip plugged with a threaded stopper made of horn, the back end capped with a cross section of deer antler. Tethered to the powder horn was another piece of whitetail antler, one end hollowed out so that it held the exact measure of powder Mark used when hunting.

The workbench proffered tools, assorted hardware, rust preventative and lubricant sprays, spinning reels in various stages of repair, and lengths of wire leader for foiling the line-shearing teeth of bluefish. Above the bench hung a tool rack and above that, at the very top of the wall, hung the small skull plates and antlers of three whitetails Mark had killed there on Cape Cod: a spikehorn, a four point, and a five.

As we tinkered with fishing gear, we talked about deer. My first autumn of hunting whitetails was about to begin. I would hunt in Vermont first. Then, the week after Thanksgiving, when Vermont’s rifle season was over and Mark was back from his annual hunt with Jay in the Blue Ridge Mountains, I would return to the Cape. The first few days of Massachusetts firearm season, Mark and I would finally hunt together.

At dawn, Mark and I were back at the water’s edge. It being a Sunday, I recalled a story Beth had told me the day before Willie’s funeral. Four years earlier, Father Bernard, a friend of Beth’s from Mount Angel Abbey in Oregon, had come east to officiate at a friend’s wedding in Boston. After the Saturday wedding Mass, Willie and Beth brought the Benedictine monk to their place in southern Maine. On Sunday morning, Beth dropped off the two men at the bridge over Spruce Creek. When she returned an hour later, they were surrounded by a dozen or more anglers.

The men—accustomed to Willie’s friendly ways and the sixpack of root beer he typically brought along to share—had been curious about the unfamiliar octogenarian with the cane, the lawn chair, and the wraparound sunglasses. Hearing that he was a priest, they might have backpedaled, or started thinking up quick excuses for why they weren’t in church on Sunday. But Father Bernard told them all that they were just where God wanted them to be. They did not have to go to Mass. They were enjoying exactly what God would want for them that day.

By midmorning, Mark and I were both shivering under our windbreakers. A cold October wind had begun to blow, buffeting us where we stood among the rocks and along the adjoining bayside beach. The stripers had vanished entirely. Though Mark reeled in a fluke—a spotted, oblong pancake of a fish, also called summer flounder—and then a big bluefish, sleek and silvery and as long as my arm, I had no luck at all. Yet, thinking of Willie, I knew there was no other way I would have wanted to spend those hours.

10

Into the Woods

When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

—Aldo Leopold,
A Sand County Almanac

I
n theory, I was ready to hunt deer. Thanks to Uncle Mark, who patiently answered the barrage of questions I sent his way, I had the basic gear. I had a pair of warm camouflage pants and a warm camouflage jacket, to break up the visual outline of my body and prevent that body from freezing solid during long hours in the woods. I had a blaze-orange vest and hat to make me glow like a neon sign during firearms seasons—deer, fortunately, do not see the color the way we do.

I had a fanny pack ready to go. With guidance from the hunter-education manual and from articles I’d read, I had stuffed its pockets with odds and ends that might come in handy: a tiny flashlight to help me navigate the woods in the predawn and postdusk dark; a compass in case I got turned around out there; a miniature first-aid kit for minor incidents; an emergency whistle, space blanket, and fire-starting materials for major ones; a flexible wire saw and lengths of cord for various situations; a folding multitool; a rifle-cleaning rod that broke down into eight-inch sections; a sharpening stone for knife and broadheads; and a small bundle of toilet paper, in case nature called. My hunting and fishing license was tucked into a ziploc bag with one of the laminated cards from the funeral home—Willie’s face smiled up at me broadly. In the largest pocket was the hunting knife Mark had given me, plus instructions on how to gut a deer. (On a shelf in the basement, I even had a boning knife—a flexible blade not unlike a fillet knife—for removing meat from bones, and a hand-crank grinder that I could clamp to the kitchen counter.)

I had a simple bow—an old recurve generously sent to me that summer by Jay, Mark’s longtime hunting buddy from Virginia—and a quiver full of arrows.

I had an old-fashioned caplock muzzleloader, much like the one Mark used for most of his deer hunting. He had helped me find it, secondhand and in excellent condition. He had also offered technical advice as I went about transforming a cow horn Jay had given me into my own powder horn: its cherry plug wood-burned to show a buck and doe in silhouette, its variegated brown-and-blond surface roughly scrimshawed to suggest Cold Brook, the rocky little waterway that tumbles through the woods behind our house, along whose banks I might look for tracks.

And I had a modern rifle. Fortunately, I did not go straight from the hunter-education class to the nearest gun shop. If I had blundered in and started asking questions, it wouldn’t have been pretty.

Me: “Hi, I want to buy a deer rifle.”

Gun guy: “What are you looking for?”

Me: “Uh, a
deer
rifle?” At this point, ignorance would still have been bliss. I knew only that I needed a centerfire rifle, so called because the firing pin strikes an explosive, impact-sensitive primer located in the center of the cartridge case’s back end. (Rimfire cartridges like the ubiquitous .22, which have a primer encircling the rear of the case, lack the power needed for deer hunting, and are better suited for smaller game like rabbit, hare, or gray squirrel.)

Gun guy: “Okay. Do you have a brand in mind? Remington, maybe? Or Browning? Or Winchester?”

Me: “Uh, not really.” Here, I would have had a first, faint inkling of what I was getting into.

Gun guy: “Okay. What kind of action do you want: bolt, lever, pump, semiauto?”

Me, relieved: “Bolt.” This was one thing I did know. In hunter education, I had learned how different types of rifles and shot-guns functioned. Any of them would work just fine, but I felt safest and most confident with the simplest design, and the most familiar. My first .22 and my father’s few long guns had all been bolt-actions.

Gun guy: “Do you have a caliber in mind? Are you thinking a two-seventy, a thirty-aught-six, a three-oh-eight, a two-forty-three, an old thirty-thirty?”

Me: “Uh.” This is where it would have begun to dawn on me that I was in deep.

As I say, though, I did not flaunt my ignorance in such a spectacularly public manner. Instead, I did it privately, throwing myself on Uncle Mark’s mercy. He was kind. When I asked him about the vast array of available calibers, he explained: The main differences were power and effective range. Though caliber designations indicated the bullet’s diameter—in hundredths of an inch for American cartridges, and in millimeters for European cartridges—the size of each cartridge case and the amount of powder inside were entirely different matters. A .30-06 and a .30-30, for instance, both fired a bullet about three-tenths of an inch wide. The former, however, was far more powerful.

Scouring the Internet for relevant articles, I came to the realization that hunters and shooters and industry professionals had written roughly a gazillion words of advice on rifles and rifle cartridges, and on how to choose the right one. There were pages and pages of history, parts of which helped me decipher common caliber notations: The “aught-six” in .30-06, for example, refers to the cartridge’s introduction in 1906, while the second “thirty” in .30-30 refers to the cartridge’s standard load of thirty grains of smokeless powder. There were ballistics tables, showing the trajectories of various cartridges with various powder loads shooting bullets of various weights and shapes, and the kinetic force each would deliver at various distances. There were even charts detailing the “sectional density” of any given bullet: a mathematically precise way of telling me whether the projectile was shaped more like a spear or more like a rock.

After a brief descent into endless rabbit holes of facts and data, I emerged, shook my head, and looked back at one of Mark’s first e-mails. He had summed up what I needed to know. Given the distances at which I would likely be shooting, any one of a long list of centerfire cartridges would provide sufficient power to kill a deer instantly and a flat enough trajectory for me to hit my target. For hunters in Northeastern forests, the average shot at a deer is well under fifty yards.

Mark also confirmed one pertinent fact that my baffled brain had begun to deduce: Firepower mattered far less than being able to hit what I was aiming at. The best rifle would be one that—in my inexperienced hands—would deliver a bullet to a deer’s vital organs every time. And the main factor apt to interfere with such accuracy was recoil, a direct correlate of firepower.

Not that recoil makes a rifle itself inaccurate. The bullet is long gone by the time a firearm bucks from the explosion that just occurred within its chamber. But it can easily make the shooter inaccurate. Having fired only small-caliber guns as a kid, I had no idea how a big-game rifle would kick or how serenely I would absorb it. If I ended up with an over-powered gun that kicked too hard, I ran the risk of developing a flinch. If I started flinching in anticipation of the recoil—just before the cartridge detonated—then my marksmanship would deteriorate in a hurry.

Online, I found several articles that offered maximum-recoil suggestions for first-time owners of deer rifles, and explained the mechanics. In short, I needed to pay attention to Newton’s Third Law of Motion: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The lighter the rifle, the greater the powder charge, the heavier the bullet, and the faster that bullet flew, the more force my shoulder would be asked to absorb.

Other articles emphasized the “knockdown power” of various types of large-bore, supercharged ammo. But I was not going to be hunting Cape buffalo in Africa or brown bears in Alaska. I was going to be hunting white-tailed deer in New England. I did not need some kind of armor-piercing, antitank ordnance. Nor did I particularly want to contract even a mild case of magnumitis: the irrational desire to possess a firearm capable of stopping a freight train.

In the end, the choice was easy. A few articles suggested that the American-made .260 cartridge—and its older Scandinavian equivalent, the Swedish 6.5x55—offered a good balance of power and low recoil, especially for a first-time shooter. A local hunter offered to let me touch off a round or two with a pair of his rifles, one of them a .260.

I was sold. The rifle was lightweight, but still didn’t kick that hard.

Walking around a shop’s impressive arsenal, I eliminated every rifle that was out of my price range. Then I eliminated every rifle that didn’t feel right in my hands. That narrowed the field to two or three. I kept coming back to a modestly priced gun made by Tikka, a high-quality Finnish manufacturer that Willie had suggested I consider. The pattern of the checkering carved into the stock was a bit modern for my taste, but the gun felt well balanced, the smooth walnut fore end and grip fit my hands, and the butt and comb settled comfortably against my shoulder and cheek. I ordered one, chambered for 6.5x55.