The Mindful Carnivore (26 page)

The warden asked me if I wanted the meat. Poachers, I had heard, swore there was no finer flesh than summer venison. “Side-hill salmon,” some called it. This would be a remarkable way to get my first deer, the animal falling nearly at my feet. But it would take me a long while to drive out with the warden and back in again with my own truck, complete my first clumsy field dressing by flashlight, get the doe up to the trail and into the vehicle, get home, and get the body or quarters iced down for the night. Too long for this July heat, I thought. Besides, I knew that coyotes and other scavengers would make good use of the remains. The food might even spare the life of a fawn who would otherwise be hunted down. So I left her there.

I was a hunter now, yes. But when I found the doe flailing on the ground, I had not seen the prey I would be pursuing in October. I had seen a fellow creature suffering—exactly what I would have seen five or ten years earlier, in my days as a vegan.

The day after the doe died, I was driving, brooding over her fate, when I caught sight of another deer. She stood her ground in the middle of the dirt road, apparently unconcerned by the several thousand pounds of growling truck that rolled toward her. Finally, she broke for the woods. When I stopped to look for her, she was there among the leaves, whole and healthy, dark eyes and great ears turned in curiosity.

13

Blood Trails

We tracked the deer for three hours before losing the trail. Neither of us said much, just followed small, scattered dots of blood, vivid red against the snow.

—Susan Ewing, “To Each Her Own”

S
aturday, the second-to-last day of bow season, dawned in an icy fog, a great ghostly halo around the quarter moon. Perched in the maple that morning, I saw only mice—or voles, perhaps—scurrying to and fro where doe and fawn had stood just twenty-four hours earlier.

My thoughts wandered to the chores I should be doing and I found myself longing for Uncle Mark’s companionship. The previous December, on Cape Cod, just knowing he was nearby had helped me stay fully present to the woods and to the moment, banishing the nagging voice of productivity. This year, given the constraints of schedules and finances, Mark and I would not be hunting together.

After several hours of watching rodents, I hiked home.

Sunday, I did not plan to hunt. It was supposed to rain all day. But Cath and I awoke to a white world. With three inches of fresh snow, the tracking would be perfect. I had to go see what stories the ground might tell.

Not that I was fooling myself about the odds. Even with a rifle, I doubted whether I could pick up a deer’s trail, follow however far it led, get within sight of the animal, and find the opportunity for a clean-killing shot. With a bow, my chances were pathetic. After all, I had never depended on hunted meat for survival. Nor had my father or mother. Nor had any of my grandparents. Far from being honed to sharp and deadly perfection, my predatory skills were dull. White-tailed deer, on the other hand, have been alert to pursuers, both four legged and two legged, for thousands of years. They have had no hiatus from the chase. Except for those animals lulled into semidomestication by life in the suburbs, they have never forgotten how to vanish.

Around my tree stand, I scanned the surface of the dense, moist snow. Nothing. No sign that even a squirrel had passed by. Slowly, I hiked farther into the woods. I walked under tall hemlocks, eased around boulders, and wove through thick undergrowth, looking for tracks.

Then I looked up and froze. A doe, bedded down in the shelter of small evergreens, stared straight at me, both ears up and funneled forward. I stared back, motionless.

There was a tree just two steps to my right, but even if I got behind it she would still know I was there. She might even get more suspicious. I thought back to an e-mail that Mark’s buddy Jay had sent the year before: Walking through the woods near his cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains, he had startled a doe. When he stopped and stood still, she got curious, moved toward him, then relaxed and began feeding. Might that work for me now?

I stood there, trying to keep every muscle still. She lay there, stiller yet.

Nearby, limbs and small treetops snapped under the heavy, wet snow. As the air temperature rose, clumps began falling from branches above, thudding down all around. When the first fist-sized clump struck my shoulder, I flinched. In response to my movement, I felt sure the doe would spring to her feet, snort in alarm, and disappear among the trees. But her eyes and ears didn’t waver.

We were about thirty yards apart: too far for a shot. That summer, I had switched from Jay’s recurve to a longbow that better suited my body. Though I stand just shy of six feet, my fingertip-to-fingertip wingspan turns out to be six foot three, which makes it hard to shoot a bow designed for someone with more reasonably proportioned arms. For months, I had been practicing with the longbow. Beyond twenty yards, though, I could not be sure of keeping my arrows in a five-inch circle.

The minutes slipped by. I glanced down at the length of teased dental floss dangling from my bow. When dry, it would tremble like dandelion down, lifting at the faintest breeze to show where my scent was drifting. Now, though, in the near-still air, it hung limp, clotted with wet snow.

Finally, an ear twitched. The doe turned her head slightly, then looked away completely. Had she forgotten about me? Had I, in my stillness, become a tall, oddly shaped stump for her?

I took a slow step to the side. As I eased my full weight over, the wet snow compressed with a sudden soft
shunk!
The doe did not look my way. One more careful step and I was in cover. I glanced at my watch. We had been motionless for a full half hour.

Now what? Looking around, I couldn’t see any good approach. If I went to the left, I would be too visible as I moved from tree to tree. If I went to the right, I would have to navigate a tangle of saplings and fallen branches. Either way, I would lose sight of the doe—I would have no idea if she was alert to my presence. There was only one way to go. I slipped an arrow from my quiver, and set it to string and bow. Then I eased back into the open, headed straight for the doe.

For five minutes, or ten, I would stand still. Then the doe would look away and I would take a cautious step, the
shunk!
of compression masked by the thudding of snow clumps falling all around.

Once, facing me, she coughed up her cud and set to chewing it. Later, when low-flying Canada geese honked over with swishing wings, she looked skyward, perhaps in curiosity. When she tucked nose to tail, averting her eyes, I took five steps in fifteen minutes. It felt like a sprint.

Bits of snow clung, dripping, to bow and arrow. My fleece jacket and pants were soaked, struck everywhere by falling, wet clumps. I trembled—from the damp cold, from holding my muscles so still, and, yes, from a kind of excitement.

Marti Kheel and other feminist critics of hunting would, I knew, seize upon such a feeling. They would interpret it in sexual terms: me, a male predator, in a state of agitation as I closed in on my prey, in this case a female. In “License to Kill,” Kheel argued that the various ethical codes espoused by hunters are all rooted in the need to restrain aggressive sexual energy and channel it appropriately. In building her argument, Kheel quoted suggestive passages from hunting literature: Paul Shepard’s references, for instance, to “treating the woman-prey with love” and to killing as an “ecstatic consummation,” and Ortega y Gasset’s lurid commentary on the “unequaled orgiastic power” of blood. Like Kheel, I found such words disturbing.

The excitement I felt now had nothing to do with sex or blood, or even killing. What I felt was aliveness. My senses were intensely engaged. My whole being was focused, trembling with energy. Was this what a cougar felt as it prepared to pounce? In that moment, despite my longstanding unease with the idea of hunters enjoying the actual pursuit, I understood how compelling this part of the hunt could be, this kicking into sensory overdrive. And I wondered what moral value there could possibly be in not feeling this, in hunting as a Puritan might want me to—setting off into the woods like a somber executioner.

There was, I realized, a second deer. Not a fawn, but another fullgrown doe, off to the side in thicker cover, facing away from me.

The first doe stood. Not in swift alarm, but casually. She shook herself and took a step. Then she stopped, broadside to me.

Should I shoot? How far apart were we? Maybe twenty yards? I still felt no particular urge to kill, but what better opportunity could I hope for? The whole scenario seemed impossibly lucky, from first seeing the doe nearly two hours ago to this moment. Slowly, I drew string to jaw and looked down the arrow. I still wasn’t sure.

According to the anatomical chart I had pinned to the basement wall beside my workbench, the doe’s heart and lungs were just behind her shoulder. With a firearm, the shot angle wouldn’t matter as much—a bullet could break large bones, busting through sternum or shoulder from the front, striking vital organs or simply killing by dint of massive systemic shock. With a bow, it mattered far more. To kill quickly, my arrow would need to pass through the doe’s most vital organs, stopping her heart or destroying her lungs. And an arrow could be deflected by major bones. Like most bowhunters, I would not shoot if a deer was facing me. The animal had to be angled away or standing perfectly broadside, as this doe was now.

I released the string.

Instantly, I knew it was a bad shot. Rather than flying toward that spot behind the doe’s shoulder, the arrow went left—far left—and stuck, quivering, in the smooth bark of a maple that stood only halfway from me to her. I stared at the arrow.

The doe hadn’t even noticed. Calmly, she took a few steps and disappeared behind a thick stand of balsam saplings. A minute later, catching wind of me, she circled back suddenly and both deer bounded off in great leaps, white flags aloft. The intensity of the stalk drained away.

I paced off the distance. Yes, it had been twenty yards. But I had established that range limit under the ideal conditions of practice, when I was steady and relaxed. It had been much too far when my muscles were shaking with tension and cold.

I turned to my arrow, embedded in the maple. There were so many other paths the shaft might have taken. If my aim had been a little better, the arrow would have struck the doe in the hind leg or belly. I had come that close to wounding her or, worse yet, killing her slowly. My stomach turned at the thought. What good were my romantic aspirations to communion with nature, or to respectful confrontation with death, if I couldn’t adhere to the most basic hunting ethic—taking only the surest, cleanest shots?

I had begun the stalk not because I imagined I might actually get close enough for a shot, but because the attempt itself appealed, as a challenge and a chance to learn. Then I had botched it. Prying the broadhead from the tree, I knew I should have heeded the voice of doubt within. The doe and I had both been very lucky.

I shambled home and turned my attention to chores. But that afternoon Cath saw a solitary doe cross the clearing below the house. Though I couldn’t imagine taking another shot that day, there were still two hours left in bow season. I could get out and learn something. Maybe I could even walk off some shame.

I followed the doe down into the woods. Before long, her hoofprints crossed those of another deer and I lost track of which was which. Oh, yes, still plenty to learn. Minutes later, I found two sets of boot tracks, one as large as mine, the other smaller. I imagined a father and son and envied them their companionship. The humans were tracking a deer. The hoofprints showed clear in the wet snow. Curious, I followed.

Then I found a small patch of blood. And another. The pattern was regular: blood staining the snow every fifty yards. After a quarter mile, I knew the shot had been a bad one.

The animal might die slowly, its intestines torn open. Or it might survive. The arrow might have passed clean through a leg muscle that would heal well, or the broadhead might stay lodged in spine or skull and never fully heal. In any case, the animal would suffer.

Most of a mile later, I had found no end to the story. No spot where the deer had been gutted. And, to the hunters’ credit, no spot where they had abandoned the search. Boot prints still pursued hoofprints. The whitetail still ran across brooks, through thickets of softwood saplings, along the river, leaving blood here and there. In the gathering dusk, I turned for home, steps slow and uncertain.

With archery season over, I was glad to hang up my longbow. Aesthetically, I enjoyed the weapon: its simple grace, its lightness in hand. And I respected hunters who used such primitive technology successfully. But I wasn’t sure I should aim it at anything with the capacity to suffer. I had taken up bowhunting because it gave me an extra four weekends to try for a whitetail, because it allowed me to take antlerless deer, and because I had enjoyed archery as a boy. Now, doubts were surfacing.

Bows, especially longbows and recurves shot “bare” (without sights), are praised by hunters and nonhunters alike for making the hunt more challenging, giving much of the advantage to one’s prey. Most traditional barebow hunters have to get within twenty or twenty-five yards; most compound hunters using sights have to get within thirty or forty. Yet bows also draw criticism—again from both hunters and nonhunters—for being less dependably lethal than firearms.

Recent studies in Maryland and Connecticut suggest that 10 to 25 percent of arrows shot at deer miss the animal entirely. And even a practiced and disciplined archer, whose arrows almost always fly true, is launching a projectile that travels far slower than the speed of sound. Deer, their reactions lightning fast, can move at the snap of a bowstring—usually crouching in preparation for a leap, so that the arrow strikes higher than intended. Those same studies suggest that at least one in six deer hit by an arrow is not recovered by the hunter. An estimated two-thirds of these deer survive, while one-third die of their wounds.