The Mindful Carnivore (30 page)

The more I talked, the deeper I spun into the vortex. All Cath could do was listen.

Was I hunting to develop my woodscraft? I supposed I had learned a few things. Hunting, like fishing, had sharpened my awareness, drawing my attention to details I would not have noticed before: to clipped twigs and seedlings where whitetails had browsed, to how deer tracks always crossed a hiking trail at a particular spot. I knew enough to pay attention to the direction of the breeze and to keep my hunting clothes from smelling too much like a human—most of the year, I kept them sealed in a plastic box with balsam sprigs and dry leaves from the forest floor. I knew that a grunting sound, or even a whistle, could stop a walking deer for a moment, giving a hunter a clear shot at a motionless target. But compared to hunters who had spent decades learning about woods and deer, I knew zilch.

I imagined that if I took a deer once, I would feel less pressure to succeed a second time. That would make the whole hunting experience more enjoyable. And yet, I said, reminding both Cath and myself of the obvious, I had never really wanted to kill a deer in the first place. If I felt that veganism could keep my body completely healthy and could truly prevent harm to animals and their habitats, I wouldn’t be eating vertebrates at all, let alone wielding a deer rifle. I felt I ought to kill a deer, yes. Like feminist and vegan Carol Adams, I objected to the “absent referent”—the separation between meat eater and animal, between animal and meat. I felt obliged to meet the requirement suggested by Christopher Camuto in his book
Hunting from Home
: “I’ve long had an odd thought that no one who hasn’t killed, skinned and butchered at least one animal on his or her own should be allowed to buy meat in a grocery store.”

Over the past five years, though, I had already done some killing. I had caught and eaten trout from nearby streams and lakes. Twice, I had caught striped bass while fishing with Mark on Cape Cod, the second time using a rod of Willie’s that Beth had given to me. I had shot at least two garden-raiding woodchucks, one of which ended up in the stewpot. And I had hunted, killed, and eaten a pair of snowshoe hares. What point was there in killing a whitetail, too? Was it just that a deer would provide substantially more food? Was I just trying to prove something to myself? Or was there more to it?

I’d had some exciting moments in the woods these past few years, especially my encounters with deer. But taking a life still did not appeal. For me, hunting would never be what Ortega y Gasset called a “case in which the killing of one creature constitutes the delight of another.” Where killing and delight were concerned, Rachel Carson’s words rang truer: “We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature.”

But was I, after all, following the path the Spanish philosopher spelled out for the sportsman, seeking a deer’s death as “the sign of reality for the whole hunting process”? Was it no more than some immature symbolic urge?

These doubts, I realized, had been with me for some time. I had been keeping them quiet, only half admitting them to myself, only partially sharing them with Mark, avoiding any mention of them to Cath. Even now, as I talked, I regretted subjecting her to my inner contortions.

Simply put, I was failing as a hunter—not only failing to bring home meat, but also failing to find meaning in the pursuit. If the hunt culminated in little more than exhaustion interspersed with mental and emotional chaos, what was the point in continuing? Maybe I would just stay home the next day. Better to spend Sunday morning doing something productive around the house than to waste several more hours sitting in the woods.

Later that evening, though, Richard called. He planned to hunt in the morning and asked if I would be coming. It would, I knew, be easier to sit in the woods if I had a companion nearby. Okay, I told him. I would be there, if only for the first few hours of the day.

As I drifted toward sleep, I considered the next morning’s hunt. During our conversation, Cath had gently reminded me that my experience of hunting had everything to do with the set of my mind, heart, and soul. If I was going back to the woods, I needed an attitude adjustment. I thought back several years, to my earliest interest in the hunt. I remembered all my correspondence with Mark, all my questions, all his insights and helpful tips. I remembered the magic of receiving that old knife in the mail from him—with the gorgeous sheath he had stitched and painted with red buck and black hoofprints—and my confidence that it would bring me luck. I remembered the excitement of hunting with him for the first time, and my contentment when he got a deer and I was able to help with the butchering. I remembered the simple faith I’d had. My first deer would come in good time. I was in no hurry.

Though Richard had said I could have my pick of hunting spots, I decided I would not return to Seven Point Draw. It might be the most likely spot for seeing a buck, with deer trails funneling there as they did. But in the morning my focus would not be outward, on killing a deer. It would be inward, on returning to that quiet, open place. I would go back to the ring of maples where Mark had hunted in October.

Down in the basement, well before dawn, I pulled the old hunting knife from my pack. Richard had recently given me the tail from his seven-point buck, for tying trout flies. I plucked a few long, white hairs and tucked them into the knife sheath.

When I arrived at Richard’s, he wasn’t quite ready. He might be another fifteen minutes, he said. I should go ahead. He would be along soon and would probably sit up on the ridge near the Four Directions Stand.

I reached the ring of maples shortly before first light. Before I sat, I took out the knife and propped it against the base of a tree four feet in front of me. As the sky brightened, my eyes began to wander the woods. But they weren’t needed there. With the leaves dry and frosty, my ears would tell me if anything moved. Instead, I looked at the knife, the rich orange-brown of the sheath, the long, white hairs sprouting from between blade and leather. The buck on the front, dyed red, seemed to stand among the maple leaves. The image could easily have taken form by flickering torchlight, in the caves of Lascaux in southwestern France, in ancient Europe, my ancestral homeland. But this was no pale imitation of some ancient hunting totem, European or North American. Painted for me by my uncle, this deer belonged in this place. The four of us—land, deer, uncle, and nephew—were linked.

Admiring the buck, thinking of Mark, my mind let go. Killing a deer didn’t matter. Praying for a deer to appear didn’t even matter. What mattered was sitting, listening, being there, attentive to the forest, grateful for the earth from which it sprang. What mattered was the rekindling of wonder.

For two hours, I sat. In the crisp leaves, red squirrels scampered, sounding huge.

To take the chill off, I poured myself a thermos cap of hot tea and sipped carefully. I had learned to breathe out, not in, as I was about to drink, to keep myself from inhaling steam that would tickle my throat and make me cough, disrupting the quiet of the forest.

I had just set down the empty cap when I heard the rhythm of steps in the leaves. Looking up the gentle slope among the trees, I saw a deer forty yards off and walking my way. A doe, surely. Then I got a good look.

Legal forked antlers
. I hardly believed it.

But my body was in motion, easing forward off the folding stool, turning, finding some kind of stable position, half crouching, half kneeling. The buck was thirty yards away now, by that big scrape, his nose to the ground, reading scents among the maple leaves and pine needles.

I avoided looking at his head and eyes. Mark had told me how animals seemed to stay more relaxed if he didn’t make direct eye contact. He guessed that deer could sense his gaze, the same way he sometimes felt the focus of someone’s vision on him, even from hundreds of yards away.

I eased the safety off. The crosshairs trembled behind the buck’s left shoulder.

There were branches in the way, two or three of them, not much thicker than my thumb. A bullet might pass between them. Or it might not. In my mind’s eye, I saw the dark silhouette of the buck I had fired at two years earlier, the gouged earth where he leapt away, the torn wood where the bullet struck the spruce branch. I imagined this buck with a bullet, or fragments of a bullet, in his leg or gut. My trigger finger relaxed.

The buck’s head came up fast. He had winded me, perhaps, or heard some slight rustle. I had missed my chance. In a moment, he would flee. I would not shoot at a running deer.

He dropped his head again, sniffed the ground, and licked his nose. Then he took a step. He was broadside to me. There was an open space among the branches. I barely heard the shot.

The buck jumped—a small, hunched movement—then leapt forward among the trees, running in a downhill arc. I stood up and absently remembered to chamber a second round. Something about his gait told me I wouldn’t have to shoot again. In midrun, just twenty paces from me, he collapsed into the forest floor.

A wave of disbelief rolled over me as I walked toward him, rifle unloaded. His ribs heaved with a final, shuddering breath. I took the last few steps to where he lay and, from behind, touched the rifle muzzle to his eye. There was no reflexive flinch. He was gone. Confident that neither hooves nor antlers would lash out in one last spasm, I crouched beside him, inhaled the musky odor of his body, and put a hand to his side.

If I ever succeeded in killing a deer, I had imagined that I, like Mark, would experience that flood of mixed emotions, sorrow and elation and awe and gratitude all jumbled together. But now that it had happened, now that this whitetail had gone down and stayed down, I didn’t know what I felt. My feelings were obscured by shock: an invisible, impenetrable veil. Crouching there, I had no idea what gesture of gratitude or apology to make.

Finally, I whispered a few inadequate words, retrieved the sheathed knife from where it leaned against the maple, and unfolded my page of instructions on how to gut a deer. Tentatively, I made the first incisions through hair and hide, then through abdominal wall. The smells of the buck’s blood and viscera mingled intensely with the musk of skin and hair. His entrails, jarringly hot against my hands in the freezing air, slid out, stomach full, liver heavy and dark, neat folds of intestines coming undone. I reached up inside him, cut the taut membrane of his diaphragm, and drew out the rest of his organs. His heart was torn in two.

When my clumsy field dressing was complete, I scrubbed my hands with maple leaves. Then I remembered that, by law, the first thing I should have done was tag the buck. I dug out my hunting and fishing license and there was the laminated funeral card: Willie looking up at me, smiling broadly. He would be proud of me, I thought. Mark, too, would be proud. But was I proud of myself?

It helped that it had been quick. Holding the deer’s torn-in-two heart in my hand, I knew oblivion had come swiftly. It was the shot I had hoped for: no more than a few seconds of shock, no time for pain to take hold. It was easier than most other ways a deer’s life was likely to end: in cold and starvation, across a car’s front end, at the teeth of four-footed predators. Yet that swiftness did nothing to alter the raw fact. I had killed this graceful creature.

Now that I had taken his life, I wasn’t sure I wanted it. Already I wondered: Was all this effort—the scouting, the hunting, and the long, grisly hours of butchering to come—really worth it? Now that the “absent referent” had become such a palpably present being, would I hunt again? A great hollow grief had begun to well up inside.

I knotted my tag to the buck’s slender antlers with a scrap of old speaker wire. Then, leaving the gutted whitetail to cool in the frosty air, I gathered up pack and rifle and headed south along the ridge. Near the Four Directions Stand, I found Richard sitting on a fallen tree trunk, meditating on the forest, .300 Savage across his lap. I raised my hand for him to see, knuckle creases and fingernail edges still speckled with dried blood. Richard’s brows lifted above deep-set eyes and a gentle smile spread across his angular face. He nodded.

“I heard the shot,” he said.

Together we hiked back to his house where I dialed the old rotary phone and left a message for Cath. I shed rifle, pack, and outer layers—the effort of dragging would keep me warm—and fetched the thin plastic sled.

Back in the woods, Richard asked how it had happened. I showed him where I was sitting, where the buck was standing when I shot. Then we lashed the animal to the sled and dragged him up past the ridgetop pool.

Once, as we paused to catch our breath, I again told Richard how the buck had come walking, how he had raised his head as if in alarm, how he had taken that final step. Even with the deer there on the ground behind me, affixed to me by a drag rope, the event seemed implausible. I recounted the moment as though my speaking and Richard’s hearing would make the bizarre occurrence more real, as though it would help me come to grips with what had happened.

“It’s quite an experience, isn’t it?” asked Richard.

I nodded.

We walked on, down the steep shale-studded slope and through the neighbor’s sugarbush. As we approached the house—on a gentle downward slope now, so that I dragged the deer with no effort and Richard walked beside me—I told him how, the night before, I had recognized the need to shift my attitude, how the hunting knife had helped me refocus, how meditating on the spray of long white tail hairs and the red painted buck had returned me to that still, open place within. And then the buck had appeared, as if by magic.

Richard looked over at me and grinned. “That sounds kind of ooga-booga,” he said. “You might want to be careful who you tell that story to.”

I laughed.

True. It was probably crazy to think that my little ritual with the knife had conjured the deer. It wasn’t a story I would want too many people to hear. Heaven forbid it should get into print.

On the other hand, perhaps that stilling of my mind—that cessation of striving—had quieted the invisible ripples I sent out into the forest. My presence in the woods still affected things, like a stone striking the surface of a pond, but perhaps I had become a smaller pebble.