A Mindful Carnivore: Same blog, new name

Dear Readers:

You’ve been very tolerant.

For months now—in email subscriptions, in RSS readers, and on my website—I have been subjecting you to the unpalatable blandness of the blog title People. Animals. Nature. Yet there has been nary a peep of protest.

The affront to your good taste is, I hope, at an end.

Next time you visit my site, you’ll see the new title, A Mindful Carnivore. Within a few days, that title will be showing up in the email and RSS feeds, too. I think the transition will be smooth. If you run across any glitches, please do let me know. (If I’m on your blogroll and it doesn’t update when my RSS feed does, I’d sure appreciate it if you could refresh the listing.)

Don’t worry: I won’t be writing only about eating meat.

The new title aims to capture the essence of the odd perspective that I, a vegan-turned-hunter, bring to the topics of…er, well…people, animals, and nature. It comes from the current working title of a writing project I’m working on. It’s in the early stages yet, but will—one of these days—be my first book.

A number of people, including my wonderful wife Catherine and several enthusiastic friends, were of huge help in getting me as far as including “carnivore” in the working title. (Our collective brainstorming generated a few memorable ideas, including From Tofu to Tenderloins and The Vegetarian’s Guide to Successful Deer Hunting. Titles including “omnivore” were contenders, too, but I think a sort-of-famous book used that recently.)

It took the sharp eye of Laurie Abkemeier, the fantastic book agent I’m working with, to pick the word “mindful” out of my early scrawlings and combine it with “carnivore.”

Next up in the blog, thoughts on something I overheard in a restaurant: “My rule is, ‘I’ll only eat it if I could kill it.’ And I could definitely kill one of those.”

Meditation with meat and knife

My fingers slide under the muscle, separating it from the layer below. My knife snips tendons and traces the curvature of bone.

I add the slab of venison to one of the 13×9 pans on the kitchen counter.

Hours ago, this leg was a deer. In the early morning light, the animal was moving somewhere in the cool, damp forest. Then pausing to listen and test the breeze. Then walking or trotting on again, toward the gentle slope where I sat waiting among the hemlocks.

Much of my time in the woods is quiet, contemplative. Afternoons spent scouting in late summer and early fall, looking for tracks and other sign. Hours, days, or entire seasons spent listening and watching, seeing no deer.

If I get the chance for a clean shot, the killing is over in a flash.

When I crouch beside the fallen animal and whisper thanks, I am both grateful and unsettled. There in the woods, though, there is work to be done—gutting the deer and dragging the body home.

It’s at the kitchen counter that I make my peace with the killing. There, with a leg on the cutting board, contemplation returns. Separating flesh from bone, I marvel at the power these muscles held, to launch the buck in great leaps.

There is a quiet rhythm to the task, like canning, my wife Cath suggests: a small repetitive act done by these hands, a pattern within the larger rhythmic patterns of the seasons, the patterns of all things that live and eat and die and feed one another.

Inexperienced as I am, it takes me a long while to get from skinning the animal to grinding the last pounds of burger. Someday, caught between my slowness and my schedule, I may have to pay a local butcher to do the work. But not soon, I hope.

Meditation with meat and knife

My fingers slide under the muscle, separating it from the layer below. My knife snips tendons and traces the curvature of bone.

I add the slab of venison to one of the 13×9 pans on the kitchen counter.

If I get the chance for a clean shot, the killing is over in a flash.

When I crouch beside the fallen animal and whisper my thanks, I am both grateful and unsettled. There in the woods, though, there is work to be done—gutting the deer and dragging the body from the woods.

Inexperienced as I am, it takes me a long while to get from skinning the animal to grinding the last pounds of burger. Someday, caught between my slowness and my schedule, I’ll have to pay a local butcher to do the work. But not soon, I hope.

Asphalt and wildness

What was that just ahead, in that puddle?

Walking up the paved path, I looked hard, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. It had been raining hard for two days, and gusty. Anything light enough to be caught by the wind could have blown about and settled here. A couple of plastic bags, perhaps.

On a pond, I would have recognized the shapes and colors. Here, though, in just a few inches of water, at the intersection of heavily traveled asphalt footpaths on a university campus?

Ducks. A pair of mallards, heads tucked under wings.

I walked past, went thirty yards, then came back. A few feet away, I squatted down to look more closely. Noticing me, the ducks lifted their heads and quacked. As soon as I stood and moved off a few paces, they settled back into their afternoon nap.

Something about the scene felt strange.

In part, it was aesthetic prejudice, the same kind of distaste I feel when I hear of bears habituated to pawing their way through landfills. In my imagination, wild ducks paddle along river banks and dabble among cattails. They don’t belong in asphalt-bordered puddles.

But something else bothered me, too. The mallards were completely unconcerned by the proximity of humans. Like zoo animals, they seemed to have lost their wildness.

What do we mean, though, when we say that creatures are “wild?”

Do we mean that they are wary of humans? That they see us as potential predators? Or, if large and carnivorous, as potential prey? Might there be a better, less anthropocentric, measure?

Are creatures who spend their lives in environments of human artifice—and who become accustomed to us in the process—still “wild?”

I wonder whether animals can feel it when their wildness slips away. I wonder whether they sense, as some humans do, that it leaves in its wake a forgetfulness—about who we are and where we belong.

And I wonder if wildness is ever truly driven out of any of us, or if it merely slumbers.

Springtime and a hunter’s debts

The snow is almost gone from our yard already. Here, facing northwest across the Winooski Valley, an April without white stuff on the ground is a rare gift.

Soon, crocuses will be in bloom. We’ll be planting peas and salad greens. And the world will be buzzing with life.

The spring peepers, returned from the mud, will begin their chirping chorus in the old beaver pond near our house. The ruffed grouse who have spent the winter feeding on aspen buds and eluding raptors will be drumming, mating, and laying eggs. And the largest of our forest-dwelling neighbors will be on the move.

Every spring, we find moose tracks by the pond. The great, dark animals come down from the hills, drawn to wetlands where they—still wearing thick winter coats—can find relief from the heat. The thermometer is supposed to hit 75 this weekend. With no leaves on the trees yet, shade can only be found among the conifers.

If we’re lucky, we find bear tracks, too. Emerging from hibernation, they’re on the lookout for food. Time for us to take the birdfeeders down, lest we once again wake at midnight to the sounds of a bruin snuffling around on the back porch.

In this lush, bustling time of year, I take pleasure in seeing our wild neighbors and signs of their passage.

On seeing deer or deer tracks, I might think briefly of autumn, of the way dry, frosty leaves crunch under a whitetail’s hooves.

Mostly, though—as I did before my hunting days—I am just grateful to move among my fellow creatures, knowing that they are moving all around me. As I did before my hunting days, I feel indebted for the simple gift of their presence.

Bear-marked beech with backhoe, near a southern Vermont ski area

As I did before my hunting days, I sense the importance of protecting our neighbors’ homes—the highlands and the wetlands and the routes traveled by moose in between, the stands of beech where bears fatten themselves when the mast crop is good, the steep and rocky places where bobcats den—from greedy encroachment by too many of our homes and roads and economic enterprises.

Perhaps the only difference, now that I occasionally drag venison from these hills, is that I am indebted to these creatures and places in yet another way.

A farewell to Kate

Kate was the only dog I’ve ever known who howled when you petted her. Her human—my good friend Steve—always insisted she was singing.

Like him, she loved people. And birds.

She stayed with me and Cath a few times over the years, when Steve had to be out of town. Indoors, she always parked herself just inside the sliding glass door to our back porch, eyes riveted on the action around the birdfeeders.

Our black Lab, Kaia—puzzled by her Brittany friend’s immobile fixation—would occasionally check on Kate, sniffing at her shoulder or licking at her fuzz-fringed ears. Kate ignored her. She had her priorities. She even spent the first night there, staring at the reflective surface of the glass, not yet having figured out that the entertainment was a daylight affair.

There were only two ways to get Kate’s attention: fill her food bowl or suggest that it was time to go out. Outdoors, she was wildly enthusiastic. Nose to ground, she’d zigzag through field and woods, casting about excitedly.

Two walks with her stand out in my memory.

On the first occasion, in autumn, Cath, the two dogs, and I had hiked out through the woods, along the old railroad bed that runs near our house. On the way back, I noticed Kate some seventy-five yards ahead of us. She was frozen, stock still, her butt visible, the rest of her buried in the brush beside the trail.

When I caught up, she ignored me. I scanned the woods and undergrowth below the embankment, but saw nothing.

“Go get it,” I said, giving her a slight nudge with my foot. The instant she moved, a grouse rocketed up. Just five feet from her nose.

That’s a bird dog.

On the second occasion, in spring, we were coming back along that same stretch of trail and Kate had gone ahead. We heard her yelp and feared she might have crossed paths with a porcupine. When we found her, she was merely splashing about in the first open water of the season, along the edge of an old beaver pond. Her yelp, like her being-petted howl, was one of delight.

But she yelped again a minute later and came out of the woods on three legs, screeching, a forepaw held high off the ground. Great. A friend’s dog injured on my watch. Inspecting her paw, I found a puncture in the webbing between two toes. Barbed wire, perhaps.

Normally an uncomplaining dog, Kate just sat there, letting out that ear-piercing shriek. She wouldn’t take another step. So I picked her up and carried her the last hundred yards to the house.

I caught Steve on his cell phone and he asked me to clean the wound and massage it. I got the peroxide and a bowl of warm water. And two pairs of ear-protectors.

When I stepped outside, though, all was quiet. Cath—who practices both acupressure and Reiki—had her hands on Kate. And our shrieking friend had subsided. Even as I worked the paw, Kate remained silent, relaxed, her eyes taking on a faraway dreamy look. I had never seen her so mellow. If her brain turned to cosmic mush and she forgot what a grouse or woodcock smelled like, I’d be pleading the Fifth.

Thankfully, both paw and mind recovered, and Kate spent many more happy days afield.

But four nights ago, after several days of precipitous kidney failure, her irrepressible little body breathed its last.

There’s emptiness in Steve’s house and heart right now. Though he has loved and lost many dogs in his lifetime, he wasn’t ready for this. Kate, his constant companion, was torn away after only seven years.

Thinking about him, I’m finding solace where I can. She didn’t die at the vet’s. She died at home in his arms. And though there’s still snow in the woods, it’s not mid-January, the earth hard as iron. Up the hill behind his house, a shovel can break the softening ground.

The why of the hunt

When I was a vegetarian, I had no clue why modern people hunted.

Now that I hunt, I still puzzle over it. Every hunter has his or her own reasons, of course. I wonder mostly about my own, and even there it’s often hard to lay claim to certainty.

Deer hunting on the Maine coast—Why do we hunt? — Photo credit: Robert Bryan

Of two things, though, I feel sure.

First, the labels we ascribe to ourselves say very little about why we hunt.

When, a few years ago, a local hunter told me he was a “meat” hunter, he wasn’t saying that “meat” explained his hunting; he only gets a deer once every few years, and enjoys his time in the woods for its own sake. He was saying that he was perfectly willing to shoot a doe if he got the chance. In other words, he was telling me what kind of hunter he isn’t. He’s not a trophy hunter. He doesn’t hunt for antlers.

This way of defining ourselves—by marking the boundary between “us” and “them”—is a human habit long studied by anthropologists. “Identity,” after all, comes from the Latin idem, meaning “the same.” We say who we are by saying who’s different: who we are not.

At times, labels serve an important function. They help us denounce the intolerable. In the mid- and late-1800s, American “sport” hunters defined themselves in part by pointing to what they were not: “market” hunters, who were pushing the continent’s wildlife to the brink of extinction. (Less helpfully, these middle and upper-class hunters also denigrated backwoods “pot” hunters, the meat hunters of the day.) Today, whatever we call ourselves, many of us decry the “slob” hunter, whose disrespect—for animals, people, and land—leaves a deep stain on the image of the American hunter.

When wildlife populations and real ethics are at stake, it’s important to say who we are not. Even then, though, labels fail to convey why we hunt.

Second, I feel sure that it’s worth making the effort to understand and explain why we hunt.

Some hunters, of course, feel that explaining such things is part of “being on the defensive.” They don’t want to go there. They hunt because (1) it’s legal and (2) they want to. And they leave it at that. Fair enough.

But I think the effort can be more positive than that. As a non-hunter (and sometimes anti-hunter), talking with respectful hunters and reading words written by respectful hunters helped me see past my negative stereotypes, opening my eyes to what hunting could be. And at least a few acquaintances have, in turn, had their views of the pursuit improved by talking with me about my hunting.

I think we need to continue the effort to understand and explain what hunting means to us. If, that is, we want hunting to be accepted by the non-hunting majority—and supported at the polls when related ballots are cast.

We need to go beyond the tired argument that hunting is needed to keep wildlife populations in balance with habitat. It happens to be true, at least where ungulates are abundant and no longer hunted by other large predators. But, as Thomas Baumeister argued in his essay “Heart of the Hunt,” it “falls pitifully short” as a way of explaining hunting.

The challenge, as I suggested above—“now that I hunt, I still puzzle over it”—seems to be understanding the “why” of our own hunting. Some parts of my hunting I can name and explain: how it helps me confront the impacts of my own eating, how it puts wonderful, local, organic, wild meat on my table, how it heightens my appreciation for everything I ingest (animal and vegetable), how it gives me a sense of participation in nature, and so on.

Other parts are harder to pin down: that sense of mystery, that call for which I still have no good name. Those pieces may be—as the late John Madson put it in “Why We Hunt”—“too deeply rooted in the metaphysical to allow clinical examination.” But I’ll keep on trying. Not for the clinical—which would, I fear, kill the mystery—but for the moderately comprehensible.

Now and then, though, I do wish that we were more like other animals. That we could, like dog or wolf, sniff at the places others have labeled, marking boundaries, and actually learn something useful.

Note: Thanks to Montana Outdoors magazine for making both of the above-mentioned essays available online.

A buck looks back: Quirk or gift?

Reaching my spot in the woods that morning, I had no illusions about my chances of seeing a legal buck.

My first three years, I had come up empty-handed. My fourth year, I had gotten lucky. This was my fifth year. Given that only one in eight Vermont hunters tags a whitetail each autumn, I had no right to expect that I’d bring home venison two years in a row.

On opening weekend of rifle season, I had hunted almost every daylight hour. And I had seen more deer than usual: one doe and one young buck who was probably a spikehorn, both illegal under current regulations.

This morning, though, and for the rest of the 16-day season, I’d only get out for the odd hour or two: almost certainly not enough time for a buck to come my way. I set my pack on the ground and sat down, my back to the half-rotten stump of a fallen maple. It was already getting light, sunrise not far off.

Four minutes later, I heard a deer coming.

The hoof steps were to my right, my view blocked by the brushy branches of a fallen hemlock.

When I saw the buck, he was already close, moving at a brisk trot, and one glance told me he was no spikehorn. He was crossing the slope behind me. There was no way to turn without being seen. I had to hope he would cross all the way behind me and offer a shot to my left.

No such luck. Just fifteen yards away, he looked in my direction, wheeled, and charged back the way he’d come. Having nothing to lose, I stood and turned to watch him go. Even at that close range, I wasn’t going to shoot at a running deer; the chances of a wounding shot were too high.

Thirty yards off, he turned to look back. I knew he’d be there just a moment.

There was no time to think through the shot, let alone brace against a tree for the kind of steadied aim I prefer—I’m a slow, deliberate hunter, not a quick, offhand shooter. There was just that one second to bring the rifle to my shoulder, see that his shoulder and front ribs looked like a barn door (something I could hit), decide that the bullet’s path was clear of branches, and fire.

The buck dropped in his tracks and lay still.

I stood there, stunned: by how fast it had all happened and how unlikely it all seemed.

Naturally, it could be explained. As I hiked in—tromping through crunchy, frozen leaves, making more noise than a moose—the buck must have been too far away to hear me, or making too much noise himself. The timing was pure coincidence. And his almost immediate pause and backward glance—a common behavior among mule deer, I gather, but less usual among whitetails—must mean that he’d scented but not seen me, and was curious to know where I was.

But that isn’t the only way to see it. Many indigenous hunting cultures say that animals “offer” themselves as a “gift” to the hunter. From a Euro-American perspective, this sounds like mere metaphor, perhaps aimed at making humans feel better about killing. Of course animals don’t “give” themselves to hunters. How ridiculous.

Or is it?

In his article “The gift in the animal” (American Ethnologist, Vol. 34, No. 1, 2007), anthropologist Paul Nadasdy argues that aboriginal accounts of hunting might be literally true. Among other evidence corroborating the views of the Kluane of the Southwest Yukon, he recounts how a rabbit escaped from one of his snares, then tried to get into his cabin five days later, with the snare wire still around its neck. It made no effort to flee as he picked it up and killed it.

What if Nadasdy is right? What if the Kluane view of nature and animals is as valid as the one I grew up with? What if there was more than chance at work in my encounter with that buck, more than a quirk of curiosity in his fatal pause? How would that change my hunting and the meaning of it?

There are dangers, of course, in lifting concepts like “animal” and “gift” off the surface of another culture. It can be rather parasitic. And we’re unlikely to understand what the concepts mean in the depth of their original context.

So let’s bring it down to earth and closer to home.

In essence, northern hunting peoples such as the Kluane understand animals to be “sentient and communicative persons,” as Nadasdy puts it. They see animals as beings who deserve respect, who are capable of feeling, suffering, and consciously interacting with each other and with humans.

In our own culture, how might we—hunters and non-hunters alike—tackle the challenge implicit in that view? How might we hold both the concept of animals as conscious fellow creatures and the concept of animals as food?

Humans, after all, are like that, too: conscious (more or less), yet ultimately consumable. Recyclable.