‘Gone killing’

Hunters and anglers, writes Marc Bekoff in Animals Matter, “often like to hang signs that say ‘Gone Fishin’’ or ‘Gone Huntin’.’ But what these slogans really mean is ‘Gone killing.’”

When I opposed hunting, I would—like Bekoff—have objected to the euphemisms. Even catch-and-release fishing, with its professed intent not to kill, often does.

Now that I hunt, though, what strikes me is simply that “gone killing” is a terribly inaccurate description of my experiences in the woods.

When I hunt deer, the creatures I see most often are small woodland birds, usually chickadees. If I’m lucky, a pileated woodpecker might land on a nearby tree trunk with a thwack, or a pair of ruffed grouse might scurry by in the brush. Typically, the biggest mammal I see is a red squirrel, hopping past or pausing to scold me.

Hunters do hope to kill now and then. Yet many of us go years without doing so. I recall talking with a man who was out in the woods, hunting with his son. He said he hadn’t shot a deer in over twenty years. He seemed perfectly content just being out there.

Even when animals do show up, often there isn’t any opportunity for a legal, ethical shot. And even when there is, hunters don’t always kill. Sometimes we let the moment pass.

On the rare occasions when I do shoot a deer, the killing itself takes mere seconds.

In short, killing isn’t what hunters do with most of their time in the field.

But, just for a moment, let’s imagine that Bekoff’s words were literally true—that all hunting entailed killing. If we were all subsistence hunters, dependent on the meat to keep our families alive through the winter, perhaps we’d be glad to know that we’d return from every outing with dinner in tow.

Even then, though, how would the certainty and the constant killing feel? What kind of experience would it be?

I’m not even sure what we’d call it. As one local hunter—a particularly experienced and skilled outdoorsman—once put it after a long, unsuccessful deer season, “That’s why they call it ‘hunting,’ not ‘finding.’”

Maybe next time I head to the woods, I’ll hang a sign: “Gone looking, listening, and birdwatching—and, just possibly, killing.”

A hero among us

The first thing I ever heard about my great-uncle Al was that he never gave up.

When I started hunting, my mentor—my mother’s brother, Uncle Mark—wanted to impress upon me the vital importance of persistence. So he told me stories about hunting with his uncles in Pennsylvania’s Moshannon State Forest back in the 1960s and 70s.

Uncle Al, me, and Al’s son Jim in Vermont in 2007. The sign behind us, which Cath and I had never noticed before, indicates that access to one of our favorite hiking and fishing areas was funded by the Land & Water Conservation Fund, a program Uncle Al helped establish in the 1960s. Photo credit: Catherine J. Cerulli

When pouring rain or biting cold or just plain hopelessness drove everyone else back to the cabin, Uncle Al would stay put, his back to a big oak, fallen logs and branches stacked up on either side as windbreaks, his .35 Remington pump in hand. Hours later, the cabin door would swing open and Uncle Al would step inside, grinning, and set a plastic bag on the table. In it would be the liver of a whitetail, still warm. While other hunters often went home empty-handed, he dragged a buck off that rough Allegheny terrain three years out of four.

I started corresponding with Uncle Al in 2006. The next year, I met him and his son Jim for the first time. As I’ve gotten to know Al and learned about his life, one thing has become abundantly clear: his dogged perseverance has led to far greater accomplishments than success in the deer woods.

Now, at the age of 93, Uncle Al (Alfred Buck) has been named a Hero of Conservation by Field & Stream.

On my essays page, I’ve posted a piece about him—Country of Rivers: A Life’s Work—along with a number of photos. I hope you enjoy it.

Legacies to leave by the roadside

Smeared with blood and deer hair, the rubber gloves had been tossed by the roadside. Next to them lay a chunk of guts. The trash couldn’t be missed by anyone who parked at the hiking trail access the hunters had used.

Whitetail shot and left by the roadside — Photo credit: Joe R. Bumgardner, M.D. Mississippi Bowhunters Association

By then I’d stopped being surprised.

In only my second year as a hunter, I’d already seen enough of this—garbage left at kill sites, deer parts dumped alongside the road, and more. No, I wasn’t surprised. I was simply angered.

And struck by the timing. This was the morning after Vermont’s Youth Weekend: the two days set aside every November for the much-vaunted purpose of getting young deer hunters out in the woods, each accompanied by an unarmed adult mentor.

Littering was, I knew, among the lesser evils. But for me, in that moment, it was symbolic, standing in for the stories I’d heard from other hunters and hunter-education instructors: The animals killed and left to rot. The Hail Mary shots taken at deer running through thick cover. The intentional gut-shooting of deer on posted private property, the aim being to have them run a long way onto un-posted land from which they could be retrieved.

Here, looking down at gloves and guts, I was seeing not just disrespectful, slobbish hunting. I was seeing the passing-along of such hunting to another generation.

When we champion the survival of hunting traditions, let’s be specific.

Reverberations of a kill

“How are you doing?” Cath asked.

We were sitting at the kitchen table, having coffee.

I waggled one hand: so-so. “I’m in that zone.”

She nodded. She’d known before I answered.

Less than an hour after sunrise that November morning, she’d heard the shot. From the direction and distance, she’d known who squeezed the trigger.

I’d field-dressed the buck, then come back to the house to leave off my rifle and pack. Soon, I’d hike back into the woods and drag the deer home. But right then, I was just sitting, noticing the strange sensation that moves through me every time I kill a whitetail. If past experiences were any measure, it would last a day or two, ebbing slowly.

I’ve been thinking about that sensation over the past few weeks, ever since receiving an email from a Colorado hunter who’s been following my blog. He wrote to say how glad he was to read the words of a fellow hunter who, like him, finds the kill to be a tough moment—who, like him, experiences such strong feelings in response.

In the last few seconds before the kill, my mind is focused on nothing but the shot. The animal. The angles of body and bullet. The question of whether I have a clean shot and, if so, when.

The moment itself is unsettling. The shock of it. The prayer that my aim was true. The relief when the animal goes down fast.

That’s when that other sensation begins to build in me, cresting slowly like a great wave.

In the days to come, I feel gratitude for the venison. And I feel gratitude for my success, which I know is always against the odds—the woods thick, the deer few.

But in the background, that other feeling is there, too.

It isn’t the storm of uncertainty and grief that whirled through me when I killed my first deer. I’m clearer about my hunting now.

Nor is it the heart-wrenching remorse I know I’d feel if I wounded an animal, causing suffering. The few deer I’ve killed so far have all gone down quickly with a single shot, dead before shock could turn to pain.

No, it’s something else. Something I can’t ascribe to thought, belief or emotion.

Again and again, I replay the kill in memory, trying to sift out something elusive, some meaning that lives just below the visible surface of the event.

Yes, it’s something else. Some kind of soul-wrenching. Some altered state triggered by the encounter with animal and death. By my snipping of that thread of life.

Hunters and other whackos

The word “hunting” or “hunter” catches my ear. Then I hear my name.

I’m at a gathering of neighbors and a friend has just told a couple acquaintances that I hunt. Catching a few more words, I can sense their astonishment from across the room. He seems like a nice enough guy, I imagine them thinking. You wouldn’t think he was part of that deranged, bloodthirsty lot.

Ten or fifteen years earlier, I would have been in their shoes. I would have reacted from the same viewpoint: Modern hunters don’t have to kill to survive. They kill because they want to. Wanting to kill is a sign of ignorance, sadism, or worse.

To be sure, there are some nasty, sadistic hunters out there. But I’m not sure that such people are found any more frequently among hunters than among the general population.

When you paint all hunters with that brush—convincing yourself that they’re all deranged—you can ignore everything they say. Who listens to nutcases? It makes things easy. You can dismiss them as a stereotyped category, shaking your head and saying, “I just don’t understand that (crazy) way of thinking.”

But the blade cuts both ways.

I hear folks talking about anti-hunters in similar ways: they’re ignorant, naïve, or worse. They’re all nutcases.

When we—in either the anti-hunting camp or the hunting camp—circle our wagons and sit around congratulating ourselves on having so much more on the ball than those whackos, I think a few things happen.

One: We lose touch with our empathy for them as fellow humans.

Two: We lose sight of our common ground. Many hunters and anti-hunters share basic beliefs about animal welfare. Folks in both groups, I wager, think more about animals than do folks in the non-hunting majority. Some folks in both groups go out of their way to help animals and alleviate suffering.

Three: We stop trying to see beyond the stereotypes, to comprehend where other folks are coming from. We run the risk of becoming rigid, self-absorbed, and deaf to reason. We short-circuit our own capacity for learning.

Anti-hunters could learn a lot from open-minded conversations with thoughtful hunters.

And hunters could learn a lot from anti-hunters.

I’m thinking, for instance, of the comments left by Clyde on my post of January 1^st. He says he’s a dedicated vegetarian and feels antipathy toward the gunshots he hears in the woods. Yet he respects those hunters who have “a solid code of ethics.” He’s found a way to hold both and expresses passionate, sensitive views. He writes of the moral responsibility that comes with hunting, the need for the hunter to minimize suffering through “compassion and acute judgment,” and the sacredness of the power to kill or let live.

Some hunters I’ve met could have written Clyde’s words. Others I’ve met could stand to read and ponder them.

Venison from the North Pole

The twinkle in my stepson’s eyes should have told me I was in for it.

He and his wife were up from Jersey for a Christmas visit. It was a month after I’d killed my first deer. And we were opening gifts.

The box was small. Pushing aside the tissue paper, I saw the silvery gleam of spreading antlers. Uh oh. I drew out a shiny reindeer, an ornament for the tree.

He’d taped a tiny circle of paper to its chest. Drawn on the paper were the concentric circles of a bull’s eye target, reminiscent of the old Gary Larson cartoon: “Bummer of a birthmark, Hal.” Also attached to the ornament was a tag—“Tovar: Let my people go.”

We laughed so hard it hurt.

When I broiled venison tenderloin that weekend, my stepson ate with gusto. He also snapped a photo of the meat starting to sizzle in the oven and emailed the picture to his brother, who’d just moved out West—with a caption: “There’s an opening on Santa’s sleigh team this year.”

And just a month ago, after Cath and I had our vehicular encounter with the doe, I talked with him by phone. He suggested that I might soon receive an anonymous letter composed of alphabet characters clipped from magazines and pasted to a sheet of paper, reading: “Mr. Cerulli: That was a warning shot. Next time we won’t miss.”

Every time he cracks a joke like that—gently razzing me about having become a hunter—I laugh. It reminds me not to take myself too seriously, even when life and death are on the table.

It reminds me, too, of how much I care about animals and their perspectives. Though I doubt ungulates quote the Bible or conspire to launch themselves at hunters’ cars, I do ponder what an old Koyukon man told anthropologist Richard Nelson: “Every animal knows way more than you do.” And I wonder: Given how much I care, is hunting the right path for me? I think so. But how sure am I?

Better that I shouldn’t lose sight of the questions. Better that I shouldn’t slip into certainty. “Human beings,” as Laurens van der Post put it, “are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.”

Kinds of harm

The doe stepped into the road, then trotted across and bounded into the woods as I slowed the car. Cath and I both relaxed. We weren’t going fast, but that had been close.

Then the second doe was there, very close, pausing at the edge of the road. I caught the flash of movement at the periphery of the headlights as she leapt forward. I went hard left. But she came fast. Cath and I heard the bodily thud as she careened off the passenger side.

I stopped and backed up. The doe was lying in the road. Done for, I thought. Then she raised her head. Oh, no. A sick feeling rose up inside. Done for, but not dead. I’d never hit a deer before. And I was going to have to finish this one off, which would be illegal—or drive the half-mile back home, call a game warden, and make the doe wait for mercy at the official hand of the law.

When Cath and I got out of the car, the doe stood up. Then, recognizing us as bipeds, she trotted off and disappeared into the woods. Looking at the dented fender over the wheel, we realized it was more a case of deer-hitting-car than car-hitting-deer.

As we drove off, we talked about it. We agreed that we’d been lucky. It could have been far worse: for us, the doe, and the car.

Three hours later, I followed the doe’s tracks by flashlight, figuring she’d stop nearby if she was seriously hurt. I found only tracks; no sign of a fresh bed. Imagining her chances were good, I prayed she’d make it with nothing more than bruises and a newfound respect for headlights.

But the incident still troubled me.

It wasn’t news to me, of course, that animals get maimed and killed by cars. As a volunteer firefighter, I’d been on accident scenes. I’d led wardens to mortally wounded deer and heard the gun’s sharp report. Nor was it news that we maim and kill in all kinds of other ways, incurring a massive debt in animal lives and, worse, in habitat. But it’s easy to forget these things, to put them comfortably out of mind. And I’d always found such harm—regrettable, but unintended—easier to accept than premeditated killing.

The doe challenged me to reconsider that.

Just five weeks before she leapt at our car, I’d put a bullet through another deer’s heart. The buck had collapsed in moments; no time for shock to turn into pain. As deer kills always do, that one had shaken me with its reverberations.

But the doe, and the sick feeling that rose up as I saw her lying there in the road, made me ask: Do I really find it easier to accept the inadvertent, often-messy, often-unseen ravages I inflict on my fellow creatures?

The answer, I find, is no. Assuming it’s done quickly, I’m more at peace with intentional harm. With the kill I’ve prepared for and chosen.