How not to keep a hunter in the closet

Seeing a neighbor coming down the woods trail, I winced.

There I was, dressed in camo with a bow in hand, headed home after a morning hunt. And here he came, walking his dog.

I suspected that he, like most of my friends and acquaintances, wasn’t keen on hunting. I could hardly blame him. I had long deplored the killing of animals for food, let alone for sport.

Though I knew a respectful hunter or two, my predominant opinions had been rooted in stereotypes reinforced by personal experience: Cath’s tires slashed after we had put up a no-hunting sign, deer parts dumped alongside our road each autumn, and more.

Now, in my first autumn afield, I was still uncertain how I felt about hunting, even my own. I imagined I would have a clearer sense of it after I killed my first deer.

As my neighbor drew near, I could see surprise on his face.

“It is you,” he said. “I thought, ‘It’s some redneck out hunting and I need to watch my back.’ But no, it’s you out hunting and I need to watch my back.”

We had a polite if awkward chat. Then, only half-joking, he reminded me that he would be in the woods for a while and that his dog looked like a deer. (It would, I thought, be impossible to mistake her for anything but a young, frenetic golden retriever.) And we parted ways.

I felt that same awkwardness three years later, when my first hunting essay was published. I knew the magazine’s readership wasn’t entirely hostile to hunting. The editor sometimes wrote short pieces about his experiences in deer season. But it felt strange to publicly announce my new pursuit. Would acquaintances see the piece and be shocked? Would they give me a hard time?

Thankfully, the essay sparked no negative response. What little feedback I got was positive: an enthusiastic phone message from a conservationist friend here in Vermont, an appreciative letter-to-the-editor from a hunter in upstate New York.

I breathed more easily. I would go about my business quietly now.

In the woods, I would rarely be seen.

In my writing, I would stick to other subjects. That first, brief essay had said all I wanted to say about hunting. There was no need to return to the topic, broadcasting news of my transmogrification.

I wasn’t ashamed of hunting. I didn’t need to hide it. But it wasn’t something I wanted my name to be associated with too strongly.

Heaven forbid it should get around on the internet.

Hunting with Gandhi

In college, studying Mahatma Gandhi’s moral and political philosophy, I was impressed by the twin commitments of his lifelong quest for truth.

On the one hand, he lived according to what he saw as the truth, which must, he wrote, “be my beacon, my shield and buckler.” On the other hand, he had the humility and wisdom to recognize that his truth was incomplete, that it was only “the relative truth as I have conceived it.” Closing himself off to new insights would obstruct his search.

At the time, in my early years as a vegan, I was confident I had a lockdown on dietary truth. Lacking Gandhi’s humility, it never occurred to me that someday I might have to lay down that particular shield and buckler.

Had I paid closer attention to Gandhi’s experiments with diet, they might have been instructive. He tried eating meat in his youth, returned to the traditional Hindu and Jain vegetarian diet on which he was raised, then went vegan.

Eventually, though, recovering from an illness, he found he could not rebuild his constitution without milk. In his autobiography, he warned others—especially those who had adopted veganism as a result of his teachings—not to persist in a milk-free diet “unless they find it beneficial in every way.”

But I wasn’t ready to hear that then. Nor was I ready to hear that other great teachers of compassion—the Dalai Lama, for example—were not the vegetarians I imagined them to be.

It was only later that some faint echo of Gandhi’s wisdom tempered my certainty.

It was only when I found that my body, too, was healthier if I consumed animal products that my truth changed. It was only when I learned that the production of almost every food I ate depended on controlling cervid populations—that is, on the annual slaughter of millions of deer across North America, by hunters and farmers alike—that I began to see a bigger picture.

Now, I wonder: How would Gandhi have responded if he had found that his body, like the Dalai Lama’s, thrived on meat? What would he have done if it turned out that even the cultivation of the fruits and nuts he ate depended on the constant killing of large, charismatic, wild mammals?

Ceremony for a meal

Kneeling beside my first deer, I had no words. I just sat there stunned, my hand on his shoulder, uncertain whether I would ever hunt again.

Finally, I whispered something clumsy: half gratitude, half apology.

The next year, when my second deer dropped in his tracks, I was shaken but less shocked. I spoke my thanks and asked forgiveness simply, without grace.

It was after my third deer fell that I knelt to lean a few small sticks against each other, then cloaked them with three fern fronds, still green in mid-November.

If I had grown up in a family of hunters, or in a culture that spoke to the wild, perhaps I would have had some prayer or ceremony at the ready. As it is, the words and gestures are still part of what I hunt for. Over time, as I find them, perhaps a ritual habit will take root in the thin soil of my few years afield.

These gestures need not be confined to the hunt, of course.

Considering all the deaths we inflict, directly and indirectly, there’s as much reason to fall to my knees by a shelf full of bread or corn chips in the grocery store, or even by a display of organic produce at the local farmers’ market.

Yet, standing in front of fruits and vegetables grown by others, I have the luxury of not knowing what cost they incurred.

Maybe the harm was no worse than the initial “conversion” of forest to tillable farm land, plus a few earthworms chopped by shovel or tractor, or some caterpillars knocked off by a bacterial insecticide.

Considering the larger impacts I know my life has, I have decided not to worry about individual invertebrate deaths. I value them ecologically and gently escort many insects out of our house. But I crush the cucumber beetles that attack our squash seedlings.

On the other hand, maybe a few toads were diced in the tilling. Maybe the field was fertilized with compost made from both the manure and the carcasses of cows. Maybe the bushels of greens on display at the farmers’ market took the life of a family of woodchucks. Maybe the flats of strawberries grew to ripeness thanks to the killing of a deer or two.

A long list of maybes: things most of us don’t know or care to know.

When I garden—uprooting weeds, mashing beetles, occasionally shooting a woodchuck—the luxury of ignorance begins to fade.

When I kneel beside a dead whitetail, it disintegrates. Yanked out of forgetfulness, I find I must offer some gesture of gratitude and apology, no matter how clumsy.

When hunters ruin the hunt

He loved the woods, the animals, and the hunt. What he didn’t count on were the hunters.

Following his boyhood dream, he earned his license as a Registered Maine Guide and landed a job with an outfitter.

Then came the group of hunters who returned to camp bragging about how they had chased a moose with their truck. There to hunt deer or bear, they had just happened onto the bull. They laughed, describing how close they had gotten to the animal and how wildly he had run.

Then came the hunters who used their truck to drag a bear back to camp. A half mile or more of high-speed travel over rough ground left the carcass battered: the hide torn and stripped of hair, the meat covered with dirt.

Then came the hunter who, having already taken a bear, illegally shot another one on the last day of the hunt. The tag on the animal belonged to an inexperienced and luckless companion.

Then came the hunter who wouldn’t keep his rifle pointed away from people, even when reminded.

Had these been isolated incidents, he might have stuck it out. They were not.

Had his fellow guides been as outraged as he was, the outfit might have tightened ship. They were not.

So he left.

When this young man and I crossed paths a few years ago, he was still a hunter. But he’d had enough of prostituting his skills to guys who cared nothing for what he loved.

When I consider the future of hunting—how it will fare in the public eye, and what meaning it will have for generations to come—it’s not anti-hunters I worry about.

It’s these guys.

Gratitude and Google bots

Looking back over this blog’s first six months, I notice three items that need tending.

First, a postscript to the loss of my friend Steve’s French Brittany, Kate: He brought home her two-month-old niece this past Friday. Cath and I got to meet her yesterday. Yes, she is as sweet and silky soft as she looks.

Second, some acknowledgments are in order. My thanks:

To all of you who read the odds and ends I share here. But for you, these posts would languish in cyberspace, noticed only by the vulture-like Google bots circling overhead.
To the fraction of readers who take the time to share thoughts here. The ideas and questions you contribute bring far greater life to mine.
To all who have generously included me in your blog rolls.
To all who have mentioned or linked to my blog in a post, including Melissa at Hunt. Gather. Love., Allison at Crossfit New York, Josh at Ethics and the Environment and Lands on the Margin, Eric at Fair Chase, Casey at Wandering Owl Outside, Albert at The Rasch Outdoor Chronicles, Jim at Grousers, and Daniel at Casual Kitchen.
To those who have made a special point of highlighting my blog on theirs, including Holly at NorCal Cazadora (who sent a bunch of folks my way back in January, when I only had two posts up), Ingrid at The Free Quark, Doug at Harris’ Hawk Blog, Kari at I Don’t Wear Pink Camo to the Woods, and, from across the pond, The Suburban Bushwacker.

As a first step in paying things forward, I encourage you to check out Tamar Haspel’s delightful blog Starving Off the Land, if you haven’t already. Two years ago, Tamar and her husband relocated from Manhattan to Cape Cod. Their goal in 2009 was, every day, to eat one thing they had grown, fished, hunted, or gathered.

This fall will be Tamar’s first deer hunt. Having hunted deer on the Cape in my first season—with my hunting mentor, my Uncle Mark—I’m looking forward to hearing how it goes for Tamar. I wish her more success than I had my first year. Or my second. Or my third.

Finally, about those scavenging Google bots. As anyone with a blog or website knows, they send visitors in hundreds of wacky ways. I’d like to share a few favorite searches that led folks here over the past six months:

“Are elf owls carnivores or vegetarians?” – Carnivores, if you count insects as carne. The swift, stealthy, typically nocturnal hunting habits of an owl would be wasted on vegetables, don’t you think?
“Does prey suffer while being swallowed?” – If the suppositions of this blog’s readers are correct, that depends on the amount of euphoric neurotoxin involved.
“Wild animals have no lace in the 21st century…” – I hope this was a typo and you meant “place.” If not, where can I read more about their use of fancy clothing and lingerie in previous centuries?
Photo by Carl Brandon
“Physics involved car hitting moose” – The physics involved are very, very bad. See photo at right. At highway speed, this is the best-case scenario.
“Is hitting a moose in a car worse than hitting a pig?” – Yes. Much worse. Unless the pig is on stilts and, like a bull moose, weighs nearly as much as a Volkswagen Beetle. See physics inquiry above and photo at right.

Monkeys, venison, and the sentience of dinner

Was that the faint sound of steps? Of hooves crunching dry leaves under the thin blanket of snow?

Seated on the ground, I shifted to the right and half-raised my .54 caliber caplock.

Moments later, I saw deer some forty yards off, walking toward me among the pines. Two, three, four of them. I brought the rifle to my shoulder and eased back the hammer. My third year of hunting would come to a close in less than a week and I had yet to kill a whitetail.

The first in line was a doe. My tag was for a buck. The little parade had closed to less than thirty yards now, weaving through the trees. Heart pounding, I stared along the iron sights, watching for antlers.

If the chance came, I would probably shoot. Yet I couldn’t be sure. I had mixed feelings about the idea.

It would have sat more easily if I believed, with Descartes, that animals are senseless: nothing more than animated meat. But I don’t.

How different am I, after all, from my fellow primates? Some days I don’t feel like the brightest monkey in the forest. If my mind was not cluttered with abstract ideas, might I experience the world much as an ape does?

If I cannot exclude all non-humans from the realm of sentience, by what logic can I exclude some, drawing the line somewhere south of chimpanzee? A deer is not a primate, but it does have senses—perhaps different in kind, perhaps different mainly in degree. So does the hawk. So does the rabbit on which the hawk feeds. If we give credence to old teachings and recent science, even plants have kinds of awareness.

Perhaps the world is more complex and more beautiful than we have imagined. And more terrible.

My vegan diet had taken its toll not only on plants, but on animals, too—those displaced by the conversion of forest and prairie to farmland, those minced by the combines that harvested my grains, those gassed in their burrows to protect my salad greens, those shot in defense of the soybeans that became my saintly tofu.

Now my omnivorous diet was taking its toll on vertebrates more directly.

And here I was in the woods, wondering how willing I was to exact that price myself.

The lead doe was closer now. Looking past her, I could see that the second in line was a doe as well. The third, also antlerless, looked like a six-month-old. And the fourth?

Ah, another doe.

There would be no killing today, and no answers. Yet my heart still pounded.

The lead doe stood broadside a dozen paces away, her breath pluming in the frosty air, her ears and great, dark eyes focused on me. All four deer paused, aware of my crouching form. Unsure what I was, they hesitated. They looked and listened. Then, slowly, they turned back the way they had come.

Trembling, I sat and watched them go.

Snake food: Humans as prey

The sound was quiet, but close: a rustle in the leaves a few feet from the hiking trail.

Curious, I peered under the ferns and caught sight of a garter snake. Then I saw what it was up to.

Not one of Mr. Frog’s better days.

The image of the amphibian in that reptile’s maw reminds me of the gargantuan snakeskin my father had when I was a boy. He had inherited it from some great-aunt who had traveled overseas. I suspect it was a reticulated python.

Now and then, I would take it out of the closet and unfurl it, fold by fold, until I had the entire skin—some twelve to fifteen inches wide and twenty-plus feet long—stretched across the ground. The desiccated skull, still attached, smelled faintly of stale decay.

I was fascinated by the sheer size of the thing.

I knew that snakes this large could eat pigs. Why not a small boy?

Examining that snakeskin was one of my earliest encounters with the idea of humans as potential prey. Not just creatures inevitably recycled in the web of life, as I touched on in one of my first blog posts, but creatures potentially hunted and eaten. For most of the last hundred millennia, Homo sapiens devoted a good deal of attention to avoiding other predators. In some parts of the world, we still have to be careful.

As a hunter, I wonder: What would it be like to end as prey?

That depends, I suppose, on how swiftly the predator accomplishes its lethal aim. The frog in the photo looks calm enough, but I don’t relish the thought of death by digestion. Faster than cancer, to be sure, but not exactly appealing.

Death by grizzly, though? Or by cougar? Given the option, those are tickets I might take.