“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.

© 2010 Tovar Cerulli

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.”

© 2010 Tovar Cerulli