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Scrimshaw, powder horns, and the limits of language

As I contemplated becoming a hunter, words helped.

It was good, for instance, to read Richard Nelson’s introduction to A Hunter’s Heart.

There, I caught a glimpse of his journey: from a boyhood of believing that “hunting was entirely evil—no matter who did it, how they did it, or why,” to an adulthood in which hunting served to remind him that he was not separate from his fellow creatures but “twisted together with them in one great braidwork of life.”

But words only went so far.

Others’ words could suggest only what hunting had meant to them.

My own words could shape only questions: Now that I was eating fellow vertebrates again, would hunting help me confront their deaths? Would it deepen my relationship with the hills and valleys I call home? How would it feel to kill a deer?

Even in asking such questions, language felt too narrow. I could not describe the feelings that stirred inside me, let alone name the unknown force—what was it?—that called me to the woods.

If I had been a fine artist, I might have sought insight in paintings. If I had been a musician, I might have sought it in songs.

Being only an amateur craftsman, I sought it in things handmade.

When a cardboard box arrived in the mail, I took out the old knife, secured in a new sheath Uncle Mark had crafted for it. I contemplated the red buck he had painted on its front, and the black deer tracks hidden behind the haft. I reflected on the belt he had made, too, and the ancientness of the image scrimshawed on the antler buckle.

Later, after I bought a secondhand caplock rifle, I took a pruned branch from one of our front yard apple trees—under which deer sometimes forage—and fashioned a ball-starter. With a woodburner, I sketched balsam twigs, the kind of cover through which I might stalk.

With helpful tips from Mark, I made a powderhorn, too. Two deer stood in silhouette on its cherry plug. Crude lines etched into its side suggested Cold Brook, the rocky little waterway that tumbles through the woods behind our house, along whose banks I might look for tracks.

Answers were still years away. But in these objects—in the variety of their shapes and textures and colors, in their symbolic and practical functions, in their very materials—the questions were given a fuller, more nuanced voice, specific to my hunting, here, in this place.

It’s hard to tell you what that voice said, though, muddling around within the constraints of these twenty-six letters.

© 2010 Tovar Cerulli

Zen and the art of deer hunting

Don’t try too hard, some folks say. Desperation can drive the deer away. The less you expect, the more animals you see.

How this philosophy dovetails with the undeniable value of perseverance, I’m not sure. But there may be something to it.

In my first few years as a hunter, I dragged home exactly zero pounds of venison. It was only in my fourth autumn—after I gave up on getting a deer and decided to focus on just enjoying my time in the woods—that my first buck came along.

The next year, I had no expectation of repeated success so soon. Yet a deer came. The year after that, with less time to hunt, my expectations were even lower. Again, a deer came.

There are limits to such luck, however.

This fall, I would be too busy to spend much time in the woods. (Of late, I’ve been too busy even to spend much time in the wilds of the internet. As fellow bloggers can attest, my forays there have left few traces in the form of comments.) I felt sure our freezer would hold no venison this winter. But I promised myself I would get out for a few mornings, just to feel the forest wake at dawn.

A week ago, on opening morning of rifle season, I was doing just that. I had reached the woods a full hour before sunrise: half an hour before legal shooting light.

In the dark, I heard one deer somewhere behind me, its hooves crunching leaves. But its meandering, start-and-stop movements sounded more like a doe browsing than a buck seeking a mate. Here in Vermont, only the latter are legal game in rifle season. Slowly, the animal wandered out of earshot. Probably the only deer I would hear that morning.

No matter. My aim, as meditation teachers say, was to “just sit.” And, as woodland deer hunters say when the leaves are that dry and frosty, to “just listen.”

The rustle of a leaf.

The swishing of wings, as a pileated woodpecker moved from one tree to another.

The sounds of the forest breathing.

I can’t recall ever taking so much pleasure in simply sitting, eyes closed. My mind went still, letting go of its churning thoughts about the next chapter I would be drafting for my book, or about the research I’m doing in grad school, interviewing hunters who came to the pursuit as adults. I was hardly even thinking about deer.

I had been there an hour, listening, when the hoof steps came, moving not into the faint breeze, but with it, so that the animal’s scent was carried my way, rather than vice versa. Again, the sounds stopped and started.

A doe, I thought, maybe the same one.

But when the deer stepped into view, just ten yards off to my right and behind me, I saw antler. And—more surprising—I made out a pair of points on one side. A legal buck.

I saw, too, why the animal’s movements sounded sporadic. The buck was so hopped up on rut-time hormones that he could hardly take a step without stopping to hook a sapling with his antlers or to paw at the earth.

A few more steps, as the buck crossed behind me. An ambling turn that would take him away, yet gave me the chance to raise my rifle unseen. A clear view as he angled off. A moment’s pressure on the trigger.

Crouching beside him, I offered thanks and apology—poor compensation for what I had taken—and thought how strange this brief hunt had been. In years past, I had never even seen a buck on opening day.

The next morning, returning scraps to the forest, I paused by a pair of crisscrossed logs. The moss was festooned with clumps of fine, downy fuzz. Puzzled, I leaned over to look more closely.

Red squirrel. The ephemeral traces of another, winged, hunter’s kill.

© 2010 Tovar Cerulli

Coyotes, deer, and the very idea of ‘game’

Photo by Christopher Bruno

A few nights ago, coyotes yipped and howled nearby. I was delighted to hear them.

Granted, I was in bed at the time. My sentiments would, I suspect, be substantially different if I was, say, deep in the woods with a turned ankle and no flashlight.

The next day I got thinking about those wild yelps, and about coyotes.

Here in Vermont, some hunters are happy to have coyotes around, and never think of killing them. Other hunters despise coyotes and shoot them at every opportunity. Still others are somewhere in the middle: perhaps ambivalent, perhaps hunting them occasionally, perhaps happy to co-exist as long as Fido and Sylvester aren’t getting snatched from the backyard.

These hunters would, I imagine, respond in various ways to Aldo Leopold’s thoughts about predators on the land:

Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism.

Photo courtesy Charles & Clint Robertson

What catches my eye in that passage is the word “game.”

As a broad category,  of course, it simply indicates creatures that we hunt or catch. “Game” says deer, not shrew. It says grouse, not egret. It says bass, not minnow.

But doesn’t it also say something else?

By saying “game,” don’t we stake some kind of claim on these creatures? Don’t we define them as somehow different from other “wildlife,” perhaps one step closer to “livestock,” to “property”?

When hunters talk about what impact coyotes do or don’t have on white-tailed deer numbers, isn’t the entire discussion built on the very idea of “game”? On the notion that deer—almost like cows and sheep, or Fido and Sylvester—are, at least in part, off-limits to coyotes?

What are the consequences of believing that certain wild animals should be killed and eaten only—or at least mostly—by two-footed predators, not four-footed?

© 2010 Tovar Cerulli

Redneck culture, city culture: The clash over hunting

Eighteen years ago, I had no doubt: hunting was wrong.

Not that I made big distinctions among kinds of violence. I abhorred the idea of industrial meat operations, and thought little about the alternatives. Why split hairs? A murdered animal was a murdered animal.

Hunting, however, did seem especially gratuitous. We no longer needed to do it. Thanks to agriculture we now had ample plant matter to survive on.

At the same time, though, I mourned the extermination of indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures around the world.

If someone had pointed out that contradiction—the fact that I wished for the survival of cultural traditions that involved killing animals—I probably would have argued that such cultures, like ours, could make moral progress away from hunting and meat-eating.

Yikes. Might I have made a good missionary?

I also would have argued that indigenous cultures respected animals in ways that Euro-American culture did not. My problem wasn’t really with human predation in all times and places. My problem was with hunting here and now: mainly white folks with guns.

Now, most of two decades later, a new book has me reflecting on the views I held back then.

In A Matter of Life and Death: Hunting in Contemporary Vermont, anthropologist Marc Boglioli argues that mainstream American culture is increasingly dominated by a particular way of seeing (and talking about) nature and animals. “Killing beautiful wild animals,” he writes in the Introduction, “simply does not fit into the mainstream urban worldview.”

Consider the quote he pulls from Matt Cartmill’s book A View to a Death in the Morning, where hunting is characterized as “the rural equivalent of running through Central Park at night, raping and murdering random New Yorkers.” Or the quote from a commentary by animal rights philosopher Tom Regan: “The gestalt of rural people, their whole way of viewing the world, is radically different from somebody living in Washington, D.C., and the more we understand the other layers of it, the more we can practice ‘hate the sin, love the sinner.’”

In short, Boglioli argues, hunting is characterized as “a morally deficient aspect of rural American culture”:

I believe my research clearly shows that antihunting sentiment is not a product of a more highly developed sense of ethics or a greater ‘respect for nature’ among nonhunters, but rather is just one aspect of a rural/urban cultural debate that masquerades as a discussion of moral absolutes.

I wonder: Was that me eighteen years ago?

My ethical concerns about the treatment of animals were—and continue to be—sincere. But was my attitude toward hunting rooted in the cultural debate Boglioli suggests? Though I grew up in the country, my parents did not. I had one uncle who hunted, but I did not come from a “rural” family.

As further evidence of the urban elite’s condemnation of rural American practices, Boglioli points to his own discipline: anthropology.

Hunter-gatherer cultures such as the Inupiaq, Mbuti, and Bushmen have been studied for decades. Their hunting practices, beliefs, and rituals have been well documented. But people such as those Boglioli studies—hunters in rural Vermont—have been essentially ignored. Prior to A Matter of Life and Death, he notes, only one book-length ethnographic study of Euro-American hunting had ever been published: Stuart Marks’s 1991 Southern Hunting in Black and White.

What value could there possibly be in studying rural American hunters, in understanding and writing about their beliefs, practices, and ways of relating to animals and nature?

A lot, I think.

For one thing, it might help us reconsider the sharp divide in our ideas about “noble savages” and “ignoble Westerners”—a split which, Boglioli notes, is “slipping into the realm of caricature.”

Note: In Boglioli’s book and in this blog post, “urban” and “rural” refer not to individual people, but to cultures—systems of meaning that tend to predominate in certain types of places. Some hunters, of course, grow up or live in cities, just as some anti-hunters grow up or live in the country.

© 2010 Tovar Cerulli

Unposted: Hunting, neighborliness, and private land

When Cath and I moved to our home here in the hills on the eastern side of the Winooski Valley, there was one group of people I wanted to keep off our few acres: hunters.

Anywhere you stood on our land—or fired a rifle—you were within a few hundred yards of our house. In most spots, you were a lot closer than that.

Our driveway is part of an old railroad bed, long used as a trail by hunters, hikers, bicyclists, cross-country skiers, and snowmobilers. Decades ago, after part of the railbed embankment washed out and disappeared downstream, a trail detour was put in around our house and driveway.

That detour winds through our woods just seventy yards from the back porch.

With safety in mind, and not liking the idea of hunting much, I did the obvious thing. I bought a roll of those ubiquitous bright yellow signs. Several went alongside the trail detour: not blocking it, but telling folks to stick to it.

Six years later, I started hunting.

Our few acres, though convenient, offered little opportunity. And, anywhere I stood—or fired a rifle—I was close to the driveway, the house, a neighbor’s house, or the frequently used trail. State land offered greater opportunity and safety, if I drove some distance to reach it. But the most convenient combination of opportunity and safety was offered by the hundreds of acres of timberland stretching out behind our house: others’ private property.

So I asked permission to hunt there.

Landowners who had grown up elsewhere thanked me for asking, and said yes.

Landowners who had grown up here were baffled by my question. Their land wasn’t posted. Didn’t I know that meant I could hunt it? (I did. The liberty to hunt on un-posted, un-enclosed private land was inscribed in Vermont’s Constitution two centuries ago.)

Talking with these landowners, I got thinking about our yellow signs.

I didn’t want to tempt fate by removing them entirely. In the previous few years, careless hunters had killed two bystanders in Vermont: one man picking berries where a hunter expected to see a bear, and another sitting in his living room watching television a long way from where a hunter missed a deer.

Reading those stories in the newspaper, I found little consolation in the statistical fact that hunting-related injuries to humans are (1) very rare and (2) almost always self-inflicted or inflicted on another hunter.

Hunters still needed to know that our few acres were not a place for shooting.

That message, though, could take a different tone.

© 2010 Tovar Cerulli

Hunting philosophy for (and by) almost everyone

A philosopher I am not.

Not in the academic sense, at least. My formal education in the subject consists of a single undergraduate class—“Reason and Argument”—which left me impressed by the contortions through which the human animal is willing to put its gray matter.

So, some fifteen months ago, when I saw a “call for abstracts” for a new anthology of philosophical essays on hunting, I had reason to doubt my suitability as a contributor. The editor welcomed abstracts from philosophy, of course, and also from a number of other disciplines—such as anthropology, political theory, and theology—in which I was equally unqualified.

Yet there was this one little phrase. They also welcomed abstracts from “thoughtful hunters.”

After a few helpful email exchanges with the editor, Nathan Kowalsky of the University of Alberta, I said, “What the heck. Why not?” and shot from the hip, firing off a 250-word description of the 4,500-word essay I would write if he and his colleagues wanted me to.

A month later, I got word that they did.

Hello. Time to step up to the plate and deliver “Hunting Like a Vegetarian: Same Ethics, Different Flavors.”

Jump a year ahead and here we are: the book, Hunting: In Search of the Wild Life, has just been released, as part of Wiley-Blackwell’s series Philosophy for Everyone.

My complimentary copy hasn’t arrived yet, so I can’t give you a review.

What I can do is tell you that the mix of voices is remarkable. In addition to contributions from a fascinating group of folks who, unlike me, are trained in philosophy (including environmentalist and vegan Lisa Kretz and weapons fanatic Jesús Ilundáin-Agurruza), there are essays, for example, by Canadian zoologist Valerius Geist, Algonquin hunter Jacob Wawatie, and historian and bird-trap builder Paula Young Lee.

I can also point you to the partial preview available on Google Books.

And I can point you to the first review of the book (review copies go out early), posted on Sustainablog by Justin Van Kleeck who, appropriately enough to my way of thinking, is vegan.

Enjoy! And I promise: my next post will not be about books, present or future.

Note: If you end up with a copy of the book in hand, and decide to read my essay, two small caveats. First, it is a smidge drier than my average blog post. Second, no sooner had the editing been finalized than I learned that some of the greenhouse gas figures given in the U.N. report Livestock’s Long Shadow, which I reference early in the essay, had been discredited. Ah well, it’s the spirit of the thing that counts.