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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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. Of two things, though, I feel … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more