The Mindful Carnivore (2 page)

I couldn’t have found a better creature on which to focus my hungry curiosity about local life-forms. Though the old granite quarry in which they swam was hardly a natural feature of the landscape, the trout themselves were. Brook trout (
Salvelinus fontinalis
) are native to only one place on the planet: northeastern North America, from the streams of the Appalachian Mountains, up through the Great Lakes basin and New England, and northward all the way to Hudson Bay and the northern Atlantic.

Though being of the genus
Salvelinus
technically makes them char, not trout, brookies are members of the broader trout and salmon family:
Salmonidae
. Like all salmonids, they’re thought to be descended from a common ancestor species that lived in the rivers and lakes of southwestern Canada fifty million years ago. That’s most of fifty million years before anyone resembling you or me showed up. We
Homo sapiens
are a very recent blip. Brookies and their ancestors were here a long, long time before we got around to noticing how gorgeous they were. And how tasty.

Each summer, as soon as school was out and I had arrived from Vermont, I would begin scouting for that summer’s sweet spot, relying on my rough mental map of the underwater terrain. From constant exploring and swimming, sometimes with a diving mask, I knew every foot of the perimeter: where the cliff walls plunged straight down toward the bottom, where shelves jutted out, where the rock piles were, where branches and leaves collected, threatening to snag my hook if I cast in too close. The deeper reaches remained more mysterious. My father had been down there with scuba gear once and said there was a grocery cart on the bottom. We joked that in the movies it would have been something more sinister, probably a car.

My father had a pair of grainy, black-and-white photos from the quarrying days. The men looked tiny at the bottom of the ninety-foot granite cliffs. From those pictures, taken shortly before the quarrying stopped, I could see the shape of the basin: the shallow, low-walled section and the wider, deeper end. Where would the trout be in summer? During April vacation, with the ice just melted as it was the day Willie landed that huge one, we would often see—and catch—hungry fish near the surface, as they hunted every corner for minnows and insects. Though more adaptable than other species of char, brookies prefer chillier water than do their rainbow and brown trout cousins over in genera
Oncorhynchus
and
Salmo
. By July, as the upper waters warmed, they’d be deep, especially at midday.

But logic was only part of the equation. In selecting a sweet spot, I relied on intuition, too. After a bit of scouting, I would decide on a place without knowing exactly why. Perhaps the spot didn’t matter. Perhaps I would have done just as well somewhere else. It
felt
like it mattered, though, as if that was the exact place I needed to be if I wanted good luck.

One summer my spot was a deep corner under the tallest cliff. Another year, my father and I set out an old, dark-green glass buoy, anchored to the bottom about twenty feet down. I would tie the rowboat to the netted four-inch sphere and sit there over the rock pile that marked the transition from the quarry’s shallow section to the deeper eastern end. On a calm, bright day I could see the rocks below, illuminated by ribbons of sunlight streaming downward like the fanned tail of some great bird. If I was lucky, I might pick out the dark shape of a trout silhouetted against the granite and have the chance to get my hook out ahead of it. In dimmer light, I would watch for narrow, white fin edges ghosting by.

There, in my little corner of the world, I was fascinated by the drama of eaters and eaten, aware that I was only one predator among many.

Under the eaves of my father’s house, antlions lay in ambush, their conical pit traps pocking the dusty earth. When an ant fell in and began scrambling out—or when a curious boy trickled in a few grains of sand—the hidden lion would rear its flat, ferocious head from the bottom of the pit. If an ant was within reach, the lion would seize it in its massive jaws. If not, the lion would flick up showers of sand, destabilizing the loose sides of the pit and bringing its scrabbling prey back down. I passed no judgment on the antlion—the larval form of an insect resembling a damselfly—for killing ants. That was its nature.

Toward the end of those long summer days, as the light began to fade, I would watch trout surfacing for food. The best shows were the all-out minnow chases. A little shiner—sometimes two or three of them abreast—would leap clear of the water, a hungry trout inches behind. A few feet farther on, the minnows would break the surface again, seeking escape, the trout still nipping at their tails. A third or fourth time the chase would flash into view before vanishing toward an uncertain conclusion.

Watching these chases reminded me of more exotic creatures. I had learned about the cheetah from the box of National Geographic cards that lived on the top shelf of my bookcase, and my mother had made me a quilt with the face of that great cat at its center, striking black eye lines embroidered on yellow, running down around the muzzle like tears. I had met the peregrine falcon as Sam Gribley’s companion, Frightful, in
My Side of the Mountain
. I knew that both were endangered—the cheetah by hunting and habitat loss, the peregrine by decades-long use of the pesticide DDT. This concerned me. But what seized my imagination was their raw, predatory speed.

I had seen it on Mutual of Omaha’s
Wild Kingdom
: the cheetah’s slow, careful stalk, the explosive charge, a gazelle leaping away, the cat accelerating to seventy miles per hour in a matter of seconds. It made my heart race. And even that stunning velocity was eclipsed—three times over—by the deadly strike of the peregrine, hurtling down in my mind’s eye like an arrow from the sky.

As a young bipedal predator, I had neither great stealth nor great speed. What I had was stubbornness, augmented by luck. I also had innate cleverness and a few rudimentary skills that—like Willie’s far greater and long-practiced skills—were unimpeded by allegiance to any notion of aesthetic purism.

I fished with whatever worked: lures, salmon eggs, live bait. Grasshoppers were a favorite, caught by hand among the tall grasses of a nearby field and stowed in a plastic bread bag. Minnows were a close second. A wire-mesh trap, baited with crumbs and set overnight in a shallow, sheltered corner of the quarry, would yield a dozen or more by morning.

In a pinch, if I wanted a minnow but hadn’t set out the trap, I would catch them singly, on a tiny hook. One afternoon I impaled a small black ant on such a hook and, rod in hand, threaded my way down to another corner of the quarry where thick alders overhung the water. Minnows congregated there in the shade. They scattered as I lowered the hook. I thought I had startled them, but then saw a trout just cruising into the shallows. I jiggled the hooked ant. To my delight, the hunter struck and I had an eight-inch fish in hand.

Another summer, I watched one drama unfold evening after evening: a single trout hunting whirligig beetles. Each time I saw the fish, it surfaced in the same area. Each time, it appeared to be the same size. I decided I was seeing the same trout again and again. Most of its leaps missed the beetles as they zigzagged their way across the surface. The ripples would subside and the whirligig would emerge, still paddling away in its evasive pattern. But the trout was persistent. Eventually there would be a leap, the ripples would vanish, and the beetle would be gone.

The trout’s tenacity gave me an idea. Though I knew little about fly-fishing, I had a rod, and I’d taken a short series of classes in fly-tying, taught by an old Vermonter who knew his stuff. The flies I had tied under his direction included a compact, dark-gray bundle of deer hair with an encouraging name: Irresistible. It floated and was about the same size as a whirligig beetle.

One evening when that trout was jumping again, I tied on the Irresistible, hopped into the rowboat, and started paying out line. For fly-fishing purists, masters of the double-haul cast, I’m sure that trolling a dry fly is an especially grievous act of sacrilege. But it worked. The trout started striking. And missing. Either its aim was poor or it was aiming to the side, anticipating that this whirligig beetle would, like all others, whirl off one way or the other just as the strike was made. A few misses later the trout connected and, looking for a meal, became one.

To me, killing fish wasn’t so different from picking wild blueberries. Both were edible parts of my world, free for the catching or gathering. Early on a summer morning, I would head to the pine and oak woods above the cliffs on the quarry’s high southern side. The berries were thick in there. I’d fill a quart container with a mix of them, some small and dusty blue, others big, shiny, and nearly black. Back at the house, my father would stir them into pancake batter and drop spoonfuls onto a sizzling griddle. On our plates, their purple juices mingled with syrup from the few maples we tapped each spring. In early evening of the same day, a pair of trout might sizzle on the same stovetop and be served up on the same plates. The sweetness of gifts straight from the land.

Hunting bullfrogs was more troubling. On summer nights—lying in a bunk bed Willie had made, the clean lines and joinery crafted with the same precise, no-nonsense style he brought to fishing—I listened to the rhythmic chorus of the frogs’ foghorn voices. By day, I caught them bare-handed.

The lucky ones got away or were released after I had marveled at their glittering gold-and-black eyes, their uncannily familiar hands and forearms. The unlucky I put into a long blue cottonmesh bag. Back at the house, I killed them one by one with a quick plunge of my fillet knife down through the spine. Three frogs and I had lunch: six hefty hind legs, each measuring five inches or so after the feet were removed. Skinned, then sautéed with butter and garlic powder, they were mild as chicken. I took their bodies, along with trout heads and entrails, out to the woods for raccoons and other animals to feast on.

Catching bullfrogs by hand took time and skill. Any approach by land was nearly hopeless. The best strategy was to swim along the shore and look for the telltale yellow throat of a full-grown male. Then, slowly, I went straight in toward his nose, keeping my hands below the surface. A swift grab and I had him—sometimes.

After my father gave me a BB gun, the killing got easier. I could take the rowboat along the shore, spot a frog a few yards away, get in position so I had a side view of his head between the cattails, and then—if he hadn’t skipped off already—aim for his big, concentrically patterned eardrum and squeeze the trigger.

I no longer needed to match guile against instinct, hand against leap. I no longer had to feel the fine, slippery texture of the frog’s skin where my hand encircled his waist, nor the forceful push of his hands against my fingers. I no longer saw the details of great webbed toes attached to living, meaty legs. I no longer had to look at his face up close before deciding whether to kill him.

In hindsight, I realize that the gun changed my frog hunting for the worse. The killing became too efficient, too coldly distant. And there was the chance of injury. Hand-caught frogs suffered no harm in the catching; I could release them unscathed. If I decided to put them to the knife, death was instantaneous. A frog hit by a BB, on the other hand, might get away wounded, suffering needlessly before succumbing to the injury or to another predator.

I don’t recall any ever escaping: I was a decent shot and made my kills at close range. What I do recall is a letter my father sent me. I was about nine. A few weeks earlier I had been at the quarry and had gone fishing and frogging. The letter reached me at my mother’s in Vermont. To say I recall it is, I suppose, an exaggeration. I recall only one or two lines. My father had found a dead frog. By the time he discovered it somewhere along the shoreline, it was gray and foul. Since a BB would only make a tiny hole, he couldn’t tell how it had died, but he wondered: Had I shot and failed to recover it? Even at that young age, the possibility made me sick—the frog in pain, its death pointless.

Still, hunting enticed me. I had a big-game knife of sorts. I don’t know where it came from or whether it would have been useful in the field. But the sweep of the blade, the stubby guard, the antler handle, and the sheath embossed with wolf and trees all excited something primal within me.

That same atavistic spirit had been kindled the moment I stepped into my uncle Mark’s room for the first time. He was living with his sister and her husband on Cape Cod’s south shore. My mother, stepfather, sisters, and I had driven down from Vermont for Thanksgiving. Walking into that room was like traveling back in time. On the walls were bows and arrows, a powder horn he had made and scrimshawed, antlers from bucks he had taken, pelts from traplines he had set. Mark, whom I saw only once every year or two, was the only hunter I really knew. He made a belt for me: smooth, wide leather embellished with arrows, diamond shapes pressed in as broadheads, fanned scallop-shell marks suggesting fletching. Snapped to it was a large brass buckle, a symmetrical cross in a near circle. I wore it every day.

I had a pair of plastic recurve bows and spent hours launching a hodgepodge of wooden shafts at straw bales or blocks of old foam. My father, though he had no interest in hunting, recognized mine. I was thirteen or so when he handed me a small Christmas package. Unwrapping and opening the box, I found a double-edged steel broadhead. My little recurves were no match for this deadly looking thing. The message was clear. He was giving me a real bow. That Jennings compound, its lacquered wooden grip richly grained in reddish orange, was a huge leap from my plastic toys. It suggested real hunting.

Yet I never took to the woods in pursuit of game. I knew no local hunter who might have offered to teach me how to hunt and, besides, I enjoyed shooting for its own sake. With my bow, I shot at targets. With my BB gun—and later with my father’s .22 revolver, a six-shot Smith & Wesson on a big .38 frame, and my first rifle, a Remington bolt-action .22—I mostly plinked cans.