The Mindful Carnivore (24 page)

Sitting there at the base of the tree Mark had picked out, I spoke silently to the unseen deer. I praised their beauty, agility, and speed. I praised their ability to become nearly invisible, standing still, blending into the forest. And I asked them to appear. Even if success was not framed by some moral universe, it felt as though the hunt—this seeking to kill an animal whose body would yield sustenance for mine—demanded this kind of attention. The practice, however, felt strange. I was praying. To animals.

I had grown up in a culture where people spoke and listened to only one unseen power. Though I wasn’t taught to pray to God, I heard talk about it all around me, so I had a grasp of how one went about doing it and what it meant. Praying to animals, on the other hand, was foreign. I did not come from a lineage of people who spoke or listened to wild things. I came from people—Italian, German, French, English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish, all now thoroughly Americanized—whose animistic traditions were uprooted centuries ago. The inclination to talk to wild animals, even to send entreaties their way and attend to their voices, might have been in me as a boy, but that inclination had not been cultivated. Now, in trying to shape a hunting prayer, I found myself unsure how to address the larger-than-human world.

It was not just that I lacked a repertoire, a range of particular words and phrases to draw from. It was that I lacked a way of thinking in which prayerful interaction with animals was coherent. Consciousness of this kind has been central to human existence for the vast majority of our hundreds-of-millennia-long tenure on the planet, but I had not learned it. Intellectually, it might make sense to me, but it was not ingrained in my patterns of thought and speech and listening. This was the kind of disconnection Thomas Berry had in mind when he spoke of our spiritual autism: “We have broken the great conversation.”

Trying anyway—clumsily piecing together silent prayers—I felt like a klutz. I also felt like a thief.

Even as words surfaced—
singing, rain, lightning
—and were cobbled together in my dim mental recesses, I knew they had been lifted from things I had read: perhaps from Claus Chee Sonny’s account of a Navajo ceremony known as the Deerhunting Way, or from prayers attributed to the Oglala holy man Black Elk by John G. Neihardt, the white poet and amateur ethnographer who wrote the famous book
Black Elk Speaks
.

It made me uneasy. My ancestors had sought to exterminate American Indian peoples, robbing them of their lives, their land, and the freedom to practice their own religions and speak their own languages. At the same time, my people adopted Indianness when and how it suited them, from the Boston Tea Party to the Daniel Boone stories, from the Boy Scouts to New Age shamanism. As historian Philip J. Deloria argues in
Playing Indian
, the two are linked. The co-opting of Indian identity has long gone “hand in hand with the dispossession and conquest of actual Indian people.” And here I was, sitting in woods long hunted by the Wampanoag, with a frontier-style musket across my lap, stitching together borrowed verbal fragments into some clumsy parody of a native deer-hunting prayer. Did my superficial need for language justify the cultural rip-off? As much as I respected the indigenous cultures of the Americas, wasn’t it high time my Euro-American psyche stopped feeding off them?

Even if I knew a traditional native hunting prayer in its entirety and could, somehow, borrow it respectfully, what meaning or power would it really have? The transplanted words would have no roots. For me, such mimicry made no more sense—and was fraught with more troubling subtext—than mouthing the words of a Catholic High Mass. Even with an intellectual understanding of what such a prayer was supposed to mean, I would still be “playing Indian.”

For that matter, even if I knew the details of an ancient European hunting ceremony like putting vegetation into the mouth of the fallen animal, giving it a “last meal,” what meaning would that have for me? That, too, was anthropology. That, too, was history, not a living tradition in which I was raised. I would just be “playing ancient European.” The act would not have emerged organically from my lived experience.

Prayers or no prayers, squirrels were all I saw those first two days.

The third morning, though, a blast came at sunrise, sudden and final. Soon, I saw Mark walking toward me through the woods, the blaze orange of his hat and vest startling in the drizzly, shrouded light.

Returning to the fallen deer, we stood together in the mist. I didn’t know what prayer, if any, Mark might have said before he came looking for me, what small ritual he might have performed to honor the life he had taken. Now, there was simply silence, our thoughts and feelings unspoken.

The lead slug had taken the doe in the chest, dropping her on the spot. Though she was small, it didn’t surprise me that Mark had squeezed the trigger. During his recent trip to Virginia, he had had no luck. Now, in early December, with the annual end of Massachusetts deer hunting only a few weeks away, his chances for venison were waning. Any whitetail was a blessing.

Quietly, Mark began the field dressing, slitting the skin and abdominal wall, and easing the stomach, intestines, and liver out onto the forest floor. (Years earlier, Mark would have saved the liver and eaten it, but health advisories had since deterred him: Deer liver can contain high levels of cadmium.) Then he cut the diaphragm free and removed the heart and lungs. I recalled Cath describing how she had watched her brother dress out rabbits when she was a kid. She hadn’t been horrified. Rather, she had been fascinated by the anatomy lesson, the shiny muscles and complex organs unveiled. As I watched Mark work, I found myself relieved that he had done the killing, not I—that his hands, not mine, were pulling out this animal’s innards.

Once the entrails were removed, Mark covered the pile with leaves. We were on public land, near a trail where people sometimes hiked, and a passerby might be offended by the sight. The area was also frequented by other hunters, one of whom might take the viscera as a clue and start hunting this edge of the small plateau. Over the years, Mark’s luck had been good here and he had grown fond of the spot. He didn’t want to show up on opening day a year from now and find another hunter sitting under the tree he had used as a backrest this morning. In any case, coyotes would soon find the entrails. This patch of earth would be licked clean in a matter of days.

When Mark was done, he said he would hike out to the car, drop off his gun and pack, and come back with his deer sled, a sheet of rugged plastic that eased the dragging of a deer across bare ground and kept the carcass clean. He suggested that I stay put, gun loaded. Unlikely as it seemed, he said he had seen whitetails, perhaps drawn by curiosity, walk right up to where another deer had just been gutted.

So I sat a few yards away and waited, meditating on dripping forest and freshly killed mammal. Five years earlier, as a vegan, I could not possibly have imagined the scene: me watching over a cooling carcass, scanning the woods for a second deer. Even now, I felt ambivalent.

When Mark returned some forty minutes later, we lashed the sled around the doe like a black cocoon, then dragged her to the road. It was easy going—the sled smooth, the terrain gentle. In the back of his old station wagon, Mark had spread a doubled-over tarp. We hoisted the animal in.

As Mark drove, I nestled into the passenger seat and watched the light rain bead up on the windshield between wiper strokes. I savored the moment, being there with my uncle, knowing we had accomplished what we had set out to do. And I felt something shifting. Cruising down the road with our dead mammalian cargo, I was crossing another threshold into the unfamiliar.

After checking in the deer at a sporting-goods shop, we headed back to the house. On the way, Mark asked if I wanted to get back to the woods that afternoon. Though the day was already warming into the fifties, he could get the doe quartered and iced down in coolers so we could head out again. The rest of the butchering could wait. I told him I saw no reason why it should. I was there to learn. Cutting up a deer was as much a part of the hunt as tracking or stalking. And we still had tomorrow, the last day of our hunt.

Under the back deck, Mark hung the doe upside down from a gambrel, a simple device resembling a large, rugged coat hanger. At each end, a steel hook passed through the gap between tendon and bone, just behind the anatomical equivalent of the human ankle. Mark made a slit up the inside of each rear leg and cut the skin free just below the gambrel. Then, with something to get hold of, he pulled downward, peeling off the doe’s hide, only using his knife when necessary.

The skinning startled me. Though Mark worked without haste, the metamorphosis seemed abrupt. As the hide peeled away from hind legs and back, the inside of the doe’s skin was revealed, white tissue overlapped by fine layers of subcutaneous muscle. When Mark was finished, the whitetail—an animal whose identity had, in my eyes, been defined by her grayish-brown coat, white belly, elegant head, and great ears—was gone. In her place hung an unrecognizable, headless carcass: muscle, fat, and bone. Mark was one of the most sensitive and softhearted people I knew. Yet he had just turned a graceful, living being into a hunk of meat.

The remainder of that gray, damp day passed quietly. We cleared the small kitchen island of its usual homey clutter and worked opposite each other. First, the hind quarters, then the front, and finally the ribs, back, and neck. I was slow and tentative with the boning knife, mimicking Mark’s sure, practiced motions. Tendons and silver skin were carefully trimmed from backstrap and steak. Smaller pieces were set aside for stew meat. The rest went through a hand-crank grinder clamped to the countertop. By night, the doe was in the basement freezer.

The last day of our hunt, Mark and I found fresh tracks in the moist earth. Neither of us saw deer. Toward dusk, a dark gray coyote trotted by on the slope below me. Perhaps the four-footed hunter would soon feast on the entrails of the doe we had butchered.

The next morning, Mark insisted that I leave with half his venison, as generous with me as the land had been with him.

I thought about the meat in the cooler behind me as I drove north. Cath and I still got the bulk of our calories and nutrition—fruits, vegetables, grains, chickens, and more—from farming done by others. From our own gardening, we got a smaller portion of our food—greens, peas, beans, carrots, squash, and the like—plus an invaluable sense of involvement and connection. From wild food, we got something else.

Whether unsought and unforeseen like a bagful of wild blue-berries spontaneously picked on a sunny hillside, or hunted and hoped for like chanterelles sought in summer woods or like this deer that Mark had killed, wild food was not something grown or owned, bought or sold. It was something given and taken.

In
Living Wild and Domestic
, Robert Kimber clarifies the difference. Unlike the hunted animal, he writes, “The animal raised and slaughtered is not a gift. We have earned that food in a different way, and when we eat that animal, we are not accepting a gift as much as we are exercising our property rights.” If Cath and I were raising chickens, we would know when those birds would go from yard to freezer. Buying them from local farmers, we could make an appointment. Buying them from the local food co-op, we could simply walk to the cooler. The food would be there.

As much as we depended on such relentless certainty, something in me craved the unpredictable. I thought once again of Willie, of poker and fishing, of Henry van Dyke’s “enchantment of uncertainty.” In hunting, the outcome would always be mysterious. Entering the woods, I would never know whether an animal would appear. Perhaps hunting would feed soul as much as body, reminding me of our oldest, humblest way of eating. To fallen deer, as to blueberry bush, I would not be master, standing over that which was rightfully mine, but supplicant, on my knees, hand outstretched.

12

Fickle Predators

There is the difference between the animal and humankind. The animal has no alternatives. We make choices.

—William A. Caldwell, “Hawk and Hare Are One”

A
year later, in the growing light of a late October dawn, a crew of chickadees darted around me in fearless curiosity. I could not imagine killing one of these birds, the way I once had as a boy. As the air warmed to just above freezing, birch leaves began to fall, round and golden, as if all that held stem to twig had been a tiny speck of ice.

Coming into my second autumn of deer hunting, I still didn’t know the land well. But I had scouted hard that summer, exploring the woods behind our house. The deer trails marked on my home-made map formed an increasingly complex web, quilting the landscape with movement as large herbivores threaded their way among pines, maples, and balsam firs, across brooks and around ponds, along old logging roads and through breaches in old stone walls. I was beginning to see how whitetails lived, here, in this place.

So far this fall, I hadn’t hunted much. The first weekend of archery season, the mercury had hovered around eighty. I could not imagine killing a whitetail in that heat: The chance of meat spoilage seemed too high. My first go at the entire process—field dressing a deer, dragging the animal out of the woods, driving it to a local check-in station, getting it home, skinning it, and breaking the carcass down into parts that would fit into coolers where they could be iced down—would, I suspected, be anything but swift.

The second weekend had brought rain. That was weather I might have hunted in with high hopes during rifle season. Mark had told me that deer often seemed less wary in a light rain and it had, in fact, been a misty day when he shot that doe on the Cape. But even with a perfectly placed arrow, straight through the heart or both lungs, I knew that a deer could run fifty or a hundred yards in the few seconds before it collapsed, and I wasn’t keen on following a faint blood trail as it washed away by the minute. The thought of shooting a deer and failing to find it made my stomach turn.