The Mindful Carnivore (29 page)

Another morning, half an hour after sunrise, a whitetail appeared near the same spot, straight ahead of me. Through my scope, I could see antler. The buck crossed a stream and moseyed up the slope, stopping now and then, passing within forty yards of me. But I couldn’t be sure about the antlers:
spikes or forks?
A minute later, he got downwind of me, snorted in alarm, and was gone. Only then did my body start trembling.

Over Thanksgiving, Cath and I drove to New Jersey to visit her family. We returned to Vermont late Saturday, giving me one last day to rifle hunt. And hunt I did. I spent ten straight hours in the Hundred Acre Woods and saw not a single deer. By day’s end, I was burned out. The optimism I had felt a few weeks earlier now seemed entirely unreasonable, and I began to wonder about the psychological health of putting so much energy into a pursuit that consistently proved my incompetence. I e-mailed Mark, just back from a successful hunt in Virginia, and shared my frustration and doubt. His reply assured me that even after four decades of hunting he could still relate to the feeling of futility. He had found no rhyme or reason to how long it took to get a deer, no evenhanded correlation between effort and success.

He had, however, noticed one curious irony: Sometimes, the less important it felt, the more likely it seemed that whitetails would appear. I was reminded of stories from Zen traditions, and of things my martial arts teachers had said back in high school and college. Mark knew that perseverance paid off. He would not succeed in the hunt by giving up and staying indoors. Yet trying too hard seemed to lower his chances. In fact, he tended to see deer more often and at closer range when he was just walking in the woods than when he was hunting. I wondered: If animals could sense predatory intent, picking up on its vibratory frequency, might not a hunter’s desperation amplify the invisible ripples he or she sent radiating out among the trees?

I thought of Richard telling me how, when the leaves were dry and loud, he sometimes brought a book to the woods. He would sit reading and wouldn’t pick up his .300 Savage until he heard hoof steps coming. Was that nonchalant attitude part of what brought those deer to the Four Directions Stand—four bucks, four years in a row?

Even if such a mind-set didn’t improve my luck in the woods, it was worth cultivating. If I relaxed, I would enjoy the hunt more. That was vital, since I—unskilled and dependent on luck—might never succeed in the goal of taking a deer. In the interest of psychological self-preservation, I promised myself not to try so hard during the two weekends of December muzzleloader season. I would hunt just a couple hours here and there. I would do my best to ease back into not caring whether I saw deer.

I kept my promise. Opening weekend of black-powder season, I hunted a few hours near home. I didn’t hope so hard. I didn’t stay on high alert. I leaned back against a mossy boulder and admired the morning light, the glistening of maple twigs and balsam needles.

When half an inch of snow came, I returned to Richard’s woods, hiking in after sunrise to look for tracks. They were there: two sets headed up past the ridgetop pool. With so little powder underfoot, the leaves frozen and loud, I had no prayer of sneaking up on that pair, so I backtracked. Sure enough, the hoofprints cut the long diagonal up through the small valley. The deer had passed right through the break in the ridge where Richard had killed the seven pointer a few weeks earlier: a place we had dubbed Seven Point Draw.

I sat exactly where Richard had been sitting that morning. After a few minutes, though, I felt uneasy. To my right, a spine of rock blocked my view. That was the direction from which Richard’s buck and the two deer I had just backtracked had all come. So I moved a few yards and sat with my back to the stone.

Was that the faint sound of steps? Of hooves crunching dry leaves under the thin blanket of snow? I shifted position and half raised my .54-caliber caplock. Moments later, I saw deer some forty yards off, walking toward me among the pines. Two, three, four of them. I brought the rifle to my shoulder and eased back the hammer. The first in line was a doe. My tag was for a buck. The little parade had closed to less than thirty yards now, weaving through the trees. Heart pounding, I stared along the iron sights, watching for antlers. Was this the moment?

The lead doe was closer now. Looking past her, I could see that the second in line was also a doe. The third, also antlerless, looked like a six-month-old. And the fourth? Ah, another doe. There would be no shot today.

The lead doe stood broadside a dozen paces away, her breath pluming in the frosty air, her ears and great, dark eyes focused on me. All four deer paused, aware of my crouching form. Unsure what I was, they hesitated. They looked and listened. Then, slowly, they turned back the way they had come. Trembling, I sat and watched them go.

The final weekend of muzzleloader season, I returned again to the Hundred Acre Woods and startled two whitetails into flight as I hiked into Seven Point Draw. Once there, I sat down to wait. It was a cold morning, well below freezing, and bright sunlight streamed in among the pines, illuminating branches laden with fresh snow. All told, I reflected, it had been a good deer season. I had seen more whitetails than in my first two autumns combined and had managed not to take any stupid shots.

I didn’t yet know this place half as well as Richard did, but here—as in the timberland behind our house—I felt a sense of belonging, a growing familiarity that encompassed both conscious knowledge and something less tangible: an impression, a grasp of how things connected and of how animals lived and moved on this land, an unsketched and perhaps unsketchable map. It reminded me of how I had felt about the water I fished as a boy.

Red squirrels leapt and chattered. Blue jays hopped among the snow-covered pine boughs. Ravens
quork-quorked
overhead. And, high up, long lines of late-season geese called out as they arrowed south. I thought of a line from Richard Nelson’s
The Island Within
: “The exploration has turned inward, and I have slowly recognized that I am not an outsider here.”

My sense of belonging had another dimension, too, one that surprised me. I had become part of a growing web of relationships with others who, like me, took guns to the woods, aiming to kill: a fraternity of kindhearted men found in the last place that I, as a profeminist vegan, would ever have imagined looking. For years, Mark and his Virginia hunting buddy, Jay, had been including me in much of their hunting-related e-mail correspondence. Recently, I had also started exchanging letters with Mark’s uncle and hunting mentor—my great-uncle Al—an avid conservationist who lived in Oregon. This fall, I had hunted with both Mark and Richard. Before long, I hoped to hunt with a local man a year my junior, one of the only adults who had taken hunter education alongside me. And several new acquaintances, from the coast of northern New England to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in South Carolina, had suggested we hunt together someday.

Willie, too, remained part of that circle. Though he mostly fished, he had hunted as a boy and, shortly before his death, had mentioned that he might return to the woods someday. A month ago, just before rifle season, Cath and I had taken a weekend trip to southern Maine to see Beth. We brought along a welded sculpture Mark had made in Willie’s honor: a miniature metal fishing pole less than two feet long, crafted from odds and ends.

The steel rod was slightly bent toward the tip, as if a fish had just taken the bait. A wire leader ran up through the guide rings and from it dangled a small, shapely fish, painted bright blue with a white belly. Mark had made the fish out of an old barbecue fork—the tang cut off short, a hole drilled for the fish’s eye, the two tines twisted together to form the caudal curve and the widely forked tail. The fork made me think of the enthusiasm with which Willie sat down to every meal, and of the joy he took in presiding over the grill.

With Beth, we placed the rod at the head of his grave, planting the butt firmly in the earth, where the cemetery lawn met the woods. The fish danced above grass and oak leaves.

15

The Red Deer

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals.… They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.

—Henry Beston,
The Outermost House

I
n the predawn dark, my flashlight illuminated half a dozen large hoofprints in the freshly pawed earth. A big scrape.

A year had passed since I first hunted these woods with Richard. Over the summer, I had scouted here, sometimes alone, sometimes with our two-year-old black Lab, Kaia, the first dog either Cath or I had had in many years: an affectionate animal who kept us company, left her ominous canine scent around our gardens, and might become a hunting companion if I ever got serious about pursuing birds.

Now it was opening morning of rifle season. Near the scrape, a deer trail crossed the top of this little valley. Close by was a small cluster of maples where, in September, I had leaned pieces of fallen deadwood this way and that, fashioning a makeshift blind that would break up the outlines of a hunter’s form, preparing a ground stand for Mark as he had once done for me. The second weekend in October, in bow season, my uncle had been here with me. He had lain in wait in that ring of maples, while I hunted a quarter mile farther down, near Seven Point Draw.

Now, in mid-November, I again headed down the small valley. Richard, tied up with another commitment, would not be in the woods today. As I approached the draw, I came to a place where several deer paths converged. My flashlight showed a second scrape. And a third. And a fourth. In his e-mailed report of a week earlier, Richard had written that there was “plenty of testosterone flowing in those woods this year.” He wasn’t kidding. The bucks were active.

I sat on a folding stool with my back to the trunk of a partly fallen spruce—windthrown, its top caught by another tree in mid-descent—and watched light come to the forest, glinting off the needles of the tall pines. After an hour, I heard something tromping around up on the ridge behind me: perhaps a deer, or a moose, or a hunter. There was no sense in trying to go have a look. The cover was too thick, the ground too thoroughly covered in dry, noisy leaves and branches. All I could do was wait, listen, and watch.

Scanning the woods below me, from the cleft of the draw on my left to the convergence of deer trails on my right, I knew the vantage point was good. I might not get an unobstructed shot, but deer would have trouble passing by unseen.

Sitting here on the second morning of Mark’s visit in October, I had spotted two does at forty yards or more. Apparently at ease, they passed within fifteen paces of where I crouched, waiting for the moment when their attention would be focused elsewhere, the moment when one of them would pause and give me the opportunity to send a razor-sharp broadhead through her heart or lungs. This time, I felt sure the arrow would fly true. I now wielded a compound bow with sights. It lacked the aesthetic charm of my longbow, but in target practice the shafts clustered together far more consistently and tightly, often touching.

The moment did not come. Both deer kept moving and, just before reaching Seven Point Draw, turned aside from the gentle, well-worn path and bounded effortlessly up the steep, thickly grown bank. Half an hour later, another doe had come through. She paused and looked away, offering the perfect broadside shot. But a pair of tiny fawns minced along behind her. I didn’t even raise my bow.

It was good to know that I could get that close to deer when hunting from the ground. Though I knew that being in a tree stand probably increased my chances of success, it felt good to keep both feet on the earth.

Now, rifle in hand, I again sat and waited. A kinglet darted past. Chickadees flitted among nearby branches. Nothing more. After four hours, I grew restless and nearly headed home. But I knew I wouldn’t get much time in the woods in the sixteen-day season, so I moved quietly through the draw where pine needles covered the ground, eased over the noisier maple-leafed shoulder of the ridge where I had watched the two bucks fighting a year earlier, and descended to the shaded softwood stand where I had watched a young buck cross the stream. I noted an active deer trail: a subtle furrow in the duff, hoofprints showing in places. Farther up the side of the ridge, I found a cluster of hoof-marked scrapes. For an hour I sat where a deer trail crossed an old stone wall. Finally, I came full circle to the ring of maples where Mark had hunted in October.

Now, in daylight, I saw that the big scrape I had found in the dark was only thirty yards from the crude blind I had constructed. Two more scrapes were even closer, one just five paces from where Mark had sat.

Inside the ring of young maples, I cleared out the dry, noisy leaves that had accumulated and then sat down. I liked the feel of the spot. But after another hour and a half, I had had enough for one day. I had been in the woods for more than eight hours and had seen neither hide nor hair of deer.

That evening, talking with Cath, I unraveled. I was doing it again, doing what I promised myself not to. I was trying too hard. And for what?

Was I hunting to procure local, wild meat and to confront what it meant to eat flesh? Well, that wasn’t happening. Even if I did succeed someday, my hunting had proved a ridiculously inefficient way to obtain food. Over the past four years, I had invested hundreds of hours in the hunt: taking hunter education, reading about hunting, scouting the land, practicing with rifle and bow, and actually hunting. I had invested hundreds and hundreds of dollars, too: purchasing rifle, muzzleloader, longbow, compound bow, projectiles for each, tree stand, camo and blaze-orange clothing, and on and on. And I had not one pound of venison to show for it, except those given to me by Mark and Richard.

Was I hunting to commune with nature? Well, I wasn’t getting any transcendental insights. I didn’t come back from the hunt feeling all warm and fuzzy and one with everything. I came back feeling cold. If I wanted to go sit in the woods and meditate, I could do that anytime, without getting up at four in the morning and without toting a gun or bow. And if such attentiveness was my main goal, why not cultivate it in some other way? Why not become a birder or take up serious nature photography?