It's not often I've been privileged to watch the moon set, followed by the sunrise a few minutes later, especially from twenty feet up in a tree. Watching, or rather hearing our woods wake up and get its day started was a distinct pleasure. It started before dawn with a hollering match between my many roosters. Among the wild birds the white-throated sparrows were first, breaking into a chorus of cheeps that only faded when they had gotten down to the business of breakfast. They were followed almost immediately by a volley of yelping calls from some species or other (I imagine woodpeckers, but who knows?), uttered only once per individual in a call-and-response daybreak liturgy that lasted all of about five seconds and was never repeated during the time of my presence in the woods, until the next day at the same time. The light was adequate now to my task, so turned to face the more open part of the woods, slipped back the hammer and was ready.
Two mornings and two evenings I sat in my tree stand, waiting. It had been since this time last year that I'd spent more than twenty consecutive minutes sitting alone in one place in a natural setting. By the time hunting season comes around again, I'm beginning to pine for it. It is healing time. I love being a dad and a husband, and would not trade this time of life, with all its challenges, for any other person's life or any other time in mine. But that part of me that craves unstructured space to think in, and which spontaneously turns outward to the world, observing, observing, gets short shrift right now. And there is something unmatchable about being there as a member, knowing that you want something that might come along. It's a different kind of attention, and a different kind of community.The first night, after dark had fallen and I was still sitting, enjoying the quiet, two or more deer came and poked around for a while near my tree, but I couldn't even see them much less get a shot off (besides it's quite illegal to shoot after dark). I unloaded my gun on the evening of the last day, returned the unused shells to their sleeve, and returned the gun to its spot in storage. No one has fired that gun for probably fifteen years.
It was, I think, twenty-two years ago this fall, on my fourteenth birthday, that my parents made me close my eyes while they walked out of the room. When they came back in, they laid in my open hands something surprisingly heavy, long, hard, and cold. It turned out to be a 30-30, complete with an over-under scope (and a field case)! A classic deer gun. This was a special event: a big moment, a loaded moment, a moment that lurched time forward. It was also a bit of an awkward moment for me. My gratefulness was real, but not simple. My parents, and by extension, us, were connected through church and family relationships to many people who maintained and valued hunting traditions. Some of my extended family counted on venison as a significant staple in their diets. My Dad usually joined his brothers in northern Pennsylvania for hunting camp after Thanksgiving each year, and my older brother wasted no time joining in when he reached his 12th year.
That is to say, taking up hunting would probably have been as hard not to do as it was to do. But my parents were not ones to press many specific expectations onto their children, and I was a sensitive, emotional, compassionate kid. The talk in my family (with no hint of disappointment or embarrassment) was that despite my native patience and my alertness to the natural world I was not too likely to be interested in hunting, since it involved killing animals. My parents could see me taking a camera into the woods, they said. True to expectations, I stayed away from hunting camp the first year, as I recall, but I did end up taking up hunting the next year. When I got home with my license, Dad took me out with his old single-shot twelve-gauge after small game in our field. I remember my heart pounding as I actually shot a squirrel from a few yards' distance off the side of a tree trunk, and then a few minutes later took a cock pheasant on the wing. I still remember Dad's surprise at my success, the lead pellet I chomped down on in that tasty pheasant fricassee, and the way the squirrel's head hung from its shoulders by a few red shreds. There is a photo somewhere of a scrawny kid wearing his Dad's ill-fitting hunting garb, holding a mutilated squirrel by the tail in one hand and a pheasant by the foot or tail in the other, squinting into the sunshine.
That year I went to camp, which turned out to be populated by thoughtful, articulate, wise, and funny men who savored their connections to the natural world and their collective history. I have often wished more people could be exposed to that kind of experience; it has payed me dividends. I think I was a bit relieved to have missed the only deer I shot at that year. I wasn't sure I had the nerve to cut open its belly and sink my arms in, knife in hand, to haul out the innards, and I was not particularly sensitive to the kind of peer pressure that makes a person need to have something to boast about...why did I come, I wonder now? I don't know exactly, but I still remember from that year the Pennsylvania mountain darkness and cold, and the shrew that popped its head up out of the leaves by my boot and disappeared again just as abruptly.
I went on to shoot deer four out of the five years I went, even paying my uncle (family discount!) to mount two of the bucks' lifeless (lifelike!) heads, which I hung in my bedroom. The only girl I officially dated in high school quit speaking to me (she was an animal lover) after I brought in one of them as a prop for a speech I'd written on deer overpopulation/hunting. I was a "smart kid" and a "good student"; I think the other "good students" were a bit baffled by my presentation, but members of the hunting subculture seemed to appreciate it. Usually those guys didn't have a whole lot to say to me, nor I them, despite there being no ill will between us.
This has been my story with hunting all along: a brainy, cerebral affirmation of a participatory form of naturalism that doesn't totally make sense to the other hunters and doesn't register with academia. Goodness knows that in the largely intellectual circles I ran in college and somewhat since, the subject didn't come up much. The merits of vegetarianism versus participation in the industrial meat system, sure. But the question of the ethics and benefits of hunting simply isn't relevant to many of our lives, so even when it comes up it's hard for the conversation to get much steam behind it.
To my life now, it is quite relevant. Among our plantings the deer are an ever-present force, and this year particularly the woods seem to have kept busy with making deer out of themselves. As such, the savvy hunters among our friends and neighbors have had a good year. Despite my hours in the woods this year, I was not among the successful. But here's the beautiful part: We have over thirty pounds of venison in the freezer anyway, because of what I'm calling the "Deer Economy." It is illegal to sell wild-harvested venison or other game, and venison in particular tends to come in fifty-pound units, so when the hunts go the hunters' way, there is often a substantial amount left over, which ends up in the grateful hands of neighbors or less successful hunters, or in my case, both. My sister E and her fiance J have gotten into making bone-based soup stocks and since they are now in the area (yay again!), we were able to pass some deer bones to them this season. E said to me, "I love how this one deer has made so many people happy." She's so right. First off, it was a happy animal itself up to the moment the shot rang out down by the neighbor's broccoli patch. Then the hunter (who was also the broccoli farmer) was happy as he claimed his quarry, and then again as he cut out the choicest meat and stashed it away. We were certainly happy to have the parts he didn't have time to mess with, and the two of them were delighted by a few bones with meat scraps clinging to them, especially when they sampled the soup! Then they passed the boiled-out bones on to some dog-owning friends of theirs who were pleased to have such a lovely treat for their beloved companions. But I suspect none of us were so purely and thoroughly pleased as the dogs themselves. This kind of exchange of gifts and sense of bounty are what the holidays are coming to mean to me. Or is it that by immersing ourselves more and more in the kind of life we find necessary if we are to live in touch with the sources of our sustenance, we rediscover the sources of our culture's rituals and ceremonies?
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