The Deer Camp

by Dean Kuipers

  The land reaches up through us to express itself in the form of a person. On August 8, while we were in Amagansett, I wrote in my daybook a line from a Galway Kinnell poem, “The Last River”: “What is it that can make a human face, bit of secret, lighted flesh, open the earth?”

  “You go out and sit in Buck One tomorrow,” Dad said to me as we all walked together through the cuts. Whenever we arrived at the camp, the first thing we did was walk. Your feet couldn’t stand it any other way.

  “Really? But you always sit there.”

  “That’s the best blind and I think you’ll see more there. I’ll hunt from the cabin with Spenser.”

  “We gotta rig up that easy chair the way Mr. Card had it,” Brett said.

  After Bernard built his log cabin, he would hunt out of it. He had a big overstuffed recliner that he had put up on a wooden platform about a foot high, so he could see over the window sills, and he’d throw open all the windows, no screens, and sit there in his winter gear with a rifle across his lap, sometimes with a fire going if it was really snowy. He’d also dug a little pond out front for waterfowl, and one year I came in and helped him pick up a deer he’d shot that had expired right on the ice.

  “Nothing like finding that spent brass on the carpet,” Joe said.

  The new aspens in the cuts were four and five feet tall. Brett pointed to where he’d found a bunch of woodcock around a vernal depression in the cut, right on the border of the USA, which we started calling Woodcock Holler. There still wasn’t enough grass on either field to call it grass. But Dad was bursting with plans.

  “Hey, we’ve got a mule deer hunt out of the Box Y in Wyoming next fall, why don’t you come? We’ll hunt on horseback.”

  The old man devoted huge amounts of time to applying for hunts out West, so you knew any time he casually mentioned something like this he’d already put twenty or fifty hours into it, collecting preference points, poring over the maps of game management units, and then often driving across five states to visit those units so he knew precisely where he wanted to hunt and talking with outfitters who hunted them.

  “You guys are going?” I said to Brett and Joe. We’d never said yes to a group trip like this before.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Yep.”

  “Were you going without me?”

  “If you didn’t go. But now it sounds like you’re going.”

  “Damn!”

  “You’ve got a year to get ready. You have to be able to shoot five hundred yards,” said Dad.

  “Not a problem.”

  “Ha!”

  “Not a problem.”

  Later, when we were working outside, I said, “I can’t believe Dad brought up that hunt in Wyoming and everybody just said yes. That never happened before.”

  “For the last six or seven years I would do just about anything to be here without Dad,” Brett told me. “Ayron and I would sneak up here without telling him, sometimes get some friends to come. I’d lie to him and tell him I was going somewhere else and just pray he wouldn’t get suspicious and go to the cabin—and sometimes he would and he’d just turn up. But I craved being here without that tension. Now it’s completely different.”

  “Now we call Bruce and ask him to come up,” said Ayron.

  “I check in to see if he can drop work, and he almost always does. Now I don’t want to be here without him.”

  On Opening Morning, the dark was dense with presentation and I sat facing the new cut, which came to its easternmost point right at Buck One. Even in the dark it was easy to feel the open space to the west, and that wasn’t the way I’d normally face but that’s where all the action was. A tiny sliver of moon was going down and slender hoofs and porcupine paws and bird feet rustled the leaf litter. We’d always had a few deer but they were coming through nonstop, high stepping and single bounding through those young trees. They weren’t feeding in there; they were busy gorging themselves on farm corn and sometimes the thin grass in Cabin Field, but they’d go back for those tender young trees when other food ran out in the winter. Just like me, they felt compelled to pay attention to the new clearing. It was the point of interest or novelty in this part of the swamp. Our ice age brains wanted to love it.

  In the evening, I sat out in Desert Storm again so that Dad could sit in Buck One. He went out late in the afternoon and Spenser went, too. He was five.

  “Spenser did great,” said Dad when I came in after dark. Dad was beaming. “He sat there just as quiet as could be. It was hard for him to see out but I think he really watched.” He turned to Spenser: “Hey Spense, did we see anything?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Some tweety birds. And deer.”

  “No big bucks?”

  “No, but that’s okay. I don’t really want to shoot anything.”

  Bruce showed us pictures of a gigantic mule deer he’d shot in Nevada earlier in the fall. He told me he’d killed something unusual but I had no idea. It was a wonder such an animal could even walk. When the guide put glasses on it, he said as calmly as he could, “Bruce, don’t look at the horns. Don’t even look.” Lots of people will get buck fever and shoot the antlers off. Which I think is fine—the madness over antlers is just that: madness. I have hunted for meat all my life and the only reason I wanted to see bigger antlers on our place was to give evidence of improved nutrition. If we were really honest about meat hunting, we’d leave the antlers in the woods for the porcupines, though I honestly can’t imagine anyone doing it. Maybe putting the antlers on the barn or on the wall is an important tribute to a creature that became a meal, that literally became my flesh. Those osteocytes sure meant something to Dad. He shot his muley at over three hundred yards and killed a Nevada record, still within the top ten largest mule deer ever shot there according to posted records, and as he went through the photos he clearly felt like he’d accomplished something. “That’s a monster!” I said, and he laughed, “Yaasssss. YAASSSSSS!”

  Dad was invited to put his story in Huntin’ Fool, a magazine full of glossy photos of white people in ball caps posed with dead stuff, and he needed me to help him write it. I told him that sounded fun, and then we had an argument over how to talk about hunting in the press.

  “You have to say ‘harvest’ now, instead of ‘kill,’” Bruce said. “We harvest the deer.”

  “God, that’s disgusting. It’s like you just bought it at Meijers Thrifty Acres,” I said.

  “Well, that’s kind of the point. We have to make it sound less bloody.”

  “Exactly. But it is bloody,” I said. “Just like people buy chicken at Meijers and have no idea that it used to be a living bird, and that it died bloody. It’s just PR horseshit. A lie that separates people from reality.”

  “Well, if we don’t make it less bloody then your eco-radical friends are going to take away your right to hunt.”

  “No, the eco-radical people go the other way: They want to make sure people know it is bloody. Several of the ones I know are bowhunters, and they hunt for the same reasons we do: so we don’t eat factory-farmed chickens and pigs and cows. Those animals suffer. The animals we kill don’t suffer. They live wild lives and then we eat them. Like cavemen.”

  “I don’t think that caveman part is going to go over very well.”

  “Cavemen never made a pig live in a cage.”

  In the spring, we were all sitting around the table drinking coffee and tea in the cabin before going out to plant Joe’s apple orchard. The watery smell of aspens and relief was on us. A yellow-green cloud of pollen puffed out of the pines with every little knot of breeze. It was early. It was pretty rare for any of us to be in bed at dawn. When I was a kid, Dad used to come wake me by kicking the post of my bed, which I hated so much that I would wake up before he got there. Maybe he had done that to everyone. We all flew out of bed in the morning.

  The cabin suddenly felt ancient or full of history, like the insides were covered in cave drawings. We were humbled by the new knowledge that had swarmed u
p into the place after the trees came up in the cuts. We could see that new forest through the red pines. It felt like it had come back after being far away.

  Dad’s story had come out in the April 2005 issue of Huntin’ Fool, and the word harvest does not appear in it.

  Joe drove the trailer down the two-track so we could off-load rolls of six-foot pig fence and studded steel T-posts along with the apple trees. Dad figured our orchard would be deer-proof if we went ten feet tall, which meant lapping the fence over itself two rows high. We estimated we’d be done with this job by noon, and then maybe we’d plant some clover in Cabin Field to get some nitrogen back in the soil. Every new plant we put into the ground seemed to beg another plant somewhere else. Maybe that was because we knew now that it was worth doing.

  We kept looking over at the Scots pine cut, as though some part of ourselves remained there. The new selves, the ones we’d dared to hope for going on six years, were there. They’d shown themselves. I was sure now.

  Brett had brush hogged the bawdy canary grass off this patch along the vernal ditch, and the mowing had laid bare the mucky black topsoil that outgassed rot and methane. We dug pits for the trees in the sour-smelling muck, struggling with cottonwood roots and carpet remnants and a World War II–era stove and other metal buried in what must have been somebody’s household dump. Bruce stretched out about four hundred feet of hose from the house and began watering the trees as we started whanging the fence posts into the ground with a steel post driver—the kind that’s a steel tube with one end welded shut and handles on both sides, and you sink the post by slamming this thing down over the end of the post with both hands. The steel-on-steel percussion will make you deaf real fast. We stopped and got earplugs. And then whanged and whanged. Got the sound muffs we wore for sighting in rifles and put those over the earplugs. Whanged some more.

  We only put in six trees, but the post-setting went on all day. I tried to imagine fencing a forty-acre pasture and figured that would take us a year. Our shoulders ached. We kept deferring to Joe, who is much bigger and more powerful than any of us. We called him Hoss after the guy from Bonanza. “I’m powerful hungry, Pa,” Joe said, quoting the actor Dan Blocker from the show. “I ain’t had but two breakfasts this mornin’.” Pretty soon it was late afternoon and our shadows draped long over the tall ditch grass.

  Dad was pretty quiet as we stretched the fence around and circled in the apples. He was so protective of the trees, careful not to knock the little blossoms off. I kept catching him leaning on a shovel or a post and raising his closed eyes to the sun. The lower layer of fence stretched real nice, but then when we put up the second layer, with not much post to support it, it looked like hell, bent inward by its own weight. We built in a little door. Dad was a stickler for the aesthetics, but he didn’t say much. He let it go.

  “It’ll keep the deer out tonight,” said Joe, knowing Dad hated the way it bent.

  “That will work just fine,” Dad said, gathering up the tools. It was twilight.

  We kicked back through the short vegetation of Cabin Field, and Joe said, “What’s up, Pa? You seem real quiet today.”

  He smiled. “I wish it could be like this every day. It took so damn long to get here, to this point,” he said. I thought he was going to cry.

  “Tomorrow we’ll disc this field,” Brett said, deflecting any forthcoming expression of regret.

  “Brett, you’ve really made this happen. It’s incredible,” Dad said. “Is there anything we can plant on the scale of a whole field that will attract grouse or woodcock?”

  “We’re doing it. They don’t eat any of this deer mix stuff, at least not that I know of, but they will forage in clover or alfalfa or orchard grass and use it for cover, too, if we can get it to grow.”

  “If it doesn’t kill us first,” said Joe.

  We walked a little bit.

  “I’m thinking about retiring,” said Dad. He was only sixty-one, but it wasn’t the first time he’d mentioned it. “I’m tired and I’ve been working since I was a kid, since I weeded onions in the muck for ten cents an hour. I’m going to sell the business.”

  He knew none of us were interested in running Delta Design, but that fact fell among us like something wounded and hard to ignore.

  “What would you do?” I said.

  “Hunt. Travel with Diane. Mostly be here, probably. Look at this place, it’s like a miracle.”

  Thirteen

  Sends a Deer

  This line of Paul Shepard’s stays with me: “But the soil was the source of complex life long before men or agriculture first appeared. It is as fundamental to our well-being now as ever, though most of us never put our hands in it.”

  Shepard believed that contemporary human beings are sick because we no longer read the “divine language” of that soil, or the rest of nature. Our brains want to read it. They are evolved to converse with it. In his 1973 book, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, he points out that the human consciousness you and I enjoy now took shape hundreds of thousands of years ago in the Pleistocene, when we were hunters and gatherers. That’s when the structure of our brains achieved its current form, and our brains have changed very little since then.

  That ice age brain and that ice age consciousness evolved to communicate with the dirt, sky, swamps, bears, ticks, and all the other forms and creatures that co-evolved with us. Shepard felt that to be separated from that stratum of information is to be broken or insane. “If man’s environmental crisis signifies a crippled state of consciousness as much as it does damaged habitat, then that is perhaps where we should begin,” he wrote. “The secret lies in the darkness of the human cerebrum. But to see it we must turn our eyes toward the sidelong glimmer of a distant paradise that seems light-years away.” Calling the savage world of the Pleistocene a “paradise” invited all manner of critique from folks who believe it is humanity’s fate—or divine mission—to transcend this world, but that completely avoids his main point: your brain works better in the field.

  The human brain is pliant and adaptable and maybe one day it will live in space, but its basic alphabet is terrestrial earth. We live on that earth and eat from it to survive, but at the same time contemporary culture forces us to devalue it and all its creatures—so we live in dissociation. We have to live in denial of our actual being. Torn by duality. Shepard digs deeper into this question in a later book, Nature and Madness, writing in the very first line: “My question is: Why do men persist in destroying their habitat?” His answer, in short, is that we’re mad.

  E. O. Wilson wrote, “The green prehuman earth is the mystery we were chosen to solve.” Chosen, along with all the other life-forms that have survived with us. In Nature and Madness, Shepard probes for the source of our contemporary fury in the way we raise our children. Many people—like my father and mother, and my brothers and me—are allowed to solve the mystery of the green prehuman earth until a certain age, a time when we are required to “grow up” and become adults. At that point, we’re often asked to relegate nature to a second-class status and acknowledge the “real world” of jobs, religion, technology, and social mores, and to build our adult relationships around those. Which is where our mental health starts to fail. Shepard wrote that the failure to base adult relationships on wind and tree and river prevents us from maturing. We’re asked to separate ourselves from nature. Consequently, we lose the basic set of symbols and referents that had been connecting us to reality early in life. So we thrash about, trying to find a new set of ideas to make sense of the world, and often end up trapped in a culture of enraged adolescence, addicted to tribalism, war, extreme ideology and religion, porn, romanticism, and fantasy. Not a culture in crisis, but a culture of crisis.

  As Shepard wrote: “The only society more fearful than one run by children, as in Golding’s Lord of the Flies, might be one run by childish adults.”

  Chellis Glendinning, a clinical psychologist, points out that we’ve only been farmers and herders for abo
ut three hundred generations, or just 0.003 percent of the time we’ve been Homo sapiens. We’ve only been building the box of industrial or technological society for six or seven generations. The rest, 99.997 percent, of the time since we evolved as humans, we’ve been living by our wits as hunters and gatherers, hand to mouth, “a hundred thousand generations in synchronistic evolution with the natural world. We are creatures who grew from the Earth, who are physically and psychologically built to thrive in intimacy with the Earth.”

  You look at the night out there, you tell yourself you don’t belong. But it is what made you.

  My father became a mature adult when those trees came out of the ground. I know that’s a lot to say. Before that spring, he had lived as what society called “a good man” for four decades. He ran a well-respected local business and made lots of money, he had kids, he was a church man, he was a pillar of Kalamazoo society. But he was also utterly childish: he kicked at the dirt and swore and called it “poisoned,” and honestly believed that ordinary soil—the regular, trustworthy soil on which all life on earth depends—was prone to failure, and would certainly fail him. Was, in fact, out to get him. Mother Earth treated the farmer next door better than she treated him. Maybe this distrust of the feminine started with Henry’s anxiety when Dad was just a kid: the soil on the farm could fail and the immutable principles of life simply turn against you. Grandpa taught him that the male sky god and the life after this one were better. But whether it started there or flowed out of Dad’s lifelong distrust of women and was extended to the ground as the mother of us all, he blamed the earth for failing. For long and ugly years, he treated us like we were part of that failure, too: Brett’s restoration efforts at the camp were futile, I was wasting everyone’s time trying to stop environmental degradation, and Joe’s troubles were proof that earthbound life was capricious and mean. Dad had pushed back against a Gaian conspiracy. He had come to believe the dirt was in conspiracy, which is as childish as it gets.