Gradually, in the months after my brother’s death, I begin to feel less raw. And I haven’t forgotten my epiphanies about the values of hunting. Hunting has changed the way I think about the food I eat and my pet dog, not to mention the animals that live out of sight but all around me. It has given me a deeper connection to the fast-growing community where I live. It has changed the way I follow politics. Still, I have only brushed the surface. I have not yet wrung all the meaning I can out of this new adventure.
Autumn is under way, and my temporary home in Michigan offers a new landscape and a new species to pursue. It’s time to reload my gun and hunt again. This time, I will try my hand at deer.
CHAPTER 13
DEER DIARY
In Michigan, some people talk about deer the way New Yorkers talk about rats. They are varmints and they are everywhere. Munching azaleas in the backyard. Sprawled out, bleeding, on the side of the highway. Bounding through the woods past my favorite jogging trail. Despite their ubiquity, shooting a deer will be the ultimate test of my decision to hunt; even a small buck weighs more than I do. I wonder, yet again, if I will be able to look into its eyes and pull the trigger. I wonder if I will be able to gut it without vomiting and then wanting nothing to do with its meat.
As hunting season approaches, I start researching rifles. I brought my shotguns with me to Michigan, just in case I decided to do some bird hunting. But for big-game hunting, a rifle offers longer range and more accuracy, which adds up to a more humane kill. I do some research online, talk to as many hunters as I can and spend hours in front of the gun counter at a large outdoors store. Eventually, I settle on buying a Weatherby 7mm-08. It’s a generous caliber for the small white-tailed deer that populate Michigan. But, in an effort to limit my accumulation of guns, I want something big enough to shoot larger mule deer and possibly even elk back in Oregon.
I ask locals for instructions and then drive nearly an hour to a shooting range where a volunteer teaches me how to load and shoot the gun for the first time. I go back and practice a few more times before opening day.
Even in liberal Ann Arbor, it’s impossible to ignore deer-hunting season. That’s not to say that everyone here hunts. Far from it. But everyone I meet here knows someone who hunts. And nobody is shocked by the practice. Unlike Oregon, where the population doubled between 1965 and 2010, Michigan residents have been leaving in droves, due to a weak economy and the decline of the auto industry. That means most Michiganders who remain have lived in the state for many years, so local traditions such as hunting don’t shock them. Small towns including Dexter, just ten miles outside of Ann Arbor, still post “buck poles” each fall. These large wooden beams are erected in a prominent spot in town, where successful hunters hang their gutted stags for all to see and admire.
In Oregon, as in many other parts of the country, the buck pole would attract more protesters than admirers. Not here. When Scott and I visit one during opening weekend of deer season, we are the only people laughing nervously as we step between two rows of hanging bucks, swinging gently in the breeze. Nearby, a stockpot of venison stew has been set atop a grill, and we smell the rich meat but are informed, apologetically, that it won’t be ready to eat for a couple of hours.
“That’s okay,” I tell Scott as we walk back to our car. “I’m not really in the mood for venison.”
But a couple of weeks into deer season, I find myself holding a rifle and sitting perfectly still on the ground beneath a maple tree, watching for deer. My mentor at the university, Charles Eisendrath, also owns a cherry farm in northern Michigan, and has generously offered to let me hunt on his property. Scott is here, too, to help if I shoot something.
White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) are sometimes called Virginia deer or simply whitetails. They are one of three closely related deer species native to the United States. Deer live just about everywhere, from cities to suburbs to rugged wilderness areas. They are particularly attracted to farms because they love many of the same foods we do: wheat, oats, corn and soybeans, not to mention fruits, vegetables and even the grasses we grow to feed livestock. If large numbers of deer are allowed to browse these crops freely, they cause astronomical amounts of damage. With most U.S. farms operating on slim profit margins, farmers can’t afford to let deer (or, for that matter, geese or rabbits) gobble their crops unchecked. And neither can we, the mouths who rely on these farms for our food. To discourage unwanted grazing, some farmers employ hazing techniques including noise machines, mechanical scarecrows and explosives. But the most common deterrent is hunting. Every state in the Union offers some form of special hunting tags to reduce crop damage. “Everyone in North America who lives each day on agricultural foods,” writes cultural anthropologist Richard Nelson, “belongs to an ecological network that necessarily involves deer hunting… In this sense, the blood of deer runs through our veins as surely as we take bread and wine at our table.”
Instead of hunting amid rows of cultivated cherry trees, however, I’m sitting in a sixty-acre stretch of forest that separates the orchard from a large lake. I don’t have a problem with hunting deer on farmland—that’s what Charles is doing, just a few hundred yards away—but one of my goals is to learn to track deer.
Almost every American has seen a deer. But going out and finding one is a different story altogether. It feels daunting at first, like finding a needle in a haystack. Except this needle can move where it likes, so I should be able to learn its preferences and predict its location.
Deer favor the margins between two types of habitat—areas where thick trees edge up to fertile clearings, farmland or prairie. Like cattle and many other mammals, deer are ruminants, which means they have four stomach chambers. A doe eats by chewing up plants and swallowing them into her first stomach. This chamber gradually softens the food. Once that first stomach is full, and before the food moves to the second chamber, the animal beds down somewhere and regurgitates its semi-digested cud, re-chews it and swallows it again. When Nelson sneaks close enough to a doe to watch her ruminate, he writes that it “looked as if mice were running up and down inside her esophagus.” In short, deer spend their days alternately eating and then lying down, hidden in dense shrubs or trees, to digest. Deer tend to spend the middle of the day bedded down, and they are most active at dusk and dawn.
The trick to deer hunting is finding out where the animals eat and where they bed down to sleep or ruminate. Deer become attached to certain places, and they tend to travel between them along well-worn routes. A common strategy is to plant oneself along such a path and wait for an animal to arrive.
“You’re looking for a deer superhighway,” Charles says as he points out a couple of spots that have proved promising in previous years.
I have a buck tag, which means I may shoot a deer with visible antlers. This is the deer tag that anyone can buy. But Charles, as a farm owner, also has a handful of doe tags. Doe hunting is more closely regulated to protect deer populations, so doe tags are much harder to come by. (Only a handful of bucks are needed to inseminate dozens and dozens of does, ensuring plenty of fawns next spring.) Charles gives me one of these tags, which I tuck in my backpack next to the buck tag.
“The does are fatter, and have better-tasting meat,” he adds.
At first, I make up my mind that I will only shoot a buck. I feel a little guilty about the other advantages afforded me by hunting on this private land, next to a farm—namely, no competition from other hunters and all of Charles’s knowledge of the place. A doe tag—which, combined with my buck tag, enables me to shoot any deer I see—feels too lenient, almost decadent. But then a couple of days go by and we don’t see a single deer.
Each morning, before sunrise, we creep out to one of the supposedly high-traffic areas that Charles has pointed out. We hide and wait for the sun to come up, hoping that dawn will bring deer rush hour. When I get too cold, or tired of sitting, we walk around as quietly as possible, looking for prints or scat or some other sign that deer
are in the vicinity.
“If a doe walked right in front of us, right now,” Scott whispers to me on the third day of hunting, “would you shoot it?”
I don’t hesitate: “Oh yeah. Definitely.”
Deer have acute senses of sound and sight, but they’re even more attuned to smells. To get anywhere near a wild deer, you have to pay attention to which way the wind is blowing, as deer can detect ribbons of human scent a mile away. Hunters gain an advantage when deer season coincides with the rut, or mating season. This is when hormones cause otherwise wary bucks to let down their guard.
Unfortunately, our mid-November outing is a week or two before the rut picks up. It’s also unseasonably warm and dry, which makes it pleasant to sit still in the woods, but the worst possible weather for tracking big game. In cold weather, animals must eat more to stay warm. When it’s mild, they can bed down and postpone their meals until darkness falls and the threat of predation drops. Also, dry leaves and twigs make it almost impossible to sneak up on a species armed with superhuman hearing.
As Scott and I creep around in the woods, all of these challenges overwhelm me. When I accidentally snapped that twig, was it as loud as I think it was? Did the wind just change direction? If I turn north and there is a deer in that gully, will it be able to smell me? Stay down, a buck in that thicket might be able to see me if I stand upright on this ridge.
I begin to understand why hunting is often compared to war. Aside from the obvious commonality of a pursuit to kill, there is the need for a physical strategy. Sometimes when I hear myself speak, I sound like I’m commanding a battalion. Sitting on a small ridge overlooking a promising-looking thicket of shrubs, for example, I decide that I need to inform Scott of my new strategy. But I don’t want any deer that might be hidden below to see me, so I army-crawl to Scott, trying to keep my knees from rustling the dried leaves too loudly.
“New plan,” I whisper. “I’m going to go up this hill, past the orchard and then come back down over there.” I point across the thicket to another treed hill. “You stay here. Then, when I’m in position—I won’t motion to you, that might give me away—walk slowly through the valley toward me.”
“Why?”
“If something comes out of those shrubs, I’ll at least be able to see it. And then we’ll know that’s where they are.”
“Got it.”
For days, we walk from one of Charles’s hot spots to the next. Then we sit as still as possible in these strategic locations, and wait. This is how I always pictured deer hunting, and it’s why I expected the experience would confirm my preference for bird hunting. Sitting perfectly still in the woods always seemed, well, boring. But I quickly discover that it’s not. In fact, it’s amazing what I get to see. Songbirds skitter right up to me, unaware that I’m here. Squirrels dart across downed logs, performing their pre-winter chores, I suppose. This is life in the forest, and for the first time I have a front-row seat. As with skiing or hiking, it is a satisfying mental exercise to keep my mind present, to stay engaged in the subtle entertainment that unfolds before me.
On our last evening, after three days without seeing a single deer, I hear something crunch the dried leaves. Crunch. Crunch. I suck in my breath. Through sweaty palms, I tighten my grip on my rifle and peer through the scope. The forest is quiet again. Perhaps the deer saw me move a little? Then crunch, crunch, crunch. It resumes walking.
This time, it’s a deer, I’m certain. I sit as still as I possibly can, but my heart thumps louder than a bass drum. Will the deer hear my thundering heart and be scared away? Every muscle in my body is flexed. The stepping sounds are coming from below the hill where I sit, on the other side of some thin, bare maple trees. I refocus my scope to get a better view. Deer are masters of disguise; their gray-brown fur blends into just about any backdrop. I scan the area slowly, but see nothing. Just a fat gray squirrel hopping through the leaves. Crunch. It hops again. Crunch. It takes me a moment to realize that the crunching is synchronized with the squirrel’s movements.
Shit. It’s not a deer at all, just a stupid gray squirrel.
Darkness falls and soon I can only see a few feet in front of me. Still, I am hesitant to leave my perch. Scott, who was sitting against a tree trunk about ten yards to my left, stands up. He’s a human cacophony: crushing leaves, shattering branches and crackling layers of clothing. I glare at him and he shrugs. Then he tiptoes toward me, still making a racket.
“Lil, it’s dark.”
“I know.” I sigh and stand up. I almost fall over, my legs are so stiff; my butt is completely numb. As we walk back to the farmhouse, I lament the outcome of my first-ever deer-hunting trip.
“Didn’t that sound like a deer walking across those dead leaves?”
“Yeah, it really did.”
“Never in my life have I been so amped up about a stupid squirrel.”
He slips his arm around my shoulders.
“Well,” he says, “now you know how Sylvia feels.”
Two days later, back in Oregon for Thanksgiving, we are on the way home from my in-laws’ house when Scott hits a deer with my ten-year-old Toyota. We gasp as a trio of deer bounds across the highway, one after another. Scott slams on the brakes and slows the car to about twenty miles per hour by the time we intersect their path, but he can’t quite avoid the third deer. Our right-front bumper hits its hind leg. The deer keeps running, no doubt from a surge of adrenaline, and we keep driving. The car is fine but we both fall silent, worrying about the doe. It reminds me of my rabbit-assassination-by-lawn-mower. Yes, I just spent four days attempting to kill a deer. But this isn’t how I wanted to do it.
The next fall, I am back in Oregon and more determined than ever to bag a deer. In Oregon, there is one brief statewide deer season followed by a series of controlled hunts, in which a limited number of tags are awarded by lottery for a particular part of the state. This system allows biologists to more closely manage deer populations because they can survey deer numbers and even size, then adjust as needed the number of tags awarded the following year. But it makes things much more complicated for hunters.
As the deadline for lottery entries approaches, I cave and spend fifteen dollars on a statistical guide to the lottery system. It explains how hunters have fared in each unit during past years: in drawing a tag and in “filling” the tag (killing an animal). I manage to emerge from this long lottery process with buck deer and bull elk tags for the same unit, about a hundred miles south of Bend. It doesn’t have a spectacular reputation. When I unfold a map of the unit, I notice immediately that a cobweb of small dirt roads stretches over the entire region. Deer and elk live here, but there’s no remote wilderness area where I can eke out an advantage over other hunters by my sheer willingness to hike.
I read everything I can find about deer hunting. I interview every hunter I can think of. When Scott and I go fishing during the summer, I practice looking for deer tracks. When I find some—cloven hoofprints—I realize that I don’t know if the cleft comes to a sharp point at the front of the hoof or the back. This seems important, so I find a pasture of grazing cows and, assuming they are closely related enough to be indicative, inspect their hooves. The notch is at the front.
As the season approaches, I also prepare by worrying. I’m not too nervous about failing to locate a deer—that feels mostly out of my control. But I am scared of what to do if I somehow manage to find and shoot one. Gutting a deer sounds like a monumental task. Also called field dressing, the process involves removing the organs to prevent bacterial contamination of the meat, or muscle. It helps cool the meat more quickly, to keep it from spoiling. And gutting it enables a hunter to cut the animal in quarters and transport it out of the woods. While doing all of this, however, you need to make sure the meat isn’t contaminated by urine or feces. Deer urine contains strong-smelling hormones that can alter the taste of the meat, and the feces and other intestinal contents contain loads of bacteria.
Field dressing is a process th
at begins with this vile instruction: Make a deep incision all the way around the anus and tie it closed with a piece of string. I shudder whenever I read this and skip ahead to the easier-sounding steps, like slicing open the abdominal cavity. Another list-topping fear: What if I shoot a deer in the evening, and have to track it, gut it and pack it out in the dark? It’s legal to be on USDA Forest Service property after sundown, but I can’t fathom having to hike across uneven, trail-less land in the dark, not to mention trying to spot droplets of blood to find an animal I’ve wounded but not yet killed. Or carrying fifty pounds of venison on my back.
For several weeks before deer season opens, we head south and camp in my unit each weekend. We drive all over, pulling off small logging roads to hike up hills, my eyes trained on the ground for deer tracks or poop (for which hunters use another pleasant euphemism: sign). Fresh deer tracks are still sharp around the edges, not yet disturbed by wind or rain or dew. The print is darker than the surrounding ground because the damp under-layer of dirt hasn’t dried yet. Very fresh deer scat looks like a glistening pile of dark-roasted coffee beans. As it ages, it looks more like a pile of chewed-up bits of grass and leaves.
One day, as we drive down a paved forest road in the pouring rain, we see a pair of deer jog up an open hill. Scott slows the car and I peek at them through my binoculars. One is a doe, the other a buck, his antlers still covered in their spring velvet.
Male deer shed and regrow a new pair of antlers every year. Hunters tend to think that the more tines or points on the antlers, the older the deer is. But diet and genetics also play a big role in antler size and formation. In January or February, a buck will rub his antlers against a tree until they fall off, one at a time. I imagine that they start to feel like loose teeth, and their release brings relief even though it sometimes draws a little blood. In late spring, the antlers sprout up again, this time coated in velvet. As fall approaches, bucks rub against trees to remove the velvet in long, bloody strips. During the late autumn rut, when they compete to mate with does, bucks spar with one another, antler-to-antler, until one surrenders. Occasionally one buck will gore the other. Rarely, two bucks lock antlers during a fight. If they can’t separate, they will both starve or die of exhaustion or be killed by a predator.
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