It's Only Slow Food Until You Try to Eat It

by Bill Heavey

  It’s Only

  Slow Food

  Until You

  Try to Eat It

  Also by Bill Heavey

  If You Didn’t Bring Jerky, What Did I Just Eat?:

  Misadventures in Hunting, Fishing, and the Wilds of Suburbia

  It’s Only

  Slow Food

  Until You

  Try to Eat It

  Misadventures of a Suburban

  Hunter-Gatherer

  Bill Heavey

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2013 by Bill Heavey

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.

  Jacket illustrations © Jack Unruh

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9348-3

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  For Michelle

  Contents

  Introduction:

  How Hard Could it Be?

  Chapter One:

  Blood, Guts, and Other Signs of Spring

  Chapter Two:

  A “Savory Little Fellow” Rediscovered

  Chapter Three:

  The Homicidal Gardener

  Chapter Four:

  Of Cattail Disasters and the Blue Goose Incident

  Chapter Five:

  Enter the Girl, Sour Cherry Pie, and Five Bites of My Own Lawn

  Chapter Six:

  Among the Cajuns

  Chapter Seven:

  Of Closet Carnivores and the Gospel of Small Fish

  Chapter Eight:

  “You Don’t Want to Grab Anything Has Red Eyes”

  Chapter Nine:

  People of the Caribou

  Epilogue:

  Don’t Ever Let That Man Near a Stove

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction:

  How Hard Could it Be?

  As the buck rises from its bed in the underbrush forty yards away, every cell in my body decides to attempt a jailbreak. I’m twenty-four feet up a tulip poplar in my hunting stand, where I’ve been concealed for the past four hours. I would very much like to come to my feet but my legs are shaking too hard. They aren’t my legs anymore.

  I’m drowning. I simply can’t suck in air fast enough to keep up with my body’s needs. And I haven’t moved a muscle. Meanwhile, the small percentage of brain still under my control is grappling with the fact that I’ve been sitting as motionless as possible all afternoon, watching and waiting for a deer, and this buck has been here the whole time.

  The interruption in muscle service shows no sign of letting up. I want to stand. I want to be able to pull back the string of my bow and be ready should the deer come my way. But first somebody needs to persuade my legs to stop auditioning for A Chorus Line.

  I double down on my efforts to pull myself together, and it’s the impossibility of this task, by which I realize that I’m now in an out-of-body state. The deer seems to exist in a tunnel, alone and apart from all other things. I distinctly note the nap of the deer’s hair—how it lies in one direction along its back, the opposite direction at the juncture of chest and shoulder. The buck drops its antlered head almost to the ground and stretches its entire body. And then freezes. It becomes a lawn statue.

  I’m certain that the buck will hear—as I can—the timpani of my heart or the way I’m gulping air like they won’t be making more anytime soon. I know that this is the fight-or-flight response, the body’s response to a life-or-death situation. And it would make perfect sense were I some early hominid out picking berries who suddenly found himself face-to-face with a giant hyena. But I’m not. This deer poses no threat to me. It’s not even aware of my existence. And if it were, it would be the one to run. But it doesn’t. It just stands there.

  Whence the physiological ruckus?

  It’s because I’m hunting this deer. I’ve come to these woods seeking its life. Not this particular one, but any legal deer to be found in this place. This is my third fall spent trying to kill one with a bow and arrow. I’ve never come this close before. That I might carry out the act has lit up more than just the fight-or-flight response. There’s more to it than that. Because while I’ve never done this before, there is nevertheless something familiar about it. As if all along I’ve had this neural pathway, this hunter’s hardwiring inside me, but had never hooked it up until this moment. In the days to come I will reexamine these feelings and conclude that I’m right, that this wiring is extant in all of us, but latent. Inactive in all but the few who choose to hunt large animals at close range. In the days to come, I will increasingly feel that I’m going down a path trod by others before me.

  Think about it. “Anatomically modern” humans—people who look like us, minus smart phones—date back about 200,000 years. We’d like to think we’re recent models, and although we are, evolutionarily speaking, that’s still an awfully long time without an upgrade. For 95 percent of that time, all but the last 10,000 years, we lived in small groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers. And we survived, or didn’t, by our abilities as hunters. Which means that everyone alive today—from the worst slob hunter to the most radical PETA activist—is the direct descendant of a long line of master hunters. Because if your ancestors hadn’t excelled as hunters they wouldn’t have been around long enough to pass their genes on to you.

  Certainly no member of the Heavey clan has hunted for four generations, which is as far back as any of us remembers. When I was growing up, the thought of becoming a hunter crossed my mind about as often as becoming a Hindu. I came to hunting late—in my ­thirties—and by the most circuitous of routes. As a freelance writer, I wrote travel stories, features, and profiles. I had fished in summer camps as a boy and rediscovered fishing when some friends gave me a spinning rod for my twenty-first birthday. A story I wrote about fishing the rivers around D.C. ran in the Washington Post Magazine.

  In the manner of freelancers everywhere, who are always in search of larger, more lucrative markets, I sent a copy to Field & Stream. It wasn’t long before I was writing regularly about fishing for the country’s oldest hook-and-bullet magazine. But fishing, the hook, was only half of what the magazine covered. If I wrote about hunting, the bullet, I could double my market. Only I didn’t want to hunt with bullets. From what little I knew, it was not particularly difficult to wait in an elevated box overlooking a field of corn or soybeans for a deer to show itself and shoot it from 200 yards. This didn’t appeal to me. But having to get close—say, within twenty-five yards—and using a bow and arrow, did. Not everyone thought this was a great idea. “How could you ki
ll an innocent animal?” my mother asked one night over dinner. I pointed out that we were having veal. “That’s different,” she said.

  Having no friends who hunted, I went at it solo, not the fastest way to learn. But I’m stubborn and have a high tolerance for failure. I kept at it. Almost in spite of myself, I learned a lot sitting like a monk in the woods in my climbing treestand. The most surprising thing I learned was that I actually liked hunting. I’d been afraid I’d find it boring. It wasn’t. Not at all. There was a lot more to deer hunting than I’d thought. If you live in the suburbs and routinely arrive home to find deer chowing down on your expensive landscaping, killing a deer would seem about as easy as rolling down the window. After all, you can run at those deer screaming bloody murder and waving your arms, and all they do is amble off a ways, maybe into a neighbor’s yard, and wait for you to go inside. At which point they return and resume eating. An animal that dumb couldn’t be hard to hunt, right? Successfully, I mean. As a prey species, however, whitetails are experts at reading the intentions of potential predators. Those deer you just chased know that you pose no real threat. If you did, you wouldn’t be making all that noise. Real danger doesn’t make a sound until it’s too late.

  What I loved about deer hunting was how it transforms you from an observer to a participant in the natural world. Clichéd as that sounds, it was true for me. When you’re hunting, everything around you matters in a way it didn’t before. The wind—which I’d never considered at all—suddenly becomes a matter of life and death. Deer apprehend the world primarily with their noses, just as we do with our eyes. A deer downwind of you will scent you—“bust you” is the hunter’s term—and be gone before you ever see it. Period. On the other hand, if the deer is upwind of you, you’re still in business. Unless, as often happens, the wind shifts.

  Every sound also matters. The woods are a spiderweb, and when you enter, it’s as a fly hitting that web. The animals throughout—seen and unseen—register your arrival and alert each other. Squirrels and birds are the loudest and most easily noticed by humans, but everything, including deer, know of your arrival. There’s not much you can do about this. What you can do, once you have ratcheted your way up a tree, is sit quiet and still. Do this, and within fifteen or twenty minutes the woods will return to a baseline level of activity. The woods will absorb you. Sit still enough and a goldfinch will land on your chest, fluff and groom itself for a few seconds, and fly off, having mistaken you for a tree. Sitting motionless but present, alert to the wind on your skin and the intermittent patter of acorns falling, you may hear a sudden uptick in chatter among the birds and squirrels. Another fly has hit the web. Now you are one of the animals being alerted long before you see the intruder. It could be anything, including a deer.

  I realized the very first time I hunted that I loved this state of state of consciousness, relaxed but aware. It was a kind of active meditation. There was something about it that was terribly compelling and grounding and exalted all at the same time. But entry into this world came at a price. You had to be hunting—I did, anyway—to achieve the transformation. “Hunting,” incidentally, doesn’t necessarily mean killing. You must, however, have the intention of killing if the opportunity presents itself. That’s what makes it hunting.

  This transforming intent is, of course, what has me so electrified at the moment.

  The buck statue finally becomes animate again, wandering up the ridge to my right. This is good. At least the deer is upwind of me. My legs are still shaking hard but not as wildly. I’m able to stand. I reach and lift my bow from the hook that I screwed into the tree trunk to keep it handy. I do this in super slow motion, taking the better part of a minute. And then I watch, heartsick, as the buck, a five-pointer, wanders into the brush and disappears. I am devastated, but remain standing. Unless you have a good reason to move, you don’t. I have no idea what the buck is up to, whether he’s going off to feed somewhere far away or is rather cruising, sniffing the air for a doe in heat. It’s November, the mating season, when the rush of hormones causes deer to let down their guard a little. It’s not impossible that the buck will come back this way. As may other deer. Or no deer at all.

  I don’t know how long I stand there before there are footfalls in the leaves behind me. It’s deer. It’s definitely not squirrels, which move brusquely and are much louder than deer. By the cadence I know that these deer—I’m pretty sure it’s more than one—are at ease. They’re walking but have no pressing appointments. They’re ambling along, maybe grazing as they amble. It’s too late for me to turn around. Deer don’t resolve detail particularly well but are uncanny at zeroing in on the slightest movement. So I freeze. Moments later, a doe, her tail sticking nearly straight out, something I’ve never seen before, passes almost directly beneath my stand. Following right behind her is the buck, its nose right under the doe’s raised tail. He’s actually trying to perform a sex act with the doe that was illegal in Virginia until 2003. This is something else I’ve never seen.

  For the next half hour, the doe leads the buck in slow loops and figure eights all over the ridge. She must be right on the verge of being ready. My problem is that while they have come within range several times, I haven’t had the angle for a shot. I’ve drawn, been ready to shoot, but let the bow down each time. A bowhunter’s only ethical shot is when the deer is broadside or quartering slightly away. Only then is the heart-lung area unobstructed by heavy muscle and bone. You aim for a spot in the center of an area about the size of cantaloupe just behind the shoulder.

  The light has started to fade as the doe turns again and circles back. I draw again. But this time, the doe turns broadside and the buck mirrors her movement. They are all of eight yards away. I aim, noting the burrs sticking to the buck’s coat just below where I want my arrow to go. I shoot. A compound bow releases a solid thunk of stored energy at the shot. The doe startles reflexively but doesn’t alter stride. The buck, his nose still right under her raised tail, doesn’t react at all. He neither breaks stride nor lifts nor drops his head. The two keep going as if nothing has happened and are gone from sight in seconds. You can’t have missed him, I wail silently. Not at eight yards. I can’t have missed. It’s not possible. But there’s no other explanation. And then a slight rustling in the leaves from the direction they took. Then a single click, even fainter, yet distinct. Then silence. An image of a hoof striking stone arises in my mind. I don’t move for an eternity, during which I hear no deer sounds at all. In a few minutes it will be dark dark. Too dark to register even the white bark of a sycamore tree. At last, in the utter silence, I lower my bow on a rope to the ground and quietly climb down.

  Wearing the headlamp I carry in my pack, I find my arrow sticking out of the dirt at precisely the angle I shot, as if it has penetrated nothing more substantial than air. But as I pull the shaft from the ground, I feel that it’s slick, then see the blood coating it. I look in the direction the deer walked and find a few feet away a dark medallion of blood on the leaves. Droplets on the leaves lead to another medallion ten feet farther on. Fifteen yards from where I shot it lies the buck. I touch his flank and see the entry wound on his left side. I roll the body over and see the exit wound on the other side. I made a perfect shot. The arrow passed through the deer as if through air. The buck never even knew he’d been shot. He was alive and dogging that doe until he felt weak, staggered—click!—and died. It is as clean a kill as you can hope to make.

  Elation and euphoria are flooding me. I start to cry out, “Yes!” but my voice instantly sounds wrong here, a transgression, and I swallow the word before it escapes my lips. As if this joy must not be spoken aloud. I had wondered how it would feel to kill an innocent animal and now I know. It feels fantastic. It feels great. After hundreds of hours—learning to shoot a bow, to sit quietly in the woods, to read deer signs, and to accept failure—I’ve finally killed a buck. I have at last been validated, initiated into the ranks of successful hun
ters. It feels awesome, in both the modern and the archaic senses. I’m overwhelmed by the gravity of what has just happened and by the wonder and shock I feel at the fact that it has happened. I feel incredibly alive and vivid in this most mysterious and improbable of worlds. I kneel and stoke the buck’s flank. I apologize for taking its life. I murmur, “Thank you,” to the deer.

  That night, I remove the tenderloins, the two prime strips of meat that lie along a deer’s backbone. I rub them with garlic, olive oil, salt, and pepper. I broil them in the oven, open a bottle of wine, and slice a loaf of French bread. The meat, the whole meal, are fantastic. Venison is denser and more finely grained than beef. It has a different flavor. This must be what people speak of as the “gamy” taste. I like the gamy taste. It’s something to enhance rather than disguise. The Indians used to speak of “making meat,” a phrase I had once thought awkward and now find apt. To put on a plate and eat the cooked flesh of an animal you sought, killed, and brought home is a quietly powerful experience, one not easily described. It’s unlike anything else I’ve ever done, and it’s full of interlocking opposites: pride and humility, exhilaration and contrition. It’s an experience that everyone ought to have at least once. Although when I try to imagine any of my friends doing this, I can’t.

  There was, I realized later, something subversive about what I had done. Food is energy. Energy is power. And in killing my own meat, I had taken back power from those who usually exercise it. Once I started adding up the people and entities I had ripped off, there seemed no end to them. No government inspector had stamped my deer. No chain of agribusinesses had raised the animal on a farm and transported it to a feedlot. No feedlot hands had administered the hormones and antibiotics that allow a cow to eat the diet of corn by-products and grains that fatten it up by 400 pounds in three or four months as it stands knee-deep in its own shit in a crowded pen. No one had loaded the deer onto a truck for the ride to the slaughterhouse or to the butcher. Not to mention the chain of wholesalers and buyers and distributors and truckers who did not handle it on the way to its final commercial destination—shrink-wrapped on a pure white Styrofoam tablet and bathed in the fluorescent light of the supermarket.