On Trails

by Robert Moor

  We sat for a few hours. The air warmed. The blue leaves grew teal, then green. Wood ducks creaked like old chairs amid the shushing and sighing of distant traffic. From time to time, he tried to summon his prey, almost shamanically, by clacking a pair of antlers against each other and manipulating a small canister, called a “doe bleat,” which produced a sound like a remorseful cat. This technique is widespread across hunting cultures: The Penobscot Indians of Maine, for example, used cones of birch bark to mimic the amorous call of the cow moose, while Ainu hunters in Japan used a device made of wood and fish skin to imitate the cries of lost fawns.

  Nothing appeared.

  After four hours, Walker began packing up.

  “Well, we made a good shot at it, but we didn’t see shit,” Walker said. “You always spend a lot more time waiting than you do shooting, that’s for sure.”

  On our walk out, Walker pointed out more signs: hoofprints in soft mud; a field of clover; a big brown hole in the ground, the rocks around it crusted with dried salt. Deer should have been flocking to this area, but they weren’t. Walker’s hunch was that they were napping, because they had been grazing all night under the full moon. “When it’s a full moon, deer tend to move in the middle of the night and the middle of the day,” he said. “It’s just a kind of rhythm they go through.”

  After lunch, we went on a hike in Bankhead National Forest. We were joined by Walker’s friend Charles Borden. Beneath his gray beard, Borden had the jarringly youthful smile of a dentist. Like Walker, he wore big leather boots and a T-shirt tucked into his blue jeans. Unlike Walker, he had a black pistol strapped to his leather belt. Behind him trailed a German shepherd named Jojo. He and Walker both carried stout wooden walking sticks as they stomped through the woods, as much to sweep away spiderwebs as for balance.

  The two men walked with their eyes pointed toward the ground, like hens searching for seed. Every time Walker found an acorn, he would call out: “Aikerns!” Intermittently, he would bend down to pick one up, crack the shell between his teeth, and inspect the flesh of the nut. A healthy acorn was white and smooth. (Walker handed me one to eat; it tasted like an astringent macadamia.) Sometimes, though, the nut was “faulty,” bored through with wormy black holes. Deer can smell faulty acorns.

  When Walker found an area with a particular density of acorns, he would glance up, looking for an ideal tree to climb. The trick, he said, was to find a tree that was downwind of the acorn pile, then to climb above the deer’s field of vision, preferably concealed by a neighboring tree’s lower branches. The two men moved on, looking down, then looking up.

  We followed a deer trail that wended gracefully down through the hilly land. One clever hunting method, Borden pointed out, was to find a particularly thick area, then clear a small meadow and a series of paths leading to it, like the spokes of a wheel. The hunter hides near the hub of the spokes, hijacking the animal’s trail-following instinct.

  Humans are not alone in our ability to exploit the trails of our prey. Many other predators do too: Bobcats crouch in ambush beside game trails; blind snakes can sniff out the pheromone trails of termites; and tiny predatory mites trace the silk trails of two-spotted spider mites. So-called highwaymen beetles, which can recognize the pheromone trails of ants, lie in wait for ants to march past so they can steal their cargo, while green woodpeckers will lay their long sticky tongues across ant trails and simply wait for their meal to be delivered. For most animals, I had come to learn, the ability to make and follow trails provides an evolutionary advantage, until a predator evolves to wield their own trails against them.

  Walker paced in circles around an oak tree, looking for signs. “Aikerns . . . Aikerns . . .” he said to himself, periodically cracking one of the shells between his teeth. As boys, he and Borden had spent much of their free time walking these woods. Both were worried about the fact that their grandchildren wouldn’t have the same upbringing. “When you’re living in a rural area, and hunting and hiking and staying in the woods, you develop an intimate familiarity with the environment,” Borden said. “It gives you a different perspective, because you see the myriad forms of life, and you are able to relate, because you are a part of that. You are not something separate.”

 

  In the afternoon, Walker brought me to his new favorite hunting spot, in a different part of Bankhead. It was ideal: the ground was well pawed and showered with acorns. It also bordered a small cleared field, which was good, because deer tend to prefer the edge habitats between fields and forests. Walker guided me to the tree he had picked out for me, a tall oak, and began rigging up a device called a tree stand, which resembled the unholy offspring of a folding chair and a pair of crampons. It consisted of two halves, a seat and a footrest, both of which were secured to the tree with a cable that looped around the tree trunk. Each half bore a set of metal teeth that dug into the bark. I attached my harness to the tree and strapped my feet into the footrest. Following Walker’s instructions, I began to inchworm up the trunk, first lifting the footrest, tilting my feet back so the teeth bit into the bark, then lifting the top half. Each time I leaned on my elbows to lift my feet, there was an alarming moment when the footrest unclenched from the bark and my feet were suddenly dangling over ten, fifteen, twenty feet of air.

  When I’d reached the right height, I cinched both halves of the tree stand to the trunk, folded down the padded seat, and secured my harness. By the time I had finished, I looked up to find Walker already sitting high up in a tree thirty yards away, balaclava pulled down over his face, utterly serene, like a green ninja.

  The day slowly undid itself. The air cooled again. Greens blued. Oak toads cheeped, and a coyote let out a neurotic whine. Acorns hailed down onto the ground below. No deer appeared, though. Hunting, I learned, is primarily a battle against boredom. I stared so long into the woods that I began to hallucinate deer out of logs; every falling acorn sounded like a branch snapping under hoof.

  Walker sat patiently, his head raptored forward, peering. When a branch fell, his head swiveled and locked in on the source of the sound, then slowly, silently, turned back to center. After a time, he began pulling off beech leaves and letting them flutter to the ground to test the wind. Then he pulled out his cell phone and began texting people, perhaps to relay the non-news. Finally, he began folding up his tree stand and preparing to descend, so I did the same.

  In the following days, we fell into a pattern. Each morning we would rise before dawn and return to this hunting spot, where we’d left the tree stands the night before. Around noon, we’d scout for new hunting sites, with an eye for tall white oaks and a confluence of deer trails. And in the afternoon, we’d climb back up our trees and wait.

  After three days, we still hadn’t gotten close to shooting a deer. As we were driving back from the forest around noon, I asked Walker what he thought goes on in a deer’s head. “Well, I ain’t in a damn deer’s head, but basically what’s in their head is feeding, sleeping, and fucking. Same things in everybody else’s head,” he said. Just then a buck stepped out into the middle of the forest service road about forty yards ahead. The buck’s wide eyes and swiveling ears were tuned to our truck, but he stood frozen. Walker stopped the truck and reached for his door handle, saying that he’d “shoot the shit out of it” in the middle of the road if he got the chance. But then he noticed the buck’s antlers. They were two stubby prongs. The buck, he explained, was too young to legally shoot. He eased the truck forward to see if we could snap a good picture, but the buck dashed off. After it was gone, we got out of the truck to inspect its tracks, which were accompanied by those of three other deer. Their trail passed through a narrow opening in a laurel thicket, which Walker called a “pinch point.”

  “See, we fucked up,” Walker said. “Deer are probably moving in the middle of the day.” By then, this observation had begun to rankle. Every afternoon, Walker would note that we had missed the deer because they we
re grazing under the full moon, but then every morning he would drag me out of bed before dawn. “It’s hard to condition yourself to change your habits,” he admitted. “So I guess we get in a rut just about as bad as the deer do.”

 

  The following day, we awoke again at dawn. We sat for hours, watching the leaves fall. When the sun was high, Walker let out a soft whistle to get my attention. A buck had appeared on the far side of the plowed field. It was a creamy brown, with a white belly and slender legs. It began picking its way toward us along the edge of the field, nibbling the grass.

  When the buck was forty yards away, Walker rose to his feet and reached for his bow. If things had gone according to plan, he would have notched an arrow, attached his trigger release, drawn the string back in one fluid motion, and held it at full draw for a few seconds as he lined up the shot. He might have let out a little sound—Ert!—to startle the buck and freeze it in its tracks. Then, with a slow constriction of his back muscles, he would have pulled back gently on the trigger until the string released and the arrow leaped silently from the bow, flying at 350 feet per second. It would have slipped in behind the deer’s ribs, the arrowhead expanding to cut a two-inch “blood hole” through the vital organs. The buck would have looked startled, then hurt, and begun to limp off into the woods. Rather than following it, Walker would have sat back down and waited for at least an hour; a wounded deer that feels pursued will walk, sometimes for miles, until it falls dead, whereas an unhurried deer will usually lie down within a hundred yards from where it was shot.

  Once Walker traced the blood trail to the deer, he would have pulled apart its front legs and cut a small incision beneath the sternum. Then he would have slipped a finger into the hole to push the stomach aside, being careful not to puncture it. (Deer stomachs tend to bloat quickly. “If you cut it too deep and pierce the stomach,” Walker warned me, “it will go FSHH! and you get shit and chewed-up food all over you.”) Wiggling his finger to open a slot for the knife to run, he would have slipped the knife in and cut all the way down to the tail, opened up the chest, cut loose the esophagus and trachea, sliced down each side of the diaphragm, and rolled the guts out onto the ground, where they’d be left for the buzzards to eat. After having cut a hole through the septum of the buck’s nose, he would have threaded a stick through it, like a bull’s nose ring, and dragged the body snout-first back to his truck.

  From there, Walker would drive the dead buck to a special shop for butchering. Years ago, he used to stay up all night butchering his own deer in his backyard with a fine-toothed saw. (“My girls could tell you horror stories about me hanging deer on their swing set,” he said.) He would carve the tenderloin into steaks, hand-grind the shoulder into hamburger patties, barbecue the ribs, and save the spine for stew. But that required an enormous amount of time and work, and Walker ultimately succumbed to the gravitational pull of modern convenience. Now, he took the deer to a special butcher called a processor, who usually threw away things like the spine. (“They do it as quick as they can to make money,” he said. “And you let them do it like they want to do it so you can pay the least amount of money.”) Since Walker already had a deer in his freezer, he would have given the meat away to his daughters or his neighbors.

  At least, that is what would have happened—if all had gone according to plan. What happened instead was that, as the buck approached, Walker lowered his bow. “Too young,” he whispered. He raised two fingers above his head to indicate that it was the same buck with the Y-shaped horns from the day before. Catching our scent, the buck stiffened, then, after a calculated pause, changed direction and walked in a wide arc around us. Perched up in his tree, Walker’s eyes followed it for twenty minutes, as it slipped in and out of shafts of sunlight, appearing and disappearing, passing through the trees at a halting pace. Small and distant, the buck paused, glowing, one last time, and then was gone.

 

  Compared to the hunting techniques of Native Americans in the past, Walker’s technique was relatively primitive. To better stalk their prey, the Powhatan of the early seventeenth century elaborately disguised themselves as bucks. John Smith described the process in detail: the hunter stuck his arm through a slit in a deer hide while holding a stuffed deer head, “the hornes, head, eies, eares, and every part as arteficially counterfeited as they can devise,” Smith wrote. “Thus shrowding his body in the skinne, by stalking he approacheth the Deare, creeping on the ground from one tree to another” until he was within range of a clear shot.

  Larger communities tended to rely more heavily on systematic communal hunts. According to Smith, the Powhatan sometimes hunted deer by surrounding them with wildfires and then forcing them to a central ambush point—a widespread technique. The arrival of the fur trade further encouraged mass killing, as opposed to individual hunting.

  According to the anthropologist Gregory A. Waselkov, deer was “the single most important meat resource of post-Pleistocene tribes of the eastern woodlands.” Put simply, the Eastern tribes could not afford to give the deer a “sporting chance”—a notion wholly alien to them. Though recreational hunting existed in numerous ancient empires, the sport as we know it was only codified by European royalty in the last thousand years.

  Deer meat was also the single most important meat resource for the European aristocracy, but for different reasons. Venison was a marker of status, a sign of manly virility, and an indication of geographic power. Deer were so integral to the notion of hunting that they became, quite literally, synonymous with it. According to the historian Matt Cartmill, the modern Irish verb fiadhachaim, “to hunt,” literally means “to deer-atize.” In English venison, which originally meant “meat gotten by hunting,” now means “deer flesh.”

  Hunting was meant to serve as a relief from the tedium of the court, so it was ironic, but not surprising, that a baroque system of courtly manners soon arose around the sport. In Elizabethan England, according to Cartmill, “a public spanking with the flat of a hunting knife” was the customary penalty for breaking one of the sport’s many rules, “for example, uttering the forbidden word ‘hedgehog’ during a deer hunt.” British royals hunted on horseback, attended by brush beaters, bow handlers, and buglers. In France, the parforce hunt, in which the quarry was essentially run to death by dogs and horse-bound riders, became the norm. Nevertheless, some kings, like Louis XV, managed to kill lavishly. Over his fifty-year sporting career, he is said to have run down some ten thousand red deer, an accomplishment Cartmill considers “possibly unique in the history of the human species.”

  The royal hunt created a new type of landscape. In 1066, William the Conqueror invaded England, took the throne by force, and began to radically redistribute the land by means of a process called “afforestation,” whereby large tracts of land were declared royal forests. Though prior residents were allowed to continue living on these lands, hunting, trapping, herding, and logging were outlawed. The famous New Forest—an ancient woodland and heath in southern England, which remains largely intact—was the result of William’s dictate. At their peak, royal forests accounted for one-third of the land in England.

  These protections did not stem from some kind of proto-­environmentalist sentiment, though. Rather, it was meant to protect the king’s prized prey: the red, roe, and fallow deer. William’s “forest law” showed a rather sophisticated understanding that without a stable forest ecosystem, large game like deer could not thrive. However, the system was explicitly designed to maximize deer populations; predators did not receive the same protection. Wolves had a royal bounty placed on their heads, and by the 1200s they had been successfully hunted out of southern Britain.

  The regulations proved onerous for local residents. William prohibited bows and arrows within the royal forests, and he ordered that all large dogs living near his forests have three claws from their forefeet removed—a grisly procedure, called “lawing,” which was performed with a mallet and chisel—to
prevent them from chasing his deer. Poachers faced losing their hands, their eyes, or their lives.

  As predation of wild deer increased and their habitat shrank, private parks were built by noblemen to protect their stocks of deer, and harsher regulations were passed. Naturally, the common people chafed against these new restrictions. In 1524, three yeomen snuck into a deer park, hacked two young deer to pieces, and ripped two fawns from their mothers’ wombs, leaving the carcasses where they lay—apparently, an act of pure, bloody rage. In the oral and written literature of the time, there arose a certain heroic aura around poachers like Adam Bell, Johnie Cock, and most famously, Robin Hood. The famed bandit of Sherwood Forest (a hundred-thousand-acre royal preserve) and his Merry Men represented both rebellion and idyll. They dined on delicacies like venison pasties and sweetbreads. They escaped capture with a superior knowledge of the land, moving, wraithlike, on “derne” (secret) paths. A bounty—called a “wolf’s head,” because the reward was the same as for that of a wolf—was placed on Robin Hood’s life. The poor championed his fight against (among other things) the excesses of sport hunting, while the nobility derided subsistence hunters like him, now dubbed “poachers,” as uncivilized and unmanly.

  The British eventually brought these mores to the New World, judging Native Americans for their “savage” methods. On seeing the popular Native hunting technique called “lead hunting”—where hunters would locate the seasonal migration route of ungulates, like caribou, and then wait for their prey to appear—the famed British hunter Frederick Selous wrote that he felt “thoroughly disgusted with the whole business. In the first place, to sit on one spot for hours lying in wait for game, is not hunting, and, although under favourable conditions it may be a deadly way of killing Caribou, it is not a form of sport which would appeal to me under any circumstances.”