by The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian's Hunt for Sustenance
Later that evening, after most folks had left the reception, Willie and I sat down at a picnic table with another old friend of his to shuck the leftover lobsters. We sat in the dark, with only faint light from an outdoor bulb some yards away, cracking shells one by one, pulling out the tender flesh and setting it aside for future meals, our hands drenched with sweet, salty juice.
Now, a year later, Willie’s schedule and mine were both looking more spacious: friendlier to fishing. Soon he would be fully recovered from surgery and we would start making plans for spring or summer. We would go for stripers. Or we would head to a nearby river mouth where a friend of his said we might find big trout: sea-run browns.
Beth’s call came the next Sunday. That morning, Willie had suddenly felt uncomfortable. They rushed to the Portsmouth hospital, but it was too late. A blood clot had struck Willie in the lungs. The clot might have come from the surgery; more likely, it was caused by the cancer, which had been more advanced than anyone guessed. It hardly mattered now. He was gone.
I felt like I’d been kicked in the chest. Yes, I told Beth, of course we would be there for the funeral. Yes, I would be honored to be one of the pallbearers.
Cath and I held each other, mourning our loss, and Beth’s, unimaginably greater.
Back in Maine a few days later, we stopped at the house. We gave Beth long hugs and met a few of her friends and Willie’s, along with members of both their families.
In the dining room, I admired the exquisite black cherry table. Willie had, I thought, been like the furniture he built. His life and character were not happy accidents of inborn personality, the way the grain of his being just happened to lie. They had been carefully crafted. “We are responsible,” he once told me, “for the refinement of our own souls.”
Atop one of the matching side cabinets, I noticed a big wooden bowl. Resting in it was the cherry cooking spoon I had carved as a wedding gift. On the back of the handle, using my woodburner’s finest tip, I had etched a tiny, leaping trout.
That night, in our motel room, Cath and I made an altar. In the center, a candle and a single red flower. In front, my fillet knife in a half circle of seashells. To one side, the little notebook I was using as a fishing log, three trout on the front. To the other side, an old copy of Henry van Dyke’s Fisherman’s Luck, and a photo from our wedding—Willie and me walking toward the altar, shoulder to shoulder, our heads inclined slightly toward one another, laughing.
At dawn we walked the beach. Gentle swells rolled in as the sun eased up out of the sea. Here and there we bent to pick up shells.
Later that morning, we gathered for the funeral at the local Catholic church. Willie had almost never joined Beth in attending Saturday evening Mass, but I didn’t think he would have objected to the venue. What had bothered him about the church was its double standards, not its basic teachings. He needed guidance as much as the next person. Though he didn’t normally seek that guidance within the four walls of a house of worship, he wasn’t picky about where it came from. On one of his rare visits to the building where his funeral was now being performed, he was standing just inside the door when a priest approached.
“Can I help you?” the priest asked.
“Father,” replied Willie, “I need all the help I can get.”
In a nearby cemetery, we carried the heavy, dark casket from hearse to fresh-dug grave. Two young navy sailors folded a flag and presented it to Willie’s mother.
Then we gave Willie back to the earth.
A low jumble of dark rocks pointed toward the open ocean. Uncle Mark, his son Adam, and I had paddled across to this spit in the dim light of an overcast dawn and anchored the old aluminum canoe in a few inches of water. Now the three of us stood among the rocks, rods in hand. To our right lay the deep channel we had just crossed. With the tide beginning to fall, Cape Cod’s East Bay was giving its waters back to the sea. With those waters came baitfish, streaming out through the channel. Drawn by the small fish came larger ones, the hunters we hunted.
I had only fished with Mark once or twice as a boy and never since. But a few days after Willie was buried, Mark had written. He had noticed that the tide charts indicated favorable conditions for striped bass and bluefish the following weekend. Knowing how important Willie had been to me and how central fishing had been to our friendship, Mark wondered if I wanted to come down to the Cape and wet a line. Did I ever.
Standing there, our feet wedged among the rocks, cold salt-water swirling around our ankles, Mark, Adam, and I heard an occasional splash as fish broke the surface nearby. If we happened to be looking in the right direction, we would see a silver flash or two before the turmoil subsided, leaving the flow of the tide unmarred. Minutes later, the surface might erupt again just a few yards away.
In that violent slapping and swirling of tails, I felt a hint of the wild, open ocean. I thought of a photograph Beth had told me about: Willie standing atop a great rock at the surf’s edge, his feet set, his fishing rod doubled over, the vast, raw power of the water making the big man look tiny. I thought, too, of the photograph in the back pocket of my jeans, the laminated card from the funeral home, bearing Willie’s broad smile.
This flinging of lures and bait into the salty, wind-driven swells was nothing like the fishing I had done with Willie when I was a boy: standing under the granite cliffs or sitting in my father’s battered old rowboat, watching our lines straighten on the breeze-riffled surface, praying for the gentle tug of a brookie. But it was, I thought, very much like the fishing we would have done if he had lived longer.
There, casting a line into the churning sea, I could begin to say goodbye.
Other goodbyes had been like this, too. After my father died, I went to a spot where he and I often swam together when I was a boy, the same spot where Willie had nabbed the huge brookie with a salmon egg. Back then, I would stand on that small granite shelf just a foot above the water, my back to the quarry wall. I would look high over my left shoulder and glimpse my father taking that last casual step toward the late-day summer sun, testicles cupped in one hand: He swam naked and the human body picks up momentum in twenty-three feet of free fall.
He would hurtle past and hit with a great splash, spraying me and the stone around me. When the froth settled, I would dive straight into the long column of air he had left, hundreds of tiny bubbles tickling skin as my small body shot through. Back on the surface, we would exchange a few playful splashes before hoisting ourselves out to towel off. Later, over a game of backgammon, we would hear the big yellow-throated bullfrogs begin their nightly chorus among the cattails.
Returning to that spot after his death, and diving in again, the simple fact struck me: I would never again feel that bubbly plume rise up around me. In that moment—and later, in walking that land with my sister, scattering his ashes on earth and water—my heart opened to loss.
Cath also turned to nature at such times. Years before we met, when her father called to tell her about the results of her mother’s first biopsy—Yes, it’s cancer—she went to the backyard and set hundreds of daffodil and tulip bulbs into the soil, tears running down her cheeks as she dug each hole and planted each tightly packed bundle of beauty-to-be. Nine months later, when her father was struck by his final heart attack, she dug a new rose bed, a circle, an opening in the ground where she could pour her grief.
In our first two years together, when her mother’s cancer returned to lay its final siege, Cath helped her at home and took her to chemotherapy appointments. Every time they walked into the chemo room, it took Cath’s breath away. The rows of big recliner chairs. The people, with or without hair, their faces ashen. Some sat up, alert, maybe reading. Others just lay there, often alone. Once, a mother sat with her sick teenage son.
After each session, Cath came home drained. We talked. She wrote in her journal. She sat by the brook, needing to hear the rhythm of the water. And she gardened, needing to feel soil against skin, to coax loveliness and sustenance from the ear
th.
My fishing, like Cath’s gardening, was not a simple matter of procuring food. Nor would my hunting be. As Canadian wildlife biologist Valerius Geist once phrased it, I would “no more hunt to kill deer than I garden to kill cabbages.”
A solid tug on the line spurred my hands into motion. The fish was close. In the swirling water, I caught the broadside flash of a silvery flank marked by dark lines: a little striper. I brought the bass to hand and eased the hook from the corner of its mouth. One powerful flick of the tail and the fish was gone. From the massive swirls we had seen and heard, we knew there were bigger fish nearby. But they would not strike. Mark and Adam, like me, caught only small bass, nowhere near the twenty-eight-inch legal minimum for stripers.
Bluefish came, though, in a toothy swarm, chattering at the ends of our lines. We landed three of them, each a foot or more long, and—there being no size restrictions—killed them.
By late morning, we were back at the house where Mark lived with his wife, daughter, and son. On the back deck, Mark filleted the blues deftly, using a knife that must have cleaned thousands of fish, its handle weathered, its blade narrowed by constant re-sharpening. By lunchtime, the rich, oily flesh was on our plates, broiled—the so-recently-living, so-recently-surging-through-the-sea feeding the so-far-still-living, so-far-still-wandering-the-earth.
That afternoon, Mark and I went to the woods across the street to walk his dog, Hunter, a burly Australian Cattle Dog he had trained to tree squirrels. As we walked, I watched Mark move. Several inches shorter than I, he had the strength of a much larger man, arms tightly muscled, shoulders sloping powerfully. Despite his physique, however, there was nothing aggressive or even assertive about how he carried himself. On the contrary, I was struck by the lengths to which he went not to take up too much room. As we approached each narrowing of the trail, Mark slowed, his pauses longer than politeness required, insisting that I pass through first. Later, running errands, he did the same at the grocery-store door. And, in his interaction with the checkout clerk, he seemed intensely self-conscious, almost apologetic, as though concerned that he might offend someone.
As we ate dinner that evening, I glanced around the small dining room. The shell of a horseshoe crab hung on one wall, photographs of sandpiper chicks and wood duck drakes on another. Two shed antlers—dropped by whitetail bucks in winter and later found by Mark and Adam—were suspended from a curtain rod.
Earlier in the day, I had taken a good look around the house. Wild things inhabited every space, indoors and out. At the street, the mailbox was painted as a striped bass, seven dark lateral lines running along its sides, with wooden head, tail, and dorsal fins attached. At the corner of an outdoor railing perched a carved wooden owl. Three fish swam below, two carved out of wood, one cleverly fashioned of metal odds and ends welded together.
In the bathroom hung a small painted relief carving of a blue whale Mark had made in his twenties, and two gyotaku fish prints he had made more recently: one showing four yellow perch, the other a pair of sea robins, their wedge-shaped bodies and broad, winglike pectoral fins realistically inked in brown and orange. In the living room, books on fishing, hunting, canoeing, and tree identification shared the shelves with painted duck decoys, rabbit sculptures, and stacks of scallop shells. Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac stood beside Gerald J. Grantz’s Home Book of Taxidermy and Tanning. Small sculptures of a loon and two sandpipers rested on the mantel above the wood-pellet stove, alongside another owl Mark had carved.
And there were the big buck heads, two of them now. The one I remembered from years ago, an eight pointer with slender, elegantly curved antlers, hung above the stairwell beside a longbow. In the living room was a larger nine pointer, its rack heavy and craggy.
As a vegetarian and antihunter, I had dismissed stuffed trophy heads as grotesque displays of prowess and machismo. Now, I considered these two more closely. The taxidermists’ craftsmanship was impressive. Technically speaking, these were not “stuffed heads” at all. Though it was impossible to tell by looking, the antlers were attached to quite small sections of skull, which were in turn attached to foam forms manufactured in the shape of a whitetail’s head and neck. What looked like a deer was, in fact, an expertly tanned hide with glass eyes.
I could tell Mark admired these two deer, yet I didn’t think he was exactly “proud” of them. I knew he didn’t hunt for trophies. When I first expressed interest in hunting, he told me that he had learned long ago not to rate deer by their weight or antlers. As far as he was concerned, every whitetail he took—big buck or small doe or anything in between—was a gift. If he didn’t appreciate it, then he didn’t deserve it.
When I asked, Mark told me that both of these bucks had simply come his way. He had killed the eight pointer many years ago, there on the Cape. The buck had come within a few yards of where Mark waited with his longbow. The larger nine pointer had been taken just five or six years ago, during a trip he and Jay made to New Hampshire. Mark had killed the animal with a single-shot black-powder pistol at close to forty yards. At the check-in station, people congratulated him again and again, oohing and ahhing over the deer. Mark was mortified: “They treated me like I’d sired the animal.”
Mark valued the buck mounts, I thought, not as proof of his hunting prowess, but as reminders of particular hunts and as symbols of the relationships he cherished—with deer in general, with the specific animals whose paths crossed his, with the land they shared. He must value them aesthetically, too. I wasn’t sure I would ever hang a deer mount in my own house—I thought of a line penned by hunter and author C. L. Rawlins, “those ranks of trophy heads on walls stare down at me like the jury in a capital case”—but I had to admit: Mark’s deer were beautiful.
All these things—the deer, the striped-bass mailbox, the photos and carvings of wildlife, the sculptures and paintings of fish—struck me as altarpieces. Mark had grown up Catholic, but rarely spoke of religion. To the degree that he followed one, I thought it must be rooted in a pantheon of wild creatures and wild places, symbolized by these objects: things he had found, things he had crafted by hand. Perhaps his path was akin to totemism, which French sociologist Émile Durkheim contended was religion’s most elemental form. What creatures might watch over Mark, I couldn’t be sure. But I would willingly hazard guesses at several species of fish, the owls he frequently carved, and the deer he stalked each fall.
When Mark had a loss to grieve, I imagined that he, too, must turn to water and woods. He had understood what a weekend of fishing would do for me, so soon after burying Willie.
That evening, we descended to the basement. The long, low, cave-like room—cluttered with outdoor paraphernalia—reminded me of the first time I walked into Mark’s room as a boy. Fishing rods were racked up on the walls alongside longbows, recurves, quivers, and arrows. Camo and blaze-orange clothing peeked out of boxes stacked up against coolers and tackle bags. On top of one box lay a leather satchel Mark took to the woods whenever he hunted with his muzzleloader. Tucked inside were lead roundballs, patches for seating the balls against a powder charge, a waterproof tin of firing caps, and a gorgeous powder horn, the tip plugged with a threaded stopper made of horn, the back end capped with a cross section of deer antler. Tethered to the powder horn was another piece of whitetail antler, one end hollowed out so that it held the exact measure of powder Mark used when hunting.
The workbench proffered tools, assorted hardware, rust preventative and lubricant sprays, spinning reels in various stages of repair, and lengths of wire leader for foiling the line-shearing teeth of bluefish. Above the bench hung a tool rack and above that, at the very top of the wall, hung the small skull plates and antlers of three whitetails Mark had killed there on Cape Cod: a spikehorn, a four point, and a five.
As we tinkered with fishing gear, we talked about deer. My first autumn of hunting whitetails was about to begin. I would hunt in Vermont first. Then, the week after Thanksgiving, when Vermont’s rifle season w
as over and Mark was back from his annual hunt with Jay in the Blue Ridge Mountains, I would return to the Cape. The first few days of Massachusetts firearm season, Mark and I would finally hunt together.
At dawn, Mark and I were back at the water’s edge. It being a Sunday, I recalled a story Beth had told me the day before Willie’s funeral. Four years earlier, Father Bernard, a friend of Beth’s from Mount Angel Abbey in Oregon, had come east to officiate at a friend’s wedding in Boston. After the Saturday wedding Mass, Willie and Beth brought the Benedictine monk to their place in southern Maine. On Sunday morning, Beth dropped off the two men at the bridge over Spruce Creek. When she returned an hour later, they were surrounded by a dozen or more anglers.
The men—accustomed to Willie’s friendly ways and the sixpack of root beer he typically brought along to share—had been curious about the unfamiliar octogenarian with the cane, the lawn chair, and the wraparound sunglasses. Hearing that he was a priest, they might have backpedaled, or started thinking up quick excuses for why they weren’t in church on Sunday. But Father Bernard told them all that they were just where God wanted them to be. They did not have to go to Mass. They were enjoying exactly what God would want for them that day.
By midmorning, Mark and I were both shivering under our windbreakers. A cold October wind had begun to blow, buffeting us where we stood among the rocks and along the adjoining bayside beach. The stripers had vanished entirely. Though Mark reeled in a fluke—a spotted, oblong pancake of a fish, also called summer flounder—and then a big bluefish, sleek and silvery and as long as my arm, I had no luck at all. Yet, thinking of Willie, I knew there was no other way I would have wanted to spend those hours.
10
Into the Woods
When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.