by The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian's Hunt for Sustenance
—Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
In theory, I was ready to hunt deer. Thanks to Uncle Mark, who patiently answered the barrage of questions I sent his way, I had the basic gear. I had a pair of warm camouflage pants and a warm camouflage jacket, to break up the visual outline of my body and prevent that body from freezing solid during long hours in the woods. I had a blaze-orange vest and hat to make me glow like a neon sign during firearms seasons—deer, fortunately, do not see the color the way we do.
I had a fanny pack ready to go. With guidance from the hunter-education manual and from articles I’d read, I had stuffed its pockets with odds and ends that might come in handy: a tiny flashlight to help me navigate the woods in the predawn and postdusk dark; a compass in case I got turned around out there; a miniature first-aid kit for minor incidents; an emergency whistle, space blanket, and fire-starting materials for major ones; a flexible wire saw and lengths of cord for various situations; a folding multitool; a rifle-cleaning rod that broke down into eight-inch sections; a sharpening stone for knife and broadheads; and a small bundle of toilet paper, in case nature called. My hunting and fishing license was tucked into a ziploc bag with one of the laminated cards from the funeral home—Willie’s face smiled up at me broadly. In the largest pocket was the hunting knife Mark had given me, plus instructions on how to gut a deer. (On a shelf in the basement, I even had a boning knife—a flexible blade not unlike a fillet knife—for removing meat from bones, and a hand-crank grinder that I could clamp to the kitchen counter.)
I had a simple bow—an old recurve generously sent to me that summer by Jay, Mark’s longtime hunting buddy from Virginia—and a quiver full of arrows.
I had an old-fashioned caplock muzzleloader, much like the one Mark used for most of his deer hunting. He had helped me find it, secondhand and in excellent condition. He had also offered technical advice as I went about transforming a cow horn Jay had given me into my own powder horn: its cherry plug wood-burned to show a buck and doe in silhouette, its variegated brown-and-blond surface roughly scrimshawed to suggest Cold Brook, the rocky little waterway that tumbles through the woods behind our house, along whose banks I might look for tracks.
And I had a modern rifle. Fortunately, I did not go straight from the hunter-education class to the nearest gun shop. If I had blundered in and started asking questions, it wouldn’t have been pretty.
Me: “Hi, I want to buy a deer rifle.”
Gun guy: “What are you looking for?”
Me: “Uh, a deer rifle?” At this point, ignorance would still have been bliss. I knew only that I needed a centerfire rifle, so called because the firing pin strikes an explosive, impact-sensitive primer located in the center of the cartridge case’s back end. (Rimfire cartridges like the ubiquitous .22, which have a primer encircling the rear of the case, lack the power needed for deer hunting, and are better suited for smaller game like rabbit, hare, or gray squirrel.)
Gun guy: “Okay. Do you have a brand in mind? Remington, maybe? Or Browning? Or Winchester?”
Me: “Uh, not really.” Here, I would have had a first, faint inkling of what I was getting into.
Gun guy: “Okay. What kind of action do you want: bolt, lever, pump, semiauto?”
Me, relieved: “Bolt.” This was one thing I did know. In hunter education, I had learned how different types of rifles and shot-guns functioned. Any of them would work just fine, but I felt safest and most confident with the simplest design, and the most familiar. My first .22 and my father’s few long guns had all been bolt-actions.
Gun guy: “Do you have a caliber in mind? Are you thinking a two-seventy, a thirty-aught-six, a three-oh-eight, a two-forty-three, an old thirty-thirty?”
Me: “Uh.” This is where it would have begun to dawn on me that I was in deep.
As I say, though, I did not flaunt my ignorance in such a spectacularly public manner. Instead, I did it privately, throwing myself on Uncle Mark’s mercy. He was kind. When I asked him about the vast array of available calibers, he explained: The main differences were power and effective range. Though caliber designations indicated the bullet’s diameter—in hundredths of an inch for American cartridges, and in millimeters for European cartridges—the size of each cartridge case and the amount of powder inside were entirely different matters. A .30-06 and a .30-30, for instance, both fired a bullet about three-tenths of an inch wide. The former, however, was far more powerful.
Scouring the Internet for relevant articles, I came to the realization that hunters and shooters and industry professionals had written roughly a gazillion words of advice on rifles and rifle cartridges, and on how to choose the right one. There were pages and pages of history, parts of which helped me decipher common caliber notations: The “aught-six” in .30-06, for example, refers to the cartridge’s introduction in 1906, while the second “thirty” in .30-30 refers to the cartridge’s standard load of thirty grains of smokeless powder. There were ballistics tables, showing the trajectories of various cartridges with various powder loads shooting bullets of various weights and shapes, and the kinetic force each would deliver at various distances. There were even charts detailing the “sectional density” of any given bullet: a mathematically precise way of telling me whether the projectile was shaped more like a spear or more like a rock.
After a brief descent into endless rabbit holes of facts and data, I emerged, shook my head, and looked back at one of Mark’s first e-mails. He had summed up what I needed to know. Given the distances at which I would likely be shooting, any one of a long list of centerfire cartridges would provide sufficient power to kill a deer instantly and a flat enough trajectory for me to hit my target. For hunters in Northeastern forests, the average shot at a deer is well under fifty yards.
Mark also confirmed one pertinent fact that my baffled brain had begun to deduce: Firepower mattered far less than being able to hit what I was aiming at. The best rifle would be one that—in my inexperienced hands—would deliver a bullet to a deer’s vital organs every time. And the main factor apt to interfere with such accuracy was recoil, a direct correlate of firepower.
Not that recoil makes a rifle itself inaccurate. The bullet is long gone by the time a firearm bucks from the explosion that just occurred within its chamber. But it can easily make the shooter inaccurate. Having fired only small-caliber guns as a kid, I had no idea how a big-game rifle would kick or how serenely I would absorb it. If I ended up with an over-powered gun that kicked too hard, I ran the risk of developing a flinch. If I started flinching in anticipation of the recoil—just before the cartridge detonated—then my marksmanship would deteriorate in a hurry.
Online, I found several articles that offered maximum-recoil suggestions for first-time owners of deer rifles, and explained the mechanics. In short, I needed to pay attention to Newton’s Third Law of Motion: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The lighter the rifle, the greater the powder charge, the heavier the bullet, and the faster that bullet flew, the more force my shoulder would be asked to absorb.
Other articles emphasized the “knockdown power” of various types of large-bore, supercharged ammo. But I was not going to be hunting Cape buffalo in Africa or brown bears in Alaska. I was going to be hunting white-tailed deer in New England. I did not need some kind of armor-piercing, antitank ordnance. Nor did I particularly want to contract even a mild case of magnumitis: the irrational desire to possess a firearm capable of stopping a freight train.
In the end, the choice was easy. A few articles suggested that the American-made .260 cartridge—and its older Scandinavian equivalent, the Swedish 6.5x55—offered a good balance of power and low recoil, especially for a first-time shooter. A local hunter offered to let me touch off a round or two with a pair of his rifles, one of them a .260.
I was sold. The rifle was lightweight, but still didn’t kick that hard.
Walking around a shop’s impressive arsenal, I eliminated every rifle that was out of my price range. Th
en I eliminated every rifle that didn’t feel right in my hands. That narrowed the field to two or three. I kept coming back to a modestly priced gun made by Tikka, a high-quality Finnish manufacturer that Willie had suggested I consider. The pattern of the checkering carved into the stock was a bit modern for my taste, but the gun felt well balanced, the smooth walnut fore end and grip fit my hands, and the butt and comb settled comfortably against my shoulder and cheek. I ordered one, chambered for 6.5x55.
In preparation for that first autumn of deer hunting, I practiced with the recurve Jay had sent. It felt good to have a bow back in my hands after so many years, feeling string across gloved fingers and fingertips against jaw, looking down the shaft and visualizing the path the arrow would take toward my target: a fifty-pound birdseed sack stuffed with lightweight tarps I’d collected on a carpentry job, the kind used for shipping lumber. I felt confident out to twenty yards.
I practiced with my firearms as well. Mostly, I shot my .22—each round cost only a few cents. Less frequently, I practiced with my 6.5x55—cartridges were a dollar apiece. And I familiarized myself with the more involved procedure of pouring black powder into my caplock’s .54-caliber maw, ramming in a bullet or patched roundball, placing a percussion cap under the cocked hammer, and sending the projectile through a paper plate. Whether looking through the low-power scope on my Tikka or through the peep sight on my muzzleloader, I knew I could hit a deer’s vital organs at fifty yards or more. Rudimentary shooting skills, however, wouldn’t do any good unless I could first succeed in deer hunting’s most basic task: finding deer.
I began my quest close to home. Cath and I didn’t see white-tails there often—every few weeks we might catch a glimpse of a doe or two standing under the apple trees or crossing the driveway, and once in our six years there I had seen an antlered buck within fifty yards of our front porch, near the forest’s edge. But we often saw their tracks, and evidence of their passage through our unfenced flower gardens: Hosta leaves were a favored delicacy, as were daylily buds, particularly when they were just about to bloom. Their visits to our yard were mostly nocturnal. By day, they disappeared into the hundreds of acres of privately owned timberland stretching out behind our house toward Groton State Forest. That, I thought, would be the place to hunt. There were no houses back there, or even any hunting camps.
Poring over the town tax map, I determined whose properties I hoped to hunt and contacted the owners for permission. Landowners who had grown up elsewhere thanked me for asking, and said yes. Landowners who had grown up here were baffled by my question. Their land wasn’t posted. Didn’t I know that meant I could hunt it? I did. The Vermont Constitution of 1777 guarantees residents the “liberty in seasonable times, to hunt and fowl on the lands they hold, and on other lands not inclosed.” (Vermont was the first state to provide constitutional protection for hunting. The second, Alabama, didn’t follow suit until 1996. By 2010, eleven more states had done the same.) But asking was still good manners.
It would also be good manners, I decided, to reconsider how we marked our own property. When Cath and I moved here to the eastern side of the Winooski Valley, we wanted to keep hunters off our few acres. Anywhere you stood—or fired a rifle—you were within a few hundred yards of our house. In most spots, you were a lot closer than that. Our driveway is part of an old railroad bed, long used as a trail by hunters, hikers, bicyclists, cross-country skiers, and snowmobilers. Decades ago, after part of the rail-bed embankment washed out and disappeared downstream, a trail detour was put in around our house and driveway. That detour winds through our woods just seventy yards from the back porch.
So I did what most safety-conscious, non- and antihunting newcomers do. I bought a roll of those ubiquitous bright-yellow signs: “Posted. Private Property.” Several went alongside the trail detour: not blocking it, but telling folks to stick to it.
Now, though, I was becoming a hunter. I had been granted the privilege of hunting on other people’s private property. It didn’t feel right to continue sending the “Posted” signs’ message: Stay the hell off our land. Yet I didn’t want to tempt fate by removing them entirely. I still thought about the local man killed while watching football in his living room two years earlier. Hunters still needed to know that our few acres were not a place for shooting. So I took down the yellow signs and replaced them with black-and-white ones provided by the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department: “Safety Zone. No Hunting Allowed. Shooting Prohibited.” In other words, you can’t see it, but you’re really close to our house.
With permission to hunt hundreds of acres, I started my scouting in summer. I took a compass, a pencil, and a paper map I’d printed from my computer, topographic lines overlaying a black-and-white aerial photograph. A quarter-inch on the map was, I estimated, just over fifty paces on the ground. Hike after hike, I explored the woods, slapping black flies as I went. I learned where beavers were actively tending dams a half mile up Cold Brook. I saw where several clearcut acres had been taken over by wild raspberries. I found where old stone walls—from the merino sheep’s heyday, I guessed—intersected along the western flank of a long ridge known as Lord’s Hill. (On its far side stands Devil’s Hill and nearby lie the remains of a long-abandoned settlement called Jerusalem, a trinity that makes me curious about the intertwining of theology and geography in local history.) On my map, I marked a spot along one stone wall where I had found artist’s conk and turkey tail: wild mushrooms Cath used in medicinal recipes.
Here and there, I also noted old wooden platforms perched in trees. The makeshift tree stands did not appear to have been used in recent years, but at one time some hunter must have thought each of these spots a likely one for seeing deer. That was my task now: to decide where, in all these hundreds of acres, I might actually see whitetails in daylight. Like an angler sizing up a river, I needed to pay attention not just to the broad sweep of the landscape—the slopes and saddles and ridges that might shape deer’s movements—but to the details.
Where might deer bed down in thick cover? To what spot might they go to bask in the sun’s warmth? Where might they habitually feed? Fifty miles to the south, stands of oak might provide acorns, one of the whitetail’s favorite autumn foods. Here, though, oaks are rare. I would need to look elsewhere, perhaps to late apples or to stands of beech trees in years when beechnuts were plentiful. What trails did the deer use to travel between bedding areas and feeding areas? And how would all these patterns change come fall, as the season turned and mating began?
Walking the woods, I watched for deer tracks and droppings. I kept an eye out for old rubs—places where, in some previous year, a buck had rubbed and hooked his antlers against small trees, stripping bark and leaving telltale scars. I looked, too, for spots where I might lie in ambush.
From Mark’s e-mails and magazine articles he had clipped out and sent, I gathered that the various hunting strategies available to me boiled down to two: going to deer, or waiting for deer to come to me. I wasn’t too sure about the former.
I knew that some hunters could track a single deer for miles and eventually get close enough for a shot. I just wasn’t one of them. Not yet, at any rate. The approach intrigued me, though, and in fresh snow I would happily give it a try.
Another variation on going to deer intrigued me as well. “Still-hunting,” despite its moniker, means hunting while moving, albeit very, very slowly. Mindful of wind direction, still hunters do their best to blend in to the woods. They take a slow, quiet step, then pause for a minute or more, sharply attentive to any movement or sound that might indicate the presence of an animal nearby, before taking another step. It can take them an hour to go a hundred, or even fifty, yards. With soft snow or damp, quiet leaves underfoot, I’d willingly give this a try, too. But I had no experience at it.
The better bet—the tactic a greenhorn like me was less apt to bungle—was to wait for deer to come to me. Once I picked a spot, my task would be simple: not to move. In the woods near active deer trai
ls and old rubs, I looked for potential “ground stands”—places to sit or stand with both my feet on terra firma.
A good spot would give me a dual advantage in the visual landscape, simultaneously providing trees, bushes, or branches to break up the visible outline of my predatory form, and giving me a clear view of locations where whitetails might appear. “Clear view” was, of course, a relative notion. In these woods, hunting wasn’t visual in the way I gathered it often was out west, where trees are sparse and binoculars can help you spot an animal half a mile away. But I wanted to avoid sitting in such thick cover that dozens of deer might pass within twenty yards, unseen.
The olfactory landscape was harder to predict. I knew that an ideal spot would be downwind of where I expected to see deer. Yet, as I started paying attention to them, I realized that air movements changed not only from day to day, but from hour to hour and even from minute to minute. The light breeze I felt in my face now might, in a moment, swirl around to push my scent out in front of me. In general, a west wind might prevail, but I couldn’t plan on it.
Near the same deer trails, I also kept an eye out for well-positioned trees to which I might strap a metal tree stand. Perching twelve or fifteen or more feet off the ground would, in theory, make deer less likely to see me, especially if I could arrange to have trees—not open sky—above and behind me. Deer should also be less likely to smell me, as my scent would be wafting along on the breeze several yards above their noses. My chances of having a deer get very close would be better: a vital factor if I was using a bow. Though I felt more confident about making a clean kill with rifle, scope, and cartridge, bow and arrow were appealing in their simplicity.
By mid-September, when Willie passed away so suddenly, I had a few spots picked out. Whether they were good ones, I did not know. But no matter. I wasn’t in any hurry to kill a deer. Just seeing one during hunting season would be a success, and I felt I had a fair shot at that.