Tovar Cerulli

by The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian's Hunt for Sustenance

  By the end of the fourth and final weekend of Vermont’s archery season, I had seen exactly zero deer from my tree stand. From the ground, though, I had seen white-tailed does three times. And I had also encountered creatures I was not hunting, each unanticipated meeting a gift.

  One day, I came across a flock of sixty or more wild turkeys, little ones and big ones, clucking, pecking, scratching, walking, hopping, and flapping through the woods. Another day, I caught a glimpse of two bears and—along the edge of a cornfield cut to stubble—found signs of their passage: scat, black hairs snagged on barbed wire, and corn stalks dragged into the woods for secluded nibbling. And, once, as I approached Cold Brook just below a beaver pond, a great blue heron burst up suddenly from among the alders in front of me, huge wings lifting the hunter’s sinuous body into the sky.

  11

  Kinds of Killing

  I will never know if animals and plants have spirits, if the tree I stand beside is aware of my presence, if respectful gestures bring hunting luck and protect my well-being. But I am absolutely certain it is wise and responsible to behave as if these things were true.

  —Richard Nelson, Heart and Blood

  A shot cracked the frosty quiet of sunrise. I flinched, my body reacting before I could process the sound and think, Rifle. My hunter-education instructor’s words echoed in my mind: “That one didn’t hit me.”

  The shot had been close, maybe two hundred yards from where I waited behind the jagged remains of a fallen fir, watching the deer trail that traversed the slope below. Bright patches on a pair of young maple stems told me that a buck had been there, rubbing antlers against trees, stripping bark.

  A minute later, a second shot rang out. Finishing the animal off, I thought, or taking a long shot. I hadn’t seen any other hunters scouting these woods in recent weeks and was surprised by the close company.

  I thought of Cath. I wasn’t far from home. She would have heard those shots, too. When I left the house with my rifle slung over my shoulder, I could tell she was uneasy. She knew that I would be careful and that I was wearing a blaze-orange hat and vest. Until now, though, I had only been out during bow season, when few hunters were in the woods and when neither of us imagined there was even the slightest risk of getting shot. I had never set foot in the woods to pursue deer with a firearm, let alone gone out in the predawn darkness of that most popular Saturday in mid-November, the first day of Vermont’s two-week rifle season. Safety statistics would not quell Cath’s instinctive reaction to those sharp reports. By midmorning, concerned for her and feeling crowded by the nearby shots, I headed home.

  A few days later, curious whether the hunter had, in fact, taken a buck in those early hours, I went looking. Tufts of white and brown hair snagged on fallen branches told me that a deer had been dragged along a narrow game path. A hundred yards farther, the drag signs stopped. The body must have been pulled up to the path from the right-hand side, across a slope covered with rocks and wild raspberries.

  Avoiding that tangle, I kept to the path and circled around to the hemlock-cloaked shoulder of a ridge where the hunter might have fired those shots. I could have missed the spot in the brush below but for the blaze-orange trash. Someone had indeed field dressed a whitetail there, leaving behind a pair of giant bright-plastic gloves, complete with the wrapper advising, “Don’t Litter.”

  The trash seemed a potent expression of disrespect: for the land, its owners, and the graceful animal whose life had been forfeit. In the scheme of things, I knew this was a minor infraction. It paled in comparison with the more flagrant crimes I had read and heard of: the gut shooting of deer my hunter-education instructor had described, for instance, or the moose pointlessly shot and left to rot. I e-mailed Uncle Mark about it and his reply resonated: “Leaving a kill site trashed is inexcusable.” For both of us, those gloves beside the deer’s entrails touched a nerve.

  It wasn’t just the littering. Every spring, Cath and I work with neighbors to clean up our several-mile-long dirt road. I don’t like the garbage we find—soda bottles, beer cans, fast-food containers, the occasional tire or two—but it doesn’t sicken me.

  The hunter’s trash was different. Walking home with those gloves dangling from my hand, my revulsion was visceral. I could get no distance from it. I felt lonelier than if I had been in deep forest, miles from the nearest human being. Days later, an emptiness lingered. The word that came to mind was desecration.

  What was it that made the deer’s death feel sacred, and thus vulnerable to defilement? What sanctified the place where the animal fell? It wasn’t simply death. When I see road-killed animals, I feel sad. But that spot on the highway doesn’t seem sacred to me. Tragic, yes, but not sacred. I’m not especially horrified by the presence of nearby litter.

  It was the killing. Somewhere along that hemlock-covered ridge, a hunter had squeezed a trigger, deliberately ending a life. In the brush below, a hunter had slit open the belly of a deer’s still-warm body. That act of intentional killing demanded reverence. It should have pushed the event and place into the realm of the sacred. The trash declared that it had not.

  Many traditional hunting cultures say that the land is watchful, that the animal’s spirit objects to disrespectful behavior. Whether that was true I had no idea, but it made more sense to me than the common Christian claim that animals have no souls. The very word “animal” derives from the Latin word anima, meaning “ life,” “breath,” “spirit,” and “soul.” If we want to deny the spiritual essence of animals, we will need to come up with a different name for them. “Resources,” perhaps. Or “livestock.”

  During my militant vegan years, any attempt to link killing with the sacred would have struck me—much as it did Marti Kheel in her critique of the “holy hunter”—as an especially deceptive sort of deviance, a ploy intended to sanctify brutality. Now, though, what struck me as bizarre was the attempt to segregate the two. In the history of human cultures around the world, such compartmentalized thinking seemed a radical aberration.

  Joseph Campbell once said that the “essence of life is that it lives by killing and eating.” That, he contended, is “the great mystery that myths have to deal with.” We have managed to forget this. We have distanced ourselves from the killing, fashioning a system in which few modern meat eaters ever make a pilgrimage to woods or farmyard to deal directly with that mystery and look those other lives in the eye. We have relegated killing to the profanity of industrial processing, pigs and cattle whacked dead along the disassembly line with the same soulless regularity as widgets being put together. And we have sanitized and fluffed up our notions of the sacred, elevating the saccharine sweetness of the beatific and the heavenly, glossing over the deeper, darker aspects of life.

  In the days after finding the hunter’s trash, I returned to the scene in memory. I returned, too, to the blocks of salt I had found under the tree stand by the beaver meadow during bow season the month before. I thought of the bowhunter who told me he had fatally wounded a young buck but failed to find it; he paid only brief lip service to regret. And I thought of the newspaper story from opening weekend of rifle season: Two local men, drunk, had been caught jacking deer, poaching them in a field at night with spotlight and rifle.

  Hunting brings us into close contact with land and animals. Approached with humility, such contact can help us recall our place in the natural world, reminding us to celebrate all those lives intertwined with ours. Approached with arrogance, it only alienates us further.

  The following weekend, I could have hunted, but I left my rifle locked away. Soon I would be hunting with Uncle Mark.

  Along the edge of a small plateau, in thick oak woods a few miles from Mark’s house, two deer trails intersected. Earlier in autumn, Mark had propped a few fallen branches against a tree, forming a backdrop of intersecting shapes and lines. More recently, he had cleared a place for me to sit or stand, removing the loud, crunchy oak leaves from underfoot. Nearby, he had used a stick to make a few
mock scrapes, hoping to arouse whitetails’ curiosity by imitating the pawed-up patches often left by bucks. In the faint predawn light, we saw fresh tracks in the exposed soil.

  Mark wished me luck and disappeared back the way we had come. He would circle around the plateau and end up a quarter mile from me, at the base of another tree. I sat down to wait, muzzleloader across my lap.

  It was opening day of the Massachusetts shotgun season, so hunters would be in the woods with all kinds of firearms. They might be hunting with guns they believed to be especially practical and effective, or with ones that had sentimental value, perhaps having been handed down by grandfathers, or simply with the only deer guns they owned. Some would be carrying recent-model 12-gauge slug guns. Others would be toting older shotguns. Still others would be armed with modern in-line muzzleloaders. And a few oddballs—like Mark and me—would have old-fashioned caplocks in hand.

  In that last oddball category, some would have made the choice based on pure aesthetics: a preference for walnut stocks over black composites, blued steel over stainless, perhaps coupled with a nostalgic affection for buckskin and Boone. Others might have something like Aldo Leopold’s thoughts in mind: “Our tools for the pursuit of wildlife improve faster than we do, and sportsmanship is a voluntary limitation in the use of these armaments. It is aimed to augment the role of skill and shrink the role of gadgetry in the pursuit of wild things.” Though Leopold tempered his criticism of gadgetry by noting that he did not “pretend to know what is moderation, or where the line is between legitimate and illegitimate gadgets,” some hunters would go further, arguing that choosing a firearm was a question of “fair chase.”

  Such questions, which go back to ancient Greek, European, and Euro-American definitions of sportsmanship, boil down to these: How much skill should be required of the hunter? How challenging should it be to find and kill an animal? What chances should the prey have of evading the hunter?

  Technology could, I thought, raise important ethical questions. In one of the essays in A Hunter’s Heart, for instance, writer and ex-Marine David Stalling—who hunts elk with both a compound bow and a scoped rifle—asked how far technology should go: Should hunters employ advanced military weaponry in pursuit of game, shooting elk from a half mile off, using .50-caliber rifles mounted on off-road vehicles? Should they use airplanes to locate animals? Should they use infrared heat-sensing technology, nightvision goggles, and electronic calls? I thought not. But where to draw the line?

  In my search for a muzzleloader, I had talked with one shop owner who made no secret of his opinion: Vermont’s muzzle-loader season should only be for traditional side-lock guns, socalled because the ignition mechanism involves a hammer on the side of the rifle. In his view, modern in-line guns—so-called because the ignition mechanism is inside the rifle, in line with the powder charge and projectile—were too much like centerfire rifles. They had no place in a “primitive arms” season. I thought I knew where he was coming from. And yet, despite my aesthetic affection for simplicity and my admiration for the skill required to hunt with more basic weapons, I always wondered where arguments for lower-tech hunting would stop.

  If the shop owner objected to in-lines, why not object to caplocks, which use nineteenth-century percussion cap technology? Why not insist on flintlocks, the seventeenth-century technology in which ignition is triggered by a piece of flint striking steel? If a hunter argued against hunting with compound bows, why not argue against bows altogether? Why not insist that hunters only use spears or atlatl darts? Why not go all the way back, insisting that we only use rocks or that we return to persistence hunting, running animals to exhaustion and throttling them with our bare hands?

  For me, sportsmanship and aesthetic preferences would be tempered by practical considerations. I wouldn’t seek every possible advantage, loading my pack and pockets with every hunting gadget I could find. On the other hand, I wasn’t auditioning for a part in a frontier flick. I was hunting for food. In Vermont rifle season, I would use my scoped Tikka. In Vermont muzzleloader season—and here in Massachusetts, where centerfire rifles were prohibited due to safety concerns over longer-range projectiles—I would use the caplock that rested across my knees.

  I sat, watching the morning sky brighten. I heard a rustling of oak leaves, peered among the trees for a hundred-pound deer, and found myself staring at a one-pound squirrel instead. I wondered: Would my first whitetail come to me here, during my first hunt with Mark?

  Not if success hinged on knowledge and skill. By hunting in a spot Mark had selected, I could borrow from his familiarity with prey and landscape. But I still knew little about deer, and I knew nothing of this particular place, nothing of when and where deer fed and bedded, what trails they habitually used, how their movement patterns changed with the seasons. And I lacked the skills of an experienced hunter. Though I could sit fairly still and shoot fairly straight, I came up short in every other department: moving silently, unraveling the stories told by tracks and other signs, responding decisively to shifts in the breeze or to the movements of deer.

  If success hinged more on luck, though, I might stand a chance. A deer might simply appear. A shift in the wind might carry my scent away just before it reached the animal’s nose. A deer might see me, but hesitate for one fatal moment.

  And what if other factors were at play in the woods? What if other forces, unseen and mysterious, helped shape the movements of deer and hunter alike, determining whether their paths would cross, and how? I thought of the red-tailed hawk feather I had found cradled in tree branches just above my head.

  In many traditional cultures, hunters are taught to approach the hunt with humility and prayer, taking care not to speak discourteously—or even directly—of the animals to be hunted. In such traditions, knowledge and skill are vital, of course. Yet it is understood that disrespect guarantees failure. Thinking of the blaze-orange trash I had found, it was hard to place much faith in the idea that animals had the ability to avoid arrogant, ill-mannered slobs. Yet my attitude might still be a factor. My thoughts might be woven into the web of influences that would either bring deer or keep them away.

  Sitting there at the base of the tree Mark had picked out, I spoke silently to the unseen deer. I praised their beauty, agility, and speed. I praised their ability to become nearly invisible, standing still, blending into the forest. And I asked them to appear. Even if success was not framed by some moral universe, it felt as though the hunt—this seeking to kill an animal whose body would yield sustenance for mine—demanded this kind of attention. The practice, however, felt strange. I was praying. To animals.

  I had grown up in a culture where people spoke and listened to only one unseen power. Though I wasn’t taught to pray to God, I heard talk about it all around me, so I had a grasp of how one went about doing it and what it meant. Praying to animals, on the other hand, was foreign. I did not come from a lineage of people who spoke or listened to wild things. I came from people—Italian, German, French, English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish, all now thoroughly Americanized—whose animistic traditions were uprooted centuries ago. The inclination to talk to wild animals, even to send entreaties their way and attend to their voices, might have been in me as a boy, but that inclination had not been cultivated. Now, in trying to shape a hunting prayer, I found myself unsure how to address the larger-than-human world.

  It was not just that I lacked a repertoire, a range of particular words and phrases to draw from. It was that I lacked a way of thinking in which prayerful interaction with animals was coherent. Consciousness of this kind has been central to human existence for the vast majority of our hundreds-of-millennia-long tenure on the planet, but I had not learned it. Intellectually, it might make sense to me, but it was not ingrained in my patterns of thought and speech and listening. This was the kind of disconnection Thomas Berry had in mind when he spoke of our spiritual autism: “We have broken the great conversation.”

  Trying anyway—clumsily piecing together
silent prayers—I felt like a klutz. I also felt like a thief.

  Even as words surfaced—singing, rain, lightning—and were cobbled together in my dim mental recesses, I knew they had been lifted from things I had read: perhaps from Claus Chee Sonny’s account of a Navajo ceremony known as the Deerhunting Way, or from prayers attributed to the Oglala holy man Black Elk by John G. Neihardt, the white poet and amateur ethnographer who wrote the famous book Black Elk Speaks.

  It made me uneasy. My ancestors had sought to exterminate American Indian peoples, robbing them of their lives, their land, and the freedom to practice their own religions and speak their own languages. At the same time, my people adopted Indianness when and how it suited them, from the Boston Tea Party to the Daniel Boone stories, from the Boy Scouts to New Age shamanism. As historian Philip J. Deloria argues in Playing Indian, the two are linked. The co-opting of Indian identity has long gone “hand in hand with the dispossession and conquest of actual Indian people.” And here I was, sitting in woods long hunted by the Wampanoag, with a frontier-style musket across my lap, stitching together borrowed verbal fragments into some clumsy parody of a native deer-hunting prayer. Did my superficial need for language justify the cultural rip-off? As much as I respected the indigenous cultures of the Americas, wasn’t it high time my Euro-American psyche stopped feeding off them?

  Even if I knew a traditional native hunting prayer in its entirety and could, somehow, borrow it respectfully, what meaning or power would it really have? The transplanted words would have no roots. For me, such mimicry made no more sense—and was fraught with more troubling subtext—than mouthing the words of a Catholic High Mass. Even with an intellectual understanding of what such a prayer was supposed to mean, I would still be “playing Indian.”

  For that matter, even if I knew the details of an ancient European hunting ceremony like putting vegetation into the mouth of the fallen animal, giving it a “last meal,” what meaning would that have for me? That, too, was anthropology. That, too, was history, not a living tradition in which I was raised. I would just be “playing ancient European.” The act would not have emerged organically from my lived experience.