Tovar Cerulli

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

  Prayers or no prayers, squirrels were all I saw those first two days.

  The third morning, though, a blast came at sunrise, sudden and final. Soon, I saw Mark walking toward me through the woods, the blaze orange of his hat and vest startling in the drizzly, shrouded light.

  Returning to the fallen deer, we stood together in the mist. I didn’t know what prayer, if any, Mark might have said before he came looking for me, what small ritual he might have performed to honor the life he had taken. Now, there was simply silence, our thoughts and feelings unspoken.

  The lead slug had taken the doe in the chest, dropping her on the spot. Though she was small, it didn’t surprise me that Mark had squeezed the trigger. During his recent trip to Virginia, he had had no luck. Now, in early December, with the annual end of Massachusetts deer hunting only a few weeks away, his chances for venison were waning. Any whitetail was a blessing.

  Quietly, Mark began the field dressing, slitting the skin and abdominal wall, and easing the stomach, intestines, and liver out onto the forest floor. (Years earlier, Mark would have saved the liver and eaten it, but health advisories had since deterred him: Deer liver can contain high levels of cadmium.) Then he cut the diaphragm free and removed the heart and lungs. I recalled Cath describing how she had watched her brother dress out rabbits when she was a kid. She hadn’t been horrified. Rather, she had been fascinated by the anatomy lesson, the shiny muscles and complex organs unveiled. As I watched Mark work, I found myself relieved that he had done the killing, not I—that his hands, not mine, were pulling out this animal’s innards.

  Once the entrails were removed, Mark covered the pile with leaves. We were on public land, near a trail where people sometimes hiked, and a passerby might be offended by the sight. The area was also frequented by other hunters, one of whom might take the viscera as a clue and start hunting this edge of the small plateau. Over the years, Mark’s luck had been good here and he had grown fond of the spot. He didn’t want to show up on opening day a year from now and find another hunter sitting under the tree he had used as a backrest this morning. In any case, coyotes would soon find the entrails. This patch of earth would be licked clean in a matter of days.

  When Mark was done, he said he would hike out to the car, drop off his gun and pack, and come back with his deer sled, a sheet of rugged plastic that eased the dragging of a deer across bare ground and kept the carcass clean. He suggested that I stay put, gun loaded. Unlikely as it seemed, he said he had seen whitetails, perhaps drawn by curiosity, walk right up to where another deer had just been gutted.

  So I sat a few yards away and waited, meditating on dripping forest and freshly killed mammal. Five years earlier, as a vegan, I could not possibly have imagined the scene: me watching over a cooling carcass, scanning the woods for a second deer. Even now, I felt ambivalent.

  When Mark returned some forty minutes later, we lashed the sled around the doe like a black cocoon, then dragged her to the road. It was easy going—the sled smooth, the terrain gentle. In the back of his old station wagon, Mark had spread a doubled-over tarp. We hoisted the animal in.

  As Mark drove, I nestled into the passenger seat and watched the light rain bead up on the windshield between wiper strokes. I savored the moment, being there with my uncle, knowing we had accomplished what we had set out to do. And I felt something shifting. Cruising down the road with our dead mammalian cargo, I was crossing another threshold into the unfamiliar.

  After checking in the deer at a sporting-goods shop, we headed back to the house. On the way, Mark asked if I wanted to get back to the woods that afternoon. Though the day was already warming into the fifties, he could get the doe quartered and iced down in coolers so we could head out again. The rest of the butchering could wait. I told him I saw no reason why it should. I was there to learn. Cutting up a deer was as much a part of the hunt as tracking or stalking. And we still had tomorrow, the last day of our hunt.

  Under the back deck, Mark hung the doe upside down from a gambrel, a simple device resembling a large, rugged coat hanger. At each end, a steel hook passed through the gap between tendon and bone, just behind the anatomical equivalent of the human ankle. Mark made a slit up the inside of each rear leg and cut the skin free just below the gambrel. Then, with something to get hold of, he pulled downward, peeling off the doe’s hide, only using his knife when necessary.

  The skinning startled me. Though Mark worked without haste, the metamorphosis seemed abrupt. As the hide peeled away from hind legs and back, the inside of the doe’s skin was revealed, white tissue overlapped by fine layers of subcutaneous muscle. When Mark was finished, the whitetail—an animal whose identity had, in my eyes, been defined by her grayish-brown coat, white belly, elegant head, and great ears—was gone. In her place hung an unrecognizable, headless carcass: muscle, fat, and bone. Mark was one of the most sensitive and softhearted people I knew. Yet he had just turned a graceful, living being into a hunk of meat.

  The remainder of that gray, damp day passed quietly. We cleared the small kitchen island of its usual homey clutter and worked opposite each other. First, the hind quarters, then the front, and finally the ribs, back, and neck. I was slow and tentative with the boning knife, mimicking Mark’s sure, practiced motions. Tendons and silver skin were carefully trimmed from backstrap and steak. Smaller pieces were set aside for stew meat. The rest went through a hand-crank grinder clamped to the countertop. By night, the doe was in the basement freezer.

  The last day of our hunt, Mark and I found fresh tracks in the moist earth. Neither of us saw deer. Toward dusk, a dark gray coyote trotted by on the slope below me. Perhaps the four-footed hunter would soon feast on the entrails of the doe we had butchered.

  The next morning, Mark insisted that I leave with half his venison, as generous with me as the land had been with him.

  I thought about the meat in the cooler behind me as I drove north. Cath and I still got the bulk of our calories and nutrition—fruits, vegetables, grains, chickens, and more—from farming done by others. From our own gardening, we got a smaller portion of our food—greens, peas, beans, carrots, squash, and the like—plus an invaluable sense of involvement and connection. From wild food, we got something else.

  Whether unsought and unforeseen like a bagful of wild blue-berries spontaneously picked on a sunny hillside, or hunted and hoped for like chanterelles sought in summer woods or like this deer that Mark had killed, wild food was not something grown or owned, bought or sold. It was something given and taken.

  In Living Wild and Domestic, Robert Kimber clarifies the difference. Unlike the hunted animal, he writes, “The animal raised and slaughtered is not a gift. We have earned that food in a different way, and when we eat that animal, we are not accepting a gift as much as we are exercising our property rights.” If Cath and I were raising chickens, we would know when those birds would go from yard to freezer. Buying them from local farmers, we could make an appointment. Buying them from the local food co-op, we could simply walk to the cooler. The food would be there.

  As much as we depended on such relentless certainty, something in me craved the unpredictable. I thought once again of Willie, of poker and fishing, of Henry van Dyke’s “enchantment of uncertainty.” In hunting, the outcome would always be mysterious. Entering the woods, I would never know whether an animal would appear. Perhaps hunting would feed soul as much as body, reminding me of our oldest, humblest way of eating. To fallen deer, as to blueberry bush, I would not be master, standing over that which was rightfully mine, but supplicant, on my knees, hand outstretched.

  12

  Fickle Predators

  There is the difference between the animal and humankind. The animal has no alternatives. We make choices.

  —William A. Caldwell, “Hawk and Hare Are One”

  A year later, in the growing light of a late October dawn, a crew of chickadees darted around me in fearless curiosity. I could not imagine killing one of these birds, the way I once had as a
boy. As the air warmed to just above freezing, birch leaves began to fall, round and golden, as if all that held stem to twig had been a tiny speck of ice.

  Coming into my second autumn of deer hunting, I still didn’t know the land well. But I had scouted hard that summer, exploring the woods behind our house. The deer trails marked on my home-made map formed an increasingly complex web, quilting the landscape with movement as large herbivores threaded their way among pines, maples, and balsam firs, across brooks and around ponds, along old logging roads and through breaches in old stone walls. I was beginning to see how whitetails lived, here, in this place.

  So far this fall, I hadn’t hunted much. The first weekend of archery season, the mercury had hovered around eighty. I could not imagine killing a whitetail in that heat: The chance of meat spoilage seemed too high. My first go at the entire process—field dressing a deer, dragging the animal out of the woods, driving it to a local check-in station, getting it home, skinning it, and breaking the carcass down into parts that would fit into coolers where they could be iced down—would, I suspected, be anything but swift.

  The second weekend had brought rain. That was weather I might have hunted in with high hopes during rifle season. Mark had told me that deer often seemed less wary in a light rain and it had, in fact, been a misty day when he shot that doe on the Cape. But even with a perfectly placed arrow, straight through the heart or both lungs, I knew that a deer could run fifty or a hundred yards in the few seconds before it collapsed, and I wasn’t keen on following a faint blood trail as it washed away by the minute. The thought of shooting a deer and failing to find it made my stomach turn.

  The third weekend, Mother Nature—apparently bored with just hell or high water—had concocted an unsavory mix of warm temperatures, rain, and winds that whipped through the forest, stripping the maples of their orange and red glory.

  Now, though, with just three days left in bow season, the sky was clear and the air cool. Getting an unexpected Friday off from work, I had hiked into the woods under a fat quarter moon. In the dark, I had climbed into my tree stand and now sat here, perched a dozen feet up a large maple, waiting. I watched the chickadees and warblers around me. I listened to the Canada geese honking overhead, winging south. I savored the quiet, knowing that now, in archery season, the forest would not be rocked by a rifle’s sudden blast. For over an hour, I contemplated the steady fall of birch leaves, each yellow oval letting go silently and coming to rest on the forest floor with a faint rustle.

  The flicker of movement came as a shock. Then another flicker. Deer legs moving through the brush straight ahead. The soft crunch of leaves under each hoof. I had an impression of one deer, then two. My heart began to thud. Cautiously I stood, bow in hand.

  The whitetails came slowly, through thick cover. Then they stepped into view just fifteen yards away: a doe and a fawn, no longer spotted but noticeably smaller than its mother. The two deer turned directly toward me, coming down the narrow game trail over which I perched. The doe was in the lead. Ten yards away. Then five. I had never been so close to a living deer. I could see muscles and shoulder blades gliding under her grayish-brown coat.

  As she passed below, her back only nine feet from my boots, she spooked and leapt forward, then stopped. She did not look up, so she had not seen me. She did not bolt, so she had not scented me. And I didn’t think she had heard me. But she had sensed something.

  The feeling must have passed, though, for she relaxed, twitched her tail from side to side, and nibbled at a maple seedling. Here they were: two whitetails, ten yards away. If I was careful, moving only when their eyes were averted, I might get a shot before they stepped back into cover.

  I wouldn’t, though. As soon as I saw them clearly, I had known I would not draw an arrow.

  My decision wasn’t rooted in reluctance to kill a doe, or even a fawn. I had heard that venison from a doe killed in October tasted better than venison from a buck killed during the November rut, when testosterone was coursing through his system. And though very young deer didn’t yield much meat, their venison was best of all—a kind of free-range veal. If doe or fawn had appeared alone, the one apparently childless, or the other apparently orphaned, I might have drawn string to jaw and sighted down the shaft, looking for that clear path to heart and lungs.

  But they had appeared together. Though I knew that the doe would survive without her fawn and that the weaned five-month-old would stand a fair chance without its mother, I could not bring myself to kill either of them. I knew they had each other. That bond was stronger than any claim I could stake.

  In writing of relationships among animals, of course, I invite the charge of anthropomorphism: the suggestion that I am projecting human emotions on to other species. That may be so. I don’t know what it is to be an animal. I have no access to the interiority of a deer. But I would rather err in that direction than make the conceited assumption that we are the only species capable of feeling, that our brand of awareness and connection is something so special. In his essay “A Killing at Dawn,” writer and hunter Ted Kerasote recounts seeing an elk calf torn apart by wolves. After the wolves have made off with the remains, the mother elk returns to the spot where her calf was killed and begins to “grunt mournfully, her sides contracting and her muzzle elongating into the shape of a trumpet.” Fifteen hours later, at sunset, she still stands there, her head hanging low. What can we call that but grief?

  Glad to have a reason not to kill, I stood silently, my heart quiet, admiring doe and fawn as they browsed together, nibbling at small trees and shrubs. I took quiet pleasure in observing their movements: a twitch of the ear or tail, a sudden lift of the head. Half an hour later, they vanished into the woods.

  A subsistence hunter whose family depended on wild meat would, I supposed, have shot the doe. So would a hunter who based such decisions on strictly ecological grounds. In this part of Vermont, the deer population is not extraordinarily dense, but their numbers do need to be controlled to allow for diverse forest regeneration, to protect species that depend on a healthy forest understory, and to prevent overbrowsing of the sheltered “deer yards” where whitetails congregate when the snow is deep. Because bucks breed with multiple does, the hunting of male whitetails has little effect on a population’s reproductive potential. If population growth is left unchecked, deer can literally eat themselves out of a home.

  But I figured that most Vermont hunters would not have taken a shot. Some, like me, would have been swayed by the motherchild relationship. Others would simply have been waiting for a buck. Though I had no particular interest in inedible head gear, I knew that plenty of hunters wanted more than meat for the freezer. They also wanted antlers for display and the prestige of having taken a buck: Male deer are scarcer than females and are seen as more challenging prey, especially as they get older, warier, and wiser to the ways of hunters. Some hunters would even have chipped in a few dollars for one of the “deer pool” bets run at local check-in stations and would be hoping for biggest-buck prize money.

  And then there were those who would have let doe and fawn pass by for the simple reason that they opposed antlerless hunting outright. Though in the minority, these Vermont hunters vocally maintain that doe killing imperils the state’s deer herd. Their distrust of wildlife biologists has deep roots, in a local history both political and ecological.

  Back in the late 1800s, when the state’s deer population was first starting to recover, farmers began complaining of crop losses and pressured the legislature to take action. Legislators responded by establishing a monthlong bucks-only season. In October of 1897, Vermont’s first deer season in three decades, 103 bucks were legally taken in the state. Predictably, whitetail numbers continued to grow. A decade later, in response to continued outcry from farmers, the legislature went further, allowing five either-sex seasons between 1909 and 1920. Two years after each season in which does were taken, buck kill numbers dropped substantially.

  By the 1920s, though, hunti
ng was becoming popular and the political tide had begun to turn. Vermont settled into a bucks-only hunting model, protecting does and allowing deer numbers to rise. In 1940, the annual buck kill was up to thirty-four hundred. In 1950, it exceeded six thousand. By this point, as anthropologist Marc Boglioli discusses in his book A Matter of Life and Death: Hunting in Contemporary Vermont, wildlife biologists were already warning of imminent danger. In a 1947 booklet entitled The Time Is Now!—A Pictorial Story of Vermont’s Deer Herd, they argued that whitetails were becoming overpopulated. Vermont’s forests—which had recovered dramatically in the century since the collapse of the sheep industry and the widespread abandonment of farms as residents headed west—could support just so many deer. If antlerless seasons were not implemented, biologists warned, deer would overbrowse their winter habitat. Before long, they would not have enough food to survive a harsh winter and their numbers would crash.

  Vermont, however, was gaining a reputation as a deer-hunting destination. Hunters’ political clout was growing and they, unlike farmers, liked what they were seeing: more and more whitetails. They did not want to see a reprise of the heavy toll taken by the either-sex seasons of 1909 to 1920. Though state biologists reassured the public that doe hunting would be more controlled this time, the legislature was reluctant. Antlerless hunting was allowed for a single day in 1961 and a single day in 1962, to little effect. By 1966—with the state’s deer population peaking around 250,000—the buck kill exceeded 17,000.

  In the late 1960s, antlerless seasons were expanded slightly, but were still limited to a small fraction of the buck kill. Unfortunately, those marginally effective seasons coincided with the brutal winters of 1969–70 and 1970–71. Deer are resistant to winter: In preparation for it, they put on a thick layer of fat and shed the short, solid hairs that make up their summer coat, replacing it with a highly insulated, double-layer winter coat of long hollow hairs over fine, woolly fur. But they are not impervious, especially when malnourished. In those two winters, with limited food available, the snow deep, and the air frigid, tens of thousands of Vermont deer died. In the fall of 1971, the buck kill dropped below eight thousand for the first time in two decades.