Tovar Cerulli

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

  “It was a good practice,” he told me. “I got sensitive to things. All critters are just trying to make a living.”

  As his awareness and compassion increased, Richard found that he couldn’t take killing as lightly. If a housefly annoyed him with its buzzing, he didn’t need to swat it. He began to notice things he hadn’t before. When he planted his garden, wasn’t he killing creatures with every shovelful of dirt he turned? When he live-trapped mice in his root cellar and then released them on the far side of the beaver dam across the road, wasn’t he just feeding them to the mink that hunted there?

  In the end, Richard had taken up the .300 Savage again. He didn’t recall any moment of grand revelation, just the gradual realization that, for him, it felt hypocritical to pretend that he wasn’t causing any harm. For him, the solution was to accept the harm, to refrain from causing it unnecessarily, to avoid wasting anything. Vegetarianism helped Richard see that, for him, hunting was part of the balance, part of the Buddha’s Middle Way.

  We were heading east, hiking down the side of a second ridge, when two or three deer again leapt off among the trees below us, white flags held high. “The deer nibble on my garden and I nibble on them,” Richard said. “Everything is chewing on everything else, yet there’s a harmony in it.” Here in the forest, or in Richard’s garden, it made sense to speak of harmony—a word I would never use to refer to eroding cropland, factory farms, or the clean, brightly lit aisles of a supermarket.

  We turned away from the property’s perimeter, walking deeper into the woodlot, and Richard stopped at a place where a deer trail cut down the side of a rocky shelf and descended toward a small wetland. Two years ago, he said, he had been sitting here when a four-point buck came along. The shot was a bad one. For the first time in all Richard’s years of hunting, the whitetail did not drop. Instead, the buck ran, leaving a sparse blood trail. It had taken several hours and three shots at a running animal to finish the job. Imagining the scene—recalling my misses with both arrow and bullet the previous autumn, recalling the two pairs of boot prints following that blood trail in the snow—I grimaced. If I got a chance at a deer this fall, it would have to be a quick, clean kill or no shot at all.

  If such a chance came, I thought it might happen here in the Hundred Acre Woods. Richard said the deer trails had been wider and more heavily worn ten years ago, but there were still signs of frequent hoofed traffic and we had already bumped into white-tails twice in one hour. Maybe deer were more numerous here than in the woods I had hunted near home. Maybe the terrain encouraged animals to move in more regular patterns, along and between the three parallel ridges, avoiding the steepest slopes, skirting the wetland, pausing to drink at the stream. Or maybe Richard just knew where to look.

  I would continue hunting the timberland behind our house, out past Lord’s Hill, but the deer sign there seemed spotty, and clear shots beyond thirty yards would be rare amidst the thick vegetation. Here, in Richard’s woods, stretches of mature soft-woods and well-thinned young sugar maples provided an open view at ground level. I might get a shot at fifty yards, or even seventy-five.

  Three weeks later, we were in the woods before first light, the morning frosty and clear. We hiked in most of the way together, Richard leading, me following, my flashlight pointed down so I wouldn’t stumble on the unfamiliar ground. We walked on past the Four Directions Stand—movement patterns had changed, Richard said, and it had been some years since he had seen any deer there.

  Then our paths diverged. He turned south, toward the lower end of a small valley where a well-worn trail snaked through a break in a ridge’s rocky spine. I continued east a few hundred yards and sat down on the earth with my back to a tree. There, I watched the gradual dawning of the day. When enough light filtered in among the trees, I could see what Richard and I had spotted during our first hike: fresh, bright patches on a nearby alder stem where a buck’s antlers had stripped the bark.

  Downy woodpeckers scaled a nearby pine, claws scrabbling drily. A brown creeper alighted near the base of a trunk and began its inevitable upward spiral, hugging the bark, probing for insects. Chickadees, ever curious, alit nearby. Squirrels scampered past.

  Now and then, a rifle popped in the distance. There would not, I thought, be many hunters nearby. Richard had only given a couple of people permission to hunt here and few others were likely to wander through. The property was tucked well back into the hills, with no roads nearby.

  In midmorning, a shrew darted past, scurrying through the leaves. A few minutes later, a sleek, dark shape appeared—a mink, loping over tumbled stones that marked the perimeter of an old cellar hole. Richard had said that his neighbor’s grandfather once lived in that house. Back then, there wouldn’t have been many deer here, or even trees. The stone walls that ran through these woods would have divided pastures. The mink disappeared toward the wetland, returning, I presumed, from its nightly hunt.

  Neither Richard nor I saw deer that day. Hiking back out along one of the ridges, though, we noted a sign that had not been there before first light. Even in the predawn dark, we would have seen it by flashlight: a fresh scrape, hoof marks plain in the scuffed soil.

  That night, it rained. Dawn was mild and overcast. The woods were quiet, without even a single shot echoing among the hills.

  Then, half an hour after sunrise, a rifle barked once. Richard’s Savage, I felt sure.

  At the shot, a rush of emotion surged through me. Jealousy? No, not quite. More like despair, the knowledge of failure.

  Maybe I was inept. Maybe I was unlucky. Maybe I was like Uncle Mark’s longtime hunting buddy and good-luck charm, Jay, who, Mark said, seemed to have a knack for bringing deer to those he hunted with. Mark told me he sometimes felt almost guilty for the success he enjoyed when they hunted together. Jay was a fine hunter, but he hardly ever got a deer when Mark was with him.

  In any case, I knew that Richard had taken a deer and I felt certain that I would not. Mathematically, the odds were against it. This was not suburban Maryland or western New York, where I had heard you practically had to beat the deer off with a stick. In Vermont, fewer than one in ten rifle hunters tagged a deer each year. And the odds were even worse than that. Just as the area’s whitetail population—ten or so deer per square mile—was concentrated in particular places rather than being distributed evenly across the landscape, hunting success was concentrated among certain hunters. The average success rate took into account the skilled, knowledgeable hunters who managed to kill a deer every single year. I was not reassured by the fact that it also took into account those who bought a combined hunting-and-fishing license but hunted deer very little, if at all. What were the chances for someone as clueless as I was? One in fifteen? I had heard of people hunting for ten, twenty, even thirty years and never dragging home venison.

  This was pathetic. I aspired to commune with the land, meditating on the nature of life and death and suffering and sustenance and the cosmos, and I responded to my friend’s success by spinning off into despair and statistics? What became of all the nonattachment and mindfulness I had been cultivating in the sixteen years since that retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh, the event that propelled me into veganism?

  Forty-five minutes after the shot, Richard appeared.

  “I need help dragging out a deer,” he said.

  Soon, we stood together, looking down at the buck. The antlers were slender, bearing six points, plus a stub where a seventh point had snapped off and worn smooth again. Richard had gutted the animal and dragged him some fifty yards before deciding to look for me. The body—solidly built, with plenty of fat reserves—pulled harder than he expected.

  He showed me where it had happened. He had been sitting at the base of a tree, when a slight noise made him turn to his right. The buck had approached silently in the wet leaves and was only a few yards away. Slowly, Richard raised his rifle and turned. The buck spooked and leapt forward, but—strangely—didn’t look at the hunter who sat so close. Within a
few yards the deer paused, then continued walking slowly, his nose to the ground. Richard got his shot at twenty-five yards. The animal only went a few feet before dropping dead.

  Even seeing the spot where it had happened, even seeing the dead animal in the flesh, I found his existence unlikely. Something that big and beautiful, in these woods, where I had been seeing little more than squirrels? The materialization of such a being seemed only slightly more probable than, say, that of a unicorn.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” said Richard. “A living creature. Now meat.”

  I nodded.

  “I wish you’d gotten him,” he added.

  I shrugged. Except for deer drives back in Wisconsin, I knew this was Richard’s first time hunting whitetails with a companion. I would have been uneasy if I took a buck from his land and he did not.

  Handing him my truck key, I suggested that he hike out with most of our gear and return with the plastic deer sled rolled up behind my front seat. I would stay and keep vigil, on the off chance that another buck came along.

  For most of an hour, I sat. I watched the woods. I listened. And I glanced at the buck that lay nearby. He was, now, nothing more than a dead body. A carcass. Did I really want one of my own? Did I really want to snuff out the animating spirit of such a being? No, I thought. Not particularly.

  My only visitor that hour was a raven. It glided directly overhead, skimming the tops of the tall white pines, croaking as it passed, perhaps already knowing that the buck’s entrails lay nearby.

  When Richard returned, we lashed the deer to the sled and started pulling. It was a hard drag, up and over the bony ridge, past the pool where the frogs, salamanders, and fingernail clams lived. When we reached the bottom of the front field, down beyond the house, we hoisted the deer up into the back of Richard’s old truck.

  At the Riverbend, we dropped the tailgate and hefted the buck onto the scale. “One sixty-three,” said the young man doing the check-in. On the hoof, before Richard gutted him, the whitetail would have weighed about two hundred pounds. He might yield more than a hundred pounds of venison.

  The following weekend, I returned to the Hundred Acre Woods alone. Having filled his rifle tag, Richard’s hunting was over for the season. I retraced our drag path and found a new scrape within ten feet of where the buck had lain cooling while I watched over him. Down in the draw where Richard had shot the animal, I saw fresh deer tracks and noticed that the coyotes and ravens had been busy. All that remained of the entrails was the contents of the buck’s stomach: a small pile of corn. He had been fattening himself in nearby fields.

  For two hours, I sat in silence. Then, restless, I headed east, deeper into the woods. As I reached the tail end of a small ridge, I heard something. Hooves in dry leaves? I eased over the rise, trying to make my own footsteps sound like the rustlings of squirrels. A deer was trotting away, then another.

  A minute later, the woods erupted. Leaves crunched and churned. Sticks snapped. Between the crowded trees I glimpsed deer sixty yards away, two of them, their bodies wheeling, their brows locked together. Two bucks fighting. The action was too fast and the cover too thick for me to see antlers, let alone take a sure, clean shot. I set down my pack and started moving toward them, but before I had taken five steps the tussle was over and both deer vanished. I stood there, heart pounding.

  Another morning, half an hour after sunrise, a whitetail appeared near the same spot, straight ahead of me. Through my scope, I could see antler. The buck crossed a stream and moseyed up the slope, stopping now and then, passing within forty yards of me. But I couldn’t be sure about the antlers: spikes or forks? A minute later, he got downwind of me, snorted in alarm, and was gone. Only then did my body start trembling.

  Over Thanksgiving, Cath and I drove to New Jersey to visit her family. We returned to Vermont late Saturday, giving me one last day to rifle hunt. And hunt I did. I spent ten straight hours in the Hundred Acre Woods and saw not a single deer. By day’s end, I was burned out. The optimism I had felt a few weeks earlier now seemed entirely unreasonable, and I began to wonder about the psychological health of putting so much energy into a pursuit that consistently proved my incompetence. I e-mailed Mark, just back from a successful hunt in Virginia, and shared my frustration and doubt. His reply assured me that even after four decades of hunting he could still relate to the feeling of futility. He had found no rhyme or reason to how long it took to get a deer, no evenhanded correlation between effort and success.

  He had, however, noticed one curious irony: Sometimes, the less important it felt, the more likely it seemed that whitetails would appear. I was reminded of stories from Zen traditions, and of things my martial arts teachers had said back in high school and college. Mark knew that perseverance paid off. He would not succeed in the hunt by giving up and staying indoors. Yet trying too hard seemed to lower his chances. In fact, he tended to see deer more often and at closer range when he was just walking in the woods than when he was hunting. I wondered: If animals could sense predatory intent, picking up on its vibratory frequency, might not a hunter’s desperation amplify the invisible ripples he or she sent radiating out among the trees?

  I thought of Richard telling me how, when the leaves were dry and loud, he sometimes brought a book to the woods. He would sit reading and wouldn’t pick up his .300 Savage until he heard hoof steps coming. Was that nonchalant attitude part of what brought those deer to the Four Directions Stand—four bucks, four years in a row?

  Even if such a mind-set didn’t improve my luck in the woods, it was worth cultivating. If I relaxed, I would enjoy the hunt more. That was vital, since I—unskilled and dependent on luck—might never succeed in the goal of taking a deer. In the interest of psychological self-preservation, I promised myself not to try so hard during the two weekends of December muzzleloader season. I would hunt just a couple hours here and there. I would do my best to ease back into not caring whether I saw deer.

  I kept my promise. Opening weekend of black-powder season, I hunted a few hours near home. I didn’t hope so hard. I didn’t stay on high alert. I leaned back against a mossy boulder and admired the morning light, the glistening of maple twigs and balsam needles.

  When half an inch of snow came, I returned to Richard’s woods, hiking in after sunrise to look for tracks. They were there: two sets headed up past the ridgetop pool. With so little powder underfoot, the leaves frozen and loud, I had no prayer of sneaking up on that pair, so I backtracked. Sure enough, the hoofprints cut the long diagonal up through the small valley. The deer had passed right through the break in the ridge where Richard had killed the seven pointer a few weeks earlier: a place we had dubbed Seven Point Draw.

  I sat exactly where Richard had been sitting that morning. After a few minutes, though, I felt uneasy. To my right, a spine of rock blocked my view. That was the direction from which Richard’s buck and the two deer I had just backtracked had all come. So I moved a few yards and sat with my back to the stone.

  Was that the faint sound of steps? Of hooves crunching dry leaves under the thin blanket of snow? I shifted position and half raised my .54-caliber caplock. Moments later, I saw deer some forty yards off, walking toward me among the pines. Two, three, four of them. I brought the rifle to my shoulder and eased back the hammer. The first in line was a doe. My tag was for a buck. The little parade had closed to less than thirty yards now, weaving through the trees. Heart pounding, I stared along the iron sights, watching for antlers. Was this the moment?

  The lead doe was closer now. Looking past her, I could see that the second in line was also a doe. The third, also antlerless, looked like a six-month-old. And the fourth? Ah, another doe. There would be no shot today.

  The lead doe stood broadside a dozen paces away, her breath pluming in the frosty air, her ears and great, dark eyes focused on me. All four deer paused, aware of my crouching form. Unsure what I was, they hesitated. They looked and listened. Then, slowly, they turned back the way they had come. Trembling, I s
at and watched them go.

  The final weekend of muzzleloader season, I returned again to the Hundred Acre Woods and startled two whitetails into flight as I hiked into Seven Point Draw. Once there, I sat down to wait. It was a cold morning, well below freezing, and bright sunlight streamed in among the pines, illuminating branches laden with fresh snow. All told, I reflected, it had been a good deer season. I had seen more whitetails than in my first two autumns combined and had managed not to take any stupid shots.

  I didn’t yet know this place half as well as Richard did, but here—as in the timberland behind our house—I felt a sense of belonging, a growing familiarity that encompassed both conscious knowledge and something less tangible: an impression, a grasp of how things connected and of how animals lived and moved on this land, an unsketched and perhaps unsketchable map. It reminded me of how I had felt about the water I fished as a boy.

  Red squirrels leapt and chattered. Blue jays hopped among the snow-covered pine boughs. Ravens quork-quorked overhead. And, high up, long lines of late-season geese called out as they arrowed south. I thought of a line from Richard Nelson’s The Island Within: “The exploration has turned inward, and I have slowly recognized that I am not an outsider here.”

  My sense of belonging had another dimension, too, one that surprised me. I had become part of a growing web of relationships with others who, like me, took guns to the woods, aiming to kill: a fraternity of kindhearted men found in the last place that I, as a profeminist vegan, would ever have imagined looking. For years, Mark and his Virginia hunting buddy, Jay, had been including me in much of their hunting-related e-mail correspondence. Recently, I had also started exchanging letters with Mark’s uncle and hunting mentor—my great-uncle Al—an avid conservationist who lived in Oregon. This fall, I had hunted with both Mark and Richard. Before long, I hoped to hunt with a local man a year my junior, one of the only adults who had taken hunter education alongside me. And several new acquaintances, from the coast of northern New England to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in South Carolina, had suggested we hunt together someday.