Tovar Cerulli

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

  It helped that it had been quick. Holding the deer’s torn-in-two heart in my hand, I knew oblivion had come swiftly. It was the shot I had hoped for: no more than a few seconds of shock, no time for pain to take hold. It was easier than most other ways a deer’s life was likely to end: in cold and starvation, across a car’s front end, at the teeth of four-footed predators. Yet that swiftness did nothing to alter the raw fact. I had killed this graceful creature.

  Now that I had taken his life, I wasn’t sure I wanted it. Already I wondered: Was all this effort—the scouting, the hunting, and the long, grisly hours of butchering to come—really worth it? Now that the “absent referent” had become such a palpably present being, would I hunt again? A great hollow grief had begun to well up inside.

  I knotted my tag to the buck’s slender antlers with a scrap of old speaker wire. Then, leaving the gutted whitetail to cool in the frosty air, I gathered up pack and rifle and headed south along the ridge. Near the Four Directions Stand, I found Richard sitting on a fallen tree trunk, meditating on the forest, .300 Savage across his lap. I raised my hand for him to see, knuckle creases and fingernail edges still speckled with dried blood. Richard’s brows lifted above deep-set eyes and a gentle smile spread across his angular face. He nodded.

  “I heard the shot,” he said.

  Together we hiked back to his house where I dialed the old rotary phone and left a message for Cath. I shed rifle, pack, and outer layers—the effort of dragging would keep me warm—and fetched the thin plastic sled.

  Back in the woods, Richard asked how it had happened. I showed him where I was sitting, where the buck was standing when I shot. Then we lashed the animal to the sled and dragged him up past the ridgetop pool.

  Once, as we paused to catch our breath, I again told Richard how the buck had come walking, how he had raised his head as if in alarm, how he had taken that final step. Even with the deer there on the ground behind me, affixed to me by a drag rope, the event seemed implausible. I recounted the moment as though my speaking and Richard’s hearing would make the bizarre occurrence more real, as though it would help me come to grips with what had happened.

  “It’s quite an experience, isn’t it?” asked Richard.

  I nodded.

  We walked on, down the steep shale-studded slope and through the neighbor’s sugarbush. As we approached the house—on a gentle downward slope now, so that I dragged the deer with no effort and Richard walked beside me—I told him how, the night before, I had recognized the need to shift my attitude, how the hunting knife had helped me refocus, how meditating on the spray of long white tail hairs and the red painted buck had returned me to that still, open place within. And then the buck had appeared, as if by magic.

  Richard looked over at me and grinned. “That sounds kind of ooga-booga,” he said. “You might want to be careful who you tell that story to.”

  I laughed.

  True. It was probably crazy to think that my little ritual with the knife had conjured the deer. It wasn’t a story I would want too many people to hear. Heaven forbid it should get into print.

  On the other hand, perhaps that stilling of my mind—that cessation of striving—had quieted the invisible ripples I sent out into the forest. My presence in the woods still affected things, like a stone striking the surface of a pond, but perhaps I had become a smaller pebble.

  Richard helped me heft the buck into the back of my pickup. It was time to head to the check-in station, then home, where the butchering would begin.

  16

  Reckoning

  The paradoxes of life and death admit no ready solutions: they should not.

  —Mary Zeiss Stange, Woman the Hunter

  Cath came out to the truck, her eyes full of compassion, both for the buck and for his ambivalent killer. Kaia sniffed at my pants curiously, smelling hair and blood, then backed off when I slid the deer to the ground. She had never been so close to any wild animal that large, dead or alive, and seemed unsure what to make of it.

  It was strange: On the ground beside me lay one mammal I had shot and would soon eat. A few feet away stood another mammal I loved and fed, one whom Cath and I had welcomed into our family, extending the interspecies relationship that began tens of thousands of years ago, when wolves and humans first joined forces. Like Kaia, the deer deserved my care and compassion. Unlike Kaia, the deer was edible. An arbitrary distinction, perhaps—one I hoped I could live with.

  By lunchtime, the buck hung upside down in our shed. A few drops of blood spattered the floor. I took the knife from my pack. I was not looking forward to this.

  I could, of course, have maintained a sanitized distance. Once the deer was dead and gutted, I could have paid someone else to do the rest. Plenty of local people offered deer-cutting services. But that would have felt like a step back toward the comforting amnesia of the supermarket. Butchering was central to the entire killing-and-eating process.

  Only half recalling how Mark had done it three years earlier, I began the skinning. Again I was struck by the completeness of the change. As soon as the hide was pulled back, the animal ceased to be an animal. No longer animated with spirit, no longer clothed in skin and hair, the deer became little more than muscle, fat, and bone. An inert carcass. Meat. Seeing this flesh in a plastic wrapper in the grocery store, most of us would find it hard to envision the actual animal, let alone imagine the steps required to complete its transmogrification.

  I slid the razor-sharp blade under each scapula, freeing the forelegs. I separated head from neck. By the time I had severed the hip joints and freed the hindquarters, the meat was well chilled and I wedged the pieces into coolers to keep them from freezing solid overnight.

  Then I carried my evening task back to the house and plunked it down on the kitchen counter: a hind leg, the thigh substantially thicker than my own. This was nothing like cleaning a fish or butchering a hare. On the check-in station scale, the buck had registered one hundred and twenty pounds. Alive—with all his organs intact, life pulsing through them—his weight would have matched mine.

  I was standing there in the kitchen when Mark called from Virginia. I had left a phone message at Jay’s house a few hours earlier, figuring I had missed them. He and Mark would have already left for the cabin along the Blue Ridge, where their annual hunt was about to begin. But Jay’s wife had reached them by cell phone. Now, in early evening, Mark sat on the cabin’s narrow front porch. He wanted to hear all about the morning’s events. How, when, and where had it happened? Had the buck gone down quickly? The congratulatory excitement in his voice buoyed me up out of grief and shock.

  After our conversation, I returned to the butchering, my hands slow and uncertain with the boning knife. My fingers slid under a leg muscle, separating it from the layer below. My knife snipped tendons and traced the curvature of bone. I added another slab of venison to a thirteen-by-nine glass pan, long used only for granola and vegetarian lasagna. I still wasn’t sure how I felt about the killing.

  Sixteen years earlier, the scene had been just like this. I had been standing at a kitchen counter, knife in hand. The creature on the cutting board had been trout instead of deer. With Thich Nhat Hanh’s words on kindness reverberating inside, I had sworn off flesh foods.

  Just a few weeks before this buck died, Nhat Hanh had posted a long letter on the website for Plum Village, his meditation center in southwestern France. In the letter, he asked all people to eat with mindfulness and compassion. He reminded us that tens of thousands of children die of malnutrition every day, while vast quantities of grain are fed to meat animals. He expressed concern over the livestock sector’s impact on global forests and water supplies, and its contributions to climate change. “We are eating our own planet earth,” he cautioned. Urging vegetarianism, Nhat Hanh encouraged us to look deeply into the meat we consume. In a plate of industrial sirloin or ground chuck, he asked us to see the suffering of starving children, and the pollution and degradation of the earth, not to mention the
animal—once a living, sentient being.

  This deep looking is a common theme in the Zen master’s teachings. In his book Peace Is Every Step, he reminds us that all things are connected and interdependent, a principle he calls “interbeing.” The paper upon which his book is printed, he notes, cannot exist without clouds: “Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper.” Sunshine, too, he reminds us, is vital. And—wise teacher that he is—he reminds us of something else: “If we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper.” The killing and processing of trees is present in each page of his book. Even if we use some alternative fiber, such as kenaf, the making of paper requires sun, rain, earth, and plant, and also the humans who harvest and process the plant.

  It was that kind of seeing that made me pick up a chain saw. In the framing and siding of our house and in the firewood that heated it, I saw the forest, cloaked in snowy stillness and dappled with summer sun. I saw the movements of water and nutrients in earth and tree. And I saw myself—the logger—and the mills to which Paul and I sold sawlogs and pulpwood.

  It was that kind of seeing, combined with my body’s needs, that led me away from veganism, dispelling my illusions about its moral purity. Like Nhat Hanh—who, in a passage entitled “Tangerine Meditation,” reminds us not only to notice our food’s taste and fragrance, but also to visualize “the blossoms in the sunshine and in the rain”—I saw beauty in my food. In salad greens, I saw the tiny, delicate leaves that first sprout from earth and seed. In strawberries, I saw the rain falling on Joey’s fields a couple miles down the road, and tasted the sun that warmed and fattened the fruit.

  But in those same crop fields, I also saw missing forests and prairies. In tofu, I saw the rifles and shotguns used to plug deer in soybean fields. In grains, I saw the birds, mice, and rabbits sliced and diced by combines. In cabbage, I saw caterpillars killed by insecticides, organic or not. In salad greens, I saw a whitetail cut open and dragged around the perimeter of a farm field, the scent of blood warning other deer not to eat the organic arugula and radicchio destined for upscale restaurants and grocery stores in San Francisco. In Joey’s kale and berries, I saw smoke-bombed burrows.

  Even in the vegetables from our garden—broccoli and green beans, lettuce and snap peas—I saw the wild grasses we uprooted, the earthworms we chopped with our shovels, the beetles I crushed between thumb and forefinger, the woodchucks I shot, and the dairy cows whose manure and carcasses fed the soil. In my own life and in the lives around me—heron and trout, hawk and hare, coyote and deer—I saw that the entire living, breathing, eating world was more beautiful and more terrible than I had imagined. Like Richard, I saw that sentient beings fed on sentient beings.

  In this half-carved leg on the counter in front of me, I saw history: wolves and cougars, American Indians and colonists, forests and sheep, market hunters and conservationists. I saw a species of deer that had nearly been wiped off the continent.

  I saw, too, that Cath and I would be eating more than this whitetail. We would also be eating everything the deer had eaten. We would be eating maple seedlings and cedar twigs. We would be eating clover from a hillside meadow and corn from the edge of a farm field. If I had shot this buck a few miles closer to home, we might even be eating hosta leaves and daylily buds from our own flower gardens.

  I saw the woods and fields where this buck must have fed, and the stream where he must have paused to drink. I saw the scarred bark of maples and alders in the Hundred Acre Woods, old rubs that might have been made by this buck’s sire. At the check-in station, a state biologist had examined the teeth and told me the deer was two and a half years old. He had been conceived three years ago, the same autumn I first hunted deer, perhaps the morning I picked up those orange plastic gloves, or the week I hunted with Mark on the Cape.

  I saw the ring of maples. I saw the scrape thirty yards away. I saw the branches that might have deflected the bullet had I fired too soon.

  I wondered what Thich Nhat Hanh would call the feeling that welled up in me as I stood here, separating flesh from bone. Would he acknowledge it as compassion? I wondered, too, how that other great Buddhist teacher—the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, who wrote the foreword to Peace Is Every Step—came to terms with his own flesh eating, how he integrated meat and mindfulness. There was, I thought, some strange poetry in the fact that Plum Village, Nhat Hanh’s meditation center, lay just fifty miles from the caves of Lascaux.

  The next morning, I stood again at the kitchen counter, steel mixing bowls arrayed around me, steak in one, stew meat in another. The thirteen-by-nine pan was piled with smaller pieces that I would put through the hand-crank grinder.

  Gradually, my mind and heart had begun to settle into the task. There was a quiet rhythm to it, something meditative about the careful disassembly of bone, meat, and silver skin. Carried along by the movement of the knife, attentive to the interwoven structures of the deer’s body, I thought of the way Paul had taught me to limb fir and spruce—the steady, flowing dance with chain saw and tree. The process, Cath suggested, was like canning vegetables: a small repetitive act done by these hands, a pattern within the larger patterns of the seasons, the patterns of all things that live and eat and die and feed one another.

  Gardening and canning, like hunting and butchering, were ways of participating in the provision of our own sustenance. I knew that Cath would always grow carrots and salad greens, zucchini and snap peas, as well as all manner of flowers. Her gardening wasn’t diminished by our purchase of vegetables and fruits, grains and beans, cheese and olive oil. She gardened to garden, as much for the moments savored and the connections grasped as for the nutrients ingested.

  I was less sure about hunting. If the pursuit could not reliably provide a significant portion of our flesh foods—if we were going to be buying chicken anyway—I didn’t know whether I would continue. I didn’t know whether hunting would open some wider landscape of meaning for me, something beyond the occasional chance at a deer, and the deep sorrow that accompanied the kill.

  In becoming a vegan, I had been mindful of my diet’s consequences for the planet and for the beings who inhabit it. I aimed to confront those consequences head-on, to see them clearly, to choose the path of least harm. I sought a respectful, holistic way of eating and living, a kind of right dietary citizenship, my food choices shaped by ecological and animal-welfare concerns in much the way that early American vegetarianism was shaped by fears of animality, issues of social reform, and aspirations to masculinity and success. I was mindful, too, of my diet’s inner consequences. Since I believed that killing animals was an unnecessary evil, integrity and alignment—a sense of values put into action—could only come from a meat-free diet.

  In becoming a hunter, my outward aim had been the same: to be mindful of the consequences of my diet, and to confront one of those consequences—the death of animals—with my eyes open. Taking a life carefully and swiftly seemed the most conscientious path. I still sought a respectful, holistic way of eating and living, my decision to hunt shaped by the same concerns that shaped my veganism. My inner aim had also been the same. Having concluded that I needed some animal protein in my diet and that some harm to animals was inevitable in even the gentlest forms of agriculture, integrity and alignment could only come from taking responsibility for at least a portion of the killing.

  Hunting, however, would not put me on a new high road to moral certainty. If this first experience of killing a deer was any indication, it would bring me face-to-face with ambiguity every time. Perhaps that was how it ought to be. I sliced off another chunk of deer and set it in a bowl.

  Barring a concentrated effort at homestead-style self-sufficiency, Cath and I would never be growing or hunting most of our food, let alone all of it. We would never know exactly what impacts our eating had. And food, after all, was only part of the picture. Though Cath and I liv
ed simply in comparison to many Americans, we still consumed far more than most of the other six and a half billion people on the planet. We weren’t jet-setting around the world, but the gasoline we pumped into our car and pickup truck meant the drilling, shipping, transporting, refining, and occasional spilling of oil, not to mention the toxic byproducts of combustion. We recycled whatever we could, but the production of every manufactured item we bought—including rifle and garden fencing, freezer and canning pot, plates and forks, and the computer on which I now type these words—incurred ecological costs. We were part of industrial civilization.

  Yet gardening and hunting reminded us that we were also part of nature. They gave us a felt sense of the elemental, inescapable relationships that sustained us. Between this deer and me there was no separation. The heavy scent of raw meat felt alien in my nostrils, yet the butchering seemed strangely familiar. The rhythm of the knife quieted my mind.

  I turned over the leg, marveled at these powerful muscles and how they must have launched the buck in great leaps, and continued with the cutting. Seam by seam, layer by layer, I took the leg apart. Gradually, I began to feel that this animal and I and the hunt that brought us together were part of something fitting. When all seventy-plus pounds of venison were stashed in the freezer alongside blueberries, peas, and chickens, I returned to the woods, singing a song I had never heard, one without words. I left the scraps for the coyotes and ravens to find.

  A week later, Richard shot a six pointer less than a hundred yards from the ring of maples. After Thanksgiving, he and a few other friends came for dinner. We feasted on venison scaloppine: tomato, garlic, parsley, mushrooms, deer.

  Epilogue

  Mindful Eating