On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, there was a photograph of a dead deer on the front page of the local newspaper. Using the deer's antlers as handles to orient its lifeless face toward the camera, as is the custom for such photos, was an eleven-year-old boy, clad in camouflage and peering through oversized, blue-framed glasses. A jagged bullet wound was visible at the base of the deer's neck.
The boy had shot this deer, the photo caption related, a little after sunrise the day before, on Thanksgiving Monday, the first day of deer rifle season in West Virginia.
The appearance of this photo in the paper was about as unsurprising as hearing someone complain about how early the stores are starting up with the Christmas muzak in any given year. This is, after all, the tradition-soaked season, a time of rituals and observances both holy and profane. Around here, one of the most dependable is the appearance in the paper of a photo of some kid who has happened to (1) shoot a deer on opening day and then (2) cross paths with a reporter who has been assigned to lie in wait at the parking lot of the game check-in station for exactly this sort of prey.
Behind his glasses, the boy's eyes looked tired, and no wonder. At the moment the camera's shutter closed, he and the rest of his hunting party would have been awake since long before dawn so as to be out in the woods lying for incautious deer by the time the sun rose. This early morning might have come after a late night. Around here, there are households where the big meal of Thanksgiving week comes not on Thursday but Sunday, when far-flung relations return to the family homeplace for the week of deer hunting they have been anticipating all year.
At some point between when the boy was shaken awake in the pre-dawn darkness and when, four or so hours later, the reporter asked him to pose for this photo, he would have laid the crosshairs of his rifle scope on top of another living being and commenced the long, slow trigger squeeze that would end its life. He would then either have helped with or maybe only observed the cleaning of the carcass, a sharp knife unzipping the deer's torso from genitals to breastbone, its steaming entrails slithering out onto the cold ground. This might have been his first time, or he might already have been an old hand. The minimum hunting age in this state is eight years old.
Whether or not this was the boy's first kill, I am struck by how wide a gulf of experience and knowledge already divides the two of us. The first time I went hunting was only about a decade ago, when I was in my mid-thirties. A new arrival in Montana at the time, I was taken under the wing of a native of the state who had grown up hunting and, despite a busy law practice, pretty much never missed a deer, elk, duck, or grouse season. Before he would me take me hunting, he said, I needed to read a book called Beyond Fair Chase by a retired Montana state biologist named Posewitz.
Using admirably clear and direct prose, Posewitz presents an ethical framework for hunters. You can get the general idea from chapter headings like "The Ethics of Preparation"; "The Ethics of the Hunt"; and "Ethics After the Shot."
"Fundamental to ethical hunting is the idea of fair chase," writes Posewitz. "This concept addresses the balance between the hunter and the hunted. It is a balance that allows hunters to occasionally succeed while animals generally avoid being taken." (Emphasis added.)
Posewitz would love me. Over the last decade, I have gone hunting four times. All four of those times, any and all deer in my vicinity certainly "avoided being taken," for I returned empty-handed each time. I'm not sure how Posewitz defines "occasionally" in this context, but it is starting to feel as though I may never experience a "successful" hunt, especially because it's now been a couple of years since I felt any noticeable desire to go on one.
In 2007, when Petra and I announced that we were moving from Baltimore to Missoula, more than one person asked if I planned to take up hunting.
This question seemed less a serious inquiry than a declaration of allegiance to coastal cosmopolitanism and against the primitive atavism known to persist out there in flyover country. It was as if people were really asking if I understood what I was getting myself into. Didn't I know that people in such places not only voted for Republicans but also went out into the woods to shoot wild animals, presumably just for the fun of it? For my part, when I answered that, yes, maybe I would take up hunting, I was speaking more from a place of rebellious contrarianism than out of any felt ambition to do so.
After all, at the time of our move out west, Petra and I were still vegetarians, although our vegetarianism did not survive first contact with summer backyard BBQs in Missoula and all of the delicious game meat that was usually on the grill. I soon found myself letting go of preconceived notions about the "type" of person who goes hunting and stopped feeling any surprise at noticing a rifle cabinet in the living room of someone whose politics and worldview I might once have assumed would preclude gun ownership.
Three months after my first taste of elk sausage, I was creeping through knee-deep snow in a gorgeous Montana fir forest, straining my eyes and ears for any sign of deer and feeling that I now understood the truth behind the bumper-sticker cliche that "A bad day hunting is better than a good day at the office." It's not only that not being in the office beats being there, it's that, generally speaking, everything that's fun about hunting happens before the shooting starts, and if you don't shoot anything you just have an excuse to go out and enjoy it all again on another day.
To that point in my life, I'd spent my share of time on hikes and walks in the woods. I'd known I was supposed to enjoy simply "getting some fresh air" and "enjoying nature" and that sort of thing, but really these activities had tended to have the aura of eating one's vegetables or going to the gym or keeping a gratitude journal: something that everyone agrees is supposed to be good for you even as it is not really what you could call fun. An elevated heart rate and the occasional opportunity to regard a wilderness landscape from a high vantage point are great and all, but never while merely "hiking" had I felt as clear-headed and attuned to my surroundings as I did on that hunt—and I wasn't even the one hunting.
It was the Saturday after our first Thanksgiving in Missoula. My friend, the attorney, had shot two deer the day before. He'd dragged one out right away but had lost the light and decided to leave the other one to chill overnight in the great outdoors icebox that is Montana in late November. Now, he had invited me and another friend, an old law professor and now friend of his, to help him fetch it out.
The professor had brought his own rifle so as to be able to take a deer for himself if the opportunity arose, and this is how we had come to be hunting during the last hour of daylight before attending to our original purpose in coming out. We made a loop that took us first uphill and then back along some bottomland through drifts of fresh powder, with more snow whooshing down on us from tree branches we brushed as we picked our way along. The only deer we saw, however, was the attorney's kill from the day before. We located its frozen carcass and gut pile as the sun was setting. After tying the deer's legs to a ski pole the attorney had brought for the purpose, we took turns dragging it out along the fir-lined, snow-packed trail under a full moon blazing yellow like a house on fire.
Hunting had always struck me as something you probably needed to have grown up doing—as had the attorney—or else you could never really hope to have the stomach for and become skilled at it. The professor was the first person I'd met who confounded this assumption. As the three of us chatted and took our turns in the traces, I learned that he hadn't taken up hunting until moving to Montana in his mid-forties, a decade earlier, but had nonetheless managed to kill a deer or two every year since. The attraction was the opportunity to stock his family's freezer with meat that was as "organic" as anything bearing that USDA-regulated and thus expensive label but which cost him only the expense of a resident hunting license, a handful of cartridges, and—in his first season—a rifle. Rifles aren't cheap, of course, but a proper accounting would amortize that cost to almost nothing per year across decades of hunts and hundreds of pounds of meat.
On top of the thrillingly transcendent state I had reveled in as we stalked the snowy woods for deer, the professor's reasons for hunting seemed excellent justifications for trying my own hand at hunting at least once. Over the course of the next year, I took a hunting safety course offered by the state fish and wildlife agency, completed the reading the attorney had assigned, and borrowed a friend's .270 Winchester.
The next fall, I set out on the first of the four hunts I've been on. Two of these were in Montana, and two were in West Virginia, where we moved in 2010.
All four were unsuccessful and thus, under one way of reading Posewitz, maximally ethical.
There was a time when I would have classified Missoula and Waldhurst in the same broad category—something like rural outposts with whose denizens I have nothing in common and among whom I could never feel at home. The time I've spent in both places, however, has taught me that Waldhurst is as different from Missoula as the latter is from Baltimore. Certainly my experiences hunting in Montana and West Virginia could not have been much more different from each other.
One of the most marked contrasts had to do with the level of physical effort required. In Montana, on both my first hunt, with the attorney, and on my second, with a neighbor who had worked as a fly-fishing guide and was pursuing a graduate degree in something to do with freshwater fish ecology, we basically walked all day. When I say "walked," I am not describing some low-key stroll along a trail but, instead, careful, quiet bushwhacking under the weight of rifles and day packs stuffed with provisions, extra shells, and tools for cleaning any deer we shot. Sometimes I carried my rifle slung, but I also spent long hours holding it in front of me in what my hunting safety class had called the "two-handed carry," ready to be shouldered and fired at a moment's notice.
My rifle weighed me down not only with its physical weight but also with a novel sort of mental burden that would not have pertained if I'd simply been carrying, say, a dumbbell or a sack of sand or some other neutral object weighing the same eight or so pounds that my rifle did. Pulsating in the forefront of my mind was the awareness that I was holding an implement with significant destructive potential that must never be dropped or, for the briefest moment, pointed at anything I minded killing or destroying, as one of the Four Rules of Firearm Safety puts it. I was keen to avoid not only maiming or killing my hunting partner but also negligently loosing a shot into the air that—traveling at something like 3,000 feet per second with at least 2,000 foot-pounds of energy behind it—might still be moving fast enough to injure or kill someone even a mile or two away.
On top of his long hunting experience, the attorney had been a multi-season athlete in high school and college and still captained a rec-league soccer team every summer. He stood more than six feet tall and weighed north of 200 muscular pounds, and one of the most physically demanding experiences of my life was simply trying to keep pace with him as he led the way off-trail up a very steep hillside. Weighted down as described above and dressed ill-advisedly warmly ("pro tip," as the kids say: you should be shivering in the parking lot if you don't want to overheat on the trail), I was almost immediately drenched in sweat and my heart seemed suddenly intent on hammering its way out of my chest, catching a breather on a log, and maybe meeting up with us on our way back down.
That was the first ten minutes of our hunt.
Aside from a short break for lunch, we would spend the next eight or so hours ceaselessly and, as it turned out, fruitlessly stalking uphill and down for deer. The attorney was committed to helping me get my first deer, and he experienced no little frustrated consternation when this piece of national forest—which he had chosen for what he considered its high likelihood of presenting us with a veritable embarrassment of the animals—turned out to be empty of them, as far as we could tell.
I appreciated his generous devotion to my cause, but after the first five hours I began to silently pray that any deer in the area would continue to elude us. After shooting and cleaning one we would still have needed to drag it back across all of these hills to the truck for God only knew how many miles, and increasingly I just wanted to be done with all of this endless tromping around. Back in the attorney's truck, after we had finally called it quits, he admitted that he'd eventually started having the same thought.
"It's like they always say," the attorney observed. "Hunting is fun until you pull the trigger. Then it's just a bunch of hard work."
My second Montana hunt, with the fishing guide, was similar in most respects. It was not quite as exhausting, perhaps because this time I was the taller one. But it was just as fruitless, in the end. As on my first hunt, we didn't see a single deer in hours of searching.
My first West Virginia hunt came a few months after we moved to Waldhurst. It was facilitated by the electrician we hired to replace the antique wiring in our new 120-year-old house. I was spending a lot of time in the house that summer while he and his assistant and son-in-law, a young man named Charlie, did their work, and it was soon clear that they lived and breathed hunting.
"We were out all night shooting coyotes," the electrician mentioned one day, explaining why they had arrived late that morning.
This was a surprising statement to me, because I hadn't been aware that night hunting was ever legal. Researching the matter, I learned that, in West Virginia, coyotes are classified not as game but as a sort of pest that may be shot year-round, with no bag limit and, yes, during part of the year, under lights at night. The rationale seems to be that killing coyotes protects the deer population; certainly this was how these two men articulated their own motivation for doing so.
The electrician was the third devoted hunter to enter my life who immediately saw it as his glad obligation to help me take my first deer. In December, he told me that he and Charlie would be taking to the field for something called muzzleloader season, and I was invited along. I hadn't previously been aware that there is a category of modern rifle that operates similarly to the way pre-modern muskets did. As it turned out, these "black powder" rifles are common enough among hunters around here that the first neighbor I asked, a forest ranger, had a .50 caliber model he was happy to lend me.
My Montana hunts had been in national forests, but this one was to occur on private property. Many people prefer to hunt on private land, because it combines ease of access with reduced competition for game. It's bad enough that crowds of other hunters might reduce your chances of getting your own deer. In the worst case, some of those other hunters might be drunk or stupid or for some other reason more likely to shoot you than a deer.
Property owners that don't allow hunting on their land must "post" their perimeters with those "no hunting" signs you may have seen stapled at regular intervals to trees along a road or, in West Virginia as in a few other states, daubs of purple paint. Some landowners issue a limited number of their own "permits" to, say, the first 50 hunters who ask. And some others offer hunting leases, or exclusive rights to hunt some specified section of their property.
The electrician had for years leased hunting rights for a sizable acreage of mountainous forest from a company that ran a nearby gravel quarrying operation. I am not sure how standardized these leases are, so I cannot characterize them generally, but apparently the terms of the electrician's lease had not prohibited him from installing a simple bunkhouse on the property. I met the electrician and his son-in-law in front of the family home, which abutted the hunting lease, and climbed into their truck for the ride to the cabin, where we would all sleep so we could get an early start the next morning.
Unsure what to expect during the evening hours we would spend at the cabin but wanting to be ready for what stereotype suggested might turn out to be an evening of manly decadence, I had packed along a flask of good bourbon. This did not turn out to be that kind of hunting party, however, and the flask remained unopened in my bag while we double-checked and repacked our equipment for the morning. Then we picked out beds in the communal bunk room and turned in early.
The next morning, well before dawn, we drank black coffee, gagged down instant oatmeal, and packed sandwiches before heading into the field. I would not actually be hunting in the company of the electrician, as it turned out. For several seasons, he had been using an arrangement of motion-activated game cameras to monitor a certain buck at one end of his lease, and on this morning he was heading off in that direction on an ATV to try to see it in the flesh and ascertain whether it had finally grown into enough of a trophy animal for him to consider it worth taking.
Charlie and I, meanwhile, would hunt from what the two men called their "deer blind." We drove in an old pickup with no plates for a mile or so, then parked at the beginning of a short trail the two men had cut. On our hike in to the blind, we spooked a buck, which flashed away through the underbrush. Our rifles were unloaded and slung, so there was no chance of shooting this deer, but spotting one so soon in the area where we planned to hunt felt auspicious.
What these men called a deer blind turned out to be a substantial and well-built structure I would call a treehouse. Situated about twenty feet up a tree that grew on the side of a steep hill and overlooking a narrow valley meadow, the treehouse had a roof and four walls with window openings cut into three of them as firing positions. Once we had maneuvered ourselves and our packs and our rifles up the treehouse's ladder, Charlie started the propane-powered space heater. Propping open the window shutters, we positioned milk crates as seats in front of our respective windows, laid our rifles on the floor at our feet, and settled in to wait.
And wait. And wait. And wait.
Where my Montana hunts had been physically challenging, this one presented me with the mental challenge of accommodating myself to sitting as still as possible for about 12 or 13 hours with nothing to do but stare out the window, engage in the occasional murmured conversation with Charlie, and listen to my stomach's at times shockingly loud gurgles as it struggled to process the breakfast of low-quality animal feed I had inflicted on it.
I wished I'd brought a book, but it could have been worse. At the end of what is still the longest-feeling day I have ever endured in my life, Charlie was driving me back to my car in the deepening twilight when he cleared his throat and shyly inquired if I were saved. He offered, almost apologetically, that the preacher whose church he and the rest of the electrician's family attended at least twice a week was always urging his congregation to minister to the unchurched and invite them into the fold, and so that's what he was now doing.
I was touched by the courage that obeying the preacher's instruction had seemed to require of this unassuming and taciturn young man, and I could not help but feel grateful for his apparently genuine concern about my prospects for the afterlife.
I was no less grateful, however, that it had taken him all day to nerve himself up to broaching the subject, and that—as I cleared my own throat, thanked him for his interest, and then did my best to let him down easy—my Corolla was already visible in the beater truck's headlights as we jounced along the last stretch of the rutted dirt road.
As we'd hiked in to the treehouse, Charlie had let slip a piece of information that suggested why the electrician had figured that hunting from the "blind" would give me my best chance of getting a deer.
Throughout the fall, Charlie explained, he and his father-in-law had been spreading corn in the little meadow below the tree house, in order to train deer to frequent the area. This was the second time in my dawning acquaintanceship with these two men specifically and the culture of hunting in West Virginia generally that I was taken aback by what at first sounded like a confession to a crime. Surely baiting deer must be as illegal in West Virginia as I had known it to be in Montana, I thought. I later learned that, although West Virginia law does prohibit baiting deer on public land, it is permitted on private property. At the time of this conversation with Charlie, I hadn't lived in this state long enough to register the "Deer Corn" signs that appear in front of local feed stores and outfitters every spring and summer and at least imply that the practice has a certain degree of legitimacy.
Perched on my milk crate in the electrician's treehouse, my rifle resting on the sill of the window overlooking the meadow, I wondered what the attorney would think of our hunting plan. Even absent the corn, it seemed clear that sitting in what was essentially a heated building while waiting for a deer to happen by was not the scenario most in keeping with that "balance between ... hunter and ... hunted" that Posewitz positions at the core of the fair-chase philosophy. Add in the corn, and—to paraphrase Captain Benjamin Willard—I didn't see any balance at all.
In addition to propounding an ethical framework for hunting, Posewitz also spends some time explaining why he thinks such a framework to be so important. Posewitz's definition of an ethical hunter is "a person who knows and respects the animals hunted, follows the law, and behaves in a way that will satisfy what society expects of him or her as a hunter." In other words, one should hunt ethically not only to be able to meet your own gaze in the bathroom mirror but also to avoid discomforting non-hunters so much that they clamor for additional restrictions on or maybe even the prohibition of the practice.
As we learned in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 or can see whenever some rich asshole tweets photos of an elephant he shot, simply obeying the law does not in and of itself qualify one as a good person. One must also, as Posewitz puts it, "behave in the right way." Failure to do so in the context of hunting could imperil the prospects of an activity that is enjoyed by less than 5 percent of the U.S. population and which involves the execution of animals that so many non-hunters enjoy both actually seeing and simply imagining living free and unharassed in the wild. In other words, per Posewitz: "The concept of fair chase is important to hunting because the general public will not tolerate hunting under any other circumstance."
There are publics and then there are publics, of course. Hunting is mostly regulated at the state level, even in national forests and on other federal lands, so the "general public" that West Virginia hunters need to concern themselves with consists mostly of other West Virginians. The fact is that baiting deer is not only a deeply rooted tradition here but also a large and profitable business, according to a 2014 West Virginia Metro News article.
"Sporting goods stores now have sections dedicated to baiting. Sophisticated feeder systems generate thousands of dollars for the companies who manufacture them. Feed stores make a killing in West Virginia selling “deer corn.” In case you are wondering, deer corn is regular corn but sold in a bag with a deer picture on the package."
There is more than one way to look at the situation, as always. There are many people who assert it as given that humans need to be killing deer in West Virginia for the good of all concerned. Even if people like my electrician weren't regularly shooting coyotes, there still wouldn't be enough wild predators in this state to keep our deer population in check, and uncontrolled deer populations are vulnerable to starvation and disease. West Virginia has also long held an unfortunate distinction as the state where a driver stands the best chance of colliding with a deer. If hunting didn't exist, in other words, perhaps we would need to invent it for the good of the animals themselves and the grillwork of our motor vehicles, even if it weren't also a way for for the disproportionately low-income residents of this state to provide themselves with high-quality protein.
As I considered the subject from this angle, I started to think that perhaps Posewitz's standards for what constitutes ethical hunting are a little fussier than they need to be. If hunting is as valuable as the above arguments suggest—if deer, in other words, basically need shooting—was it really such a bad thing to make the process of doing so a little easier and more comfortable? Would it really be so bad, that is, if I shot a deer over bait from a heated treehouse?
Such questions were moot, as it turned out.
The buck Charlie and I flushed on our hike in to the treehouse was the last deer we saw all day.
The man who took me on my second and so far final West Virginia hunt was known to me mainly in his capacity as one of Waldhurst's part-time city councilors, although long before I'd ever conversed with him I had seen him around town playing guitar in a well-regarded local roots band. He was also an ordained Episcopalian minister, in which capacity he had done mission work in Liberia during one of that country's awful civil wars, but he had parted ways with his church some years back and was at the time of our hunt on the verge of retirement from a second career in community development—whatever that is.
The councilor was also a hunter of long experience, and—just like the previous three such men I'd hunted with—had only to hear the slightest expression of interest on my part before he was offering to help me get my first deer. He was not without his own interests in cultivating me as a potential long-term hunting partner. Not only did his girlfriend seem increasingly unwilling to tolerate his wandering the woods alone with a rifle at his age, he told me, but he was actually beginning to think she might have a point.
To this partnership, then, I brought the vigor of relative youth, which would be useful for lightening both his girlfriend's concerns and the grunt work of dealing with a newly killed deer in the field. The councilor, for his part, brought not only his knowledge of hunting and a spare rifle I could use but also personal traits that I already knew made him good company even in large doses. He had a dry sense of humor and, either despite or because of his religious training, a tendency to favor conversation topics like literature, guitars, guns, and whiskey over Jesus.
Even if I could not claim much hunting experience, it had long been a point of shallow masculine pride that my military experience had familiarized me with the safe handling and operation of firearms, but my qualifications on this point were promptly called into question by a mishap that occurred while the two of us were sighting in our rifles at an outdoor range in the national forest.
The councilor had just stepped away from the firing line into the bushes to jettison some coffee while I made ready to take my next shot. Peering downrange through my scope, I took up the slack in my trigger, let my breath partway out, and stated to gradually increase the pressure of my index finger against that all-important little metal comma.
"Squeeze, don't pull," the boot-camp marksmanship instructor had told us. "Let the shot surprise you."
And surprise me this shot certainly did. There was not only the expected "surprise" of the shot—the usual thunderous boom and the usual shock of the rifle butt jumping against my shoulder—but also a sharp and genuinely startling blow between my eyebrows. Confused, I probed the area with my fingertips. They came away bloody.
"You scoped yourself!" said the councilor, zipping his jeans as he emerged from the bushes.
I do not believe I had ever once heard this term before. The first time I'd ever shot a gun was in boot camp, and the vast majority of my rifle shooting experience had thus been on M-16s. The ones we carried had not worn scopes and so I had not internalized scope safety to the same degree I had internalized the operation of charging handles, forward assists, selector levers, and the various other fiddly bits of that venerable military rifle. I'm sure that, the first time I'd shot a big-game rifle, back in Montana, someone had warned me not to put my eye too close to the scope when firing, but apparently I had not added this to my mental checklist.
Investigating my visage in a side mirror on the councilor's truck, I saw that the rim of the scope had inscribed a bloody semi-circle that arced from dead center on the ridge of bone over my eyes up and over my right eyebrow. No major damage seemed to have been done and the swelling was keeping the bleeding down. I took out one of the Band-Aids that being a parent of young children has trained me to keep in my wallet and slapped it over my wound, and then we walked back to the firing line and finished attending to the afternoon's business. Speaking of points of shallow masculine pride, I had hopes for the consolation of a satisfying scar, but today you would have to take my word for it that this accident ever happened.
The Sunday before Thanksgiving, the councilor took me along to scout a piece of national forest land he knew. We followed a trail for about two miles before bushwhacking uphill toward a tall ridge. The councilor pointed out an area under some oaks that was littered with fallen acorns, a food that deer are fond of, and then we circled around lining up shooting angles and backdrops and picking out the spots where we would sit and wait the next morning.
I was gratified in the abstract that our planned hunt would be more in the spirit of the ones I'd experienced in Montana, but, when the time came, part of me was sorry that there was no heated treehouse in our future. Around here, Thanksgiving week can be mild, but on this particular morning the temperature was in the single digits as we set out with packs and rifles from the little gravel parking area near the trailhead.
Knowing that we might need to endure hours of sitting still in the woods, I had layered myself with more clothes than I had ever worn at one time in my entire life. This included not only heavy wool pants and a parka but also long underwear under several sweaters, a double layer of thick socks, glove liners under gloves under mittens, and a ski mask under a long scarf wound around the lower half of my face. Even with all of that, I don't think I would have lasted half as long as I did without the healthy supply of handwarmers I'd packed along. You may have noticed these things for sale at the checkout stands of sporting goods stores, little disposable orange pouches that, when exposed to air, commence some kind of chemical reaction that generates what the advertising copy describes as "up to ten hours of heat." In the temperatures we faced that morning, it was generally only 30 or so minutes before their warmth started to recede and the chill began to exert its grip once again.
This being public land, we were not the only ones in these woods that morning, and a shot we heard a little after dawn made us hopeful about our own chances. But after sitting in our respective firing positions for about seven hours, at which time we had still not seen or heard the slightest sign of any deer, the councilor made his way over to me, offered me a hit of Irish whiskey from his flask, and suggested that maybe we ought to throw in the towel for the day. I agreed, trying not to sound too relieved, and we slung our rifles and packs and started back down the trail.
About halfway to the councilor's truck, we found the hunter who had fired that shot at dawn. He had killed a deer, as we could see, and he'd been laboring to drag it out to his truck ever since. An out-of-state hunter, down from Pennsylvania, he had at least 10 years on the councilor and seemed frail relative to the task he'd set himself. He gratefully accepted our offer to help drag his deer the rest of they way and said he'd been starting to think he'd never manage it on his own.
As far as I know, that was the councilor's last hunt. The next fall, as hunting season approached, he said he had decided that perhaps he no longer needed that kind of bother in his life and we've never since discussed the possibility of hunting together again. I can't say I was massively disappointed. Our single hunt together had been miserable and I wasn't eager for a repeat experience.
Besides, Petra was soon putting her own deer in our freezer every winter, without having to fire a shot. A man she works with loves to hunt and is happy to provide us with one of his deer each year, as long as we pay the cost of having it butchered and packaged by a local meat processor, or about a dollar a pound. This is an expense we'd likely have to bear even if I shot my own deer but which at least avoids the cost of a rifle and the risk of frostbite.
I cannot say whether my hunt with the councilor was my last—I cannot rule out the possibility that I will, in fact, shoot a deer some day—but the literary artist in me is certainly tempted to keep it so for the sake of the neat set of bookends it provides. There is a certain satisfying symmetry in my first and last hunting experiences ending with dragging someone else's deer out of the woods.
Perhaps you disapprove of hunting. If so, take heart. The number of U.S. hunters has been plummeting since its peak in 1982, and the senescence of Baby Boomer hunters, who are not being replaced in sufficient numbers by younger ones, promises a dramatic further drop-off over the next decade.
So maybe the practice is on its way to simply dying out, but here on my street someone is doing his part to keep the hunting tradition alive. My neighbor, whom I'll call Gene, is one of the many people I've met in both Montana and West Virginia who, before I moved to rural America, would not have fit the mental picture I once had of "the kind of people who hunt." He is a liberal Peace Corps veteran who went to boarding school in Switzerland, has a master's degree in Latin American Studies, and works on stream restoration for the Nature Conservancy.
It is of course ridiculous to assume we can discern a person's worldview and predilections from a few items on his resume. No less ridiculous than the next human being, however, I will confess that, if I'd met Gene while I still lived in Baltimore, I'd never have taken him for a gun owner, much less guessed he might be a deer hunter with a long record of success in the field.
At the moment that I am typing these words, however, he has two squirrels in his freezer, which were shot earlier this fall by his 13-year-old son. (They are waiting until they get three or four more before trying to make a meal of them.) The squirrels were first blood for the boy, but Gene has long been in the practice of taking at least one deer every year on the large piece of land his mother owns a few counties over from here, and he not only cleans what he kills but butchers it, too. The expedition for squirrel had been part of the boy's training for his own first deer hunt, planned for Thanksgiving week of this year.
Gene had already taken his own deer before the day of his son's first hunt, so the pressure was off. They used a tent-like portable hunting blind, which Gene had set out a few days earlier to accustom the deer to its presence. Earlier in the fall, the boy had practiced shooting his father's 7mm-08 Remington, noting how differently it handled from the little .410 shotgun he'd used for those squirrels. They rose early, walked out to the blind as quietly as they could, and settled in to wait.
Those 13-year-old eyes were the first to spot the deer, a doe—you know, a female deer. Unfortunately, this doe was accompanied by a fawn. Shooting it wouldn't have broken any laws, because West Virginia's rifle season, like that of most states, is timed so that each year's fawns will already have been weaned and so stand a good chance of surviving on their own. Still, it turned out that shooting Bambi's mother was not the first hunting experience the boy wanted for himself. Neither Gene nor his son took the shot, and they came home empty-handed.
As Gene related these developments to me the other day, I was reminded of a similar story in Posewitz's book, about a hunting guide who took his daughter on her first deer hunt when she was sixteen. As the two of them lay on the ground with an excellent shot at a group of "four magnificent mule deer bucks," the guide urged the girl to take the shot she'd been training for. But she remained still, just watching, as the deer disappeared one by one over a ridge.
"In this story," Posewitz relates, "the hunter ... was just not ready to shoot one of those bucks. She did the right thing. She savored the hunting experience and let the bucks pass. The lesson is that it is up to you to decide when you are ready to kill. It may take time before you feel ready, and it is important to reserve that decision for yourself."
Posewitz continues: "Since that first hunt, that girl has taken many deer, elk, antelope, and upland game animals. Yet she is content with her decision that [first] day ... For her, that day remains one of her fondest memories."
I know exactly what he means.
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