The Mindful Carnivore (16 page)

On a Saturday morning in mid-September, we gathered for the final class. Following a multiple-choice exam, we headed out to the shooting range. There, under the close supervision of an instructor, who handed us live cartridges one at a time, we each fired five shots with a .22, aiming at a paper target twenty-five yards away. Keeping the rifle pointed downrange was required. Operating the bolt, safety, and trigger mechanisms without mishap was also required. Hitting the mark was not. Though most of the group’s shooting was good—bullet holes clustering in and around the bull’s-eyes—at least one target survived without a single blemish.

Passing the course was, I reflected, no proof of preparedness to hunt. The real education of American hunters still depends on the traditional transmission of knowledge and skills from one generation to the next. I hoped that the kids who had completed the course alongside me would have good guidance—in safety and in ethics—when they spent their first eager days afield.

At the conclusion of the live-fire exercise, the head instructor handed us each a blaze-orange Hunter Firearms Safety card, the document required to purchase a hunting license. One man looked down at his young son and asked, “Do you think we could possibly get to the store and buy that license fast enough?” The round-faced boy grinned widely and shook his head: No, not even sixty miles an hour would be fast enough.

I wasn’t in that kind of hurry. Though Vermont’s most popular hunting season—the two weeks of rifle hunting for deer—was still two months off, I had no plans to hunt that autumn. I wasn’t equipped for it yet, in all kinds of ways.

8

A Hunter’s Prayer

No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s own culture but within oneself.

—Barry Lopez,
Arctic Dreams

T
hat fall I hunted through Uncle Mark’s eyes.

In mid-October, he sent an e-mail about his first outing in archery season on Cape Cod, recounting the quiet pleasure he took in watching the woods come to life at dawn. Chickadees landed on branches within arm’s reach, calling
dee-dee-dee
. A gray squirrel scolded as a big hawk swooped low. Shafts of early sunlight pierced the woods, illuminating a nearby patch of yellow ferns. After a day of rain, the fragrances of pine needles and oak leaves were strong.

In November, he sent pictures from his annual pilgrimage to Virginia, where his longtime buddy Jay has a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains. One photo showed their old-fashioned caplock muzzleloaders, crafted from do-it-yourself kits years earlier: the reddish stock of Mark’s nearly as dark as mahogany with a crescent brass butt plate, the wood of Jay’s nearly blond, its butt plate carved of moose antler.

Another photo was of a vulture. The first morning of the hunt, Mark had let two deer pass, neither close enough for him to feel certain of a clean kill. The second morning, another had appeared in thick cover nearby. It had taken ten minutes for the young buck to wander into a tiny clearing where Mark could finally take a twig-free shot, enough time for his heartbeat to double and his hands to start trembling. “There was also plenty of time,” he wrote, “to say the hunter’s prayer about a dozen times: ‘Lord, let me kill clean … and if I can’t kill clean, let me miss clean.’” The buck had gone down on the spot. In the photo, the vulture stood by the bones and scraps that Mark returned to the woods. Mark had jotted a caption on the back: “Nature’s recycling.”

Back on Cape Cod, Mark sent an e-mail describing the last morning of archery season. Over the previous six weeks, he had hunted his favorite spot ten times without seeing a single deer. That last morning, though, after several hours of waiting, he heard a whitetail coming. The four-point buck strolled within twenty feet, so close that Mark could see his eyelashes and whiskers as he pawed the ground, then lifted his head to lick an overhanging branch. The buck paused in a shaft of morning sunlight, his coat shimmering with golden highlights. Then he took a few steps and stood broadside to Mark, his entire head behind a tree. It was a bowhunter’s dream shot—the angle perfect, the deer unable to see the archer raise his bow. “I never did draw an arrow,” Mark wrote. “It was just wonderful to be so close to such an incredible animal.”

That, I thought, was how I wanted to hunt. Appreciating everything I saw, heard, and smelled. Admiring my fellow creatures and enjoying their presence. Not caring too much whether deer came my way. Often letting animals pass by. Choosing my shots carefully. Killing swiftly.

I was not my uncle, though. He had been hunting for nearly forty years, having started in his teens. In my teens, I had been on the brink of veganism. Hearing Mark’s experiences and insights was helpful as I thought more seriously about becoming a hunter. But I had my own sorting out to do before I took to the woods, bow or gun in hand.

How would the compassion and respect I had for animals inform my hunting? Having grown up without a hunting tradition of any kind—in a broader culture that saw nature and wildlife as little more than scenery—what meanings would frame my experiences afield?

Inside the front cover of the hunter-education manual, I had come across a quote from one José Ortega y Gasset. As the manual’s one oblique reference to hunters’ motives, it annoyed me from the start: “To the sportsman the death of the game is not what interests him; that is not his purpose.”

I soon discovered that the Spaniard was a luminary of hunting philosophy. His little volume
Meditations on Hunting
—originally published in 1942 as a long-winded prologue to another man’s book—is quoted so often in the literature of hunting that it has taken on near-scriptural status. Reading it, I decided I was a heretic. Here and there, I wanted to underline a sentence, noting my emphatic agreement. Mostly, I wanted to cram the margins with question marks, exclamation points, and words of protest. (Unable to mark up a pristine hardcover the way I would a paperback, I did neither.)

Working my way through Ortega’s flowery prose and convoluted logic, I could see why Edward Abbey referred to him as “that sly sophist.” Ortega celebrates the “exemplary moral spirit of the sporting hunter” who hunts for diversion, but looks down on the “utilitarian” hunter, who, like “Paleolithic man … the poacher of any epoch,” hunts for food.

A sport is the effort which is carried out for the pleasure that it gives in itself and not for the transitory result that the effort brings forth.… In utilitarian hunting the true purpose of the hunter, what he seeks and values, is the death of the animal. Everything else that he does before that is merely a means for achieving that end, which is its formal purpose.

Ortega misses a crucial point. What the utilitarian hunter seeks and values is not death. It is life: food. But Ortega goes on.

In hunting as a sport this order of means to end is reversed. To the sportsman the death of the game is not what interests him; that is not his purpose. What interests him is everything that he had to do to achieve that death—that is, the hunt. Therefore what was before only a means to an end is now an end in itself.

Setting aside the fact that some sport hunters do seem quite interested in “the death of the game,” I agreed with Ortega, if only in part. There would, I imagined, be far more to hunting than the death of the animal. From personal experience, I knew that fishing could be compelling in and of itself. Part of the point was to be on the water in an old, battered rowboat, to learn the habits of the fish I sought and to master techniques that would fool them, to watch the complex, cross-patterning of riffles as the breeze changed direction, to stand on a bridge with an old friend at sunset. The process of the hunt could, I imagined, be equally compelling.

But, here again, Ortega misses something, for utilitarian hunters also find enjoyment in the hunt itself. As anthropologist Richard Nelson wrote in reflecting on a year he spent living in the Alaskan coastal village of Wainwright, “Inupiaq men lived to hunt as much as they hunted to live.” In his attempt to establish a simplistic binary model of hunters and their motives, Ortega divorces means and ends, obscuring complexity and truth. Inupiaq men enjoyed hunting, and they also aimed to bring home an animal—a seal, perhaps—and to eat it. I enjoyed fishing, and I also intended to bring home fish, make use of my fillet knife, and take down one of our cast-iron skillets from where they hung beside the kitchen window.

Ortega’s celebrated sportsman might live to hunt, but he does not hunt to live. And that makes the killing—and Ortega’s explanation of it—more tenuous.

Death is essential because without it there is no authentic hunting: the killing of the animal is the natural end of the hunt and that goal of hunting itself, not of the hunter. The hunter seeks this death because it is no less than the sign of reality for the whole hunting process. To sum up, one does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted.

That last bizarre line—enough to make one wonder about the accuracy of the translation from Spanish to English—may be Ortega’s most frequently quoted phrase. On first reading it, printed there inside the front cover of the hunter-education manual, I had no words for the feelings of irritation and offense that welled up within. If I could have articulated a reply in the moment, it would have been far less civil than Edward Abbey’s: “Not good enough.”

Ortega’s ideal sportsman kills not to eat, but to fulfill some kind of symbolic necessity. The animal’s death is a “sign” that the hunt is “authentic” and “real.” To my ear, such insistence on authenticity suggested one thing clearly: The philosopher’s hunter was out of touch with reality. Why else would he need a sign of it? Would the Inupiaq kill seals or other creatures merely to assure themselves that they were really hunting? What kind of deranged angler would I be if I beheaded trout so I could think,
Ah, now I have authentically fished
?

The philosopher’s sportsman, moreover, seems to be above mere killing. Killing is “the natural end of the hunt and that goal of hunting itself, not of the hunter.” What are we to make of this hunt that apparently hurtles toward a natural end of its own accord, without a hunter who really wants—let alone needs—to kill? What are we to make of this sportsman who does not hunt to eat, who—immune to such contamination—has risen above the base realities of life and death?

Ortega’s case for the superiority of sport hunting over utilitarian hunting stems from a fundamental cultural arrogance. Tribes who depend on hunting for survival, he writes, “represent the most primitive human species that exists.” Ignorant as these primitive brutes are—lacking “the slightest hint of government, of legislation, of authority”—their hunting and their philosophical understanding of it must, naturally, be inferior to those of civilized Europe. But it is his own ignorance—of tribal cultures such as the Inupiaq of the Arctic and the San of the Kalahari, and of their enormously complex “utilitarian” hunting traditions—that Ortega demonstrates.

I was thankful to find a kindred skeptic in Robert Kimber. His book
Living Wild and Domestic
helped clarify why Ortega’s attitude toward utilitarian hunters and “primitive” tribes bothered me so intensely. “It is the utilitarian hunter dependent on the hunt for sustenance,” Kimber writes, “who will have the greatest knowledge of, and respect for, his wild brethren and whose culture will make that knowledge and respect manifest in its arts, rituals, myths, and day-to-day behavior.”

The sport hunter, Ortega admits, is never as skilled as the true subsistence hunter: “Today’s best-trained hunter cannot begin to compare his form to that of the sylvan actions of the presentday pygmy or his remote counterpart Paleolithic man.” He even allows that the modern European subsistence hunter is more skilled than the sport hunter. But, for Ortega, that modern subsistence hunter is an uncivilized brute: “the poacher,” an “eternal troglodyte” who “always smells a little like a beast.”

Call me a troglodyte then. Unlike the Inupiaq, I did not need to hunt to survive. But it was for food—not for a sign that my hunting was real—that I would take aim at a whitetail’s heart.

Prowling through a local used bookstore one day, I paused in front of the small shelf devoted to hunting and fishing. My eyes fastened on a beige-and-yellow spine bearing the title
A Hunter’s Heart
. As soon as I opened the book, I knew I was in good company.

In the introduction, I learned that Richard Nelson—whose account of the vast numbers of deer killed to protect agricultural crops had brought me up short in my latter days as a vegan—had grown up opposed to hunting. As a boy he had believed that “hunting was entirely evil—no matter who did it, how they did it, or why.” Yet, living among native peoples in Alaska, he had learned to hunt. Now, in middle age, he found hunting for food to be a vitally important part of his life, an activity that served to remind him that he was not separate from his fellow creatures but “twisted together with them in one great braidwork of life.”

In the essays that followed, I encountered dozens of hunters—and a few nonhunters—willing to ask hard questions, to write honestly about animals and killing and eating. In one essay, philosopher Ann Causey tackled a deceptively simple question—“Is hunting ethical?”—and contended that there is no simple answer. In another, outdoor writer Mike Gaddis rejected the premise “that life other than human is devoid of feeling and is, individually, of small consequence.” In yet another, farmer and professor George Wallace—having shot an animal badly—stated bluntly, “If elk would scream, the woods would have fewer hunters.”

For me, the book opened up a whole landscape of recent hunting literature. One essay, for instance—about hunting during a brutally cold winter on the northern Great Plains when deer died of malnourishment and froze solid—had been penned by women’s studies professor Mary Zeiss Stange. The essay led me to Stange’s intriguingly titled book,
Woman the Hunter
.