The Mindful Carnivore (25 page)

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, hunting 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.

As Boglioli notes, this was precisely the kind of collapse biologists had predicted. Many hunters, however, refused to believe that overpopulation and resulting habitat decline were at the root of the problem. Instead, they pointed to the killing of does, which they had opposed all along. For the next twenty years, antlerless seasons were closed and reopened. The buck kill ticked up and down, but never rebounded to anything like the glory days of earlier decades. In 1991, rifle hunting of does was prohibited altogether.

Over the years, opposition to antlerless seasons has declined, as younger generations of Vermont hunters accept the scientific evidence concerning the importance of habitat health. Most hunters support the current regulations: Antlerless deer can be taken during archery season. They can also be taken during the nine-day December muzzleloader season, by special permits issued in varying numbers around the state, depending on where biologists see a need.

Reflecting on the passionate intensity of these historical and ongoing debates, I wonder: Are the arguments and resulting regulations rooted only in hunters’ and biologists’ assessments of various approaches to deer management? Or are they also rooted further back, in the sporting codes of old? In the nineteenth century, reports historian Louis Warren, white middle- and upperclass American men’s preoccupation with their own masculinity was frequently expressed in terms of hunting. As sport hunters lobbied for wildlife conservation, they also lobbied for hunting regulations that mirrored their particular codes for masculine behavior. In Warren’s words, “How one hunted and what one killed came to define what kind of man one was.” Hunting big, antlered bucks was manly. Hunting does and fawns was not.

Once, as I read down a roster of deer reported at a local checkin station during archery season—4-point buck, 135 pounds; doe, 108 pounds; 7-point buck, 172 pounds; doe, 94 pounds—I came to several entries without a field-dressed weight listed, each noted simply as “BB” or “FF.” The first, I figured, stood for “button buck,” meaning a male fawn with tiny “button” nubs instead of antlers. But the second? I asked the guy behind the counter.

“Fuzzy-faced fawn,” he said. “Female.”

Ah, yes,
I thought,
the fuzziness factor: the undeniably cute, foreshortened features of young mammals. Button Bambi and Fuzzy Faline.

He explained that they didn’t bother to weigh fawns, male or female. Unlike the biologists who attended major check-in stations on opening weekend of rifle season, the staff members at this sporting-goods shop weren’t gathering detailed data. So why embarrass the hunter?

What strange and fickle predators we modern humans are. If a hungry cougar had been in my place, perched in that maple as doe and fawn passed below, it would not have hesitated. The cat might have pounced on the larger, meatier doe. Or, like the wolves that killed the elk calf as Ted Kerasote watched, it might have gone for the easiest prey: the fawn.

Whichever animal the cougar pounced on, the cat would not have invoked some moral calculus, giving special consideration to the relationship between doe and fawn. Nor, I thought, would a cat have shared my impulse three months earlier, when another whitetail went down.

It had been a Saturday evening in mid-July. I was out for a walk, with the thick, drizzly remnants of a hurricane blowing overhead, bringing an early dusk and filling the woods with dripping, rustling noises. I paused on the trail, sensing something. What was that, standing there under the softwoods? Gradually, I made out the form of a doe, rusty brown in her sleek summer coat. A moment later, she leapt across the trail and disappeared.

Movement caught my eye, though, in the ferns below the trail. A fawn? I moved closer. The doe who had just leapt across in front of me now lay on the ground, thrashing. I had no idea what had just happened, but I felt certain that she was done for. If I’d had a gun with me, mercy might have trumped law.

I hurried the fifteen minutes back to the house, and an hour later, a game warden and I were driving down the rail-bed trail in his truck. He suspected that the doe might be long gone, having only pinched a nerve or temporarily subluxated a joint, but he thought it was worth looking.

We reached the spot at full dark. Our flashlights showed the place where she had been and the wide swath of matted ferns where she had dragged herself downhill. She had gone just thirty yards. The warden drew his pistol, covered his ears as well as he could with one hand and a hunched-up shoulder, and did the only humane thing. Then a second shot, just to be sure.

I watched her body twitch. When she was still, the warden pointed out that her legs looked fine. Then he felt along her back and found the spot where her spine had snapped. Leaning over, I felt it, too: under the smooth hair, a soft distortion in the regular rhythm of her vertebrae. The warden had heard of this happening, but had never seen it before. We wondered aloud: Did she land wrong, the force of impact traveling through her body just so? Or had she been thrown in midleap by a piece of the rusty, broken telegraph line that ran along that stretch of rail bed, sometimes hanging in trees, sometimes buried, sometimes looping up to catch unwary feet? And how long would she have lingered, before being finished off by coyotes or dying of thirst?