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There are a million things I could
be doing this weekend--moldy boots and saddles wait in a tack room
that has needed cleaning far too long. My desk is piled high with
books, papers and an elk bugling video I need to watch. And I won't
bother to describe the kitchen.
Sorry, but I'd rather be
hunting.
From the end of deer season on
January 1 to the time when I start to scout for wild turkeys is a
downhill two months. Semi-hibernating, I handle it. But from turkey
season's end to opening day of early primitive weapons season, it's a
long haul.
At the end of turkey season, I'm
parachuted into a hot southern summer, pitched into the gigantic
terrarium that is South Carolina for the next five months. I begin
to have self-doubts about my hunting.
It used to be just the obsession of
it. People who don't have any form of addiction--people like my
good, sweet, tolerant husband--don't understand what it is like,
period.
To be unable to stop. To be unable
to get enough. To come home cursing the cold or cursing not seeing
deer or cursing the bolts on the treestand. To swear I'll never,
ever do it again. And the next morning finds me sipping coffee in a
dark vehicle while double-checking the contents of my orange fleece
daypack.
This is addiction, pure and simple,
as bad as alcoholism, workaholism or being a slave to narcotics. We
deny ourselves, our jobs, spouses and children. I find myself
fighting the helplessness of this hunting addiction, of not being
able to tear myself away from it.
Because I am a veterinarian I have
been responsible for the deaths of maybe a thousand animals by
euthanasia. Sometimes humane, sometimes selfish, it's a grisly
necessity I'm not exploring today. I've formed calluses to protect
me from its reality. But after so many years and so many pets, I
question my role as death's helper.
Some cumulative guilt must be
working into my psyche, adding all the dogs and cats and horses to
all the wild turkeys and whitetails. I find the concept of the
deaths of so many animals staggering.
Last week, I struck and killed a
bird that flitted across the road from a hedgerow dotted with pink
wild roses. A songbird is so small that I did not feel or hear the
impact, yet a glance in the rearview mirror told me I'd connected
with the bird.
How many millions of times this must
happen every day! Yet the sadness I felt for that one tiny life is
still with me. How is it possible that this creature was alive,
self-propelled one minute and dead before hitting the pavement less
than a second later, crumpled heap of molecules without that spark we
call life?
Lately, I find myself questioning
the ownership of animals. Is it wrong to keep animals as pets? For
food? For captive breeding of endangered species? For research that
makes the world a better place? For the pleasure they bring
us?
Of course not. But I reserve the
right to feel sad for them.
Native Americans considered many
wildlife species brothers or even gods. There was worshipful
utilization of these animals. I fill the freezer with venison each
year. Imagine if we had to subsist on what we could kill day to day,
without the benefit of modern methods of food preservation. We'd
pray to them, too.
When I make a kill now--for that is
what it is, killing--I begin with jubilance. I holler to the trees
and sky, rear back and whoop like an Indian. Then, I bury my face in
the hair of this object before me, taking in the wild scent it has,
touching blood on brown hair, staring at the dark and wiry mystery of
tarsal glands, the genitals that drive him, and the deep furrow of
the pre-orbital fold.
This hunting, this is not for food
or bragging rights or trophy antlers. This hunting is to possess in
one's hand the utterly wild spirit of a whitetail deer.
It is an essence that cannot be
bottled or sold in stores. You cannot go to church and pray for this
and receive it from above. You cannot steal it or borrow
it.
A whitetail buck is the most wild
thing I have seen on earth. He swaggers seemingly without fear but
his head jerks up at the slightest motion, and he is perpetually
poised for flight. To see even a basket-racked, year-and-a-half-old
buck plunging through an oak flat toward your buck lure or grunt tube
or chasing a doe is as close as we can ever come to possessing true
wildness.
He will not let you touch him in
life. A pen-raised deer is not the same, because if it's tame, you
are not communing with the wildness you seek.
And when you shoot him, when he lies
there with pupils dilated and the color of a peaceful green sea, he
is not wild. Hover over the body, and seek the essence of this
wildness even as it evaporates on the October breeze, for it is one
of the most rare things in the world.
You will re-live this over and over
in dreams and wakefulness: the buck plunging after his intended doe
with gutteral grunting, the haughty movement of his head as he
pauses, then the familiar smell of burned gunpowder. This is your
wildness, for if you have it in your memory, it is yours--nearly
close enough to touch, but never quite there for you.
In South Carolina, people don't ask
if you've gotten your buck yet. They say, "How many deer'd you get,
Jackie?" I say four, in a great year five. I masquerade under the
pretense of being a meat hunter, and stop hunting when the freezer is
full. I am fooling the public, and kidding myself.
Next, they will ask me if there was
any size to any of them. I'm always very modest, and rightly so.
I've never killed a big buck, what a trophy hunter would consider a
wall-hanger.
One day I let a big one go because
he was farther than I like to shoot, though well within range for
many hunters. Another one sneaked up on me and presented himself
broadside through some saplings, a makeable shot if my scope hadn't
fogged. In the mist he looked like a spirit buck, and I mostly
remember how very long his body was.
I'll work through this problem I am
having with animal's deaths, both at my job and in the woods. Some
say you can always hunt with a camera. Maybe I will try that some,
but those guns in the closet will be itching to get out.
I passed a persimmon tree along the
road the other day and thoughts of it laden with fruit stirred me.
When the first cooler nights of September herald the coming of the
season, I'll be carefully making my plans. I'll be chasing a
hologram that is wildness. After all, the big bucks I've seen were
just glimpses through the trees.
THE END
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