Authors: Dan Baum
It’s one thing to handle guns and shoot them at paper targets. It’s another to blow a ragged, bloody hole through a large warm-blooded animal. A week later, in my capacity as a police reporter, I sat in on an
autopsy and was dumbstruck at how similar we are, internally, to a white-tailed deer: same pink-and-purple organs, same striated meat. Shooting that deer changed my relationship to guns. I’d killed something with a firearm, which both connected me to guns’ history as tools and made me forever a dealer in gun death. I felt oddly freed to start buying them and discovered that I liked the ones from the early twentieth century. I found a 1918 British Webley revolver as a companion piece to my big Enfield, a 1942 Victory Model Smith & Wesson .38, and a Marlin pump-action shotgun from the Pinkerton strikebreaker era. Like a dope, I hung them on the wall of my Atlanta cottage, envisioning myself as the great outdoorsman, and was promptly burgled. For months, I imagined arriving at a homicide, reporter’s notebook in hand, to peer over a detective’s shoulder and find my Webley lying in a pool of blood.
It was around this time that I fell in love with Margaret, who was also a reporter at the paper. She’d spent her childhood summers hiking the Sierras from a phoneless, unelectrified family cabin three miles from the nearest road, so her appetite for the woods was a given. I worried that my gun thing might be a problem for someone reared by Berkeley-educated Unitarian academics who worshiped at the altar of logic and reason. But I was encouraged when, on a hike, I pointed out a deer about the size of the one I’d shot, and she said, “Yum!”
Margaret was not a girly girl. The second of four children, she’d spent her childhood trying to keep up with a big brother. It was encoded in her DNA: If the boys were doing it, she had to do it. On a reporting trip to southern Georgia, I wandered into a pawnshop looking for old, cheap guns, as usual, and found on the rack a beat-up .30-30 Winchester, the basic cowboy saddle rifle, for $140. Margaret had been a horse-crazy kid and had learned lots of cowboy songs on the guitar during her off-the-grid summers. I wondered if a gift of weaponry too early in the relationship might queer it, but the Winchester’s size and history seemed perfect.
“I have something for you,” I told her that evening, and gingerly placed the rifle in her hands. “Cool!” she said, working the lever—
click-clack—
and sighting down the barrel. When I told her that she could learn to use it and come along hunting with me and the rednecks, whatever anti-gun instincts had been imprinted on her yielded to the need to keep up with the boys. We went to a range, and although the rifle’s concussion made her burst into tears after the third shot (“I’m okay, I’m okay”), she put ten bullets through a five-inch paper plate at a hundred yards.
She wondered, as I had, whether she could bring herself to shoot a
deer. “If, at the moment, you don’t want to,” I said, “don’t. This isn’t for everybody.” All the lead-up, though—packing gear, studying maps, learning regulations—she enjoyed. She drank bourbon with the rebs in hunting camp and rose the next morning in the dark without complaint. We trooped farther into the woods this time, to get away from the gunfire, and found a couple of spots along a narrow creek. It was a cold morning; I kept my ungloved hands away from the rifle’s metal parts as I waited for dawn. I blew on my fingers to keep them warm and ready, until finally, orange sunlight caught the frosted tips of the tall grass.
Gunshot. Gunshot
. I took off running. As I approached, Margaret called through the forest, with an admirable lack of euphemism, “I killed a deer.”
She hadn’t—yet. The deer, which lay about fifty yards from where she had hidden, raised its head and looked at her. Beyond, frozen in wonder, stood the deer’s fawn. For the first time, Margaret was upended. “Which do I shoot?” she asked, her voice trembling.
“Finish the one you shot,” I said, and lifted my rifle to shoot the fawn, which to my great relief bounded off into a motherless future. Hurrying, Margaret fired. Her deer kicked around in the leaves and sat back up. I aimed at the deer’s head, but Margaret said, “Let me.” She stepped in closer, held her rifle out in front of her with two hands like a pistol, looked the deer right in the eye, and fired again. The deer went over and didn’t move.
“Whew,” Margaret said, panting clouds of steam, openmouthed and wide-eyed. We stood for a long moment saying nothing, then she sighed, jacked the remaining shell from her rifle, knelt beside the deer, and drew her knife. She ran her hand along the doe’s flank and said, “Soft.” She lifted its hind leg to roll it onto its back and began the incision. “Look,” she said, “she’s lactating.”
Margaret worked with single-minded concentration, taking as long to gut her dead doe as it would have taken to perform a heart transplant on a live one. With her hands deep in the steaming cavity, she asked questions about the butchering. But when I moved to help, she said, “I’ll do it. It’s kind of nice. She’s warm inside.”
She’d had the same reaction I’d had on my first hunt. After she’d waited, listened, and watched, unmoving forever in the cold, something primal had taken over when the prey stepped into view. For better or worse, we of the twenty-first century are held to a much narrower range of animal emotion than our forebears. Few of our stresses involve death. When you shoot a mammal as big as you are and bury your hands in its
hot viscera, your spiritual-emotional seismograph swings like crazy: raw, chest-beating triumph, horror, gratitude, pride, shame … It is a brief and tiny taste of what it means to be a link on the food chain. A mammal’s open eyes going cloudy as the life drains out, piles of steaming entrails on golden autumn leaves: Hunting is in a different category from tennis or windsurfing—or even other gun sports. You know you’re really into it when you walk up on your dead animal and your stomach rumbles.
Thus did my childhood fascination with guns become my adult fascination with guns. I didn’t yet understand the many ways that hunting—and the guns essential to the enterprise—moved other people. But for me, guns had become entangled with death and the outdoors and the woman I eventually married.
Mostly, I’ve hunted with a guy who doesn’t care much for guns at all. Craig Menteer was raised in the dark woods of Washington State by a logger father so strong, stocky, taciturn, and stubborn that behind his back his stepsons called him “the Stump.” He taught them everything there is to know about the woods—particularly how hard a man has to work to make them mean anything. Hunting trips with the Stump were businesslike affairs. The purpose was to gather meat, not clown around, drink, or show off. It wasn’t about the guns, either; it was about the woods—understanding them well enough to navigate without getting lost, finding animals, surviving the unexpected, taking home the bounty. Craig also earned an Eagle Scout badge, expanding his familiarity with ropes and tools and the ways of Northwestern nature.
Hunters are warned never to take loaded firearms in a car, but some are so familiar with their equipment—and so sure of their own abilities—that they write their own rules. One night on the way home, with Craig behind the wheel and his brother in back, the Stump sat up front, unloading a lever-action .348 Winchester, a giant of a gun popular in Alaska for killing bears. As he worked the lever to jack the shells free, his finger touched the trigger. The blast, encased in the car, was so loud that Craig’s ears swallowed it as a thick, high-pitched silence. By luck, the bullet missed Dad’s foot, the steering apparatus, and the brake lines, making a harmless hole in the floorboard. The car filled with the smell of burned cordite and the appalling realization that the Stump had screwed up. Nobody yelled,
though, and nobody apologized. Craig muttered, “It’s okay. It didn’t hit the tire.” They drove on in silence and never discussed it again.
By the time I started hunting with Craig in Montana in the early 1990s, he was a carpenter and performance artist, gray-haired, broad-chested, and strong as Samson. He was more at home in the woods than anyone I’d ever known, with a natural command of their rich lexicon. We’d “work a drainage” to “jump up” an elk. He’d have me sit by a “swale,” stake out a “coulee,” or climb to a “park.” We’d separate for the morning, and when we met up, he’d draw in the dirt a map of everyplace he’d been. Being an Eagle Scout, he built hunting camps that looked like illustrations from
Boy’s Life
—the tents squared, with drainage ditches cut around them, a neat fire ring with grill and coffeepot atop, ample firewood in stacks segregated by size, and a hatchet planted in a stump at the regulation 45-degree angle.
What impressed me most when I started hunting with Craig was the solemnity that attended the harvest. Montana’s hunting regulations were published in a thick booklet that divided the state into more than a hundred tiny hunting districts, each with its own fussy rules about species, sex, weapon, the permissibility of vehicles, day of month, time of day, and antler points. Forms had to be filled out and boxes checked. A tiny mistake could invalidate the application. Getting a deer tag was as complicated and tedious as doing taxes, but the process imparted a message: Deer were a precious resource, to be managed with care.
Craig extended the ethic into the field. He taught me to stalk on tiptoe, “glass” animals through binoculars for their legal characteristics before placing a shot, and butcher with the exactitude of a surgeon so as not to waste a mouthful of meat. The hip thing to do in those days was to rub a little tobacco on the dead animal’s fur to thank its spirit for the offering. The whole exercise was wrapped in reverence.
For all of his love of hunting, Craig’s rifle was the most woebegone piece of shooting equipment I’d ever seen. It was an old bolt-action Savage .30-30, a low-end gun to begin with, and in miserable shape. A hose clamp held the rear sight to the barrel. The olive-green cloth strap of a Boy Scout canteen was tied on as a sling. He kept it clean and oiled, being an Eagle Scout, but he cared little for it.
He didn’t shoot it much, either. We’d go to the range before the season began, and he’d bang away a few times to make sure it was sighted in properly, but I never knew him to shoot for fun. He didn’t troll pawnshops
with me in search of old guns. During hunting season, he rarely shot. Many years, he bagged no deer at all. He never seemed to care, though. What he liked was hunting—reading the woods, searching for signs, sensing where the animals might be feeding by how the snow fell and the wind blew, cooking and sleeping among the trees. When the season ended, he cleaned and oiled his rifle, put it in the basement, and didn’t think about it again until the following October. When I finally persuaded him to buy a new rifle, he made an odd choice: a lever-action .444 Marlin that shot a monstrous straight-walled, blunt-nosed cartridge. It was designed to hunt bear in dense woods, not deer in the kinds of fields and open forest where we hunted. Guns move people in mysterious ways. The Marlin was heavy, expensive to shoot, and terrible beyond a hundred yards. It did, however, recall the Stump’s big lever-action .348.
Craig was on my mind as I drove back to Boulder after the Arizona machine-gun shoot. Margaret and I were planning to canoe Utah’s Green River with Craig and his wife, Laura, in a few weeks, and I looked forward to being in a new kind of wilderness with the old Eagle Scout.
I tried telling friends in Boulder about the Wikieup machine-gun shoot, but few of them could get past their horror that people were allowed to own machine guns. I also wrote an article about it for
Men’s Journal
, one of the magazines owned by
Rolling Stone
publisher Jann Wenner, and for the first time in my twenty-five-year career had an article killed for explicitly political reasons. The editor had quibbles with the piece as editors always do, but wouldn’t give me the chance to fix them. “I can’t even show this to Jann,” said the editor. “It’s not anti-gun enough.”
Not anti-gun
enough?
Machine gunners were a colorful male subculture that did nobody any harm. Why did an article about them have to be
anti
at all? I tried explaining to my editor that gun owners felt vilified by the media and that this was a good opportunity for
Men’s Journal
not only to run a story appealingly full of bang-bang and idiosyncratic characters but also to buy some goodwill from the 40 percent of American households that owned guns. He wouldn’t budge. Jann had his position on gun stories, he explained. Only one point of view was welcome.
I broke my “concealed means
concealed
” rule only once, and was instantly sorry. A few days after returning from Arizona, I went to hear a lecture at Naropa University, the Buddhist college in Boulder. Naturally, I
had my gun under my jacket, and I later made the mistake of mentioning that to a friend. He went white with rage. “You wore a
gun
into a peace-building institution?” I might as well have told a Hasid that I’d smuggled a crucifix into his shul. Our relationship was strained for months.
I was looking forward to taking a break from the gun; I wasn’t planning to bring it on the canoe trip with Margaret, Laura, and Craig. Nor were we planning to take Rosa. She was deep in the swale of high school’s junior year and the dreary approach of college application essays. Also, she had recently gotten her driver’s license and was eager for a vacation from parental supervision. She was a responsible kid; we had no reason not to trust her. After heaping upon her the obligatory mountain of rules and admonitions, we kissed her on the forehead and ditched her for the desert.
The Green River was a thick chocolate brown, silty with winter runoff. The stretch we were floating had no rapids, and we could paddle or not as we saw fit. We spent many hours holding the canoes together by the gunwales, pinwheeling gently downriver, the scenery gliding past. No e-mail, no cell phones, no automobiles … nothing but river, sky, and the soughing of the breeze. By the middle of the third day we were floating through a Road Runner cartoon; walls of red rock three hundred feet high towered over us like great slabs of raw beef. We paddled close alongside and ran our fingers over their smooth scarlet faces, and when ravens flew by, the sound of their wings echoed off the rock like vorpal blades going
snicker-snack
.