Truck (26 page)

The real changes are less about gear than land, which is being divided into smaller and smaller fractions and is less and less available for hunting. More and more hunting is being organized into a group or preserve-based pay-as-you-go situation. Some of this is driven by the desire for trophies, which permeates hunting top to bottom and leads to the deer herd being cultivated and manipulated to grow more and bigger antlers. I like a big rack as much as the next guy, but readily shoot any small buck that presents itself, and am thus razzed at fire department meetings by my friends who practice Quality Deer Management, whom the last time we discussed this generally agreed any set of horns wide enough to accommodate a case of beer is a keeper.

Those who cast aspersions sometimes portray the average hunter as a beer-swilling lout incapable of ambulating more than five feet without the aid of a four-wheel-drive ATV and a packet of Slim Jims, to which I say, I dare you to go down to the bar and say that. Of course you will find fellows in blaze orange who have confused their rifles with their penises (and what fun to poll their wives and lovers for the purposes of drafting a list titled Top Ten Reasons the Metaphor Is Inapt, but let's stay on track). You shall know them by their bumper stickers, which run along the line of
HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUTPILE
or
I LIKE LIPSTICK ON MY DIPSTICK
. While graceless, neither sentiment is ipso facto impeachable. I find it helps to remember sometimes the First Amendment has a beer belly.

It is easy here to veer off into a defense of hunting and simultaneously bemoan its current state, with its focus on trophies and management and gear and soft, lazy boys, but that is not so much an issue of hunting as it is the ongoing issue of the commodification and overimprovement of simply everything. What I am doing this November is a little bit all of the above. But it is also the most consistent form of local food-gathering in which I have ever participated. I have gardened off and on, I have spent the standard amounts to have animals killed and packaged by proxy, but
for the past twenty-six Novembers I have gone into the same patch of woods with a gun and tried to kill a deer so I could eat it.

 

I have taken up a gun with an eye toward my own security only once. Wakened at 3
A.M.
by the sound of someone scuffling with the side door to my garage, I grabbed the shotgun, rolled off the mattress, and was shortly at the screen window that overlooks the space between the house and the garage. I got there just in time to see two skulkers enter and pull the door shut behind them. It was a still night. Even with the door closed I could hear their feet shuffling, and I heard one of them say, “I know there's gas cans in here.”

They were in for a tough go. At the time my garage was a combination storage locker, dumpster, and recycling repository. Navigation was difficult in the most favorable circumstances

“I know it's in here,” I heard one of them say. “I seen him carry it in.” Then I heard a faint scratching, followed by two weakly bobbing lights through the garage window. It took a second, then it registered: I was being robbed by thieves using cigarette lighters to locate cans of gasoline.

You'd love to see how this would play out, but with respect to my insurance agent and the rest of the fire department, who need their sleep, I decided to put a stop to it. In my best fake manly bellow I hollered, “You boys better HIT THE ROAD!”

The garage went dark. Then I heard muttering.

“Whuwazzat?!?”

“I dunno.”

“I thought somebody yelled.”

“I think it was a security system.” Now there's a concept. A slantways garage filled with junk, protected by a security system that heckles you.

“No, I thought I heard somebody yell.”

There was a stretch of quiet. Then out of the darkness, the same voice, directed against me: “FUUUCK YOU!”

You'll hear that around here after bar time. But what followed knocked me sideways. I heard the other guy speak, quietly but urgently.

“Hey! What the hell! You can't talk to people that way!”

“What?”

“You can't just yell at people like that!”

“Whuhh…”

“He might of let us have some, but you can't just holler at people like that.”

By this time I had realized they had no idea where I was, so I just stood there silent. Shortly they emerged and made the slow journey out my driveway, up the sidewalk, and started across Main Street over by the Sunshine Café. Slow, because every four feet the thief whose sensitivities had been offended would get in front of his partner, block his progress, and lecture him on civil discourse. They'd been drinking, sure, but the sincerity was touching. The last I saw them, they were in the middle of Main Street in the ambient yellow of the streetlight, and the impolitic thief was saying, “I
know,
man. I'm
sorry,
man.”

I leaned the shotgun against the wall and went back to bed. I had completely forgotten to remove the trigger lock.

 

The night before the season opener, I am trying to beat a magazine deadline and wind up writing until midnight. When the alarm rings at 5:30
A.M.
this morning, my head hurts, but I drag myself out of bed. Lately it's been snowless but cold, so I layer on my thermals and go downstairs to put the kettle on. I have begun a tradition of taking a thermos of green ginger tea to the stand, if only because I like its fragrance against a clean palate of cold air. This tradition was leaked to the fire department by, I think, one of my brothers and I have suffered because of it.

I quit trying to remember everything years ago and have written up a little list, which I store right in the box with my hunting gear, so everything is laid out and ready to go. Shells, buck scent, knife, paper toweling, notepad and pens, binoculars, hand warmers (you expected hardiness from a guy who drinks ginger tea?), fire department pager and radio (deer season is not the best time for little Susie to light the drapes), trail mix, granola bar, miniature flashlight. When the water boils and the tea
is made, I finish dressing: blaze orange bibs, jacket, and hat. Big boots. My rifle is in its case by the door, and I grab it as I leave.

It's a six-mile drive to my father's farm, and all along the way I see kitchen lights on and headlights moving across fields. I drive to my spot and set out from the car. I have to hike across most of a wooded forty, but I am on a logging trail and I walk with the flashlight wedged in my hatband. Among other things, I want to make it clear to anyone who might be out here that I am a human.

The stand is shortly in view, gray in the shifting beam of the flashlight. It's basically a wooden box on stilts. No roof or heater, but walls to keep the wind out, cut to a length where I can sit in a collapsible camping chair and see over. I came out yesterday afternoon and planted the chair and a sleeping bag. I climb the ladder, settle in the chair, arrange my things, and drape the sleeping bag over my lap and legs. When I turn off the flashlight, it is still dark. I can hear the muffled rise and fall of motors in the distance, and the flatulence of ATVs, and now and then through a thin spot in the trees, a set of headlights rounding a corner and moving up a dirt road. Beyond that, there isn't much, and this time of morning the wind rarely stirs. Behind me, to the east, the sky is easing up some gray. The birch and popple trunks are just beginning to emerge as white strips against the black. Things are slowly taking on dimension. I shrug a little deeper into the chair and pull the sleeping bag tighter around my waist.

When I wake up it is overcast but we are in the full light of day, definitely well past sunrise. I check my cell phone clock. 7:30
A.M.
I've been asleep over an hour. So much for the wily stalker. I unscrew the thermos cap and tip it full of tea. The wind has yet to move, and the steam rises straight to my nose, fragrant with the ginger. I wait a moment for the tea to cool, take a sip, and then set the cap carefully on the wooden floor. When I bring my head back up, a small buck has appeared on the logging trail standing broadside. He is looking directly at me. If I move he'll bolt, so I freeze. He watches me for a while, then turns his head and looks the other direction, and I raise my rifle and fire. He runs toward me but I can see he is shot through the chest and I do not shoot again. He stops, falls, heaves a breath, and is dead.

 

Back in 1988, when I was first fiddling around with the idea of writing for magazines, I sent a query letter to several hunting magazines proposing that I write an article sharing my tips for a successful crow hunt. I based my knowledge on a sum total of maybe three crow-hunting expeditions with my friend Max Jabowski. His father taught him how to call a crow, and Max taught me. I can still do it. Using nothing but my hand and mouth, I can hide in a stand of popples and have the air swirling with big black birds in under five minutes. I still call crows sometimes when I am out and about in the spring, but I stopped killing them in the early 1990s when I realized it was shamefully pointless and possibly sacrilegious. But what really creeps me out about the rough draft of that proposed article in 1988 (I keep
everything
and am eminently unelectable) is this line: “…two hours later we had bagged several crows, with no plans to stop.”

Bagged
. What a puny little swagger.

I read that line today and am stricken with the usual chronological schizophrenia. Who was this twerp? In scanning the text (Title: “Run'n'Gun for Crows”—pardon me while I seal this airsickness bag), I see we were bombing around in the International, so certain threads remain. But when I look at that little deer lying there now,
bagged
is the not the term that comes to mind. As long as you hunt and eat red meat, you will never fully evolve, but I have gotten beyond the insulting claptrap of
bagged
.

Killed. Period. Because I want to eat it. Because this is where the tender stuff in the pan—the inch-thick chop banked with garlic, brushed with soy, garnished with fresh-diced chives, and done just to pink—comes from. Neither poetics nor bravado serves to respect the deer that is done running.

 

After a decent interval—again, based not some mystical tradition, but on the fact that where there is one buck there are often others, and furthermore I have a doe permit yet to fill—I climb down from the stand to tag and gut the deer. The registration tag is attached to a larger numbered
tag we are required to post on our backs like a license plate for humans. The registration tag tears free along a perforation, and then you have to note the date and time of kill by piercing the proper numbers with the tip of your hunting knife, an exercise that I assume is a leading cause of deer hunter injuries. After further perforating the tag to indicate sex and size, I tie the tag to one of the buck's antlers, then flip him to his back and open his belly. Everyone has their own process here, but the bottom line is, when you are up to your elbows in deer guts, you are shopping for groceries without equivocation. You also cannot help but notice the similarities of the deer's organs to your own, nor is it possible to pass the back of your hand over the jagged edges of a shattered rib without clearly understanding the power of your tools and the violence of your act. It isn't that we are ignorant of what we are doing out here. Sometimes when I hear parlor talk against hunting and guns it isn't the reasoning I dispute as much as the tone. Sometimes I get the feeling someone is trying to give the savages a little religion.

 

And now I am back in the stand, where I will remain all day with the dead buck at the edge of my vision. It is a good thing in any circumstance, I think, to sit in one place for the duration of the time it takes the sun to cross the sky. You begin to attune yourself. The early stillness is my favorite. Invariably, though, the air begins to shift, and then the noise begins to build. Just now I hear the sound of a squirrel's claw on bark. Then the spiking call of a woodpecker, followed by the soft tappety-rap of pecking. Even with the constant hiss of tinnitus, my ears still work pretty well, and I am listening for the crack of a twig or papery leaf crumple that will tell me a deer is approaching. The distinctions are something you pick up over time. A twig broken high up—by a squirrel, or the wind—has a resonance, whereas the crack of a twig broken against the ground by the tread of a hoof is slightly dampened. A deer approaching through oak leaves tends to generate a steady
swish, swish, swish
. A squirrel working in the same leaves can fool you by hopping to the same rhythm, but when they are foraging, they create a fluffier sound, more like a finger flicking around a loose pile of leaves. Think of the sound of someone looking for the last raisin in the bran flakes.

Visually, these snowless gray days are the least desirable for spotting deer. Everything is tan, brown, gray, or off-white. The young maples have tones of pale lichen green, but beyond that and the needles of the Norway and white pines, that's pretty much it for color. Once on a day like this I did spot a weasel, all white for winter but betrayed in his ermine by all the brown around him. You have never seen a leaner machine. He did not scamper, he poured himself across the ground and over logs like mercury. For ten minutes, he appeared, disappeared, and reappeared. When I finally got the binoculars on him, he had a mouse in his mouth, which made me feel a little better about my hunting.

Some days the sun is bright, which can help or hurt depending on its angle and the cover it strikes. Much of the underbrush around my stand is clad in slick bark, and when the sun hits it from behind you it sets up a myriad of glistening cobwebs, and where you could see fifty yards in the overcast, you can't see twenty. But I once shot a buck that came through that same underbrush in sun of exactly that sort because the light glanced off his horns in a way that didn't match the other light. That's what you're looking for on any sort of day. A line or a movement or a shape that doesn't fit the pattern. Something going lateral when everything else is still or bobbing. Of course when you have the backdrop of snow, you can spot things at ten times the distance.