Month: April 2010

April 30, 2010

‘I could definitely kill one of those’

The timing was dead-on.

Just as I walked past the table, the woman said, “My rule is, ‘I’ll only eat it if I could kill it.’ And I could definitely kill one of those.”

I left the restaurant chuckling. I was thinking how the line echoed one of my reasons for taking up hunting: to face the killing of the fellow vertebrates I had begun eating after a decade of abstention. There would, I felt, be a lesson in that confrontation.

But the line also reminded me how complex our eating is.

As a vegan, my rule had been like hers. I was unwilling to kill animals or keep them penned up—or to have someone else do the killing or penning for me—so I didn’t eat their flesh or even their eggs or milk. I was okay with the killing of vegetables, grains, and legumes. Whether I grew it myself or bought it, the question seemed simple: Was I willing to behead broccoli?

Eventually, though, I came to the uncomfortable realization that harvesting individual plants was not all it took to put vegetarian meals on my plate.

Was I willing to remove wild plants (trees, grasses, and wildflowers) from a given area, to make room for domesticated plants? Was I willing to evict the wild mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians who lived there?

Was I willing to keep marauding insects and herbivores at bay? If deterrents and repellents didn’t work—if fences were breached or unaffordable—was I willing to kill beetles, woodchucks, and deer so I could eat?

If not, was I willing to do all of the above by proxy, knowing someone else had done it for me?

Faced with these questions, I had to (A) stop eating, (B) stick my head back in the sand, or (C) make peace with a far more complex picture of what it meant to be alive. I opted for C.

Yet I do still find value in posing the woman’s simpler question, especially when I’m about to eat flesh: Could I kill one of those?

And I still find myself wishing I had seen what was on her plate.

April 23, 2010

A Mindful Carnivore: Same blog, new name

Dear Readers:

You’ve been very tolerant.

For months now—in email subscriptions, in RSS readers, and on my website—I have been subjecting you to the unpalatable blandness of the blog title People. Animals. Nature. Yet there has been nary a peep of protest.

The affront to your good taste is, I hope, at an end.

Next time you visit my site, you’ll see the new title, A Mindful Carnivore. Within a few days, that title will be showing up in the email and RSS feeds, too. I think the transition will be smooth. If you run across any glitches, please do let me know. (If I’m on your blogroll and it doesn’t update when my RSS feed does, I’d sure appreciate it if you could refresh the listing.)

Don’t worry: I won’t be writing only about eating meat.

The new title aims to capture the essence of the odd perspective that I, a vegan-turned-hunter, bring to the topics of…er, well…people, animals, and nature. It comes from the current working title of a writing project I’m working on. It’s in the early stages yet, but will—one of these days—be my first book.

A number of people, including my wonderful wife Catherine and several enthusiastic friends, were of huge help in getting me as far as including “carnivore” in the working title. (Our collective brainstorming generated a few memorable ideas, including From Tofu to Tenderloins and The Vegetarian’s Guide to Successful Deer Hunting. Titles including “omnivore” were contenders, too, but I think a sort-of-famous book used that recently.)

It took the sharp eye of Laurie Abkemeier, the fantastic book agent I’m working with, to pick the word “mindful” out of my early scrawlings and combine it with “carnivore.”

Next up in the blog, thoughts on something I overheard in a restaurant: “My rule is, ‘I’ll only eat it if I could kill it.’ And I could definitely kill one of those.”

April 16, 2010

Meditation with meat and knife

My fingers slide under the muscle, separating it from the layer below. My knife snips tendons and traces the curvature of bone.

I add the slab of venison to one of the 13×9 pans on the kitchen counter.

Hours ago, this leg was a deer. In the early morning light, the animal was moving somewhere in the cool, damp forest. Then pausing to listen and test the breeze. Then walking or trotting on again, toward the gentle slope where I sat waiting among the hemlocks.

Much of my time in the woods is quiet, contemplative. Afternoons spent scouting in late summer and early fall, looking for tracks and other sign. Hours, days, or entire seasons spent listening and watching, seeing no deer.

If I get the chance for a clean shot, the killing is over in a flash.

When I crouch beside the fallen animal and whisper thanks, I am both grateful and unsettled. There in the woods, though, there is work to be done—gutting the deer and dragging the body home.

It’s at the kitchen counter that I make my peace with the killing. There, with a leg on the cutting board, contemplation returns. Separating flesh from bone, I marvel at the power these muscles held, to launch the buck in great leaps.

There is a quiet rhythm to the task, like canning, my wife Cath suggests: a small repetitive act done by these hands, a pattern within the larger rhythmic patterns of the seasons, the patterns of all things that live and eat and die and feed one another.

Inexperienced as I am, it takes me a long while to get from skinning the animal to grinding the last pounds of burger. Someday, caught between my slowness and my schedule, I may have to pay a local butcher to do the work. But not soon, I hope.

Meditation with meat and knife

My fingers slide under the muscle, separating it from the layer below. My knife snips tendons and traces the curvature of bone.

I add the slab of venison to one of the 13×9 pans on the kitchen counter.

If I get the chance for a clean shot, the killing is over in a flash.

When I crouch beside the fallen animal and whisper my thanks, I am both grateful and unsettled. There in the woods, though, there is work to be done—gutting the deer and dragging the body from the woods.

Inexperienced as I am, it takes me a long while to get from skinning the animal to grinding the last pounds of burger. Someday, caught between my slowness and my schedule, I’ll have to pay a local butcher to do the work. But not soon, I hope.

April 9, 2010

Asphalt and wildness

What was that just ahead, in that puddle?

Walking up the paved path, I looked hard, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. It had been raining hard for two days, and gusty. Anything light enough to be caught by the wind could have blown about and settled here. A couple of plastic bags, perhaps.

On a pond, I would have recognized the shapes and colors. Here, though, in just a few inches of water, at the intersection of heavily traveled asphalt footpaths on a university campus?

Ducks. A pair of mallards, heads tucked under wings.

I walked past, went thirty yards, then came back. A few feet away, I squatted down to look more closely. Noticing me, the ducks lifted their heads and quacked. As soon as I stood and moved off a few paces, they settled back into their afternoon nap.

Something about the scene felt strange.

In part, it was aesthetic prejudice, the same kind of distaste I feel when I hear of bears habituated to pawing their way through landfills. In my imagination, wild ducks paddle along river banks and dabble among cattails. They don’t belong in asphalt-bordered puddles.

But something else bothered me, too. The mallards were completely unconcerned by the proximity of humans. Like zoo animals, they seemed to have lost their wildness.

What do we mean, though, when we say that creatures are “wild?”

Do we mean that they are wary of humans? That they see us as potential predators? Or, if large and carnivorous, as potential prey? Might there be a better, less anthropocentric, measure?

Are creatures who spend their lives in environments of human artifice—and who become accustomed to us in the process—still “wild?”

I wonder whether animals can feel it when their wildness slips away. I wonder whether they sense, as some humans do, that it leaves in its wake a forgetfulness—about who we are and where we belong.

And I wonder if wildness is ever truly driven out of any of us, or if it merely slumbers.

April 1, 2010

Springtime and a hunter’s debts

The snow is almost gone from our yard already. Here, facing northwest across the Winooski Valley, an April without white stuff on the ground is a rare gift.

Soon, crocuses will be in bloom. We’ll be planting peas and salad greens. And the world will be buzzing with life.

The spring peepers, returned from the mud, will begin their chirping chorus in the old beaver pond near our house. The ruffed grouse who have spent the winter feeding on aspen buds and eluding raptors will be drumming, mating, and laying eggs. And the largest of our forest-dwelling neighbors will be on the move.

Every spring, we find moose tracks by the pond. The great, dark animals come down from the hills, drawn to wetlands where they—still wearing thick winter coats—can find relief from the heat. The thermometer is supposed to hit 75 this weekend. With no leaves on the trees yet, shade can only be found among the conifers.

If we’re lucky, we find bear tracks, too. Emerging from hibernation, they’re on the lookout for food. Time for us to take the birdfeeders down, lest we once again wake at midnight to the sounds of a bruin snuffling around on the back porch.

In this lush, bustling time of year, I take pleasure in seeing our wild neighbors and signs of their passage.

On seeing deer or deer tracks, I might think briefly of autumn, of the way dry, frosty leaves crunch under a whitetail’s hooves.

Mostly, though—as I did before my hunting days—I am just grateful to move among my fellow creatures, knowing that they are moving all around me. As I did before my hunting days, I feel indebted for the simple gift of their presence.

Bear-marked beech with backhoe, near a southern Vermont ski area

As I did before my hunting days, I sense the importance of protecting our neighbors’ homes—the highlands and the wetlands and the routes traveled by moose in between, the stands of beech where bears fatten themselves when the mast crop is good, the steep and rocky places where bobcats den—from greedy encroachment by too many of our homes and roads and economic enterprises.

Perhaps the only difference, now that I occasionally drag venison from these hills, is that I am indebted to these creatures and places in yet another way.