The Mindful Carnivore (21 page)

In preparation for that first autumn of deer hunting, I practiced with the recurve Jay had sent. It felt good to have a bow back in my hands after so many years, feeling string across gloved fingers and fingertips against jaw, looking down the shaft and visualizing the path the arrow would take toward my target: a fifty-pound birdseed sack stuffed with lightweight tarps I’d collected on a carpentry job, the kind used for shipping lumber. I felt confident out to twenty yards.

I practiced with my firearms as well. Mostly, I shot my .22—each round cost only a few cents. Less frequently, I practiced with my 6.5x55—cartridges were a dollar apiece. And I familiarized myself with the more involved procedure of pouring black powder into my caplock’s .54-caliber maw, ramming in a bullet or patched roundball, placing a percussion cap under the cocked hammer, and sending the projectile through a paper plate. Whether looking through the low-power scope on my Tikka or through the peep sight on my muzzleloader, I knew I could hit a deer’s vital organs at fifty yards or more. Rudimentary shooting skills, however, wouldn’t do any good unless I could first succeed in deer hunting’s most basic task: finding deer.

I began my quest close to home. Cath and I didn’t see white-tails there often—every few weeks we might catch a glimpse of a doe or two standing under the apple trees or crossing the driveway, and once in our six years there I had seen an antlered buck within fifty yards of our front porch, near the forest’s edge. But we often saw their tracks, and evidence of their passage through our unfenced flower gardens: Hosta leaves were a favored delicacy, as were daylily buds, particularly when they were just about to bloom. Their visits to our yard were mostly nocturnal. By day, they disappeared into the hundreds of acres of privately owned timberland stretching out behind our house toward Groton State Forest. That, I thought, would be the place to hunt. There were no houses back there, or even any hunting camps.

Poring over the town tax map, I determined whose properties I hoped to hunt and contacted the owners for permission. Landowners who had grown up elsewhere thanked me for asking, and said yes. Landowners who had grown up here were baffled by my question. Their land wasn’t posted. Didn’t I know that meant I could hunt it? I did. The Vermont Constitution of 1777 guarantees residents the “liberty in seasonable times, to hunt and fowl on the lands they hold, and on other lands not inclosed.” (Vermont was the first state to provide constitutional protection for hunting. The second, Alabama, didn’t follow suit until 1996. By 2010, eleven more states had done the same.) But asking was still good manners.

It would also be good manners, I decided, to reconsider how we marked our own property. When Cath and I moved here to the eastern side of the Winooski Valley, we wanted to keep hunters off our few acres. Anywhere you stood—or fired a rifle—you were within a few hundred yards of our house. In most spots, you were a lot closer than that. Our driveway is part of an old railroad bed, long used as a trail by hunters, hikers, bicyclists, cross-country skiers, and snowmobilers. Decades ago, after part of the rail-bed embankment washed out and disappeared downstream, a trail detour was put in around our house and driveway. That detour winds through our woods just seventy yards from the back porch.

So I did what most safety-conscious, non- and antihunting newcomers do. I bought a roll of those ubiquitous bright-yellow signs: “Posted. Private Property.” Several went alongside the trail detour: not blocking it, but telling folks to stick to it.

Now, though, I was becoming a hunter. I had been granted the privilege of hunting on other people’s private property. It didn’t feel right to continue sending the “Posted” signs’ message: Stay the hell off our land. Yet I didn’t want to tempt fate by removing them entirely. I still thought about the local man killed while watching football in his living room two years earlier. Hunters still needed to know that our few acres were not a place for shooting. So I took down the yellow signs and replaced them with black-and-white ones provided by the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department: “Safety Zone. No Hunting Allowed. Shooting Prohibited.” In other words, you can’t see it, but you’re really close to our house.

With permission to hunt hundreds of acres, I started my scouting in summer. I took a compass, a pencil, and a paper map I’d printed from my computer, topographic lines overlaying a black-and-white aerial photograph. A quarter-inch on the map was, I estimated, just over fifty paces on the ground. Hike after hike, I explored the woods, slapping black flies as I went. I learned where beavers were actively tending dams a half mile up Cold Brook. I saw where several clearcut acres had been taken over by wild raspberries. I found where old stone walls—from the merino sheep’s heyday, I guessed—intersected along the western flank of a long ridge known as Lord’s Hill. (On its far side stands Devil’s Hill and nearby lie the remains of a long-abandoned settlement called Jerusalem, a trinity that makes me curious about the intertwining of theology and geography in local history.) On my map, I marked a spot along one stone wall where I had found artist’s conk and turkey tail: wild mushrooms Cath used in medicinal recipes.

Here and there, I also noted old wooden platforms perched in trees. The makeshift tree stands did not appear to have been used in recent years, but at one time some hunter must have thought each of these spots a likely one for seeing deer. That was my task now: to decide where, in all these hundreds of acres, I might actually see whitetails in daylight. Like an angler sizing up a river, I needed to pay attention not just to the broad sweep of the landscape—the slopes and saddles and ridges that might shape deer’s movements—but to the details.

Where might deer bed down in thick cover? To what spot might they go to bask in the sun’s warmth? Where might they habitually feed? Fifty miles to the south, stands of oak might provide acorns, one of the whitetail’s favorite autumn foods. Here, though, oaks are rare. I would need to look elsewhere, perhaps to late apples or to stands of beech trees in years when beechnuts were plentiful. What trails did the deer use to travel between bedding areas and feeding areas? And how would all these patterns change come fall, as the season turned and mating began?

Walking the woods, I watched for deer tracks and droppings. I kept an eye out for old rubs—places where, in some previous year, a buck had rubbed and hooked his antlers against small trees, stripping bark and leaving telltale scars. I looked, too, for spots where I might lie in ambush.

From Mark’s e-mails and magazine articles he had clipped out and sent, I gathered that the various hunting strategies available to me boiled down to two: going to deer, or waiting for deer to come to me. I wasn’t too sure about the former.

I knew that some hunters could track a single deer for miles and eventually get close enough for a shot. I just wasn’t one of them. Not yet, at any rate. The approach intrigued me, though, and in fresh snow I would happily give it a try.

Another variation on going to deer intrigued me as well. “Still-hunting,” despite its moniker, means hunting while moving, albeit very, very slowly. Mindful of wind direction, still hunters do their best to blend in to the woods. They take a slow, quiet step, then pause for a minute or more, sharply attentive to any movement or sound that might indicate the presence of an animal nearby, before taking another step. It can take them an hour to go a hundred, or even fifty, yards. With soft snow or damp, quiet leaves underfoot, I’d willingly give this a try, too. But I had no experience at it.

The better bet—the tactic a greenhorn like me was less apt to bungle—was to wait for deer to come to me. Once I picked a spot, my task would be simple: not to move. In the woods near active deer trails and old rubs, I looked for potential “ground stands”—places to sit or stand with both my feet on terra firma.

A good spot would give me a dual advantage in the visual landscape, simultaneously providing trees, bushes, or branches to break up the visible outline of my predatory form, and giving me a clear view of locations where whitetails might appear. “Clear view” was, of course, a relative notion. In these woods, hunting wasn’t visual in the way I gathered it often was out west, where trees are sparse and binoculars can help you spot an animal half a mile away. But I wanted to avoid sitting in such thick cover that dozens of deer might pass within twenty yards, unseen.

The olfactory landscape was harder to predict. I knew that an ideal spot would be downwind of where I expected to see deer. Yet, as I started paying attention to them, I realized that air movements changed not only from day to day, but from hour to hour and even from minute to minute. The light breeze I felt in my face now might, in a moment, swirl around to push my scent out in front of me. In general, a west wind might prevail, but I couldn’t plan on it.

Near the same deer trails, I also kept an eye out for well-positioned trees to which I might strap a metal tree stand. Perching twelve or fifteen or more feet off the ground would, in theory, make deer less likely to see me, especially if I could arrange to have trees—not open sky—above and behind me. Deer should also be less likely to smell me, as my scent would be wafting along on the breeze several yards above their noses. My chances of having a deer get very close would be better: a vital factor if I was using a bow. Though I felt more confident about making a clean kill with rifle, scope, and cartridge, bow and arrow were appealing in their simplicity.

By mid-September, when Willie passed away so suddenly, I had a few spots picked out. Whether they were good ones, I did not know. But no matter. I wasn’t in any hurry to kill a deer. Just seeing one during hunting season would be a success, and I felt I had a fair shot at that.

Judging by the tracks I had been noting, there were definitely deer in these hills. The historical record, however, makes it easy to imagine a Vermont, a New England, indeed an entire continent, without white-tailed deer.

Prior to European settlement, whitetails (
Odocoileus virginianus
) may have numbered twenty-five million or more across what is now the United States and southern Canada, where they were hunted by wolves, cougars, and bears, as well as humans armed with atlatls, bows and arrows, spears, snares, pitfalls, fences, corrals, and fire. Here in the densely wooded, mountainous regions of Vermont, there might have been only two or three deer per square mile. Further south, in what is now Massachusetts, where habitat was enhanced by American Indian clearings and periodic burnings of forest undergrowth, whitetail densities may have been closer to ten or fifteen per square mile.

By the seventeenth century, though, with intensive farming by Massachusetts settlers leaving little cover for large mammals, whitetail numbers were dropping fast. In 1698, with deer nearly extirpated in eastern parts of the Bay Colony, hunting was prohibited between January 15 and July 15. But continued habitat loss and hunting—in both the open and unenforced closed seasons—further depleted the population. In 1718, the colony enacted a three-year moratorium on all deer hunting. Finally, in 1739, Massachusetts hired its first game wardens or “deer reeves.” It was too little too late.

At the peak of New England agricultural activity and deforestation in the early- and mid-nineteenth century, when even steep terrain had been cleared as sheep pasture, only a quarter of Vermont, and even less of Massachusetts, was wooded. Though some wildlife species, including grassland birds like the bobolink and meadowlark, thrived in this human-crafted habitat, elk and wolves had disappeared from the region. And whitetails were almost gone, too. Yet remnant deer populations persisted wherever the land seemed too poor or too remote to be worth domesticating—in the sandy-soiled pine and oak woodlands at the base of Cape Cod, in the still-forested parts of the Berkshires, along the spine of the Green Mountains, and in the least settled sections of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.

To the west, the depletion of whitetails was slower. By the early 1800s, massive trade hunting—much of it done by Indians in response to economic and political pressures—had reduced the North American whitetail population by half or more. Deer hides were used for everything from clothes and wall coverings to saddles and book bindings. In the Midwest during the 1830s, settlers could buy venison for three cents a pound, or they could buy a whole deer for one dollar—leading, some suggest, to the phrase “a buck.” On the continent as a whole, however, whitetails were still numerous and habitat changes remained relatively insignificant. It was in the second half of the nineteenth century that the slaughter began in earnest.

As for the passenger pigeon, the bison, and so many other species, the rapid expansion of the U.S. railway system—from just over 9,000 miles of track in 1850 to over 160,000 miles in 1900—was a decisive factor for deer. Market hunters, armed with the newly invented lever-action repeating rifle, headed west and shipped millions of pounds of deer hides and meat back east. In a single year, 1860, a father and son team in Minnesota killed some 6,000 whitetails. In a single month, December 1882, six tons of venison were shipped from Litchfield, Minnesota, to Boston, using the newly invented refrigerated railcar. By the turn of the twentieth century, the nationwide population of whitetails had plummeted by 97 percent in just forty years. With only a few hundred thousand animals left, the species was nearly extinct.

In part, white-tailed deer were saved by the Lacey Act of 1900, the nation’s emerging conservation ethic, and the advent of scientific wildlife management, all vocally promoted by recreational hunters. In part, they were saved by their own scarcity. Deer were so few that they no longer warranted attention. As wildlife researchers Richard and Thomas McCabe sum it up, “The whitetail rarely was hunted, even for the table, because it was rarely seen.”

At the peak of western market hunting, though, remnant deer populations were already starting to recover in the Northeast. As the railroads took farmers westward and sheep pastures were abandoned, forest habitat began to return to New England, especially on the higher terrain. In some cases, deer were reintroduced. In 1878, for instance, seventeen whitetails were imported from New York and released near Rutland, Vermont.