The Mindful Carnivore (22 page)

During the twentieth century, with game laws actively enforced and very few large four-footed predators remaining in the lower forty-eight, deer numbers rebounded with astounding rapidity. As early as 1910, with only five thousand deer in the state, Massachusetts farmers were already complaining of crop losses, helping prompt the opening of regulated hunting seasons. By 1991 there were fifteen hundred deer living within the Philadelphia city limits, more than existed in all of Pennsylvania in 1900.

Today, just over a hundred years after near extinction, the nationwide deer population stands at thirty million or more, at least as many as were here before Europeans arrived. In some places, they number fifty or more per square mile. Most hunters and wildlife watchers are pleased by this cervid resurrection; as a friend once said to me, “Some people just can’t imagine such a thing as too many deer.” But the recovery of the whitetail has its complications.

For one thing, the United States is also now home to over three hundred million people. Whitetails and humans are living in closer proximity than ever before, resulting in all manner of conflicts. Deer on highways. Deer on airport runways. Deer landing in homes and businesses, having crashed through plateglass windows. Deer carrying ticks that serve as vectors for the spirochete that causes Lyme disease, especially in the Northeast and upper Midwest. And, everywhere, deer eating.

Collectively, America’s deer ingest about ninety billion pounds of vegetation a year: an average of three thousand pounds per animal. In agricultural areas, whitetails’ voracious appetites take a heavy toll on crops. In places like eastern Massachusetts—where rural and suburban housing development has broken up farms and forests, creating the kind of edge habitat on which deer thrive—they take a toll on backyard vegetable gardens and front-yard ornamental plantings. And deer take a toll on forests, too, threatening both the economic viability and the biological diversity of our woodlands.

As Richard Nelson explains in
Heart and Blood
, deer evolved under heavy predation and their reproduction is not self-limiting. In good habitat without severe winters, deer populations can increase by 40 percent per year despite mortality from vehicle collisions, moderate animal predation, and the hunting of bucks. When completely protected, they can reproduce even faster, as demonstrated by studies at the 1,146-acre George Reserve in southern Michigan. With no predation and contained by an 11½-foot fence, 10 deer multiplied to 212 in just six years.

At high densities, deer quickly overbrowse their food sources. Constant overbrowsing destroys the understory, killing tree seedlings and wiping out smaller plants, including rare and endangered species. This alters the composition of forest regeneration, subjects some areas to erosion, and eliminates niches for many other wildlife species. Studies in Virginia and Pennsylvania have shown that many smaller mammals and songbirds dependent on close-to-the-ground vegetation become extremely scarce when deer become too numerous. Many reptiles, amphibians, and insects also suffer significant losses when deer remove the understory. Eventually, the deer themselves become malnourished and starve, setting up a boom-and-bust cycle that never allows deer, other species, or habitat to recover fully.

“Just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves,” wrote Aldo Leopold in
A Sand County Almanac
, “so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades.”

In much of Vermont, the mountains are partly protected by climate. When deep snows limit access to food sources and temperatures drop well below zero for extended periods, deer can easily die of malnutrition. Among the hills I would be hunting, whitetails might only number ten or so per square mile. But they were far and away the most common big-game mammal in the area. If any animal was going to stock our freezer with free-range meat, it would be a deer.

My first hours in the October woods were peaceful. I sat on a rock near an old logging road, watching. The recurve that Jay had sent lay across my lap. A red squirrel, apparently unaware of me, scampered by within a few feet.

Another day, I perched in my tree stand not far from where I had recently seen a pair of deer. It was a gray dawn, damp and misty. Chickadees alit close by. A chipmunk bounded through leaves and ferns. I felt no need to do anything but listen and watch, bow in hand. No need even to think. As Zen teachers say,
Just sit
.

In moments of delusion, I found myself assuming that a deer would soon appear, and thinking through the steps I would take to properly care for the meat. In other moments, I realized how unlikely that was—as a novice, I had only just begun to learn—and felt relief. I wasn’t sure how it would feel to kill a deer. Nor was I sure I was ready to find out. Killing the hare nine months earlier had been unsettling, and I imagined that taking a deer would hit me harder.

It might be better to focus on more modest goals that autumn. Just get out in the woods. Spend some time with Uncle Mark. Settle into the idea. Start getting a sense of what it would mean to be a hunter.

Partly, it would mean quiet reverie, watchfulness, and learning to navigate the woods. Partly, it would mean learning to navigate more complicated, human terrain.

Hiking home one Saturday afternoon, I detoured to check for deer sign along the back edge of an overgrown beaver meadow. When I got to the spot—the trees sparse, the long grasses bent over by the repeated passage of whitetails headed down to the water’s edge—I found a tree stand set up near illegal bait: two blocks of salt. And the hunter had gone further.

While it’s common enough for hunters to nip off a few small branches here and there to allow a clear shot, this one had carried in a chain saw and felled a six-inch-diameter balsam fir, leaving a wide-open shooting lane between tree stand and salt. The landowners, I imagined, might object to that much disturbance. I hoped the deer would, too, steering clear of the bait and denying the hunter any ill-won gains.

I left a phone message for the local game warden. Even if the hunter wasn’t caught in the act of hunting over salt, he would get a warning letter in the mail. Finding him would be easy enough, for he had obeyed the law in one respect, by prominently displaying his name on the tree stand.

Headed home the next morning after two more quiet hours in the woods, I saw a neighbor coming down the rail-bed trail, out for a walk with his young golden retriever. I winced. I felt certain that he, like most of my friends and acquaintances, wasn’t keen on hunting. Given my own longtime opposition to the killing of animals for food, let alone for sport, I could hardly blame him. In his eyes, I would be one of
them
.

As he drew near, I could see surprise on his face.

“It
is
you!” he said, taking in my camouflage clothing and bow. “I thought, ‘It’s some redneck out hunting and I need to watch my back.’ But no, it’s you out hunting and I need to watch my back.”

We had a polite if awkward chat, and parted ways.

Walking home, I considered the encounter. Though I knew I posed no danger to my neighbor or his dog, it didn’t surprise me to hear his safety concerns. Nor did his phrase “some redneck out hunting” shock me. He was merely articulating the stereotype of the hunter as an ignorant backwoods rube—a common view rooted in the kind of tree-felling, law-breaking behavior I had come across the day before, and also in centuries of history.

Recall that when early English colonists arrived in the New World, they came with the notion that hunting was an elite avocation. Whatever they thought of hunting—and the Puritans despised it—they associated it with European nobility, for whom the chase had been reserved both as a privilege and as a method of developing martial prowess in young gentry. Colonists came, however, to a continent already inhabited by millions of other hunters: Indians. In the native peoples of North America, and in their hunting, colonists saw humanity at its most animalistic, primitive, and brutal.

When European colonists hunted, they trod a cultural no-man’s-land between these two extremes: nobility and savagery. As Daniel Herman argues in
Hunting and the American Imagination
, common folk who hunted were, in one sense, claiming an element of genteel identity. But they were also bringing the hunt down to the commoner’s level, especially by ignoring the “sporting codes” of elite hunting and instead killing game as efficiently as possible. Just below the hunting commoner lurked the savage, always threatening to undermine the foundations of agrarian civilization.

Recall, too, that when tales of Daniel Boone became popular in the first half of the nineteenth century, the backwoods hunter was elevated from bloodthirsty brute to noble adventurer. This new American was at home in the wilderness yet lived according to middle- and upper-class values. And it was middle- and upper-class men who swelled the sporting ranks of the day and who—when populations of deer and other animals plummeted in the late 1800s—led the call to conserve wildlife for future generations.

A legal cornerstone for such conservation had been set in 1842, when the case of
Martin v. Waddell
came before the U.S. Supreme Court. At stake were oysters, and a New Jersey property owner’s claim that he held title to the land that lay beneath the water of the Raritan River and to the mudflats below the high-tide mark of Raritan Bay. In a ruling based in part on an interpretation of the Magna Carta of 1215, the court declared that the oyster fishery was a public commons. This set the foundation for what came to be called the Public Trust Doctrine: the principle that fish and wildlife cannot be owned by individuals, and are to be held in trust by the government. This doctrine has been a key part of the North American model of wildlife conservation ever since.

The ideals of a public commons and the praiseworthy achievements of early American conservation, however, were not without their dark sides. As white sport hunters asserted their vision of wildlife as a national commons, generations-old conflicts with American Indians took on an added dimension and their hunting rights came under increased fire, both figuratively and literally. As historian Louis S. Warren recounts in
The Hunter’s Game,
in 1895 a white posse arrested and then massacred a group of Bannock Indians in northwestern Wyoming for violating state game laws, despite the fact that the Bannocks’ right to hunt elk on public land was guaranteed by treaty. The next year, that treaty right was abrogated by the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1903, wildlife officials again opened fire on Indian hunters in Wyoming. In 1905, government authorities encouraged New Mexico ranchers to kill Indian hunters. In 1908, officials opened fire in Montana.

The flames of old conflicts among whites were fanned as well. For decades, elite urban hunters had been clashing with poor rural hunters. Herman documents, for instance, how, in the 1820s, gentlemen of the Unadilla Hunting Club in Otsego County, New York, hired thugs to catch and beat local men who—hunting legally—tried to shoot deer being pursued by members of the club.

In advocating game conservation, middle- and upper-class sport hunters spoke out not only against market hunting, but also against subsistence hunting: hunting for “the pot.” The “pot hunter,” wrote Philadelphia author Elisha Jarrett Lewis, would “lay waste all animated nature … without regard to etiquette, humanity, law, or even the common decencies of life.” (Arguably, my own objection to the two salt licks and the felled tree were rooted in some version of this same revulsion at lawlessness and indecency.) The shots taken by such hunters were, according to Lewis and his brethren, easy, cheap, careless, and opportunistic, not at all in keeping with the rules of sport—hence our modern use of the word “potshot.”

The rhetoric of urban sport hunters promoted particular ideas about who should hunt and how, including culturally specific ideals of masculinity that echoed the sporting traditions of England. Like the subsistence-hunting “troglodyte” Ortega y Gasset later berated, backwoods hunters did not belong on hunting’s pedestal of nobility, for the pursuit of game should be a chivalrous enterprise, conducted within the bounds of a highly refined code of conduct. It should not be a crass matter of bagging meat to provide for one’s family or community. It should not, in short, be savagery. (The parallels with dietary rhetoric of the same era are striking: Idealized sport hunters sound much like the gentlemanly, vegetarian University of Chicago football team of 1907; backwoods pot hunters sound much like the team’s savage, legbreaking, beef-eating opponents.)

In the early 1900s, sport hunters were at the top of their game. Their recreational interests had triumphed over subsistence traditions, as rural, lower-class white folks who had been hunting local hills and valleys for generations were suddenly faced with enforcement of state and federal laws that defined their hunting as poaching. In those early years of the twentieth century, upper- and middle-class hunters also enjoyed widespread public approval, as most nonhunting Americans associated the hunt with chivalrous men the likes of President Theodore Roosevelt. Ironically, though, the very popularity of hunting soon tarnished its public image.

Herman notes that as cheap firearms, cheap automobiles, and labor laws mandating more time off for workers made hunting and hunting grounds more accessible, more people took up the pursuit. Between 1910 and 1920, sales of hunting licenses doubled. By 1945, a quarter of American men were hunting. Many of these men were working class. No longer associated primarily with noble urban citizens, hunting lost its respectable sheen. It came to be associated, once again, with the rural recklessness and savagery that haunted the colonial imagination. It became, as my neighbor succinctly phrased it, the kind of thing that “some redneck” would do.

By the end of the fourth and final weekend of Vermont’s archery season, I had seen exactly zero deer from my tree stand. From the ground, though, I had seen white-tailed does three times. And I had also encountered creatures I was not hunting, each unanticipated meeting a gift.