It is now September in Taylor County (and everywhere else, I suppose), which means the woods and pastures will soon be alive with folks getting ready for deer season. The ritual is part of the rhythm of life in this part of the South. We sight in our rifles that have been collecting dust in a corner for the better part of a year since the end of last season, shooting at a paper target and using a coin to adjust the scope a couple clicks left or right, up or down. We set up feeders, big stilted barrels filled with corn that drains into a spreader, and set the timers so the deer will fall into the habit of showing up at the same time each evening. We clean out our shooting houses, maybe spray paint them in camouflage if we feel so inclined. We plow little half acre "food plots" and throw a little winter rye seed, creating brilliant green lawns in the middle of nowhere by Thanksgiving. We lop limbs on the paths to our shooting houses and around our food plots.
And all of this to create a space where, perhaps, we may have a deer walk past the shooting house to pick at the corn at the base of the spreader, or nibble the winter rye. Most seasons it is a given that the deer will appear. That does not mean, however, actually killing one. In fact, it has been two years for me since the last time. But shooting a deer really isn't the point.
I have hunted pretty much every season since my eldest son announced in middle school that he wanted to learn to hunt. I grew up in a gun-averse household, and it was a running joke during the Gulf War that I always kept my sidearm unloaded, even in combat, with the bullets in a sandwich bag--no use agitating a pursuer with an AK-47 by waving a pop-gun at him and his buddies. So when Jim wanted to hunt, we went to hunter safety school together in a crowded community center in Wausau, bought all the equipment and a share in a deer lease, and spent the next decade or so heading to the woods every chance we got from November through February.
It was a magic time. We talked endlessly in the truck each way, about whatever was on his mind as he grew from a pudgy middle-schooler into a chiseled young college student. Our shooting houses were maybe 200 yards apart, and we texted each other as a bobcat or a fox or a big buck walked out into the clearing. When he was old enough, we met at the tailgate at the end of the hunt and drank a beer with our friends who also hunted the property, telling stories and, I guess, initiating Jim into manhood.
Now Jim lives on the other side of the planet, and his guns sit in storage. I walk out into the woods alone when it's time to go "sit the stand," except when I hunt in our two-person shooting house and P comes along with a book and a glass of wine.
And books are the best part of the season. For years around this time part of my preparation for those long hours sitting in silence was researching my deer season reading list. I would assemble a smattering of history, philosophy, maybe some great work of literature I'd pretended to have read before, and then enjoy the luxury of not billing my time and just savoring a good book until I dozed off in the stillness of the woods.
Any of the handful of folks who read yesterday's post are probably wondering how I reconcile reverence for animal life and a hobby that involves shooting a beautiful creature with a rifle or a crossbow. As I said, we as humans have a place in our diet for meat, and have eaten it for so long our alimentary tract has evolved for that. I can say honestly that I eat a lot less meat, and eat it differently, since my hunting journey began. And that goes back to the act of killing---when you startle yourself with the crack of the rifle, see the deer jump and drop, then walk up on a doe or a buck who was just as alive as us a few seconds ago and see the life go out of its eyes, you gain an acute sense of the cost of a partially carnivorous diet. It means death so we can live, which is one of the paradoxes of existence on this planet. If we had to kill every animal we ate, we'd eat a whole lot less of them. Over the years I'd make two deer last a whole year in a house full of hungry boys. Now P and I will get along just fine with one.
That is, if I see one at all. The motion activated cameras at Wyldswood suggested last season that if we were hoping to supplement our diet by hunting, we needed to develop a taste for something other than deer.
We are not quiet there yet, although I'm told the neighbors could offer a few recipes.
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