I had become tired of my family's winging. They heaped scorn on all the rednecks for being crass and uncultured. They drank wine and discussed matters. Meanwhile, the rednecks were out with their power toys, engaging in visceral thrills. Their political agenda was far advanced. They sent their sons to foreign battles, where they drove around in big trucks blowing up rammed-earth houses and killing people dressed like hippies. In short, the rednecks were having all the fun while the urban haute bourgeois was stuck complaining.
The kind of people surrounding me were willing to eat their veal, but not without talking about suffering and death all the while. They wanted other people to do their dirty work. I wanted to see what it really took to take down a sentient being, to eliminate a large, complex organism, to wipe out one of God’s creatures. I wanted to send a deer to kingdom come.
Really, I only wanted to want to send a deer to kingdom come. Really, I was not comfortable with the idea at all. I wished I were an easy killer, a wooden stump of insensitive redneck, totally oblivious to the pain of others. But I knew the killing exercise would be gristly and unpleasant, slaying a noble animal with a red-hot chunk of ballistic lead.
The muzzle would explode with a shocking concussion, and if I were lucky the deer would then jump a few steps in terror before collapsing with blood gushing from his neck. I’d go down to his expired corpse and, as a man named Mike Guerin wrote on some online hunting forum, I would then perform the following procedure:
with the guts half in and half out I cut the diaphragm away from the deer's chest cavity, I then reach as far up into the deer's chest as possible and grab the deer esophagus. With the other hand I carefully slide the knife into the deer's chest and work my knife up into the chest to cut the esophagus just above my other hand. After it is cut I simply pull the heart and lungs out and with it comes the rest of the intestines.
I'd rip his skin off, hang him by a meat hook and saw off his legs and head. Like a Tutsi clansman in a genocidal fervor, I’d then eat the deer’s heart to capture its spirit fire. This last element, along with the process of quartering and further butchering the animal, composed what I dubbed “the complete visceral killing experience.”
For this purpose I added a Savage model 111 30-06 to my redneck heirloom collection. Savage is a model of long rifle. Its logo is an Indian with a headdress, a delightfully anachronistic, racist mascot.
The Savage was a bolt-action affair with a Simmons scope, black synthetic stock, four-round magazine, and floating barrel to reduce strange harmonics that might send my bullet eschew. Its muzzle velocity was 9000 feet per second, and one of its 150-grain bullets would land with the weight of a loaded semi trailer dropped from forty feet onto a surface half that of a dime face. When I deflowered it at a popular firing range on the summit of Horse mountain, I hit a target a football field off, within a couple inches of where I had aimed. The weapon's accuracy was acute. I knew I was not responsible for it. I can’t even hit a clay pigeon with a semi-automatic shotgun.
Within a few bullets I was tired of shooting the rifle, though, as it was very loud and kicked like a drunken mule. I would not improve my accuracy before hunting, I reasoned. I would manifest the opportunity to behead a deer from point-blank range.
Hirsch and I were staying at a luxurious craftsman style house in the boondocks of Humboldt County while its owners explored Montana. Initially I spent a days pacing around the house with the rifle in my hands, spotting the cat through the scope, climbing onto the roof and assuming various prone poses, covering the entrance to the driveway from the roof, fondling the nicely heavy cartridges and the bolt, listening to Megadeth and ranting about how I was going to blow off some deer’s head. “I’m going to go strait for the head shot,” I said, and Hirsch said, “but what if you miss, and you blow off its jaw or something, and it goes around all deformed for days before it dies?” And I said, “I’m going to blow its head clean off.” I even made a ghilly suit, with the leaves of huckleberry bushes. I imagined myself in an abandoned warehouse, Hillary Clinton rolling by in a convertible…
In order to learn the proper way of gutting a deer, which Hirsch was certain I would not be able to psychologically handle, we watched a series of videos on You Tube titled “Fat Boy Goes Hunting.” These were hosted by a rotund, beer-sucking redneck slouched in the seat of a swamp boat. “Gun berk, huhguhug. Bingk dung berk,” he bellowed, pointing this way and that, his face the color of a ripe tomato.
The only other chore I had to carry out before hunting was to obtain a license. By state law, I had to undergo a short gun safety class to do so. The class was held at a skeet club whose firing range pointed towards the end of the regional airport's runway.
Jeanette Griffin of the California Department of Fish and Game instructed five fat white people in the club's lounge shack. She began by defending the philosophy of hunting.
“These animals are going to die anyway, so instead, we kill and eat them,” she said. “You ever seen a deer with two fawns? Yeah, well, later in the year there’s only one fawn.”
Jeanette brought a small arsenal of firearms. She had a break-barrel shotgun, a semi-automatic shotgun, a bolt-action rifle, a semi-automatic rifle, an autopistol, a revolver, and a muzzle loader. She went over each and explained how they worked in a perfunctory manner. "This here's the barrel," she would say, and then closing the bolt, "is it loaded? What do you think? Is it loaded?"
A few hours later she handed out a multiple choice test with questions like:
Question 51.
An animal that kills other animals for food is called a:
- Rooster
- Vegetarian
- Varmint
- Predator
Question 62.
Hunter Education is important because it:
- Helps sell camouflage clothing
- Keeps old instructors busy
- Teaches ethics, safety, and responsibility
- Spends government money
Behind the house lay an open field. A top-floor window there afforded a perfect view of the field. This area Hirsch and I considered the “kill zone,” and every day a doe and her two fawns would come prancing through to eat berries and other plants in the kill zone. One time we saw six of them, all fawns and does. There was a garden and orchard of perhaps a quarter-acre there, surrounded by a deer fence.
“All we have to do,” Hirsch said, “is open the gate and let the deer saunter in, and then close the gate on them, and corral them in there, and then shoot them one at a time from the upstairs window. Boom! Chik-chik. Boom! Chik-chik,” he said, miming racking the action of a rifle.
We started baiting the field with apples. The deer came and ate the apples, even fighting over them. The little buck (he had two little stubs on his head and his coat was still spotted) would come and munch on the apple and chase all his sisters away. This sexism offended Hirsch's sense of social justice. “That motherfucker,” he said, “we should blow his head off.”
We moved the apples inside the corral while I set up a turret in the upstairs bedroom. Then Hirsch hid behind a nearby bush and we waited, sucking beers. Sure enough, the little buck and his two sisters came back, entered the garden and began nosing around.
It is illegal to kill a buck who lacks at least one junction in each of his antlers. This law I did not care for, any more than I would care for statutory rape laws if I encountered the opportunity to ravish a nubile young girl. My visceral impulses were too strong. There they were, the animals, and my trigger finger was itching. A drop of drool hung from my lip.
Suddenly, Hirsch emerged, startling the deer, and they ran in a circle idiotically, unaware that their route of escape had just been eliminated. He closed and latched the gate. I smiled. I cocked my weapon.
Our little Soribor was perfect. From my perspective, the slaughter wouldn't even take any heroic marksmanship. I held the high ground. Julius Caesar's podium. The little buck was a miserable Christian in the lion pen. Slowly I lowered the barrel to the window sill, peered through the scope, and lined up the little buck's forehead between the cross hairs. He peered back with a resigned expression. I saw it in his eyes. He knew. Breathe out slowly.
Then a sudden realization seized me.
What about the deer's feelings? He was still young. He had his entire deer life ahead of him. His spirit fire was inherently valuable. He was a unique ball of energy who contributed meaning to the vast and incomprehensible universe. What about the precepts of Zen? They expressly forbid killing, even though there isn't so much as killing. There isn't even “no killing.” Mu killing. Were not their long spiritual traditions in Christianity against killing as well? It led to Hell. In Judaism too there was a commandment. Just about every ethical framework in the world looked warily at wholesale slaughter like the kind I proposed to undertake. There were metaphysical prohibitions on killing, and humanistic ones. There were legal codes everywhere that proscribed harsh punishment for it. There was a strong sense of guilt swirling around it. The karmas would come back around later. The deer would come home to roost. Five lifetimes from now I'd be lined up and shot and bulldozed into a shallow grave for it, like all the people in Soribor.
Hirsch wondered if I was going to shoot. I looked down through the window over the end of the Savage barrel and told him that I had reconsidered. I was pardoning the deer.
He slouched over to the fence, disappointed, and opened it. Then he went back inside downstairs. The little buck pranced towards freedom. It could have been a scene in a Disney animated feature. The sun broke through a cloud at that moment, and the little buck turned and looked up at it, and I could have sworn that I heard celestial organ music.
I had a robust meal of bacon that evening.
