Okay, that’s not strictly true. I come from a long line of Austro-Hungarian cattle rustlers and one furrier, my grandfather, who apparently became a furrier only because Minneapolis got too hot to hold him, apparently because the mob was pissed at him, apparently because he was an extraordinarily skilled pool shark.

While he waited for everything to cool down, he went around the Wisconsin woods buying raw pelts from trappers. The only story I know from this era is that he ate lots of different fur-bearing animals, and could attest to the aptness of the name ‘muskrat.’

When things calmed down, he returned to Minneapolis and became a retail furrier, but he got out of the business in 1948, just as people started to think twice about wearing wild furs. He then started a perfectly respectable laundry, about which I know many more stories, including a very good one about a laundry truck and a parade. If you run into my father, ask him about it.

Now that I think about it, that’s not much of a pedigree, but it gets me closer to having fur in my blood than Kevin will ever be – there may never have been an Irish furrier in the history of the world. (And, although Kevin doesn’t have forbearers who got in trouble with the Mafia, he does have a few who knew their way around explosives.)

Still, it was Kevin who tackled the rabbit hide.

When I skinned the rabbit, I had a hazy idea that we’d do something with the hide, but I also had a hazy idea that tanning a hide was a pretty serious enterprise, involving tedious scraping, dangerous chemicals, and climate control. All that for one little rabbit hide with two rather prominent holes through it seemed a bit disproportionate.

But then Kevin talked to his friend Dave. Dave grew up in Georgia, shooting and eating small animals. He was processing squirrel hides while he was still in short pants. Dave told Kevin he could simply salt the hide to cure it.

Almost cured?

What, just pour salt on it and wait?

Basically, yes. Pin it to a board, scrape off any flesh (no avoiding that step), and cover it generously with salt. Let it sit a few days, take the old salt off and add new salt. Let it sit a couple weeks.

It’s now been sitting for a couple of weeks. It’s got some bloodstains, but otherwise looks surprisingly like a hide well on its way to being cured. We’re going to give it a little more time, and put some extra salt on the raw-looking spots, and then we’ll probably put it in the freezer to kill any hangers-on of the insect variety. And then … well … is that really all there is to it?

If this works, it’s a powerful incentive. Bag a rabbit, and in one fell swoop you eliminate a thieving varmint, procure an excellent meal, and get yourself a nice soft fur.

I want a first-hand hat.

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While I’ve never thought of myself as the “highly educated elite,” I did manage to hang on long enough at my fancy-pants college to get a degree, and most of my friends, for most of my life, have come from the pool Murray’s talking about. Literally, I’m certainly one of “the great unwashed.” Figuratively, probably not.

Luckily, for those of us not sure just how we fit in, Murray designed a quiz to help us figure it out. Had I taken that quiz four years ago, when I was safely ensconced on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I certainly would have rated “hopelessly mired in elite isolation.” But recent experience has given me different answers to some of the questions. Have you or your spouse ever bought a pickup truck? Why yes, yes we have. During the last five years, have you or your spouse gone fishing? Maybe a hundred times. Have you ever held a job that caused something to hurt at the end of the day? I’ve hauled oysters until everything hurt.

And those things have done more for me than earn me a less contemptible score on Charles Murray’s quiz. They have given me common ground with a lot of people whose background, interests, politics, priorities, and ideas are different from mine. And I am the better for it.

I remember having a disagreement, years ago, with a friend of mine in New York. She expressed surprise that my parents, both irredeemably godless, had nevertheless chosen to raise my brothers and me as Jews. We went to Hebrew school, we went to temple on holidays, we got a standard-issue Jewish education. I explained that, first, Jews go out of their way to accommodate the godless, there being an awful lot of them in the tribe. And, second, it was the community, and not the religion, that my parents valued. And if you want community, there aren’t many places to find it. Religion and ethnicity are about the only two issues a community will coalesce around in this country. (The secular humanists have been trying to disprove that for decades, with no luck so far.)

“Fie!” my friend said. Okay, she didn’t really, because no one ever does, but that was the gist of it. She said that she considered her circle of friends to be the community in which she was raising her son.

That didn’t sound like the kind of community I had in mind, but I had to think about why. The answer I came up with, which I’ve stuck with all these years, is that, in order for a group to count as a community, it has to have people you disagree with. It has to have people you have nothing but that one community characteristic in common with. It has to have jerks. If you cherry-pick your members so that everyone gets along, and everyone likes everyone else, and any small political or ideological differences get discussed coolly and respectfully, that’s no community. That’s a circle of friends and, while it makes for great dinner parties, it is of limited utility as a stand-in for the world as a whole, the place children need to learn to navigate.

For most of my adult life, I’ve had an interesting and vibrant circle of friends. We’ve had great dinner parties. But, as Charles Murray pointed out, coming to Cape Cod, buying the pick-up truck, going fishing, and hauling oysters has expanded my circle. My new, expanded circle includes people I disagree with. It includes people I have nothing but that one community characteristic in common with. It even includes jerks.

And it includes hunters.

Hunting, more than anything, has introduced me to people I would never otherwise have crossed paths with, and I love that I can sit down with someone who may be worlds away from me politically or ideologically and talk about whether it makes sense to try the National Seashore in Truro for deer. Or how to cook a sea duck. Or what kind of dog is best for flushing pheasants.

Or whether there’s meaning to be found in being out in the woods with a gun, in search of dinner.

I suspect many of you read Tovar Cerulli, who blogs at A Mindful Carnivore, and has just published a book of the same name (or almost the same name — a book contract entitles you to a definite article). Had I never left New York, I’d never have met Tovar. Although he, too, spent time in Manhattan, he spent most of it counting the days until he could move away. I miss it so much I hesitate to go there because I’m afraid I’ll never come back. Tovar misses it not at all.

Tovar could, I think, be fairly described as crunchy. He’s an ex-vegetarian. He lives in Vermont. He takes feminist literary criticism seriously. He’s thoughtful and upright and thin. And I’m guessing he’d have to answer yes to the defining question of crunchiness: Are you now or have you ever been a wearer of Birkenstocks?

The Mindful Carnivore is about how Tovar went from a boyhood catching and eating fish to a manhood of veganism, and how he came eventually to see hunting as consistent with the values he had developed over the course of that transformation.

Tovar and I are both adult-onset hunters (an excellent term; his coinage). We both take the idea of killing very seriously. Neither of us would hunt unless we were convinced it was moral. But the similarities end there. Tovar’s story is one of a search for meaning. As he considers it, he says “I would be hunting to confront the death of fellow vertebrates, yes. And I would be hunting to learn about myself and the place I inhabited, to be nourished by the land and participate in its rhythms, and to answer a call for which I had no name.”

I, on the other hand, hunt simply to eat.

Tovar quotes Ted Kerasote, who says hunting should be “rooted in reverence,” and I think there are many, many hunters who agree. Almost everyone I’ve read on the subject finds some kind of meaning or satisfaction in being in the woods, or the marsh, or the fields, and it’s clear to me that I’m the outlier. I don’t look for meaning because I don’t think life has any other than that with which we endow it with our words and deeds. I am as godless as my parents, and I don’t have a spiritual bone in my body. I don’t even really understand what the word means.

All this is by way of saying that Tovar and I approach hunting from very different angles. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. I know Tovar touches a nerve with a lot of hunters, and I’m glad he’s there to articulate ideas that are clearly important to many people – people I talk to, people in my community.

But don’t let all this give you the impression that Tovar’s book is unrelentingly philosophical. It isn’t. Its seriousness is punctuated with humor and periodic questioning whether all that seriousness is warranted. One of my favorite parts is when he first starts deer hunting, and goes deerless for a couple of seasons. At one point, he comes in from another fruitless hunt, irritated. “I was failing as a hunter,” he says. “not only failing to bring home meat, but also failing to find meaning in the pursuit.”

No meat, no meaning. Welcome to my world!

Tovar visits Cape Cod regularly because his Uncle Mark, who I had the good fortune to meet on Tovar’s last visit, lives here. This year, Kevin and I hope to bring both of them out on our boat, maybe in search of bluefish or striped bass. When we’re out there, I look forward to talking to Tovar about some of the bigger issues he finds in fishing and being out in the great outdoors, because otherwise I would probably be thinking about what’s for dinner or whether it would be OK to pee off the stern when we have guests, and Kevin would be thinking about sex.

Maybe I should ask Charles Murray if he wants to join us.

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Unfortunately, the only thing we managed to trap before raccoon season ended was one hapless opossum, which we let go. But Kevin’s been practicing with the air gun.

Last night, just at dusk, he went out to lock up the chickens and spotted a rabbit coming around the side of the garden. I happened to be watching out the kitchen window, and he pointed to the rabbit and motioned for me to get the gun. I brought it out.  The rabbits regularly maraud through our garden, and are single-pawedly responsible for the complete failure of our bean crop, so I’m in favor of reducing their population.

The rabbit went behind the barrel we use as a firebox for the smokehouse, and then peeked its head and forequarters out so Kevin had a clear shot, under ten yards.

He took it, and the rabbit went bounding away into the leaves. “I was pretty sure I hit it,” Kevin said, and we went off in search.

We looked under the rhododendrons, we looked in the turkey pen, we looked anywhere we thought it might be, but we couldn’t find it. We figured he missed it after all, which meant that the “thunk” he thought he heard was probably the pellet hitting our truck tire, which had been inches from the rabbit.

Great.

This morning, though, in the full light of day, Kevin found the rabbit. It was under the rhododendron where we’d looked, but a rabbit in leaves at dusk is easy to miss.

He pulled it out, handed it to me, and got in the car to go to his office. He couldn’t miss the market opening, so I was on my own with the rabbit. I wasn’t yet fully caffeinated, so I poured a second cup of coffee and sat down to watch a few YouTube videos on skinning and gutting a rabbit. It didn’t look that hard.

I finished my coffee, donned latex gloves (in case of tularemia), and got some twine, a scissor, and my trusty poultry shears. I hung the rabbit on a tree by tying twine to a hind foot, running the twine around the trunk, and tying it to the other foot. A convenient branch ensured that the rabbit wouldn’t slip down.

I used the poultry shears to lop off the head and front feet, and made a cut around each hind ankle to release the pelt. Then one cut, ankle to ankle, and the pelt came off like a glove. So far, so good.

I’d been wondering whether it was safe to eat an animal that sat out all night but, because the temperature was well below freezing, I figured it would be fine as long as the rabbit hadn’t been gut-shot. When I pulled off the fur, I saw that the pellet had gone right through the chest and vital organs – the intestines were intact. Seeing the wound, I was amazed the rabbit could have moved at all after the shot; it must have died very quickly.

In the video, the gutting looked pretty straightforward, An incision down the underside, and everything comes out easily. But I don’t think I paid enough attention, because I struggled with the pelvis. Birds have a different skeletal system, and when you open the hind end you can pull the innards straight through. But mammals have a pesky pelvic bone between the chest cavity and anus, and I couldn’t quite figure out how to get everything out in one piece. I botched it a bit.

This was the first mammal Kevin ever shot, and the first mammal I ever processed, but it didn’t feel momentous. Maybe it was because it was a rabbit. Had it been a grizzly bear, or even a deer, and had artillery heavier than an air rifle been involved, I think it would have felt like a bigger deal.

But I also think we’re getting used to the idea that meat necessarily comes from actual, genuine animals. In order to transform them from animals into meat, you have to kill them. There’s no way around it. The only thing at all remarkable here is that I have gotten to the point that, when Kevin hands me a dead rabbit and drives off to work, I tell him to have a nice day dear, and have it skinned and cleaned before breakfast.

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Yesterday was the most astonishingly beautiful January day Cape Cod has ever seen. Temperatures rose into the high 50s, and there was a light breeze out of the southwest. We outfitted our oyster boat, a 17-foot Carolina Skiff, for duck hunting, by which I mean we put three chairs in it. Three, because Bob was going with us.

You may remember Bob as the guy who’s taught us just about everything we know about Cape Cod fishing. Well, turns out Bob hunts, too. He used to hunt ducks a lot, but he hasn’t been out in a while. Okay, 27 years. But the jacket still fit him.

We met at the ramp yesterday morning, and set out into Barnstable Harbor. Our plan was to go fairly deep into the harbor, set out decoys and then drift east, toward the mouth. We knew we’d be at a disadvantage because we don’t have a camouflaged boat but, hey, ducks make mistakes.

Don’t they?

All our ducks were in a row

It’s easy to tell which birds are hunted and which birds aren’t by the alacrity with which they avoid a boat full of people with guns. Ducks fly away when they’re still way out of range. Seagulls, you can practically run over. Terns circle over your head, laughing because they know the song:

To every tern,
Turn, turn, turn,
There is no season,
Turn, turn, turn,
And no time you may send it
To tern heaven.

Occasionally, though, a duck would make a mistake and come within range. Bob or I would take a shot, or maybe two, and miss. (Kevin, who’s never cared for duck hunting, was driving the boat.) While it’s not surprising that I would miss, Bob is an excellent shot, and it’s very surprising that he would miss.

The problem, I think, is that the kind of shot we use for ducks is so expensive (up to $25. a box) that it’s hard to bring yourself to practice with it much. So you practice with the other, cheaper stuff and the trajectory is just not the same.

I have a 20-gauge, which is arguably not enough gun for sea ducks. I tried to make up for last season’s wrong-shot fiasco by getting 3-inch cartridges of #2 shot. Out of a 20-gauge, that should do the job.

But only if you actually hit the duck.

I don’t know how different the trajectory of the shot I was using was, but I do know I was consistently behind and below the target. Part of this, no doubt, is that I was making various other mistakes, including not swinging through properly, but part of it was that I wasn’t sure by how much to lead the duck or how quickly the shot would fall.

There was one duck, in particular, that haunts me. I had not one, but two chances as it flew by the boat’s broadside, a mere twenty yards out. It was big and meaty, and I missed it twice, low and behind.

“Big and meaty?” you may be asking. “Don’t you even know what kind of duck it was?”

The answer, sadly, is “no.” When they’re flying, all ducks just look like ducks to the inexperienced eye, which mine most definitely is.

The night before, I’d spent a couple of hours studying pictures of ducks, in the hopes that I would be able to tell one from the other. Fortunately, there’s only one kind of duck we’re not allowed to take, and it’s the easily (?) identifiable harlequin duck. You’re allowed to take at least one of every other kind, so identification only becomes an issue once you have one in the boat.

I was pretty sure I could identify eiders, scoters, and long-tailed ducks, which are the three sea ducks you’re allowed to take seven of, and I figured I’d simply limit myself to one of any kind of puddle duck I couldn’t ID; I’d have to be content with a boat full of one-offs. Yeah, like that’d happen.

After we’d drifted around the harbor for a while, missing ducks, we went out toward the end of Sandy Neck, where the harbor turns into Cape Cod Bay. There were more sea ducks and fewer puddle ducks, and the sea ducks weren’t quite as skittish as their inland brethren. Two eiders let us get quite close before they flew, and then went by right in front of me.

My first shot missed, and I thought my second did, too, but after a couple of wingbeats the eider dropped to the water, wounded. Before I could shoot it again it dove, and it came up on the other side of the boat. That was Bob’s side, and Bob finished it off when he had the chance. We didn’t want the poor bird to get away, wounded, and die a long, hard death, which it might have if we had waited for me to get over there to take the shot.

So I didn’t even kill my first duck. I only winged it.

We were out on the water for about six hours, and that was the only duck we had to show for it. Despite its being a beautiful day, it was a profoundly unsatisfying hunt.

I took the eider home, and turned to the world’s leading expert on preparing wild ducks, Hank Shaw, for advice. Hank, who’s known for eating “everything but the quack,” makes an exception for sea ducks. Roasted whole, they taste like low tide, so he skins them and takes the breast and legs. I watched his video, and did the same.

I was left with ten ounces of duck meat, plus a heart and gizzard that I added to duck stock I was making out of one of our ducks. It wasn’t much.

Had we been properly equipped and more skilled, it probably would have been much more. But to be properly equipped and more skilled takes both time and money. The boat needs to be painted, and it needs one of those hula skirts you put around the gunwales so it looks like a patch of reeds. We need more decoys, more realistically deployed. And I need to spend a lot of time at the range, shooting shells that can cost a dollar a pop.

I’m just not sure about duck hunting. A successful hunt yields something very delicious, but also very time-consuming. I’ve processed ducks, and it isn’t much fun. And Kevin and I have taken on so much that we have to start thinking about what we don’t want to do.

I realize that all this doubt may be the byproduct of a profoundly unsatisfying hunt, so I’m going to wait until I do well, at least once, before I make up my mind. But hell mayhave to freeze over first, so I suspect I’ll be in limbo for a good long time.

While I’m there, I do intend to enjoy some eider-pork sausages with caraway and sage.

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On deer hunting itself, McGraw says that responsibility to keep the deer population in check, in the absence of virtually all wild predators, falls to humans and he’s doing his part. I think that’s perfectly reasonable, but he goes on to justify using his flintlock. He admits that it’s unreliable and difficult to use, and that it sometimes fails altogether. He admits that it’s more likely to wound than a modern weapon, and tells a story of wounding a deer and having to kill her with knife.

Why use it? Here’s why:

[W]hen I took up hunting, I eschewed all the technological gadgets designed to give modern hunters an extra edge over their prey. I like to believe that there’s something primitive and existential about the art of hunting, and that somehow, stripping the act of hunting to its basics makes it purer.

There you have it. Mr. McGraw wounded a deer in the name of purity. He wanted to give that poor deer a sporting chance. Never mind that, if he really wanted primitive and existential he would have dispensed with the firearm altogether and gone out with a pointy stick.

What he really wanted to do was philosophize. He wanted to have his venison, but also to make it clear that his thoughtfulness sets him apart from his fellow hunters, those Neanderthals who use things like rifles that make a clean kill easier and more likely.

The more time I spend in the woods with a gun, the more I think that hunting and philosophy don’t mix. Recently, my friend Tovar at A Mindful Carnivore wrote a post called, “Hunting philosophies in ten words or less,” I found that all I had to say on the subject fit into five: Hunt, with care, to eat.

Okay, it’s not literally all I have to say on the subject, but it’s everything important, and certainly everything that could be called “philosophy.” I’ll take a life only if it sustains me (because I eat the animal or because the animal is a threat to what I’m planning to eat or, ideally, both), and I’ll take it in such a way as to minimize its suffering as best I can.

The only ancillary issue worth mentioning is which animals I’ll kill. Because hunting isn’t a necessity for me, I prefer to hunt overpopulated, non-endangered animals, but I’ll take the last dodo if it stands between me and starvation.

While McGraw claims that using a flintlock makes hunting more primitive, I’ll go out on a limb and posit that what he really likes is that it makes it less primitive. It gives him a reason to engage his higher faculties, and it means he has enough to say about it to get himself on the Times Op-Ed page. It means that hunting is a whole-man, cerebral pursuit. So what if a doe dies a slow death?

And that’s what irritates me about so much hunting philosophy. It’s narcissism masquerading as concern for the purity of the hunt. The idea of “fair chase” is at the heart of most of it; it’s supposed to be about giving the animal a sporting chance but is really about making the hunter feel better about himself because the hunt was more challenging. The sense of accomplishment is seriously lessened if you take a deer over bait, but the deer who dies instantly at your corn feeder has it way better than the one you wound and track through the woods for hours.

McGraw’s doe would have taken the Neanderthal with the rifle, any day, even if it meant she wouldn’t have made the Times op-ed page.

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Being in the woods, the reasoning goes, is an end in itself. You learn the animal’s habits and habitat. You learn how to make sense of the signs and the noises around you. You learn the value of taking time off from civilization.

This is stuff and nonsense. What you really learn is how uncomfortable it is to sit in one spot for a very long time. You learn how adept deer are at giving you a wide berth. You learn that your own thoughts aren’t such great company.

Other commitments prevented me from spending more than about five days out in the woods this deer season, but only part of me would have wanted more. The other part definitely had to wash my hair.

Normally, I use audiobooks to enliven tedious tasks (and there are a lot of them around here). Give me a good book, and I can face just about anything. Hunting deer, though, you’re supposed to be attuned to every noise. I tried an audiobook, at low volume, with only one ear plugged in, but it became clear that I wouldn’t notice a deer until I took an antler in the gut. So I had to leave Anthony Bourdain at home.

Which left just me and my brainwaves. Earlier in the season, in Vermont, Kevin and I were hunting a patch in our friend Dave’s back yard, so we could stay out for a few hours, come in for a bit, and go back again. Last week, though, we went to opening day of the annual hunt at Otis Air Force Base, and it was sun-up to sun-down.

The Otis hunt is one of the best deer bets on Cape Cod, which has an abysmal deer-to-hunter ratio (abysmal, oddly, for both hunters and deer). The base is closed to civilians all year, and opens for one week to allow hunters to cull their substantial white-tail herd.

Lt. Frank Otis (d. 1937), pilot and surgeon, for whom the base is named

Otis is 22,000 acres, but not all of them are open. Since it’s an active military base, there are areas with unexploded ordnance, clearly marked with scary signs and definitely off-limits. This should please any hunter committed to the idea of fair chase, as it creates vast safe havens for the animals you’re trying to hunt. Although deer only read at a third-grade level and ‘ordnance’ probably trips them up, they get the gist and go running for those areas at the first sound of shotguns.

Still, opening day is usually a good day. So we went.

Kevin and I arrived pre-dawn, but hadn’t counted on the long line of trucks waiting to register. By the time we got to our chosen spot, the sun had been up for almost half an hour, and we paid the price. As we hiked into the woods, we saw two bucks, already on the run from the chaos that was descending on them. We didn’t have a shot.

And those were the only deer we saw. We were in the woods for eight hours, with a break for lunch, and all we had to do was think.

I cycled through just about everything I could think of to think about, and it was still only mid-morning. So I cycled through it again. I thought about the looming due date of the magazine article I wasn’t working on. I thought about whether we really want to get two Scottish deerhounds. I considered whether a post about not shooting a deer could possibly be interesting. I wondered what Kevin was thinking.

All that took about fifteen minutes, so I did some work on my all-purpose acceptance speech (Pulitzer, Nobel, Oscar, whatever), which is getting pretty good. I planned what I’d make for dinner. I figured out what I’d jury-rig to try to get the chickens to stop roosting on the nest box dividers. I wondered what problems Kevin was solving.

Then, having run through everything practical, I fantasized about actually getting a deer. I wondered out what we’d do with it, given that it was a little too warm to hang it in the garage. I developed some venison recipes. What could Kevin be thinking?

We packed it in a little after sunset, when there was just enough light to get us out of the woods. As we hiked back to the truck, Kevin said, “So, were you thinking about sex that whole time, too?”

“The whole time?”

“Sure,” he said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. And then paused. “Well, I also thought about that boat for a couple minutes.” (We’d gone to look at a bigger boat the day before.)

Maybe that’s a consolation prize for not getting a deer, but I can’t imagine it’s enough of one to elevate the experience to “successful hunt.”

Although there are things to be learned in the woods, no one in his right mind would go out in the freezing cold and sit in a tree stand, or behind a rock, or in a blind, for hours on end if there were no prospect of venison. I gotta believe that a successful hunt is one in which you bring home dinner.

Luckily, the idea can’t make me a killer until I actually kill something. Which won’t be this year.

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We don’t have a trap, but our friend Les does. And the only reason it isn’t sitting outside our chicken coop, baited with raw meat, is that we’re not quite sure how to dispatch the raccoon once we get one.

Your days are numbered

My idea of a humane kill is one shot through the heart, but we can’t discharge firearms on our property. Taking a trapped raccoon somewhere else to kill it would just prolong the poor thing’s agony. Besides, I don’t think shooting an animal in a cage is particularly safe, or particularly easy.

There is drowning, which would be easy, but I suspect there’s a lot of suffering involved. At the moment, we’re leaning toward carbon monoxide – put the trap in a box and attach the tailpipe of our catalytic-converter-free Land Rover. In the movies, people who die this way just drift off to sleep.

Before we do anything, though, I’m soliciting input. Many of you have much more experience killing things than I do, and I’d like to hear your ideas.

Anyone?

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I’m not overly susceptible to the Siren Song of Stuff – sloth and gluttony are my vices of choice – but I’m not deaf, either. I heard the call this morning, when, for the first time in months, maybe years, I had to go stuff shopping.

Kevin and I are visiting our friends Dave and Bonnie, who live on the outskirts of Manchester, Vermont, in the Green Mountains. We’re here to hunt deer, and there were a couple of items I needed. First on the list was a pair of pants. Last year, I made do with a pair of beige wool slacks. They were the dress-up kind – Ann Taylor, I think – not the outdoorsy kind, but I figured once I had a coat and boots on, they would look just like those old-fashioned wool pants they sell for the purpose. And they were fine. They were warm, they were beige, they were fine. Then, at the end of the season, I put them in the laundry, in open defiance of the “dry clean only” tag. “Shrink” doesn’t begin to describe it.

Next on the list was a pair of hiking boots. I own a pair of outstanding boots – Lowas – that are about eight years old. I hadn’t worn them in a couple of years, and they were in a plastic box in the basement. I took them out, dusted them off, and wore them to the range last week.

They fit as well as I remembered, and as Kevin and I walked down-range to hang targets, I was congratulating myself for having sprung for the expensive boots, boots that give proper support, have the right kind of cushioning, and last a lifetime. Then I felt a weird kind of drag on my right heel, like I had stepped on something that was trailing behind me. When we got to the bench, I found that the heel had essentially rotted in half, and the bottom of the sole had separated from the rest of the boot.

Next trip to the targets, the whole damn sole came off, and I was flapping around like something out of Mad magazine.

If there is any place on earth where you want to look competent and in-control, it’s the rifle range. Everyone there has loaded guns, and we all know our lives depend on our fellow-shooters’ ability to handle weapons safely. You simply do not want to look like an idiot.

As a rule, Kevin helps protect me from doing really stupid things. The first time we went to the range, he told me to bring earplugs, since we didn’t have any of those big earmuffs people use to muffle sound. But I had a better idea, and I packed the Bose noise-canceling headphones. When we got there, I was about to put them on, and he stopped me.

“You can’t use those,” he said, taking them out of my hands.

“Why not?” I asked. “They’re noise-canceling.”

He pointed to the long curly cord. “What are you going to do with that?”

I considered. “I’ll tuck it in my sweater.”

“No.”

He didn’t say it then, but I know it now. You don’t want to look like an idiot at the rifle range. So the whole flapping sold thing was extremely unfortunate. Back at the bench, I held my boot up, and Kevin pulled the sole completely off. And then he did the other one, which had also started to go.

That’s why I was shopping this morning. And Mission: Acquisition took me to H.N. Williams General Store, in Dorset, where Dave sent me.

H.N. Williams General Store

You have to love H.N. Williams General Store. On the outside, it looks like just what you think a Vermont general store should look like. On the inside, it has a complete supply of hardware, hunting and fishing gear, and outdoor clothing. The salespeople are suitably laconic. There’s a little café.

But it’s a diabolical little place. Just when you’re feeling all salt-of-the-earth, browsing the full Carhartt line, you get distracted by an extremely attractive line of jackets. Turns out they’re from a company called Ibex, which makes high-end merino wool clothing. Not just jackets, but base layers and socks and sweaters and pants.

It’s soft and beautiful and expensive. I have a soft spot for fine-spun wool, and I was hearing its call, loud and clear. I had to stand in front of the rack and take mental inventory of the clothing I already had that would serve the same function. (Silk base layer and a couple of ratty cashmere sweaters that are great for hunting.) I walked away, only to run into the rack of Gore-Tex hunting pants, with a price tag north of $200. And the boots …

I walked out with a pair of brown Carhartts with reinforced front panels (for crashing through brush), and a pair of hiking boots that were on super sale, made by a company called Irish Setter. But I could easily have spent many hundreds of dollars. This, despite the fact that I’ve been hunting for about seven seconds and have succeeded only in irritating some ducks.

There’s something disconcerting about using an activity that’s supposed to help you provide for yourself as an opportunity to buy. But it happens to me, over and over. There’s the super groovy Shimano composite fishing pole Kevin got me for my birthday. There’s my Ribb clam rake. And then there’s this rifle – a Marlin .308 with a 24-inch barrel, in stainless steel, thank you very much. I don’t have it yet, but I want it.

My friend Amanda lives in Portland, Oregon, and she told me that there is an entire store there devoted to homesteading supplies. You can buy greenhouse frames and solar set-ups and all-in-one canning kits – in stainless steel, thank you very much. Shop O Pioneer: The Homesteading Super Store!

On the one hand, as has been discussed here before, good tools and clothing and supplies outperform bad tools and clothing and supplies. But at some point the purchase is less about the incremental advantage than about the fun of owning really cool stuff.

Rifle season for deer opens tomorrow, and I’ll be hunting in a second-hand coat, with a sixty-year-old gun. I’ll be kept warm by a motley array of layers accommodated by pants that are a size too big. And I’m fine with that. I am. But there’s an Orvis outlet in this town, and if we happen to pass it, you’d better tie me to the mast.

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The basic operation of firearms hasn’t changed in the eight hundred years or so we’ve had them, and the principle is beautifully simple. The pressure created by burning propellant pushes a projectile through a tube. That’s it.

Image borrowed from howstuffworks.com

Over those eight hundred years, the propellant has changed (although the black powder of the old days isn’t so far removed from the smokeless powder we use now), the loading method has changed (we generally don’t load from the muzzle), and the way the powder is ignited has changed (flint-on-steel has been replaced by primer made of pressure-sensitive explosive and triggered by a firing pin). The basic idea, though, is the same.

This is why guns that had a career robbing stagecoaches are still in circulation and also why Kevin and I, last week, ended up buying a gun older than we are.

We had three guns already – all shotguns. Kevin owned a .410 Remington and a 12-gauge Browning Citori when I met him, and he bought me a Remington 870 20-gauge for my birthday two years ago. Unfortunately, none of those guns was able to get us a deer last season.

Deer hunting on Cape Cod is difficult, partly because there are many hunters and not many deer, and partly because we’re prohibited from using rifles. Instead, we load shotguns with slugs (preferably using a rifled barrel, which my 20-gauge has), and wait for a close-range opportunity.

This year, we’re going to try our luck in Vermont, in the woods behind our friend Dave’s house. Unlike Massachusetts, Vermont allows rifles, but that’s helpful only if you have one.

Last week found us meandering through the backroads of North Carolina, on our way home from the wedding of our good friend Allison Fishman and our new friend Aaron Task, and we kept seeing billboards for the world’s largest gun store. Mackey’s, it was called. We’d been considering buying a rifle, and we talked about maybe going to find the store. But we had a long drive ahead of us, and neither of us made a move for the GPS.

We continued the meander.

And then we saw a sign we did stop for. “Boiled Peanuts.”

I’d never had a boiled peanut, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. We pulled in and got ourselves a pint.

Now, having tasted them, I have a theory. Boiled peanuts are yet another manifestation of the inferiority complex that the South has had ever since it lost the Civil War. By insisting that a product that is clearly inferior to its roasted Northern counterpart, and arguably inedible, is actually a regional delicacy, the appreciation of which separates the men (that would be them) from the boys (obviously us), they are holding on to their sense of separateness in the feeble hope that, some day, they will rise again.

I’m thinking boiled peanuts should go the way of slavery, although I stop short of supporting a Constitutional amendment.

As we stood in the parking lot, marveling at the watery taste and cardboard texture of this Southern taste treat, we took a moment to look around. Right there, across the street, was the world’s largest gun shop.

I have no idea whether it really is the world’s largest gun shop, not having been in all the others. I can say, though, that it’s definitely a really big gun shop.

When you walk in, the first thing that hits you is the smell of cigarette smoke, which transports you back to about 1978, which was the last time you were in a store where someone was smoking. A very nice woman looked up from her paperwork. “Shotguns to the left,” she said, gesturing to a cavernous room filled with racks, “Rifles to the right.”

The rifle room was as big as the shotgun room, and there were hundreds of guns, new and used. I know next to nothing about rifles and browsed aimlessly, but Kevin looked with a purpose.

He found a gun he liked, and he called me over to show me.

“It’s a Marlin .30-30,” he said. “An old one, but it’s in great condition.”

“How old?” I asked.

“Probably from the sixties.”

He asked to see it, and they unlocked it. He worked the action and mounted it to see how it felt. It felt good, and he decided to buy it. After ascertaining that he wasn’t a felon or a fugitive from justice, they sold it to him.

When we got home, we checked the serial number and found out it was made in 1950. I couldn’t help but be a little leery of a sixty-year-old gun, but Kevin assured me that guns like that get passed down through generations, and that the new ones are almost identical to the one we’d just bought.

Still, when we brought it to the range, I was a little apprehensive. I asked him to shoot it first. Nice, eh?

We put targets at fifty yards, and he shot it. A little low, a little left, but only a couple inches from the bulls-eye. After a couple more shots, he handed it to me.

I was still apprehensive. My experience shooting a slug through my 20-gauge had me braced for a big bang and a strong kick. But this gun was entirely different. It wasn’t nearly as loud or as boisterous, and the sights were such that I felt I could aim it with confidence. At fifty yards, all my shots were in a one-foot circle, which isn’t great but is probably acceptable. At a hundred yards, I had more trouble, but I’ll go back and practice.

Beyond how it feels to hold and to shoot, it’s the action I like. It’s got a lever that ejects the spent cartridge as you pull it out, and loads the new cartridge when you push it back. It has a smooth, solid, mechanical feel, like all the parts mesh together exactly the way they’re supposed to. It feels like a well-made tool.

Before we took the rifle to the range, I was having some trouble mustering enthusiasm for deer-hunting. (I wasn’t the only one – NorCal Cazadora wrote about the self-same problem.) But the rifle makes a difference, and it’s hard to explain why. I’ve practiced with my 20-gauge, and I’m reasonably accurate at fifty yards, the longest shot I’d take. But it feels like the wrong tool for the job. It’s a shotgun that’s been jury-rigged to imitate a rifle. I feel better being in the woods with a firearm that’s designed to do the job at hand, particularly if feels right in my hands and against my shoulder.

Which is a problem, given that the Marlin is Kevin’s gun, and he likes it as much as I do.

Luckily, our friend Tim offered to lend us his Winchester .30-06 (a somewhat more powerful rifle of the same caliber). Maybe we’ll trade off.

I’ve known, in other parts of life, what it feels like to use a tool that suits you. I have a Cleveland five-wood that must have been made for me. My chef’s knife fits in my hand and rocks on the cutting board just the way I want it to. While I’m perfectly capable of using other clubs, and other knives, those are the ones I’m happiest with.

So why do I feel like the Marlin .30-30 is poised atop the slippery slope that has “gun nut” at the bottom?

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