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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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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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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I blame Tovar. He started it, in a post at A Mindful Carnivore about wounding animals.

In search of pheasant

Every hunter I know believes it is a hunter’s responsibility to kill an animal cleanly. Ideally, you drop it with one shot. If you hit an animal but don’t kill it, it’s your job to track it and finish the job.

Although even the most conscientious hunter will sometimes lose a wounded animal, I think it’s fair to say that making that happen as infrequently as possible is the single most important guiding principle of hunting. (Okay, there’s don’t shoot people, but that’s a little different.)

Yet deeply ingrained in the loose collection of principles that is hunting ethics we have the concept of “fair chase.”

Different people have different definitions, but it boils down to giving an animal a sporting chance. Many hunters frown on shooting a duck in the water, taking a turkey off a roost, or luring a deer in with bait. What it boils down to is that those strategies most likely to yield a clean kill are considered off limits to the “ethical” hunter.

I have no objection to going into the thickest part of the woods and pitting your wits against a deer by trying to get it to come into range. Making hunting difficult is not incompatible with a commitment to a clean kill. But what, exactly, is the objection to making hunting easier?

It’s not sporting, it’s not fair, it somehow violates a fundamental sense of justice to take an animal that’s sleeping, stunned by sudden light, or baited.

As Holly at NorCal Cazadora has pointed out, if you’re concerned about having an unfair advantage over an animal, what’s with the gun? Seems to me that firearms irrevocably tipped the scales in favor of humans as predators. If you really want to give your deer a sporting chance, go into the woods unarmed and see how well you do with a pointy stick.

The problem with “fair chase” is that the more you level the playing field, the more likely you are to wound an animal. There’s evidence that the deer wounding rate for archery is higher than that for firearms, yet I have heard bowhunters talk about the authenticity of the experience and the satisfaction of taking a deer without a firearm.

And I understand that. To be perfectly clear, I do not oppose bowhunting, or any strategy that makes hunting more difficult. I just think that, the more likely your hunting method is to wound, the more committed you have to be to developing your skills and the more careful you have to be about deciding which shots to take. Responsible bowhunters are very skilled and very careful, and their feeling of accomplishment when they take an animal successfully must be commensurate.

I respect skill. I know some very experienced, responsible, successful hunters, hunters who wouldn’t dream of baiting a deer, and my hat is off to them for having gotten good at something difficult. I hope to learn from them and become more skillful myself.

My point here (and I do have one) is that what’s “sporting” is arbitrary. And I think a commitment to a clean kill trumps any consideration of fair chase. While I appreciate the challenge of hunting, the need to understand an animal in order to get close enough to it to kill it, and the connection to wildlife that many hunters feel, the primary reason I hunt is for food. If I can take an animal easily, I will.

The deer doesn’t care whether you shoot it over a feeder or you take it in the wild. The deer does care that you kill it in such a way as to minimize its suffering. Anything that makes that more likely is okay in my book.

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Man the hunter

Deer hunting season has been over for three hours now, and we have to chalk this year up to experience. No deer, but something of an education.

We learned about how, where, and when to look for deer, and what we should smell like while we’re doing it. We learned about deer blinds and tree stands, driving and stalking, guns and ammunition. I learned that waving your hunter-orange hat is the universal sign for “Don’t shoot me.”

I also learned that I’m not cut out for long stints in the woods, standing still and doing nothing.

There’s a lot of that in deer hunting. Hours and hours of it, sometimes. You stand (or sit), keeping noise and movement to a minimum, trying to act like a tree, listening for a sign of deer. Most hunters I know, while they acknowledge the hardship of it, find good in it as well.

I’ve cited Tovar Cerulli, who blogs at A Mindful Carnivore, before. This is what he has to say about being in the woods at dawn, waiting for deer:

I can’t recall ever taking so much pleasure in simply sitting, eyes closed. My mind went still, letting go of its churning thoughts about the next chapter I would be drafting for my book, or about the research I’m doing in grad school, interviewing hunters who came to the pursuit as adults. I was hardly even thinking about deer.

And he’s not alone. There seems to be an almost universal sense among people who frequent the woods – hunters, campers, hikers – that peace, or freedom, or meaning, is to be found there.

A couple of posts ago, when I griped about spending so many deerless hours in the trees, astute commenter Brooke posted a Wendell Berry poem, “The Peace of Wild Things,” by way of encouragement:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

And I want to be encouraged but, if there’s a gene for finding peace and freedom in the great outdoors, I was born without it. Maybe it’s linked to the gene for musical ability, or negotiation skills. While I think the woods can be very nice, especially when the sun is out and the weather is warm, having to be silent and still in them is, to me, nothing but a chore.

I envy what Wendell Berry and his fellow agrarian contemplatives find in the woods, and although I don’t share their sensibility, I enjoy reading some of them. E.B. White, when he left New York City for a farm in Maine just before the advent of World War II, wrote a number of wonderful essays anthologized in One Man’s Meat. Berry himself writes engagingly about agriculture, although I part company with him on some environmental issues. Walden, for the record, I loathe.

My problem, I think, is that I am soulless. I don’t look for meaning because I don’t believe life has any beyond that with which we endow it with our words and deeds. I think the plants and animals in the woods are interesting, but I don’t find majesty or mystery. My strategy for controlling anxiety is distraction, not contemplation, and sitting quietly with nothing to do doesn’t clear my head. How can your head be clear when the bathtub needs scrubbing? Are the property taxes due? What on earth am I going to make for dinner? Is that a deer tick?

So, in the many hours I spent in the woods over the course of the last two weeks, there was no peace. There was no tranquility. And there sure as hell was no ten-point buck.

But there was a doe. A real, live doe.

I heard her as I stood, still, next to a tree about twenty yards down from a ridge. She came from my right, behind me, and as soon as I heard the leaves rustle I knew it was a deer. A deer doesn’t sound like a squirrel, or a hunter, or the wind. The noise was a set of sharp, quick hoofsteps in the dry leaves. Clip … clip … clip clip.

The sound got closer and I slowly turned around. There she was, maybe thirty yards away, crossing my field of view across the ridge. She was easily in range, but there were two problems. First, I was facing down the slope, and to turn around and get a shot without spooking her would have been difficult. Second, she was right on the ridge line, which meant I couldn’t see what was on the other side of her. One of the cardinal rules of gun safety is to know what’s beyond your target.

She went by behind me and headed down the slope and into the woods to my left. I had a shot. For someone of my minimal skill, it was a long shot, probably fifty yards. It was through trees and brambles, but I had a shot.

I pointed my gun. I saw her head and chest, looking very small above my gun sight. But it took me just a moment too long to line up the notch on the sight with the bead on the muzzle. It wasn’t quite right, and I didn’t have confidence in the shot.

I didn’t take it. She went on her way, out of range.

In eight days of hunting, that’s the only deer I saw. Kevin saw none, although he heard at least two. I am haunted by the sight of her, and how a more experienced hunter would have handled the situation differently and undoubtedly gotten a shot. But I am constrained by the idea that I am out in the woods, with a deadly weapon, inexperienced and unsupervised. While I’d very much like to bring home a deer, my first priority is handling a gun safely and responsibly.

That deer, though, will be what gets me out to brave the cold and the tedium, the ticks and the greenbriar, next year at this time. There will never be tranquility, but there will, some day, be venison.

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The section of Truro we're ... um ... hiking in

We assume we’re making many, many mistakes, and we’ve been talking to as many hunters as we can to figure out where we’re going wrong. Last night, Kevin and some of his fellow oystermen shucked oysters for a charity event, and I took advantage of a break in the action to talk to Dave Ryan, of Wianno Oyster.

You know how we’re making a big hairy deal about trying to source as much of our food first-hand as we can? Dave Ryan actually does it, but just doesn’t feel the need to shout it from the rooftops. He and his wife have taught their three sons about seasonal eating by hunting, fishing and gardening with them from the time they were small. Every year, Dave harvests two or three deer, and that’s the bulk of his family’s meat until next year’s deer season rolls around.

Did you get that? Every year, Dave harvests two or three deer!

This will give you a clue as to the level of Dave’s hunting expertise. Granted, he has property in New York where the hunting isn’t quite as maddening as it is here on Cape Cod, but lots of New York hunters go deerless. Just not Dave.

He was good enough to give me some tips about how and where to hunt, and then he said, offhandedly, “You do have the whole scent thing down, right?”

Scent thing?

It seems deer have very sensitive noses, and as soon as they catch a whiff of you, they’re off and running. So you’re supposed to wash your clothes and yourself, early and often, with scent-free detergents and soaps. You can’t smell human.

This requirement does not play to our strengths. Once the weather gets cold, we play by hygiene’s winter rules, which specify that you don’t have to remove your base layer except when A) there’s a freakishly warm day, B) people you really like have invited you to their home, or C) it’s April again. Just so you don’t think we’re total barbarians, I’ll point out that it’s whichever comes first.

Some Cape hunters point out that deer populations in densely peopled areas don’t bolt at the first smell of Homo sapiens. If they did, they’d run for the hills every time somebody took out the garbage within a half-mile radius. They’re certainly attuned to human scent, but don’t necessarily flee, we’re told.

Still, Dave’s opinion on hunting carries a lot of weight with me, and I’m going scent-free as soon as I can stock up on the right kinds of detergent.

In the meantime, there are two days left of deer season. Tomorrow, we’re going to try a section of the National Seashore that a friend of Kevin’s, also an experienced hunter, recommended to us. I’ll be showered and ready at daybreak.

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When I signed up for my hunter education class, about a year ago, it was because I felt like hunting was something I needed to do if I was really going to try to eat as much first-hand food as possible. A lifetime of rooting for the gazelles on Wild Kingdom because I couldn’t bear to watch lions rip out their throats convinced me that I was not, at heart, the hunting kind.

When I thought about looking at a deer, up close, and then taking careful aim and shooting it through its vitals, it seemed a grim prospect. I wasn’t looking forward to it.

But now I am.

Many of the hunters and farmers I know say that killing the animals you eat gives you a respect for life. If your porkchops are just porkchop-shaped pink things, wrapped in plastic, you’re too far removed to care about Elmer, the pig who died so you could grill. If you raise Elmer from a piglet, and feed him kitchen scraps and acorns, you have a profound appreciation for what it means to be carnivorous.

Something different has happened to me. I don’t think I have more respect for life. I don’t have less, either. It’s just that I’ve been hardened. I haven’t turned into a stone killer; no need to lock up your children. I’ve simply become less sentimental about the death of animals.

To some degree, our desires and preferences are shaped by custom and proximity. Whether something – eating dog, practicing polygamy, hunting deer – repels or attracts us may have more to do with whether we grew up doing it than anything inherent in us. Unless there’s a moral objection – no widow burning! – what keeps us from the unfamiliar is simply its unfamiliarity.

I didn’t grow up hunting, and until this year I never met a live animal that was to be my dinner. But by a slow course of thinking, talking, and writing about killing things, coupled with spending time reading about and talking with smart, interesting people who kill things, I have turned myself into someone who actively wants to shoot a deer.

I do find this a little unnerving. While I don’t really believe this is the first step down the path to a callous disregard to life, that’s what all stone killers said. I will continue to monitor my progress.

Today, I’m resting easy because, in order to be a stone killer, you have to actually kill something. It will probably not surprise you to learn that I didn’t do that on this, my fourth day hunting deer.

We decided that Cape Cod was not an optimal place to find deer. “Come on,” Kevin said. “How many of them do you suppose swim over from the mainland?”

The impenetrable deer habitat of Standish forest

We went over the bridge to the Myles Standish State Forest, a 15,000-acre park in Plymouth. The nice guy at the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife had given us a map and pointed us in a direction he thought might be fruitful, and dawn found us loading the guns and hiking into the woods.

Even to my untrained eye, this was clearly deer habitat. The woods were laced with trails, and the trails were dotted with poop. There were bare spots where they’d scraped the dirt, and bare trees where they’d rubbed antlers.

We were hunting a rectangular piece of land, about a mile by half a mile, bounded on all four sides by dirt roads. Kevin and I split up, walked parallel tracks, and met on the opposite road.

On my second pass, walking on a deer trail through scrub oak, I heard a noise. I froze, and listened. It was the distinct rustle rustle rustle of something big in the bushes. I thought it might be another hunter, but no hunter emerged. No deer emerged either.

For the first time in my thus far inauspicious deer hunting career, I took the safety off my shotgun. And I will admit that my heart was racing. Buck fever, they call it.

I walked toward the bushes to investigate, but there was no other noise. I didn’t see anything at all. Whatever it was (and I’m convinced it was a deer), it had run away.

I went on my way, and met Kevin on the other side. “I heard one!” I told him, and related the circumstances. He told me, to my great dismay, that a deer will sometimes stay very still, in the hopes that you think it has run away and continue on to tell your husband how you didn’t manage to figure out that there was a deer right there.

Yes, it’s possible that there was a deer right there. That this was my best chance to date of actually getting a deer. And I blew it. I didn’t go far enough into the bushes. I fell for the ruse.

One of the things you can do in a deer blind while you wait for deer

In my defense, I will point out that all the stupid, slow, or friendly deer got weeded out the first week of deer season, leaving only the canny, streetwise deer. Besides, the fact that this process has been going on for many years means that virtually none of the stupid, slow, friendly deer live to procreate, whereas the canny, streetwise deer survive into their deery dotage, reproducing and volunteering their time to teach Hunter Evasion to the young generation.

It was encouraging to know that there were deer in them thar hills, and we set up our blind near the spot I’d heard the rustling. A couple of hours yielded no sightings, and we gave it up about 1:00, some six hours after we arrived.

We left the blind in the spot, though, and we’ll go back again tomorrow morning. It’s unnerving, but I actively want to kill a deer.

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