by Rick Bass
I cleaned him, dragged him out to the road, then went and got the Jeep to take him back to camp. In the old days, I used to carry the deer out on my back, believing it had something to do with responsibility and respect, until my father pointed out to me that it was a good way to get shot, were I to pass by a fenceline and some other eager hunter who didn’t know who and what I was.
The deer hang vertical from the same metal pole they’ve always hung from. There is art to the stripping, the paring down, no matter how familiar the act has become, over the years. We peel the neck cape back a bit to let the carcass cool and age in the mild November breeze, and then, a couple of days later, the deer is skinned, revealing every perfect muscle, every whitened strand of fascia. Creatures wrapped in muscle, red muscle sheathed within more muscle, sheathed then within more muscle.
I like some of it in chili. I like certain cuts of it in the iron skillet. I like certain cuts roasted, others breaded lightly in flour.
Taking them apart—first the long backstrap, which powers their sinuosity, then the shoulders, folding back like wings, with no joint to hold them to the body, only more muscle, and then the big hams, heavier than sacks of grain and fastened firmly with ball-and-socket, whose connective tissue must be cut; then the smaller pieces, butt steak and shanks and neck roasts. Neck loins, tenderloins, and then the delicate strips of meat between the narrow ribs. Then the flank steaks, the sheets of muscle transversing the ribs.
Now the deer is beginning to look more like a wingless bird or a reptile—all the vertebrae and ribs gleam. It’s become such a shadow of its former self, and so light.
You cut and wrap, over at the butchering table, beneath the great oak. You toss the ligaments into the cedars, for the jays and coyotes to eat. For the soil, the cedar and oaks, to eat with their roots.
You might have a hundred pounds in your ice chest when you are done. Rendering the deer, you understand physically in a way you could not understand by reading or listening about it, that you are eating the mountain: that fruit trees grow fruit and that mountains grow deer.
The shape of those muscles you learned, in the disassembly, held silent discourse for you about the shape of the land that accommodated them: the gullies descended, the ravines climbed, the side hills traveled. Cleaning the deer, handling each muscle, you would stop and think how each muscle must have worked to travel across a certain feature on the landscape. And would again, in another.
Coming back apart the way we were assembled. Like the rocks, like us. As with the gone-away granite that formed and then laid down the crystals and then left, abandoning the crystals, so too are there ghosts of my family’s deer all around. I see them, I taste them, and remember them across the years, and the places they were found. They are in the muscles of my arms, my back. They’re in the cells of that part of the brain that holds memory.
What has Uncle Jimmy forgotten, with his stroke? Nothing, it seems; he just has great difficulty speaking or writing. He seems to remember everything. The little rifle that he and my father used to hunt with. The pig that chased him up the tree, gashing his calf muscle with its tusks.
This year at supper one night my father asks him if he remembers the big catfish that lived in the deep watering hole beneath the waterfall, below the old camp. I’d forgotten that fish myself—had forgotten it with a cleanliness and severity; there was a strange and not altogether unpleasant depthfulness to my forgetting, so that when my father’s storytelling dredged it back up, I understood immediately that I would never, ever have thought of that fish again in my life, without his having mentioned it.
I was probably only six or seven, during the reign of that fish; it was long before I began hunting, though sometimes in the summer my mother and father would bring me up to the deer pasture just to walk around and to go on a picnic.
The catfish was a black bullhead, weighing probably more than ten pounds, and had lived in the clear deep pool below the falls since before I was born. The plunge pool was eight to ten feet deep, round and crystal clear, about the size of a large garage, and it was where my father and uncle and grandfather had bathed, no matter what the weather, in the old days, before electricity came to the Hill Country. The pellucid waters seemed to magnify both the brilliance of his skin as well as his size—this jet-black fish with whiskers like a dragon cruising slowly around and around, dark amidst the mossy green of the submerged boulders, and so visible in that clear water—and he was half-tame, so that you could swim next to him and around him in those clear waters, though he would shy away if you tried to touch him.
Then one year he was gone—any guess would be as good as another—and I was still a young boy, with a world to see and remember, and the memory of that fish escaped too, until it was brought back on this year’s hunt, summoned by the memory not of my own doing, but of another connected to me.
“Yes,” Uncle Jimmy says, when my father is done telling us, re-telling us, the story of that fish, “yes.” Meaning: yes, he remembers. How strange it is that he is the one who has had the stroke but I am the one who has forgotten.
I have been taking photographs every year, and it’s really starting to get fun now, as we knew, I suppose, it eventually would; I’ve been doing it for a long enough period of time, roughly thirty years, that the photographs are finally—after a long period of seeming timelessness—showing progression: aging, repetition, pattern. I have photos, unposed, of my father and uncle working on deer at the butchering table, and then, thirty years later, ourselves, doing the same work, and looking so much alike. As the photos of my father and uncle are now, like a dissolving magic trick, beginning to look so much like those of Old Granddaddy, thirty years earlier.
What’s equally amazing is the realization that these patterns of repetition have probably been present all along; that it’s only now, decades later, becoming evident, revealed to all, stripped by time.
It’s amazing to me how meaningful some of those old photos are to me. Nearly indiscriminate snapshots—my father pondering a move in a dominoes game; Uncle Jimmy at the stove, spatula in hand, back at the old camp . . . . Things you never dreamed would be gone, things you never really considered one way or the other—like the existence of a big black catfish—but that now exist only in those pages.
The sight of them—like some familiar topographic relief—helps hold them firm in the memory.
Often now I find myself consciously taking indiscriminate photos of our surroundings, and our way of life at the deer camp, and of the landscape itself. Perhaps that’s a code for the times: document the familiar. Even the mundane, the common, the secure, and the comfortable, will not endure. Sometimes you can’t help but think that it’s all already been decided: that there is no escaping, even if one wanted, the eternal relationship between a thing and the shadow cast by that thing.
This year, more than any other, I was struck by how worn the paths are before us. The deer use the same trails; they scrape and rub the same trees with their antlers and, in the winter, shed their antlers in the same places.
Even the geometry of the world seems extraordinarily decided, some days. The curved, smooth-weathered silhouettes of the stones at dawn look like the curved backs of animals, haunch and hip, flank and shoulder, as do the rounded curves of cactus pads. Certain twists of branches look exactly like the branches of antlers. The similarity does not in any way diminish one’s wonder at the reasons for and presence of life on this earth—if anything, it causes one to marvel even more. How easy it would be for our shapes to remain static, unanimated, even inorganic.
Just as visions, corners, flashes of grass in the wind swirl like the flagging of the bright tails of fleeing deer, but upon whirling to face that glimpse of sight, you see that there is no deer, was no deer, only wind.
Not all the granite boulders come apart so quickly. A few are actually held together by thick mats of the bright hieroglyphic-patterned lichens that feed on the faces of the boulders—though they feed much more slowly than do
es the wind and rain. Perhaps this is what family is. We cannot stop each other’s aging, and at times it must surely seem that the youth feeds on the parents, and the family on its past, wearing down a thing that once was. But the only thing more disintegrating would be to have none at all. And the lichens are like nothing so much as a depiction, with their strange roseate swirls and curlicues, of the vapors and currents of time’s breath, but colored with such vivid hues—crimson, periwinkle, magenta, aquamarine, chartreuse—to be sure that we don’t miss them.
Or perhaps if the lichens are not time, or family, they are stories and memory. Something’s holding certain things together, while letting others fall apart.
On this year’s hunt, a little miracle occurred, or so it seems to us. Uncle Jimmy shot a deer, a nice deer, an eight-point, over on the east side. It was to be the last and nicest buck we’d kill, on this year’s hunt. He sat beneath an oak tree that afternoon of the next-to-last day, thinking and remembering God knows what—while my father parked about a quarter mile away, and waited, and watched the afternoon shadows lengthen.
About an hour before dark, says my father, the buck jumped the fence onto our property. My father watched the deer wander off into the woods in Uncle Jimmy’s direction.
Uncle Jimmy can’t tell the story. We really don’t know what it was like for him when he saw the deer coming his way. How long he might have watched it before raising his rifle. Whether it spotted him at the last second. We know none of that: only that it was a good shot, a clean kill.
My father heard the single shot and went over to find Uncle Jimmy and his nice buck. My father drove Uncle Jimmy back to camp, then went back out to clean the deer for his older brother, as he and Jimmy had once cleaned deer for Old Granddaddy, in his waning years.
When I came into camp and saw Uncle Jimmy wearing his sweatsuit and sipping a drink, I wasn’t sure what to think. I’d heard the shot and knew it had come from Jimmy’s vicinity, but didn’t want to just out and out ask the miraculous, Did you get a deer? With one arm all but paralyzed, did you get a deer?
Instead, I asked around the edges of it.
I heard a shot. Did someone shoot over there?
Yes.
Is there a deer down? Is that where my father is?
Yes.
Is he looking for the deer? (I imagined one hurt, wounded, leaving a blood trail.)
No.
Is the deer dead and down?
Yes.
Did you shoot the deer?
Yes.
Many hunters believe—have always believed—that it is not the skill of the hunter that brings game to the hunter—no human could ever be as wary or cunning as a wild animal—but rather, that the animal comes as a gift of the land: that it is an act of good luck, grace—a presentation. And that the good hunter always remembers this, and is always grateful, amazed by and marveling at his luck—at the beautiful, intricate specificities of it. And I’d have to agree: with every deer I’ve ever killed, that’s always how it’s been.
The mountain delivers a deer to you. Like something eroding slowly, the mountain shed itself of one deer, but sends it not randomly downslope, but in your direction.
It’s easy to say thank you. It’s the easiest part about hunting.
THE DEER PASTURE
There has been dramatic ecological change at the deer pasture, change in even the last hundred years. The old-timers, men and women of my grandfather’s generation, and even my father’s and uncle’s, still recall the days before “cedar”—western juniper, Juniperus occidentalis—swarmed over the land, sucking the moisture from it, and creating a huge and escalating biomass of extremely flammable wax-coated fuel that one dry and windy day will burn hot and big, killing some but not all of the oaks (which are already being crowded out, killed, by the cedar, with or without a fire) and giving rise once again to sweeping grasslands.
The mountain above where we camp is called the Burned-Off Hill, known also on maps as Green Ridge, so named for the verdant pastures that bloomed there after the last big wildfire in the area, in the 1920s. For a long time afterward there were a ton of deer up there, huge herds that I remember even from my own childhood of the early 1960s, late-season herds of forty or more does, in which might be mixed a few spikes and one or two modest bucks.
Since then, as the cedar has reclaimed the Burned-Off Hill, the herds are smaller, but there are some bigger bucks, which brings us to a further discourse on change: how do you hunt deer in such a tangled thicket? Pretty much gone are the days of seeing deer wander across the wide savannah, canted into the wind like ships at sea. In the old days you could crouch in a grove of oak and cedar and watch such a clearing, particularly during the rut—typically the second or third week of November—and you could see some things.
Now, unless the cedar has been treated mechanically—dozed or cleared with chainsaws (though always, it sprouts right back, grows wildly, enthusiastically; only regular fire keeps it back)—there are fewer such openings, and the deer, particularly the bucks, have learned—not just as individuals, but as entire populations, via the filter of natural selection—to stay in the cedars as much as possible.
A thrilling way to hunt them now is to find a scrape or rub and sit in the cool shade of the cedar bower and wait. You’ll hear the deer coming, their little hooves kicking against the loose granite and sandstone, and then you’ll see, through the dense matrix of so many juniper branches, the tan shins of their forelegs, dappled in that latticed light. Then the legs will come slowly closer, down the little rabbit warren of a trail, and then, best of all, you’ll see the glint of sun on a set of mahogany-brown antlers. You’ll click your rattling antlers together, and blow once more lightly on your grunt tube, and sometimes, if you’re lucky, the breeze will hold in your favor and the buck’s keen bright eyes will not see you, will not meet your eyes (you’ll be wearing a camo mask)—and when the buck moves again and its vision is obscured by a trunk, you can lift your rifle slowly and carefully and take aim.
It’s more like hunting turkeys than deer. It’s certainly not like it was in the old days, but it’s fantastic; that part, the emotional core of it, will never change.
How quickly, though, the rest of the world changes, and particularly once one is no longer a child! There is the far distance of the Old Ones—the exciting and yet also sobering feeling one gets upon discovering a perfect, or near-perfect, chip or arrowhead loose in the granite gravel beneath those slowly eroding giant hoodoo boulders—and then there is the nearer-distance of the old-timers who came just before my grandfather: the Byrd family, related to Davy Crockett, who was given this homestead in gratitude for Crockett’s service at the Alamo; and old Homer Young, who married into that family, and from whom we first took our lease. (Howard married Mr. Young’s daughter; after Mr. Young died, we leased from Howard.)
Our old-timers—Dad and Uncle Jimmy—still almost children, back then—recall that Homer Young would come down in the evenings to play dominoes, and even take a sip of whiskey, and seemed glad for the company.
Sometime after Homer and Mrs. Young settled, the cedar began to encroach, and for a while—half a generation, perhaps—a lone ranch-hand, working diligently and daily, was able, with a single ax, to chop down every invading cedar.
He could not have envisioned a world more different: the stuff of his nightmares, perhaps, as he considered his labors at the end of each long day, hands blistered, but with the cedar kept in check single-handedly, if just barely. One such laborer per ranch, holding back the weeds of the world and believing he could hold back change. But concurrent with his unknown passing, the cedar came, and still comes, an explosion of single-minded enthusiastic photosynthesis.
Because of this, the best way to hunt is to still hunt, whether during the rut or pre-rut, or in the harder times, following the rut. It’s often hot as Hades in the early season, and rattlesnakes are often still active; in such heat, the deer seem to me to be even more crepuscular than normal. There�
��s a tradition among many Texas hunters to hunt from high towers, in plastic blinds, over machines that spray corn out to the deer and turkeys, which then approach like domestic livestock. While it’s not my place to judge another hunter, I have to say, that style is not for me—to my way of thinking, that changes the hunting to mere killing, and I see no need for that, here in the twenty-first century. As well, it’s so wonderful to hunt a deer deep in the cedar thickets—again, it’s like calling in a wild turkey, except that the deer has keen scent—that I feel a wave of pity for the hunters, or shooters, whose experience is so reduced by such a practice.
Sound carries, in the clean air of the Hill Country, and in November, hiding in a clump of cedar, waiting and watching, at daylight you can hear the mechanical whirr of feeders spraying corn pellets everywhere, followed by the almost simultaneous report of rifles near and far. I’ve had the good fortune to know the pleasure of wilder hunts—walking up on bedded animals, or waiting in the bedded areas, or sneaking through the boulders and catching them in pursuit of does—and it’s all the difference in the world. I’d sooner go to the grocery store than sit like an office-hostage in a cubicle at daylight and wait for the mechanical farmer to spew corn and then, dutifully, the deer-turned-into-livestock to come galloping in. Call me old-school, but to me, there’s a difference between killing and hunting.
More change: Back in the oil-rich 1970s, some Hill Country landowners began experimenting with the farming of exotic game animals—most notably axis deer and Aoudad (Barbary) sheep—with the Hill Country so closely resembling parts of Africa. Over the ensuing decades, the exotics have—as they always will—escaped their fences and are slowly establishing themselves in their new non-native habitat.
Perhaps the greatest change I have experienced is the strange circularity of no-change. I used to wonder if my father and uncle would ever one day take my grandfather’s place as esteemed elder of the deer camp—such a time seemed light-years away—and yet somehow, through the turning of the calendars, it has happened. Just as strange, or stranger, to imagine my brothers and cousins and I likewise one day stepping up to inhabit that position.
