The Homing Instinct

by Bernd Heinrich

  Darkness lifted. The ravens gave their first few quorks at the pines on York Hill. They launched themselves to fly side by side into the distance down the valley toward Webb Lake, maybe to the mountains beyond. The first finch flocks awoke—I heard goldfinches and the bell-like jingle of a flock of crossbills. The eastern horizon lightened to orange and yellow and I could start to make out the still-green ferns below. Trunks of blown-over fir trees littered the ground. I could see now into the hardwood forest in front of me, and into the still-dark softwoods to my right. I strained to hear faint stirrings, and I could feel the rhythm of my heart and hear the faint squeak of a shrew in the leaf mold below. Two hours later, I heard a short whistle. Charlie had left his rock and was coming toward me down the slope to pick me up so we could head back to camp for breakfast with another coffee. Afterward we made a tour around the hill, and by two in the afternoon we returned to our stations.

  It was dark three hours later when we got back to the cabin from our third, the evening, hunt. We partook first of all of the customary liquid refreshments and then made a stir-fry of kielbasa, with potatoes and carrots. Kerry, a friend from Rockland, had just joined us for the next day’s hunt, and in anticipation of it our conversation invariably led to hunters’ tales. Kerry, who had time enough in the afternoon after arriving at camp to take a walk through the woods, found an antler rub on an alder, and also a paw mark on the ground. As was the norm, he reported the age and size of the buck, where it was likely hanging out, where it would move, and when. His “knowing” about the deer seemed to end only when it came to the exact number of its antler tines. Kerry’s admission of imperfect knowledge was perhaps proportional to his sense of the growing skepticism of his listeners. Still, even if we seldom believe our fellow hunters’ every word, we enjoy them. The truth is that deer encounters are unpredictable. The stories in the “sports” magazines make you think there is a magic formula to make them appear; there isn’t.

  After a sound sleep that night, we were ready again and eager at the proper time: 4:30 a.m. We knew where we were going. I would this time take my stand on the Rock where Charlie often waits, and he would sit by a big spruce tree at a slope to the south. The only question was how Kerry would get to the knoll where he had seen his hot sign. He could either start out with me and then head east the kilometer or so through the woods to his knoll, or he could head down toward the brook and then swing west until he reached it from there. He decided on the latter option, because if he came with us and then headed east from our stations, he might, as he reasoned, “mess up any deer approach from that direction.” I was thinking the same, and also something else, and therefore added pointedly: “Maybe at eight you can swing west and meet me at the Rock?”

  “Agreed.”

  It had rained during the night, and our footsteps depressed the wet leaves without making a sound. A deer could walk up on us from any direction, at any time. As soon as it was light, two ravens zoomed over and I heard the ripping sounds of their wing beats, chopping the air. One was aggressively chasing the other, and both were soon out of sight. I heard the high-pitched staccato calls that you always hear in these chases, getting fainter and fainter in the distance. Odd, I thought, because the deer-tagging station in Weld had registered only one deer so far, and that was on the first day of the season nine days ago. The gut pile from that deer would be long gone. What was the territorial bird, which was likely trying to chase out a vagrant scout, trying to defend? Did it expect future gut piles in this area? If so, it likely sees deer—and maybe us? The raven’s behavior seemed like an omen of good luck. I’m not superstitious; it’s just that my mind wanders more freely when there is much to hope for. Optimism is adaptive—it keeps us active without requiring any assurance of success.

  I was chilled to the bone already at 8:00 a.m., and the thought of hot coffee became ever more inviting. I shivered and did vigorous isometric exercises like those a bee does to generate metabolic heat and keep the blood flowing. Darn—where was Kerry? I wondered. Maybe I’ll hold out for another ten minutes, I thought.

  A pileated woodpecker started drumming. It had found a dead tree or limb that resonated with a deep sound. Each drumroll of about two seconds was followed by a silence, and then by another drumroll. This sequence continued regularly for about fifteen minutes. Why was this woodpecker making its music in late fall? Admittedly, the pileated has to prepare for nesting early because it takes the pair a month just to prepare a nest hole, and because it is a big bird and bigger birds take longer to grow up than smaller ones. But this early drumming seemed like premature anticipation of spring.

  I had been distracted, and more time had passed. But I stayed because I wanted to know how long the woodpecker would hammer or drum, and how long afterward it would remain quiet. Well, Kerry will be here any minute now, I thought, and also wondered what a man walking through the woods would sound like on this day. From how far would I first hear him walking on the wet leaves? But I got impatient and stood up to leave.

  There—what was that? A twig snapping? Yes, faint footsteps, another little crackle. Kerry should be in view any second. No sight of orange, though—yet. There—a fleck of movement—something brown. Silence. I saw nothing move. Seconds later—I saw it now—a deer walking. Deer had not been plentiful this season due to a harsh winter in which many starved. The state had therefore specified a “bucks-only” hunting policy in this area. I didn’t see antlers (in some deer, such as caribou, both males and females have antlers, but in the whitetail deer, only the males are antlered, and first-year males’ are very short, thin, and usually unbranched), so I couldn’t shoot.

  The deer came closer. Yes, small thin antlers—a young spikehorn. The best eating kind. I slowly raised my rifle, saw him over my open sights, and did the one thing that is both hard to do and easy—pulled the trigger. The deer crumpled on the spot. As I walked over to the downed deer, I could not take my eyes off him. He was a beautiful animal, and I had killed him. I felt a momentary sadness. We as a species have been hunting “forever,” and the lure of the hunt is irresistible. We are all on precious borrowed time. This is real, the way it is. I took a deep breath, and the sadness of death made way for the joy of life. Here, at this spot, they melded together.

  I waited another minute and then jacked a second bullet into the rifle chamber, lifted the barrel, and pulled a shot off into the air. Nobody gets two shots at a deer that are separated from each other by more than ten seconds, so Kerry and Charlie would now know we had a deer. I looked at my watch: 8:35 a.m. We would all three soon exult with instinctual awe and excitement, and celebrate with a sip of Scotch, before the long hard drag to bring the precious deer, our food, to the campsite. In several days, I would skin him and process every ounce of meat to steaks, roasts, hamburger, and venison jerky.

  But before my companions arrived, before the anticipated celebration and libation, I bent down and slit the buck’s belly. I reached up to his diaphragm to make a cut so I could dislodge and pull out the stomach and intestines and leave them for the birds. As expected, both Kerry and Charlie arrived on the run, and we dragged the deer to camp.

  I returned into the woods that afternoon without my rifle. As I wandered back to where I had gutted the buck, I heard a commotion of ravens. Some were flying in the vicinity and others were already down at the gut pile. They scattered when I came near. I stayed listening to the “yells” vagrant juveniles make when they are near food and are harassed by territorial birds trying to chase out the youngsters from their home territory. Thinking of the many adventurous winters I’d spent studying the birds in these woods and learning more about them than I ever thought possible, I expected these young aggressively chased ravens to return at the next dawn with a pack of reinforcements of juveniles and so to overpower the defending pair.

  That evening, as Charlie and Kerry and I retold our version of the hunt, we suddenly heard an eruption of yipping, yapping, howling, and the tremulous harmonies of coyotes’ singing. I
made sure to get back to the gut pile the next morning before daylight, and to my not-great surprise there was not one scrap of entrails left. Presumably the coyotes got them during the night, unless the ravens beat them to it in the evening. It was early, and I expected the ravens to come in at any time and therefore waited. But none returned. I think the ravens had won.

  Our early-season hunt was over. Duty called. However, Charlie and I came back to the cabin later that month, on November 23 in the evening, as a sunset over the mountains turned the darkening blue sky in the west to yellow, greenish, orange, and then crimson. The distant mountains were a filmy gray-blue, and from my perch in a spruce I saw the white streak of a meteor through the dark lattice of black tree limbs. The branches next to me were covered with chalky and dark green lichens that varied in form from flat clinging to hanging filaments. A wind was roaring and moaning through the trees, and they were whipped about and crackling and snapping. Two pine grosbeaks, making high-pitched sweet whistles, perched next to me in an ash. The ash didn’t have any more seeds hanging from its twigs, but the birds were eating the stems where they had been attached. I had never seen that before.

  That evening our camp was cold, and I fired up the stove with the dry sugar maple wood I had chain-sawed during the summer and stacked in the cabin. Charlie sliced up tenderloin from the spikehorn and, with chopped onions and butter and olive oil, dumped it into our sizzling big black iron skillet. I diced some carrots and potatoes from our garden and boiled them only briefly. As Thoreau wrote, “It is a vulgar error to suppose that you have tasted huckleberries who never plucked them.” We served our “huckleberries” of spikehorn tenderloin on the wooden plank table and they had never tasted better.

  Next morning I woke Charlie and we got up to start the fire. The stove was slow to start because it was so cold that the iron sucked the heat out of the fire, but the wood was dry and we did get a fire. Revived by heat, coffee, and the light of the Coleman lantern, we put on layers of clothes and, by 6:30 a.m., as the stars faded, we saw a sliver of a moon up above the reddening eastern sky silhouetted by the still-black pines and twiggy maples. Charlie picked up his rifle and left, but this time I stayed, with pencil in hand, to try to capture some of my night thoughts before they vanished like frightened deer.

  After Charlie returned and we’d had breakfast, we wandered to Cherry Hill, where in the 1950s a long-since-fallen barn and crumbling farmhouse had stood next to ancient dying sugar maple trees in a clearing. The clearing had grown in and the farmhouse had vanished, leaving only a cellar hole. But now, from a recent clear-cut of the area, we could again see the surrounding hills, the mountains, and the lake.

  The more we become familiar with the four square kilometers of diverse forest we hunt around York Hill, the stronger our bond to it, and the better our chances of hunting success. For more than thirty years we’ve hunted in these ridges, and we know precisely where we are and can communicate certain locations that may seem devoid of landmarks to others. I can tell Charlie, “Meet me at the Moose Pasture at 10:00 a.m.,” and we’ll come to the same spot from different directions at exactly the same time. The Moose Pasture was once a cleared yarding area for a lumber operation next to Alder Brook. It quickly became a favorite spot of the bull moose to engage in their premating rut activity every October. With the passing years, this wide-open moose pasture became an overgrown thicket that would be nondescript to most other hunters. But we know exactly where it is, how to find it, and why the trunks of the large moose maples are scarred and cherries and birches broken over at two meters off the ground. Other specific locations are sometimes identified by certain events. “Did you see the buck tracks on the south side of the hill, near where Scott Dixon slept?” asks Charlie. I know exactly where that spot is. More than twenty years ago, Charlie’s college friend from Bowdoin came up to visit. It was his first time here, and Scott arrived well after dark on a moonless night with no flashlight. He managed to feel his way along the trail but soon strayed off course. After realizing he had no idea where he was and not being able to take two steps without hitting a tree, he made the smart decision to lie down for the night right where he was. Finding a relatively soft area with some grass, he rested his head on the ground and heard what he thought was the hum of a distant train getting closer and closer. However, after a few minutes he realized that he was directly on top of someone else’s home—a large underground yellow jacket nest. He then made the even smarter decision to relocate rapidly. At sunrise when he awoke, he found the trail less than a few paces away, made his way up to the cabin, and joined us for a morning beverage.

  Our forest is dotted with such locations linked to memories—the “mud trap,” the “underground gurgling stream,” the “lucky stump,” the “feeder stream,” the “swimming hole,” the “three-notch fir,” “pine hill,” the “burned land,” the “beech ridge,” “tall pines,” the “hemlocks,” the “north rock,” just to name a few. Our familiarity and connection to these spots enable us to find our way to and from the cabin in thick fog, blizzards, and darkness. We’ve learned every footstep on our favorite paths and can anticipate the feel of the ground under each step, and we can recognize certain trees in the dark that will lead us back to the warmth of the cabin, the central “nest” in our true home territory, where familiarity breeds bonding and sometimes even success.

  That night, after a day without deer sign, we heard the wind roaring again. It was much louder than before, reminding us of jet engines revving up. When we awoke in the morning it was to an expanse of white! Wet snow was blowing almost horizontally, plastering onto the southwestern sides of trees and stinging our eyes. The fir branches bent from their heavy loads. The wind picked up, and the trees whipped back and forth, shaking off loads of wet soggy snow. Then it started to pour rain. We were heading out on the north path to the three-notch fir and became soaked from the sweat of our exertion from hiking in waterlogged clothes and boots. It was truly bad weather, the proof being that we went back home even though we had enough light to stay out fifteen minutes longer.

  There is nothing cozier than sidling up to a warm wood stove, in a dry change of clothes, while the wind is howling outside and hurling buckets of water onto the roof and against the sides of a cabin every second, after having plowed through kilometers of deep snow in icy rain. But the discomforts of the day were bearable, because we always knew where home was, how to get there by the shortest route, and that sitting by the fire and retelling the old deer stories awaited us.

  We didn’t sleep well on this 2008 Thanksgiving night after our soaking. I had never before heard such heavy pounding of rain on the roof, or such fierce wind. We heard the brook roaring a kilometer down the hill. There must have been a monumental heat input somewhere on the Earth to evaporate so much water into the air and then provide the energy to bring it here. I wondered how it would be possible for any warm-blooded animal to stay alive during this night of freezing rain, with the snow compacted and holding water like a sponge.

  We got up in the dark as always. The wind had died down by then. Charlie pulled a soggy dollar bill out of his wallet and pinned it onto a nail in a ceiling log above the stove: “To tag my deer with.” (Each person with a hunting license can “tag,” or register, one deer each season at the nearest tagging station, which for us is at Jerry’s general store in nearby Weld, and the fee is a dollar, and always has been.) And then we were out before daylight for yet another day.

  I soon saw several hale and hearty black-capped chickadees. They were flitting along close to the ground under some fir trees and making their soft high-pitched tseet calls. I again heard the pileated woodpecker drum from the same area—and possibly from the same tree/log where it had been busy two weeks earlier. Another made maniacal laughlike calls from about a kilometer distant to the southwest. A pair of red-breasted nuthatches hopped sideways and up and down a pine trunk, and one of them was voicing the nuthatches’ usual drawn-out nasal twangs. Two blue jays flashed through the
fir trees ahead of me, staying silent, but I heard the sweet whistles of pine grosbeaks, the tinkly chittering of flying crossbills, and here and there the churr of a red squirrel. I was walking the kilometer of woods on the west side of the Hill, past the big pines, heading toward Charlie sitting under the spruce at the Rock, and in that distance I also crossed six porcupine tracks, ten fresh coyote tracks, and one deer track. It looked as if both the birds and the mammals had survived quite well. Each has its own unique home here where it had found shelter in the night.

  Then I found a new track, made by someone not at home here.

  The boot track had a different tread from either of ours, and it belonged to a hunter we did not know. It made me feel uneasy. Our net of private paths and knowledge covers our hill and its watershed like an orb web spider’s net covers its hunting territory. We are uneasy of others too close by—we avoid them, or they us.

  We have notions of where the deer might be or travel, and we have drifted into hunting as a team. One of us “covers” one area while another covers the next. Our cooperative hunting can work only because we are on home ground we know intimately, and because we have it to ourselves. If a stranger walks between us, he might spoil our game. True, we can stay alive without getting our deer. But what might our feelings be if we were, like the spider, or our ancestors thousands of years ago, dependent on getting prey for survival and reproduction?

  I returned to where Charlie was waiting on station at the Rock, so we could walk back together to the cabin for breakfast. We had walked south on the north trail only a short distance when, thanks to the remaining snow on the ground, we found the tracks of a deer that had crossed over the tracks Charlie had made earlier. We hesitated a moment, studying the tracks: “Big enough to have antlers,” I ventured.