Call of the Mild

by Lily Raff McCaulou

  My thoughts are interrupted by a stage whisper from Marc: They’re coming. I squint. Yes, tiny spots are soaring over the hill. Doves. I roll my foam earplugs between my fingers and squish them into my ears. Andy shoulders his gun.

  A flock of doves is sometimes called a dule or a dole. There are places in South America where dules can reach tens of thousands of birds. Here, there aren’t that many—a hundred, maybe. As the birds reach the trees in front of us, I notice that when they stop flapping their wings and glide through the air, they strike a pose immediately recognizable from any peace flag or greeting card (but without olive branches clutched in their beaks). Andy and the other hunters begin blasting. I try to control my shoulders, to avoid shuddering with each shot.

  The doves are fast, fancy fliers. They glide, then accelerate without warning. It’s hard to tell from my angle, but they seem to weave left and right as they fly. This is why ammunition manufacturers love dove season: It takes a lot of shots to bag one bird. After a minute or two, when a few of the birds have fallen from the sky and the rest have flown to safety, everyone lowers their guns. Andy heads into the trees to find the birds he has downed. I follow him. I’m having trouble hearing him, so I remove my earplugs. We hike down among the trees, and I relax a little. Andy thinks one of his birds has fallen in this general vicinity.

  Suddenly the shooting resumes. Another dule has arrived along the same flight path. Andy waves, then yells, “Hey! We’re down here!

  “I just want to make sure they see us,” he explains to me. He doesn’t look alarmed, as I am.

  “Here it is,” he says as he reaches down and picks up a bird. “I’m pretty sure I got another one, too.”

  We pace around, but instead of looking at the forest floor, I keep looking at the bird dangling from Andy’s clutch. He holds it casually, upside down, and the bird’s head flops like a ball on a limp string.

  Andy finds the second bird, and as he bends down to grab it, I hear what sound like heavy raindrops. Andy raises his eyebrows.

  “Let’s get outta here,” he says.

  The dripping sound was shotgun pellets hitting juniper branches as they fell from the sky. Some hunter is aiming too close to our vicinity for Andy’s comfort. We walk briskly back to the road. I would sprint but I don’t want Andy to know how scared I really am. When we arrive, Andy hands me the birds so he can shoot at the next dule.

  I hold each bird by its neck, which is no thicker than a Sharpie and surprisingly warm. One at a time, I lift them up and examine them. The birds are small, with blue eyelids. Other than their tails and wings, which are mottled black and white, their bodies are covered in the tiniest grayish brown feathers I have ever seen. Their fanned tails are outlined in white, as if the edges were dipped in paint.

  Later, Andy shoots another dove and finds it still alive, twitching slightly. He calmly clutches the animal with two fists and twists, like he’s opening a jar. Just like that, its neck breaks and the animal goes limp. I know it’s the humane thing to do, but his calm shocks me. I try to imagine what it would feel like to wring a bird’s neck with my own hands. By comparison, shooting it from twenty yards away seems so detached it might be easy.

  In the early afternoon, we gather around a trash can to clean the birds, which, it turns out, we’ll be eating for lunch. A short, pudgy older hunter shows me how to do it. He grabs one of the birds from a nearby pile and holds it in one hand, on its back.

  “These birds are so small, you don’t bother cleaning the whole thing,” he tells me.

  I stare at the tiny, perfect bird cradled in his hand. It has no blood on it, no sign of the metal pellet that caused its death. Its eyelids are closed, which makes the animal look cold but peaceful.

  “So you just breast it out, taking these two parts.” He touches his thumb and pointer finger to either side of the bird’s breastbone. He clutches the two areas he just touched, one with each hand, and rips, violently. I flinch. The skin tears with a little zip, like the sound of splitting pants. Inside, there is no blood, just taut breast muscle. It’s purple, much darker than the thighs of a chicken.

  “Then you fillet the breasts,” he says, cradling the bird on its back again, now with its loose skin dangling on either side of his hand. He takes a small knife in his other hand and draws it along the breastbone, until he has separated one breast from the bird’s body. He drops the dark purple slab—only slightly larger than a chicken nugget—into a stainless-steel bowl that the other hunters have already filled halfway with their boneless, skinless dove breasts. Some of these fillets have a small, dark spot on the muscle, announcing the entry point of a pellet. Once the piece of steel is removed, the meat will be as good as new.

  “And that’s all there is to it,” he says, starting in on the second cutlet, which he then plops into the bowl. He drops the rest of the animal into the trash can and wipes his hands and the knife on a small towel.

  “You’re not going to do anything with the rest of it?” I ask, peering into the can at the pile of half-emptied birds.

  “Nah, there’s no meat left,” someone else pipes in.

  “Here ya go,” my instructor says as he hands me a bird.

  I pinch the skin covering the breast with both hands, then look back at the man.

  “Just tear it?”

  “Yep.”

  I jerk my hands apart and am surprised at how easily the skin rips. It’s no thicker or stronger than a green oak leaf. How does an animal this fragile survive the bumps and scrapes of daily life?

  The bearded man nods approvingly and hands me his knife. I pierce the muscle with the tip and start feeling around for the bone as a guide. Satisfied that I’m following orders, he picks up another bird and rips into it.

  By the time I’m halfway done with my second bird, the two or three other hunters have cleaned the entire pile—thirty or so doves in all.

  Marc takes the bowls into the kitchen. There, he chops the meat finely, mixes it with ground chicken thighs and stir-fries it in a wok. Half an hour later, we are sitting on his sunny deck, spooning the meat, which is drenched in sweet soy sauce, onto crispy rice noodles and eating it, wrapped in iceberg lettuce leaves, with our hands. Despite my hesitance about eating it, the meal is delicious.

  On the car ride home, Andy tells me he’s disappointed that, beneath the sauce and the ground chicken, we didn’t really get to find out what dove meat tastes like. I don’t admit that after watching the slaughter, I didn’t have much appetite and felt grateful that the resulting meal didn’t taste any more exotic than chicken, my lifelong comfort food.

  I stare out the window and wonder, yet again, if I actually have what it takes to kill an animal. Just two generations ago, almost any American would have answered this question about herself long before turning twenty-seven. Even those who didn’t farm or ranch went to butcher shops where they saw their meat before it was hacked into roasts or ground into burger. They knew what went on behind the scenes. In a very short amount of time, we have become completely detached from the gory, grisly truth about what we eat.

  More than 96 percent of Americans—298 million of us, give or take a few hundred thousand—ate at least one piece of meat last week. Most of us ate meat more than once a day. Strips of bacon with breakfast. A sliced turkey sandwich at lunch. A quick snack of beef jerky. Grilled chicken breast for dinner.

  As a nation, we raise and slaughter nearly ten billion land animals each year—more than one million each hour—for food. That portions out to about two-thirds of a pound of meat per person per day, or 241 pounds a year, which happens to be more than twice my body weight. It’s also more than twice the international average. The average American today eats eighty pounds more meat per year than in 1942.

  On a global scale, our appetite for meat has literally changed the face of the earth. Add up the weight of all land animals on the planet—monkeys, mice, elephants—and domestic livestock accounts for one out of every five pounds. Thirty percent of the earth’s land
surface is now used to raise meat, either for grazing or growing grain for feed. All of that land was once habitat for wildlife and native plants, making livestock one of the main reasons why, every hour, an average of three species go extinct from our planet. The meat industry is a leading cause of deforestation, erosion and water pollution. It’s responsible for 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, which is more than transportation. The production of merely 3.8 ounces of beef—enough for just one McDonald’s Happy Meal hamburger—releases about as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as a sedan emits by driving eighteen miles. And that’s not including the gas it takes to get to the drive-through window.

  Unless you eat wild game or raise your own meat, you can bet that the meat on your plate lived a miserable, confined existence. As Jonathan Safran Foer writes in his vegetarian treatise, Eating Animals, “We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film.” Still, it’s easy to live a well-fed life in the U.S. without thinking about where any of that meat came from. As a lifelong meat eater, I feel a responsibility to see for myself that uncomfortable thing that has always been at the heart of a human diet, since long before meat animals were domesticated and their upbringing industrialized: death.

  CHAPTER 6

  FIRST KILL

  When I read about a hunting workshop offered by the state, I jump at the chance to enroll. It’s part of a series of workshops—on fishing, camping, paddling and the like—bearing the unfortunate name “Becoming an Outdoors Woman” and aimed at females with little to no outdoors experience. For forty dollars, a woman may hunt for real, live pheasants with the help and advice of experienced volunteers, all of whom are male and own well-trained bird dogs. As with the dove hunt, my main goal is to leave with a better idea of what it takes to find and kill an animal in the wild. Actually shooting a pheasant would be a bonus. Or perhaps, if I feel as guilty as I expect to, a curse.

  The workshop starts at eight in the morning in a cement barracks-style building where we eat donuts, sip coffee and listen to a state wildlife employee lecture us on hunting safety. Next he shows us photos and explains how to identify the gender of a pheasant. This is important because we are only supposed to shoot males, sparing the females to lay eggs and raise babies. As with a lot of birds, the two sexes hardly look like the same species. Roosters are gaudy, with a shimmering teal head with a scarlet patch around each eye, a white collar and bodies speckled with copper, blue, purple, brown and white. Hens are plain by comparison, with mottled brown-and-white feathers covering the whole body. Both sexes have long, pointed tail feathers with horizontal brown stripes.

  The state employee gives us no other background on the animal, so it isn’t until I return home that I learn ring-necked pheasants (Phasianus colchicus) are native only to Asia. Today the birds are found in farmlands all over the country, although populations in many places have declined since the 1960s. Wildlife biologists say that small American farms used to contain rugged, overgrown vegetation along the fence lines. Now, as many of those fields have been fully tilled and consolidated to make operations more efficient, there is little nearby cover left for the birds to hide and nest in.

  We’re in the Klamath Wildlife Area, a state-owned piece of land in southern Oregon whose primary goal is providing habitat for wildlife, especially birds. There are a few wild pheasants here, but mostly we’ll be shooting the pen-raised birds that were released last week for a similar workshop.

  We head to a nearby field to practice shooting some clay pigeons, then divide into small groups and head out to hunt for real, live birds. At first, the morning feels similar to that of the dove hunt, full of nervous excitement. This time, of course, there’s more gravity because I’m carrying a weapon. Another, smaller, difference is that all of the other gun toters are women. But that doesn’t help me feel like I belong. All morning, I keep thinking: I’m not one of these people. These other women may not know what they’re doing, but they seem confident that it’s a good thing to do. Their faces strain with concentration. Each of them wants, without question, to shoot a bird. Me, I’m still not sure.

  We hike along a dirt road, swing ourselves over a barbed-wire fence and start picking our way up a small, treed hill that Gerry, our volunteer guide, finds promising. We spread out and walk side by side in a straight line. This way, if a bird flushes in front of us, nobody is caught in the line of fire. This does little to allay my fears of being shot, however. I’m on the end of the row, with three other women to my right, and it’s easy to imagine a scenario that ends with an accidental shooting. What if a bird flushes to my left, and an eager hunter swings and shoots before noticing me? What if a bird flushes between me and the hunter to the right, and we shoot each other? My imagination gets plenty of time to run wild because despite hiking for over an hour, we still haven’t seen any birds.

  Until we’re halfway up the hill, that is, and my doomsday-dreaming is interrupted by some commotion to my right. Tessa’s tail is wagging in double time, and Gerry is getting excited. Before I have time to make sense of it all, there’s a loud squawk and some thrashing in the tall grass. A huge bird rises like a phoenix in front of us.

  “It’s a rooster!” Gerry yells. “Shoot it!” I lift the long neck of my gun off its rest on my shoulder and settle its butt into my collarbone before noticing that the entire weapon is upside down.

  Bang!

  I haven’t even turned my gun over and Lori has already popped the bird. It flops into the tall grass and Tessa jogs over to it.

  “Wow! Nice one!” The group convenes around Lori. Tessa drops the bird in front of Gerry. He tosses it a few feet in front of the other hunting dog, seventeen-year-old Teesha. She picks it up in her mouth and proudly walks it back to us. Gerry takes the bird from Teesha’s mouth and hands it to Lori.

  She admires it for a moment, then slides it into a large pocket on the back of her hunting vest. Its talons and the tip of its tail poke out an opening on the side. We spread out again and resume hunting. This time, to be prepared, I carry the gun horizontally.

  Ring-necked pheasants don’t fly very well, and prefer to run from danger. This makes them particularly easy for dogs to track, because they leave a scented trail on the ground. When the birds do lift off, the wings betray their struggle with loud, clumsy flapping sounds that startle an unsuspecting hiker or a hunter who has allowed herself to daydream for a moment.

  Sometimes Gerry sees a bird land in some bushes, far away, but his dogs don’t notice. So he pulls a slender whistle from his pocket and blows into it—its sound is imperceptible to mere human ears, but the dogs stop in their tracks and turn to him. Gerry swings out one arm in the direction of the bird. The dogs immediately head off in the direction he pointed.

  I think of my pet dog, Sylvia. I rescued her from a pound just a few months after moving in with Scott. She’s a black mutt with lots of retriever instincts; nothing makes her happier than chasing a tennis ball or catching a Frisbee. She knows how to sit, lie down, stay, come and go to her bed on command. She even fetches the newspaper each morning and brings it inside. Yet she still hasn’t mastered the correct response to pointing. If I drop a grain of rice on the floor and point to it, she nudges my finger with her nose. I have to lower my hand until my finger is practically touching the rice before she sees and eats it.

  So much training goes into hunting dogs, they don’t usually hit their peak until five or six years of age. As a dog owner who has poured countless hours into training, I am amazed at what these dogs are capable of. I can’t even fathom how I would convince Sylvia to tolerate the bang of a gun. As we hike, I ask Gerry how he trained Tessa and Teesha, who are German shorthaired pointers.

  “It’s easy,” he responds, adding that any dog can overcome gun-shyness; all it takes is patience and—these are my words—tough love.

  “There needs to be two of you,” he starts. “And then what you do is, you have someone bang two pots or pans together at the exa
ct moment that you place the dog’s food on the ground. If the dog flinches or runs away, immediately pick up the bowl. The dog skips that meal. At the next feeding, try it again.”

  I immediately picture Sylvia, emaciated from fear and starvation. I take a deep breath, trying to prevent my disapproval from leaping into my throat while I ask: What if the dog doesn’t get it?

  “I’ve never, in all my years, seen a dog take more than three tries,” Gerry says before continuing with the lesson plan.

  Once the dog is acclimated to the sound of banging pots, you have someone shoot an air gun or a BB gun when you put down the food. This technique rewards the dog (with a big bowl of food and praise from her owner) for managing her fear as well as for tolerating the bang of the gun.

  “I know it sounds mean,” Gerry concedes, “but it works really well. Pretty soon the dogs associate gunshots with something really good.”

  It’s Rambo’s version of Pavlov’s bell, and if Gerry’s dogs are any indication, it works. These dogs don’t just tolerate guns—they get so excited when they hear shots fired that they drool and whine to be let loose. In fact, the dogs are making this day much more enjoyable than I could have imagined. They are enthusiastic and happy, and when one of them sidles up to me, wagging her tail, I can’t help but feel enthusiastic, too. Hunting is their instinct; it’s in their blood. These dogs have never known hunting without humans—and guns.