We humans certainly benefit from the dogs. I don’t have to try it to know that bird hunting without a dog would be far less efficient. I would have to systematically walk up and down an area that looks like good habitat, covering every square foot and hoping to stumble across a bird. A dog, on the other hand, simply has to stick her nose in the air. She can catch a whiff of a bird who’s more than half a mile away. Her stubby tail oscillates slightly, like the meter on a stereo with the volume turned down. The dog trots in large, loose circles until she finds bird scent on the ground. Then she zigs and zags, nose to the ground, with her tail wiggling faster as she closes in on the animal.
The hunter pays special attention to that wiggly little tail. It dictates where to walk and when to pick up the gun and get ready to shoot. Nose to the ground, as the dog homes in on the bird she focuses on one small area, tail still wagging furiously. When the dog’s tail freezes, she has found the bird.
A good pointer will stare directly into the bird’s eyes, Gerry tells me. If she remains perfectly still, the bird usually does, too. The bird is hypnotized by fear. Once the hunter is close by and ready, she releases the dog, who flushes the bird. The bird hoists its heavy body into the air, flapping loudly, feet dangling, tail cocked. The hunter has a couple of seconds to get off a shot before the bird flies out of range, usually gliding to a landing a few hundred yards away and disappearing under a tree or some heavy brush. So many elements—the bird, the dog, the hunter, the gun—must harmonize for a successful hunt.
We are wading through tall grass and soft mud when Tessa locks in on a pheasant tucked in a ditch beside the road. She holds the bird for what seems like an hour, while Nancy and I make our way over to her.
“Go past those tules,” Gerry whispers, his eyes locked on Tessa.
Nancy and I start walking toward the dog. As soon as we’re out of Gerry’s earshot, I whisper: “What are tules?”
“I don’t know,” she says.
We both giggle. For the first time, I relax a little. Maybe I do have something in common with these hunter-women, after all.
Gerry holds out his hand, motioning for us to stop. We raise our guns to our shoulders.
“Go ahead and switch your safety off,” Gerry whispers.
I place my thumb over the switch and hesitate. I vaguely remember learning, in my hunter education class, to keep the safety on until the bird flies. But Gerry knows so much more than I do. Maybe he’s right.
My right thumb works the safety forward to the “off” position, ready to fire. Then I stand, frozen, while Gerry asks, for the umpteenth time, if we are ready.
“Once I release her, you’ll just have a second to shoot,” he says.
“I’m ready,” Nancy and I say. I want to tell Gerry to hurry up and release the dog already, but saying anything more might break my concentration.
My gun feels so heavy and I’m clenching the barrel so tightly that my left arm starts shaking. My right cheek, pressing the gun down into my shoulder, isn’t helping.
Suddenly I hear rustling and frantic flapping. The bird’s head pops into view, neck outstretched, eyes open wide. I wrap my index finger as far around the trigger as I can, just as Del taught me. Then I squeeze.
Boom!
The bird drops with a thump, landing not twenty feet away. A few loose feathers drift down leisurely. It was a head shot—a clean, perfect kill.
Burnt gunpowder hangs in the air and I notice, for the first time, its faint sweetness.
“Yeah!” Lori and Debra whoop and holler from the nearby road. “Wahoo!” They jog toward us, the tall grass leaving wet stripes on their pants.
Tessa bounds over to the bird, scoops it up in her mouth and trots a victory lap around us. Nancy and I slap each other high five. Gerry shakes our hands. Everyone is smiling. Gerry tells Tessa to drop the bird. He hands it to me. I hold it by the neck, again thin and warm in my fist. Its feathers are beautiful—green, blue, purple, red, white, brown, black. I can’t think of a color that doesn’t appear somewhere on this body. The feet, for some reason, are what really amazes me. They are covered in blue-gray skin that is so wrinkled it looks reptilian, but feels soft and taut over perfect, complicated bones. There are talons and toes and ankles, connected by real, working joints. I push my finger against the bottom of one of the claws, and the toe bends gracefully in two different places, a movement I recognize from my own fleshier toes. It is real.
I have imagined this moment hundreds of times. Each time, the act itself was to be simple: Bird sails into view, I pull the trigger. Bang. A single shot. A clean kill. The emotions, I figure, will be the messy part. I brace for a strong cocktail of excitement, pride, guilt, sadness, even disgust. I wonder if I can stomach it.
In the end, it’s the other way around. The action, I realize later, was muddled. Nancy and I shot the same bird at precisely the same time, so I will never be sure of that one critical fact: if my shot was fatal. But my own feeling, as the pheasant falls from the sky in a surprisingly slow, graceful flutter, is singular and pure: euphoria.
It isn’t until later—weeks after I’ve eaten the pheasant—that doubt will begin to creep into my head. It starts as a niggling feeling that something isn’t quite right. Yet it’s not the kind of doubt that I was expecting: remorse over killing the bird, guilt over relishing it. That happens, too, but not until months later, when I am gluing the bird’s feathers onto a Styrofoam ball to make a Christmas ornament. No, in the more immediate aftermath, instead I begin to worry that maybe I hadn’t killed the bird. Maybe Nancy killed it. Maybe I simply synchronized the impotent pull of my trigger with her fatal one. I’m startled to realize how much I want to be the one who took the bird’s life.
On the way home from the hunt, I stop at Walmart and buy a Styrofoam cooler and a bag of ice. I place the cooler in my backseat, throw the ice inside and gently lay my bird, double-wrapped in plastic shopping bags, on top. The stacked bird-on-ice is too tall for the lid to close, so I tear open the ice and pour half of it onto a grassy median before putting the bird back on top, faceup, and carefully lowering the lid.
During the long drive home, I replay the final shot, over and over. So many events and lives managed to collide for that one perfect moment. Tessa employed thousands of years of instincts, hundreds of years of breeding and six years of practice to find that bird and hold it in place until I was ready. I was in exactly the right place at the right time. The bird was in exactly the wrong place at the right time. I somehow found it in me to pull the trigger. This is the part that amazes me the most—that I actually did it, I shot the animal. Someone banged two pots together and I didn’t run away. I didn’t flinch. I dug in.
It feels, in retrospect, like a miracle. Then there’s the relief. A post-adrenaline warmth, like stepping off a roller coaster, spreads across my body as I marvel that my entire hunting party escaped unscathed. Every time I think about what I have done, I am amazed all over again. Weeks ago I had never held a shotgun. Now I have killed a bird and will soon eat it for dinner. I roll down the windows, crank up the radio and sing along at the top of my lungs.
Euphoria, I learn later, is a common reaction among first-time hunters. Almost every hunter I’ve ever interviewed has been surprised by it. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan is bowled over by the sensation after shooting a wild boar. He describes a flood of pride, then relief and then, unexpectedly, overwhelming gratitude. “The animal,” he writes, “was a gift—from whom or what I couldn’t say—but… gratitude is what I felt.”
As I hunt more, I will find that no other kill—nearly all of which will be much harder-fought—evokes such pure elation as my first. Still, there is a visceral sense of satisfaction in each of them. And I begin to see how a hunter might crave that special intoxication that oozes from a clean kill.
Some of our greatest writers, from Hemingway to Faulkner and many, many more, have tackled the subject of the hunt. But I never fully appreciated these contributions to literature befor
e I related to this mysterious thrill of killing. In Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, for example, Captain Ahab hunts whales in general and the white Moby-Dick in particular with such vicious antagonism that 822 pages cannot explain it. To Ahab, hunting is more addiction than sport or profession or anything else. In one scene, he acknowledges to a mate that his single-mindedness has chewed up his life and spit out his marriage: “Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey—more a demon than a man!” Before I started hunting, this is how I viewed any thrill-seeking hunter I encountered in books—someone plagued by an addiction that I could never truly understand.
After killing just one pheasant, I begin to think differently about these fictional characters and their reactions to hunting. My own post-hunt euphoria was, I think, rooted in satisfaction and awe. Thanks to the popularity of gardening, many Americans can relate to a version of this feeling. Garrison Keillor, in a story about his fictionalized hometown of Lake Wobegon, describes how a child feels when he grows his own tomato:
We all go through these terrible things in childhood. Somebody looks at you and says, “You look funny. Your eyes look funny… And you’re scorched, your little heart is scorched by it. And you never completely get over it. But, if you can make this beautiful thing—a tomato, a perfect tomato—that you hold at arm’s length and it smells of tomato. And you eat it; you eat it with maybe a little fresh basil and a little piece of cheese. Or you just put a little sugar on it. Or you just put a little French dressing on it. And you realize: this is as good as any tomato anywhere in the world. And all that the best chefs of New York or Paris or London could do for this tomato would only be to cover it up. To realize that most of the fancy seasonings and sauces and marinades ever made in the world are orthopedic in nature. That this, you can find the best, you can produce the best of something in Lake Wobegon or Kalamazoo: this is a redemptive experience.
Growing food is an experience that offers pride not only in one’s self but, perhaps more important, in one’s place. At its essence, hunting is finding food in the wild. Whether hunting for birds or for mushrooms, it evokes an exaggerated form of the satisfaction that Keillor describes. It feels miraculous. Shooting my first pheasant gave me the same exhilaration that I got from reading my favorite chapter books when I was nine or ten years old: The world around me suddenly became bigger than I had ever imagined and, at the same time, it moved closer within my reach.
It’s increasingly rare for Americans to relate to this. The continuing decline in hunting mirrors our overall tendency toward spending more time indoors and online, detached from the natural world. Ironically, this has coincided with a sharp rise in meat consumption and, more recently, a growing interest in where our food comes from. Farmers’ markets have popped up all over the country—there are now at least 4,385 in the United States. But only about 3 percent of farmers’ market vendors sell meat. Most of us still stop at Safeway or Stop & Shop on the way home, to buy steaks to put all of those locally grown vegetables around.
As we distance ourselves from the meat we eat, it’s tempting to view any decline in hunting as a reprieve for wildlife. Counterintuitively, hunting can actually protect the health of a wildlife species. When hunting is overseen properly—with scientific study, responsible quotas and enforcement—hunters play an important role in population control. Overpopulation of deer, for example, is a growing problem. The animals have fewer natural predators in the wild. Roads and other development have disrupted their migration routes, which means more deer are crowded into smaller spaces. Deer numbers can skyrocket during years of mild weather and then plummet during a harsh winter, when limited food and habitat can’t sustain the inflated population. Say, for example, that a population has grown 30 percent larger than the winter landscape can sustain. This rarely means that 30 percent of the population will die off before spring. Instead, it is likely that the entire population will run out of food before the winter is over. Allowing hunters to cull a certain number of deer helps prevent mass starvation that could collapse the species for decades.
Good hunters are intimately familiar with the land where they hunt, so they can be the first to notice ominous changes in the environment. They value wildlife habitat and will work tirelessly to protect it from urban sprawl. This is the message I hear from one hunter, Lew, who grew up in a part of Colorado where nearly everyone except his own family hunted. His father, he explains, was a pacifist who didn’t want to participate in a killing ritual, even though he ate meat on a regular basis. Lew never thought he was missing much until, in adulthood, his writing career led him to a job editing a hunting magazine.
A couple of stories about wild pig hunting in California somehow beckoned him, and when Lew got to the end of one article, he tells me, “I knew I had to do that.” He booked a trip to wine country and hired a guide to lead him on his first-ever hunting excursion. As Lew got more interested in hunting, he paid more attention to development news and various issues facing the environment.
“Before hunting,” he says, “even though I would hike and camp and fish, I didn’t think about those things. I was just moving along with my own life. I never appreciated the precarious nature of the whole ecosystem… With hunting, I started to understand just how limited some resources are in certain areas. I saw the ways that we impact the landscape.”
Lew got to know hunters who bemoaned changes to their old hunting grounds. Soon he, too, had a personal interest in seeing valuable habitat spared from development. Hunting had turned Lew into a conservationist.
My reporting job introduces me to Greg, a retired Oregon State Police trooper who spent his career enforcing fishing and hunting laws. Standing more than six feet, two inches tall with thick silver hair and a mustache, he looks the part of a retired cop. Back when he first joined the force, in the 1970s, every police academy graduate wanted to be a game warden. It was a state trooper’s dream, the intersection of career and obsessive hobby. Greg tells me that when he grew up hunting in central Oregon, he knew the game wardens personally. To law-abiding hunters, he says, the wardens were superheroes. They were the community’s badasses, protecting the game on which every hunter in the state relied.
Wardens have to be experienced hunters themselves, to have knowledge of typical hunters’ behavior but also to be able to talk to suspects, hunter-to-hunter (or hunter-to-poacher). Wardens say that poachers frequently admit their crimes, and even brag about them, to other hunters.
Poaching is the illegal killing of wildlife, whether it’s hunting without a license, hunting out of season or using illegal means to lure and shoot an animal. The reasons people poach are as varied as the ways in which they break the law. Some are too poor to pay for a license and tag. Some are thrill seekers.
Like any illegal activity, poaching is difficult to quantify. But studies indicate that it’s a much bigger problem than even most wildlife biologists would like to admit. In Oregon, not far from Bend, biologists placed radio collars on five hundred mule deer in July 2005. Five years later, 128 of the collared deer had died. Poachers were found responsible for nineteen of those deaths—nearly as many as the twenty-one shot legally by hunters. Cougars killed fifteen. Coyotes killed five. Eight were hit by cars. Five succumbed to disease. Four got tangled in fences or endured some other fatal accident. Fifty-one died of unknown causes, though scientists admitted that poachers could have killed at least some of them. “Sometimes,” one biologist told The Oregonian newspaper, “we just find the radio collar [lying] out in the sagebrush.”
During his career, Greg underwent a change that he says eventually happens to all game wardens. His lifelong love of hunting wildlife was gradually replaced with love for a different type of hunt: “Catching a poacher became much more satisfying than shooting a deer,” he says.
This new type of hunting held all the familiar app
eals: nervous anticipation, stealth, frustration that eventually cracks and gives way to satisfaction. But the technique was so much more challenging, the stakes so much higher. This was the kind of hunting that animal rights activists joke about: The prey carried guns. By comparison, Greg tells me, “hunting for deer and elk wasn’t fun anymore.”
In recent years, however, Oregon has struggled to find qualified and interested candidates to become game wardens. Officials chalk it up to low interest in hunting, overall. The children who eventually become state troopers no longer grow up hunting each fall and revering their local wardens. The decline in hunting, in other words, is self-perpetuating.
CHAPTER 7
OFF THE MARK
When I get home from my pheasant hunt, the house is dark. Scott hasn’t returned yet from his day of fishing. I leave the cooler on the front porch and check the telephone for messages. There is one from my mother.
“Hi, Lily and Scott, it’s Mom calling.” She sounds as excited as I feel. Maybe she heard about the bird somehow?
She goes on to announce that I have a niece. Luciana had her baby today—a girl named Sofia.
“I love you both,” she signs off before adding, “I’m a grandma!”
I smile as I hang up. This day could not have been more perfect. The cycle of life has not only excused my killing but rewarded it. The bird died and a baby was born. What a trade!
The next morning, I am still on a high. Scott and I admire the bird, which is now stiff and ice-cold, before carrying it into the backyard to pluck, gut and clean it. Hunters refer to this process using the rosy euphemism “dressing.” Neither of us has done this before, but I have a pamphlet with instructions and line drawings titled How to Field Dress a Bird. I slip my wedding ring into my jeans pocket—I don’t want guts stuck in it—and place the bird on a cutting board perched on top of a trash can.
Call of the Mild Page 9
