Tovar Cerulli

by The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian's Hunt for Sustenance

  I had seen it on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom: the cheetah’s slow, careful stalk, the explosive charge, a gazelle leaping away, the cat accelerating to seventy miles per hour in a matter of seconds. It made my heart race. And even that stunning velocity was eclipsed—three times over—by the deadly strike of the peregrine, hurtling down in my mind’s eye like an arrow from the sky.

  As a young bipedal predator, I had neither great stealth nor great speed. What I had was stubbornness, augmented by luck. I also had innate cleverness and a few rudimentary skills that—like Willie’s far greater and long-practiced skills—were unimpeded by allegiance to any notion of aesthetic purism.

  I fished with whatever worked: lures, salmon eggs, live bait. Grasshoppers were a favorite, caught by hand among the tall grasses of a nearby field and stowed in a plastic bread bag. Minnows were a close second. A wire-mesh trap, baited with crumbs and set overnight in a shallow, sheltered corner of the quarry, would yield a dozen or more by morning.

  In a pinch, if I wanted a minnow but hadn’t set out the trap, I would catch them singly, on a tiny hook. One afternoon I impaled a small black ant on such a hook and, rod in hand, threaded my way down to another corner of the quarry where thick alders overhung the water. Minnows congregated there in the shade. They scattered as I lowered the hook. I thought I had startled them, but then saw a trout just cruising into the shallows. I jiggled the hooked ant. To my delight, the hunter struck and I had an eight-inch fish in hand.

  Another summer, I watched one drama unfold evening after evening: a single trout hunting whirligig beetles. Each time I saw the fish, it surfaced in the same area. Each time, it appeared to be the same size. I decided I was seeing the same trout again and again. Most of its leaps missed the beetles as they zigzagged their way across the surface. The ripples would subside and the whirligig would emerge, still paddling away in its evasive pattern. But the trout was persistent. Eventually there would be a leap, the ripples would vanish, and the beetle would be gone.

  The trout’s tenacity gave me an idea. Though I knew little about fly-fishing, I had a rod, and I’d taken a short series of classes in fly-tying, taught by an old Vermonter who knew his stuff. The flies I had tied under his direction included a compact, dark-gray bundle of deer hair with an encouraging name: Irresistible. It floated and was about the same size as a whirligig beetle.

  One evening when that trout was jumping again, I tied on the Irresistible, hopped into the rowboat, and started paying out line. For fly-fishing purists, masters of the double-haul cast, I’m sure that trolling a dry fly is an especially grievous act of sacrilege. But it worked. The trout started striking. And missing. Either its aim was poor or it was aiming to the side, anticipating that this whirligig beetle would, like all others, whirl off one way or the other just as the strike was made. A few misses later the trout connected and, looking for a meal, became one.

  To me, killing fish wasn’t so different from picking wild blueberries. Both were edible parts of my world, free for the catching or gathering. Early on a summer morning, I would head to the pine and oak woods above the cliffs on the quarry’s high southern side. The berries were thick in there. I’d fill a quart container with a mix of them, some small and dusty blue, others big, shiny, and nearly black. Back at the house, my father would stir them into pancake batter and drop spoonfuls onto a sizzling griddle. On our plates, their purple juices mingled with syrup from the few maples we tapped each spring. In early evening of the same day, a pair of trout might sizzle on the same stovetop and be served up on the same plates. The sweetness of gifts straight from the land.

  Hunting bullfrogs was more troubling. On summer nights—lying in a bunk bed Willie had made, the clean lines and joinery crafted with the same precise, no-nonsense style he brought to fishing—I listened to the rhythmic chorus of the frogs’ foghorn voices. By day, I caught them bare-handed.

  The lucky ones got away or were released after I had marveled at their glittering gold-and-black eyes, their uncannily familiar hands and forearms. The unlucky I put into a long blue cottonmesh bag. Back at the house, I killed them one by one with a quick plunge of my fillet knife down through the spine. Three frogs and I had lunch: six hefty hind legs, each measuring five inches or so after the feet were removed. Skinned, then sautéed with butter and garlic powder, they were mild as chicken. I took their bodies, along with trout heads and entrails, out to the woods for raccoons and other animals to feast on.

  Catching bullfrogs by hand took time and skill. Any approach by land was nearly hopeless. The best strategy was to swim along the shore and look for the telltale yellow throat of a full-grown male. Then, slowly, I went straight in toward his nose, keeping my hands below the surface. A swift grab and I had him—sometimes.

  After my father gave me a BB gun, the killing got easier. I could take the rowboat along the shore, spot a frog a few yards away, get in position so I had a side view of his head between the cattails, and then—if he hadn’t skipped off already—aim for his big, concentrically patterned eardrum and squeeze the trigger.

  I no longer needed to match guile against instinct, hand against leap. I no longer had to feel the fine, slippery texture of the frog’s skin where my hand encircled his waist, nor the forceful push of his hands against my fingers. I no longer saw the details of great webbed toes attached to living, meaty legs. I no longer had to look at his face up close before deciding whether to kill him.

  In hindsight, I realize that the gun changed my frog hunting for the worse. The killing became too efficient, too coldly distant. And there was the chance of injury. Hand-caught frogs suffered no harm in the catching; I could release them unscathed. If I decided to put them to the knife, death was instantaneous. A frog hit by a BB, on the other hand, might get away wounded, suffering needlessly before succumbing to the injury or to another predator.

  I don’t recall any ever escaping: I was a decent shot and made my kills at close range. What I do recall is a letter my father sent me. I was about nine. A few weeks earlier I had been at the quarry and had gone fishing and frogging. The letter reached me at my mother’s in Vermont. To say I recall it is, I suppose, an exaggeration. I recall only one or two lines. My father had found a dead frog. By the time he discovered it somewhere along the shoreline, it was gray and foul. Since a BB would only make a tiny hole, he couldn’t tell how it had died, but he wondered: Had I shot and failed to recover it? Even at that young age, the possibility made me sick—the frog in pain, its death pointless.

  Still, hunting enticed me. I had a big-game knife of sorts. I don’t know where it came from or whether it would have been useful in the field. But the sweep of the blade, the stubby guard, the antler handle, and the sheath embossed with wolf and trees all excited something primal within me.

  That same atavistic spirit had been kindled the moment I stepped into my uncle Mark’s room for the first time. He was living with his sister and her husband on Cape Cod’s south shore. My mother, stepfather, sisters, and I had driven down from Vermont for Thanksgiving. Walking into that room was like traveling back in time. On the walls were bows and arrows, a powder horn he had made and scrimshawed, antlers from bucks he had taken, pelts from traplines he had set. Mark, whom I saw only once every year or two, was the only hunter I really knew. He made a belt for me: smooth, wide leather embellished with arrows, diamond shapes pressed in as broadheads, fanned scallop-shell marks suggesting fletching. Snapped to it was a large brass buckle, a symmetrical cross in a near circle. I wore it every day.

  I had a pair of plastic recurve bows and spent hours launching a hodgepodge of wooden shafts at straw bales or blocks of old foam. My father, though he had no interest in hunting, recognized mine. I was thirteen or so when he handed me a small Christmas package. Unwrapping and opening the box, I found a double-edged steel broadhead. My little recurves were no match for this deadly looking thing. The message was clear. He was giving me a real bow. That Jennings compound, its lacquered wooden grip richly grained in re
ddish orange, was a huge leap from my plastic toys. It suggested real hunting.

  Yet I never took to the woods in pursuit of game. I knew no local hunter who might have offered to teach me how to hunt and, besides, I enjoyed shooting for its own sake. With my bow, I shot at targets. With my BB gun—and later with my father’s .22 revolver, a six-shot Smith & Wesson on a big .38 frame, and my first rifle, a Remington bolt-action .22—I mostly plinked cans.

  Once or twice, at my father’s utilitarian request, I did pick off woodchucks that had been tunneling around the foundations of the house.

  And, once, I took aim at a chickadee perched on a low tree branch. My sights had been drawn to the bird by the challenge of making the kill. When the .22 went off, the creature dropped to the earth and I felt a burst of exhilaration, of accomplishment. I approached and picked up the bloody bundle of feathers. There wasn’t much left. The meaninglessness of it turned my stomach.

  One evening in early fall, we had dinner guests coming. I was in middle school and had moved back to my father’s full-time. That night, there would be four of us. Fresh trout topped the menu. As soon as I got home from school, I dropped my books, hopped into the boat, and rowed, oarlocks squeaking, out to that summer’s sweet spot, a short distance off the jutting granite corner we called Paul Winter Point. The musician had, I was told, sat there once, playing his sax, plaintive notes echoing off the quarry walls opposite. Half an hour before dinner, I hooked the fourth fish.

  But such meals were rare. Most flesh came from the grocery store, and I gave no thought to its provenance: the chunks of beef my father sliced up for his favorite slow-simmered stew full of parsnips and carrots, the pork chops my mother broiled. They came neatly wrapped in plastic. No muss, no fuss.

  Right through high school, I ate whatever was in front of me. When I had dinner with my girlfriend’s family, I enjoyed their vegetarian stir-fries and salads. When I visited my best friends—a pair of brothers—I savored their mother’s meaty German-style cooking just as much. If I was out with friends and we stopped at McDonald’s, I would order a Quarter Pounder with cheese, never pausing for a moment to consider where the beef patty came from.

  By the time I was twenty—holding that trout to the cutting board and considering Thich Nhat Hanh’s words on kindness—my days of carefree carnivory were over.

  I started cutting back on meat in my late teens. I had learned that excess beef and pork weren’t good for my health. I had learned, too, that supermarket meat was far from pure. Looking at ground chuck in the local IGA cooler, I wondered what chemical mysteries lay accumulated inside those plastic and foam packages. How much pesticide had been on the corn those cattle had eaten? What antibiotics had been pumped into the animals, keeping them alive for slaughter day?

  A year or two later, I learned that more than ten pounds of corn were used to produce every pound of U.S. grain-fed beef and that broad swaths of South American rainforest were being denuded to raise cattle for North American markets. Why should my diet harm the earth? Why should it make such wasteful use of the fruits of the land, perpetuating this pattern of First World gluttony when people around the globe were starving?

  My appetite for supermarket flesh had been further dulled by what I knew about factory farming: pigs crammed into crates barely larger than their bodies, chickens stuck in tiny cages for the entirety of their brief lives. What right did humans have to treat animals so cruelly? And must not that cruelty harm humans in turn? Must not the common practice of “thumping” runt piglets—grabbing them by the hind legs and smashing their heads against concrete floors—harden people’s hearts and distort their notions of morality?

  The change had been gradual: these questions growing, my meals including less and less meat. Now, at twenty, the final recognition hit hard. I had killed this fish out of nothing more than habit.

  Picking up my little spinning rod, I had tied a lure to the stiff, tightly spiraled line and cast out into the quarry. Soon enough the trout had struck and had come in flashing, struggling against the hook. A minute later, I had it on the cutting board, its head severed, my heart filled with sudden disquiet.

  Because I had killed the fish, I ate it. But I cooked and swallowed its tender flesh with regret. Unlike a factory chicken, it had lived well, yet its death had been gratuitous. There were so many other things I could have eaten, things like rice and vegetables, things that would not have felt the hook or even the briefest slice of steel. It was, I vowed, the last time I would ever consume a fellow creature.

  During my last two years of college, I lived in Brooklyn and attended classes in lower Manhattan. Practically all of my friends were vegetarians. We could see no conscionable reason to eat the flesh of other animals. No rationale could justify it. No apology could set it right. Before long, I became a purist: a vegan. I forswore eggs, milk, yogurt, and cheese. I objected to specific practices like the partial clipping off of laying hens’ sensitive beaks to prevent them from pecking at each other in overcrowded conditions. And I objected more generally to the confinement of fellow animals, the bending of other creatures’ lives to serve human ends.

  I could walk into any New York City grocery store and find shelves and display cases brimming with bread and beans, fruit and greens. Or I could walk over to the farmers’ market in Union Square, at the intersection of Broadway and Fourteenth Street, to buy produce directly from the folks who had grown it.

  I still knew plenty of meat eaters, of course, including my family. Fortunately, they accepted my diet. When we sat down to Thanksgiving dinner at Uncle Mark’s house and I declined turkey, no one said anything. I, in turn, said nothing about the roasted flesh on the table or about the antlered deer head on the living-room wall.

  If I had paused to think about it, I don’t suppose I would have known what to make of Uncle Mark and his pursuits. To me, hunting now seemed like a barbaric relic of the past. Perhaps it had been a necessity in our days as hunter-gatherers, but here in modern America that time was long gone. Mark didn’t depend on wild meat to feed his family. His job as a mechanic and machinist, keeping mowers and other equipment running smoothly on a Cape Cod golf course, put groceries on the table.

  The idea of hunting for trophies—anachronistic proof of Man the Hunter’s machismo, his capacity to dominate nature and shoot down the largest possible animals—appalled me. So did the idea of hunting for “sport” or “recreation.” What excuse could there be for taking pleasure in the act of killing? As a boy, I had read Jean Craighead George’s Julie of the Wolves. In the novel’s climactic scene, the young heroine’s friend and wilderness foster parent, the wolf Amaroq, is killed on Alaska’s North Slope. The men who shoot him from an airplane do so not for the sake of protecting livestock, nor for his pelt, nor even for profit. They kill solely for amusement. When I put the book down, I had no words for the grief lodged in my throat.

  Yet sadistic fun wasn’t a motive I could have attributed to Mark. He was tender with his wife and kids. He doted on his dog. Driving, he swerved to avoid squirrels or turtles crossing the road. And, though there was that one deer head on the wall, I couldn’t have imagined Mark—who seemed quiet to the point of timidity and self-effacement—getting all puffed up about trophies. So why did he go to such lengths to pursue and kill meat on the hoof?

  I might also have wondered why Willie fished. We had lost touch after my father’s sudden, devastating death in an accident when I was seventeen. But toward the end of college, I called Willie and we met for lunch in Boston. He was just as I remembered him: big, warm, full of that funny, high-pitched laughter, at ease with himself and the life he had crafted. He had no vicious streak. And his custom furniture business, while not lucrative, kept him fed. Why, then, I might have asked, did he feel the need to catch and kill fish?

  Repentant, I looked back on my own boyhood with a mixture of regret and sympathy, wishing I hadn’t been a killer, but chalking it up to hot-blooded ignorance. I hadn’t known any better.

  Now,
with the unassailable certainty of youth, I did know.

  Peregrine falcons, well on their way to recovery, had begun nesting in New York City. But living there wasn’t going to suit me for long. In my small apartment, I felt separate from nature. It was all around me—in the trees that lined the streets, in the gray and black squirrels that loped through Washington Square Park, in the grass that sprouted in the cracks and seams of the pavement—but it felt too fragmented. I wasn’t touching soil. I wasn’t hearing the sounds of water, of wind in the trees. Unlike the farmers whose trucks I visited in Union Square, I had no contact with the earth from which our food sprang.

  Along the sidewalks of Brooklyn and Manhattan, I picked up pigeon feathers. I read and reread the Wendell Berry poem pinned to the wall of my apartment, “The Peace of Wild Things”:

  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.

  One evening, leaving class and stepping out onto Eleventh Street near the corner of Sixth Avenue, I noticed an unusually bright streetlamp out of the corner of my eye. Looking up, I saw the full moon and realized I hadn’t seen stars in months.

  Two years later, I was in love. My sweetheart, Catherine, and I were moving in together and had rented a place among New York’s Finger Lakes, an hour from her hometown.

  Leaving my father’s house for the last time, I sorted through my things. I had gotten rid of my .22 and my father’s few firearms by then; guns had no place in the life of mindful compassion I intended to lead. I still had my Jennings bow, though, and decided to give it to a friend.