To kill a deer

Mindful Metropolis, November edition

It was the second bullet that pierced the deer’s brain. The first one, fired through the barrel of my father’s rifle a couple minutes earlier, only maimed him as the buck bent down to eat a fallen apple in the orchard on my parents’ property — on the opening morning of Michigan’s deer-hunting season five years ago.

I was at the computer absorbing the day’s news when I heard the shot. George W. Bush had won his reelection two weeks earlier, and I still felt numb with disbelief. Secretary of State Colin Powell (“the voice of moderation”) was resigning today and Condoleeza Rice would replace him. The news was expected to make the White House more hawkish.

In Iraq, the U.S. military’s invasion of Fallujah — seemingly postponed until after the presidential election — was entering its eighth day of bloody, street-to-street fighting, pitting American soldiers against Shiite rebels loyal to the fiery cleric Abu Musab al-Zarquawi, with plenty of innocent civilians trapped in between. The reports coming out of Fallujah were confusing, and morbid.

Then, the second gunshot. Remembering my pledge to my Dad to help this time, I threw on a raggedy pair of jeans and walked outside into the cool northern Michigan fall air. There, on a bed of freshly fallen leaves and under a knotty old apple tree, where I had once lain in a hammock and memorized statistics on the backs of baseball cards, a beautiful animal lay dead. Blood trickled from his mouth and wound near the heart, where the first bullet struck. The deer had been sacrificed to feed us.

“Are you ready for this?” my Dad calmly asked as we stood over his body. I nodded, though I wasn’t convinced, myself.

He later told me that he had been reading an essay in The New Yorker by John McPhee about barges on the Illinois River when he saw the deer walk into the orchard. The buck had appeared suddenly and was in such a direct line of fire that my Dad had taken a couple deep breaths to calm himself before pulling the trigger. Nevertheless, the first shot hadn’t killed the deer — the nightmare for every hunter with a conscience. The animal stumbled for 20 yards before falling down. He must have felt at least 90 seconds of bewilderment and pain before leaving this world.

My Dad knelt over the deer’s body and said in a hushed tone, “Thank you for your life.”

I imagined Native American hunters performing the same ritual over centuries — taking a moment, just a moment, between kill and butcher, to reflect on the animal’s life and thank it for its contribution to the food chain.

Then he pulled out a knife and cut the deer’s throat so it could bleed. Next he made an incision along the belly, from crotch to ribcage. When we opened up the deer, the air around us became warm, and it took on a sickly, sweet smell of blood and organs. There’s no smell quite like it — and it’s nothing like the experience of consuming meat, which I’ve done my whole life and continue to do today.

We reached our bare hands and arms into the deer, navigated past the heart and lungs with a sharp knife, and cut its esophagus so that we could pull out its guts and intestines. We were careful not to rupture anything, as we separated the part of the animal we would use with what we wouldn’t. My Dad cut out the deer’s liver and placed it in a plastic bag — part delicacy, and perhaps also part trophy. The innards were left in a far corner of the apple orchard for coyotes and vultures to eat that night. Everything would be used somehow.

Then we each grabbed two hoofs and dragged the body across the yard, marking the path with a slight trail of red. She was not heavy, but my thoughts weighed me down. When we got to the tree where the cars are parked, my Dad fetched a rope from the tool shed, and we tied the hoofs to the antlers and strung the deer from a tree limb, to let its blood drain onto the ground and to cure the meat.

The liver was put in salted water to soak and to draw out the blood. I showered and changed my clothes, then sat down in front of the computer again.

Hundreds were reported dead in Fallujah, and the occupying army was blocking an aid convoy from the Iraqi Red Crescent from entering the besieged city. Amidst the fog of war, rumors surfaced of an ambulance — which may or may not have been carrying insurgents — with sniper bullet holes shot through the windshield from above, aimed at chest level. An NBC cameraman videotaped a U.S. Marine shooting an unarmed and wounded Iraqi prisoner in a Fallujah mosque, yelling, “He’s (expletive) faking he’s dead!”

A couple hours after the kill, my Dad invited several friends and fellow hunters over for lunch, and the fresh liver was fried up with onions. Though I’d eaten this delicacy before, today I had trouble chewing the body of the animal. The aroma of the liver in my nose took me straight back to the smell of the body when we opened it up. It wasn’t that I was nauseated; I just couldn’t chew.

I thought of the deer lying there in the apple orchard, how she had been alive and graceful just minutes before, how quickly this animal had gone from pasture to plate, and how I had witnessed and taken part in most of the process. I thought of all the meat eaters in this country who have never killed or butchered what they eat, and I wondered how many would continue to do so if the gun and the knife, the blessing and the intestines were required to be a carnivore. And I couldn’t help but think of the bloodbath in Fallujah.

Was shooting a human being anything like shooting an animal? Was it difficult to chew food in the mess hall afterwards? Was there a connection between how we get our food and how we fight conflicts in the world? All I knew for certain was that the tender liver seemed rougher than any meat I’d ever chewed before.