Whitetail365: The Deer Hunting Blog From Field & Stream

I've just returned from a hunting trip to Alabama, which has greatly reduced my life expectancy, mostly because of what I ate. At home, I stick to a balanced diet of pizza, cheeseburgers, beer, Doritos, chocolate bars, and one dessert a day: a single serving of ice cream consisting of however much is left in the carton.

Alabama hunters consider this a vegan diet. We rolled out of our bags each morning and immediately nuked two or three Jimmy Dean sausage-egg-cheese-and-more-sausage biscuits apiece. We washed this down with Dr. Thunder, an off-brand carbonated beverage that lives up to its name. As sitting in a shooting house burns untold calories, we loaded our pockets with more Dr. Thunder and peanut butter crackers before heading out.

Lunch began with grilled homemade sausages (plain, jalapeno, or jalapeno-and-cheese) made by Jimmy, who excels at fixing trucks, reloading bullets, and cooking. We ate these hot and dripping fat with our fingers while he deep-fried bass filets, deer medallions, and breaded chicken bits. Halfway through the meal, which we ate standing around a fire in a 55-gallon drum, someone produced a loaf of white bread. The slices served as plates for food too hot to touch, as napkins when you tired of wiping your hands on your pants leg, and had the added benefit that you could eat them.

Dinner was at a restaurant that served fried dill pickle slices as an appetizer. Most of us went for the 17-oz. ribeye with hush puppies and, for the vegetable, french fries. We washed this down with beer. Then, because it is impossible to eat while you are asleep, we had slivers of cheesecake with a molecular density similar to that of uranium to tide us over until dawn.

The guys invited me to come back next year for the annual barbecue on the last weekend of the season. "We get serious about it then," one said. "Damn near stop your heart up like a rusty watch."

If I'm alive, I'll be there.

I got a letter from a Mr. R. L. Fischer of Pittsburgh the other day, passing on the transcript of an interview in which the subject delivered  “the best justification for hunting” that Fischer had ever heard. The person being interviewed was a non-hunter, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Food Column editor of the L.A. Weekly, Jonathan Gold. And it aired on every hunter’s favorite radio outlet, National Public Radio. 

That’s right, a food writer from La-La Land on the liberal elite’s favorite radio. Gold, an adventuresome eater, described both his extreme discomfort and a kind of epiphany he had while eating a live prawn in a Korean restaurant in Los Angeles.

“...it was not dead, this prawn, it was extremely alive and it was wiggling its legs and it was wiggling is antennae. And its eyes were like swiveling madly in its eye sockets, and it was looking back at me, seeing me as actually the predator, the creature that was going to eat it.

“It was getting too close to the actual nature of consumption, which is killing a living creature with our teeth...(but) the taste of the prawn, the taste of the meat of it, was extraordinary. It was sweet, it was like there was life pushing through it.”

The interviewer then asks the million dollar question. Was Gold of the opinion that it mattered, that it was morally better to eat an animal if the eater was more awake to the fact of the animal’s life and that it had had to be killed to end up on his dinner plate?

He responded: “I think it matters a great deal. I mean, one of the greatest metaphors in western civilization was that of Christ who gave his life so that others might live. And I don’t want to be sacrilegious and I don’t want to belittle that myth in any way, but a pig is giving his life so that we might eat, a chicken is giving its life so that we might eat. And I think the least we can do is to think about that chicken, to think about that calf we are eating. Not necessarily to be sad for it, but to celebrate it, to be aware of it being that what it was, that it wasn’t just this bioengineered protein that somehow managed to find its way onto our plates.”

I was thinking about this all day yesterday while butchering my deer, which took me and a friend about five hours. It was something I hadn’t done in a long time. It brought home to me once again the strange miracle of our lives: of the fleeting now-ness of them, of the violence of existence, of the vividness of any given moment as it flies. And of how all living things are part of a mystery far beyond our ability to comprehend.

Hunting success and I meet up so seldom that I hardly know what to do when he stops to shake my hand.

The fact is, there was nothing particularly dramatic about the encounter in which I killed my buck. (Incidentally, I cannot abide the word “harvest.” A whitetail is not a tomato. Taking the life of a game animal is no small thing, and I fail to see the merit in glossing over that fact.)

I was 22 feet up in a tree and looking down a ridge at about 8 o’clock on a Saturday morning. It was mid-December, a notoriously difficult time to see bucks, and I had no higher hope than a shot at a doe. Then came the shuffling in the leaves behind me. I turned to see, 20 yards out and closing, a buck: big shoulders and curved tines.

There was no time for counting points or guessing his spread. The binary switch in my head just flipped to “shoot” and I clipped release to string. I’d never seen him before, but he was obviously familiar with the area and knew exactly where he wanted to go. And his path would take him right behind me. Five seconds later, he passed within 10 feet of my tree. Five seconds more and he was quartering away at 15 yards. I drew, let him make it to an opening in the brush, and gave him my best bleat.

You should understand that my best bleat sounds like a goat choking to death on a fan belt. But it did the trick. He stopped. I shot. The divot from his leap was a shovel’s worth of black dirt lying atop the wet leaves. The blood trail was continuous, six inches wide, and a full 120 yards long. I have no idea how he made it that far missing that much blood, but he did. I am incapable of aging deer once they appear to have reached the age of 3 1/2, but he looked every bit of that and maybe more. That’s a trophy in my book.

Now that I’ve tagged a good buck, I feel entitled to offer my expert advice on hunting wily old bucks:

1. Spend more hours on stand than you can possibly justify; and
2. Hope that he offers a clean shot before you have time to fully realize exactly what’s going on.