I killed my first deer at eleven years of age. Where I am from, that makes me a border-line late bloomer. It was not the first time I had taken an animal’s life—I had killed a couple of squirrels with a .22 at that point—but it was my first deer, which is a liminal event for boys across the South. After all, when a young boy kills a deer, the beast is just as big as him.
It was across state lines, in Alabama, with a family friend. My vision was still boyish then. The ritual, ancient, was so enchanting, so fitting. It was all I had hoped it would be. Most of my friends had killed their first deer, and I knew I was stepping into something, joining something. The whole ordeal is fastened to my memory.
We shot multiple rifles the evening before, mostly so our family friend could get a sense of my level of comfort. The .270 was chosen, a gun I will hunt deer with until I die. I still remember the gun range, hidden in a stretch of pines dividing two pastures of grazing red lowlines. I recall the shaky breath and the smell of smoke and the words: Just shoot like that tomorrow.
Then we went to bed early in the late autumn darkness.
Then we awoke in it.
Then we drove for a while.
By the time we reached the first spot the sun had just touched the pine needles. A bit of warmth fell on us through the cold. The forest had long lost its summer density, and fresh sunlight stretched into the openings in shafts. We moved carefully through the woods to a clearing which split it in half. A gas line ran down the middle, and you could see north and south for a couple hundred yards. We waited there for a few hours but saw nothing, so we left.
The next spot was across the county, so we drove some more. To get to the deer blind we had to hike for a mile. Upon arrival, I was shocked at just how well it was camouflaged. ‘Forget the deer,’ I thought, ‘it’d fool me.’
I cannot recall how long we sat in the blind, but I recall the drowsy, hazy state of consciousness I was in. I was tired, and we’d been at it for a while. I do, however, remember clearly what broke me from my trance:
Psst… Micah Paul… Shoulder it.
I looked up. Three does were coming down the ridge.
Wait…
They were browsing in a line that would take them fifty yards directly before the blind.
Just wait… You’ll have the perfect shot.
And the perfect shot I had.
Safety off… When you’re ready.
To this day I’m unsure of how I made the shot. I remember looking through the scope, the doe broadside and my crosshairs somewhere just behind her shoulder, but I was shaking like a leaf on a tree. I just shot, figuring the shaking would only get worse.
Next, I remember looking up to see our family friend victoriously pumping his fist. It took me a second to hear, but then again I hadn’t been able to hear since I clicked the safety off.
You absolutely smoked ‘er. I finally heard.
I faced back where I had shot, and she was there. I had killed my first deer.
We took a picture with it for my Momma and then went back. The ritual was not over: There was now a deer to skin.
I remember her hanging by her back hooves, the hind legs and the body y-shaped and the blood dripping on the leaves; then the skin tearing off, the stretching sound, and the unveiling of shiny, pink flesh.
I was swollen up with pride.
A couple of days later, my Momma showed one of my uncles the picture at work. He carefully inspected it, taking note of my camouflage and my hunting-orange beanie and the .270 with a muzzle brake and walnut stock. But then something caught his eye and displeasure stretched across his face: At the bottom of the picture was the doe, lifeless in the leaves, and planted firmly on her stomach was my foot.
Don’t ever let him do that again, he said, steadfast as a mountain, pointing at my foot.
I have spent many years chewing on his admonishment. Or, it has spent many years chewing on me. I come back to it time and again. It has changed me, slowly, clinging to my moral imagination.
Now, I was just a boy then. I did not mean any harm by my actions. I had no malice toward the deer harbored in my heart; it was not my mortal enemy. But I did have that boyish fascination with conquering.
Everything leading up to that was in order, though—the target practice at the range the day before, the going to bed and getting up early, the hiking through Alabama pine forests, the time spent in the blind, and then the aim and the shot. I was being enculturated into that tradition I could feel above me. My sensibilities and my manners were under cultivation. An understanding of, and love for, the woods was being watered, and seeds of patience, stillness, toughness, and alertness were being sown in the inmost soils of my being. I was a young Georgia boy on the path to manhood. But all of this, these lessons, came under threat with my foot upon the young doe’s stomach.
Archibald Rutledge, the great South Carolina sportsman and writer, claimed, in defiance of modern fragilities, that “hunting is not incompatible with the deepest and most genuine love of nature.” A proper hunt, therefore, ought to reflect just that. Mine, however, did not. It almost did, as explained above, but the threat my mistake posed was in its incompatibility with a love of nature. It revealed a disposition toward nature whereby I impose my will on it, taking as I please and flexing my muscles as I take. I went into the wilderness and conquered a life because I was stronger. That’s what I thought as I left the woods. That thought, though, that feeling and that disposition is rooted, as thinkers from Thomas Jefferson to Wendell Berry have explained, in the very thing the Industrial Revolution was built upon: violence. Man has power over the natural world, he lords over it and can therefore extract from it whatever he wishes, whenever he wishes, however he wishes.
I therefore find it to be no coincidence that at the same time I postured myself over the doe in domination, I was also at an age where I was amused by road kill—the tragic, mechanical accident of the industrial age. When my father’s truck would pass over a squirrel, or I saw a deflated buck on the side of the road, something in my boyish imagination was deeply intrigued. The display of power, the violence, the automotive prowess, and the destruction fascinated me completely. It was so exact. The critters stood no chance.
That is what threatened the hunt: A boyish understanding of the world. But it is also why the hunt existed.
I had to grow up. I had to become a man, and hunting was integral to that. I had to come to grasp, over time and more hunts, why my uncle was so offended by my actions. I had to learn patience, stillness, toughness, and alertness, yes, but also love and dominion and responsibility. I had to learn how to use my power.
I had to understand life and nature not as something to be mastered, but as gifts afforded to me to steward by a God abundant in goodness. I had to appreciate, as only a man can, my limits.
I am still learning and appreciating all of those things. And so, as it turns out, what threatened my first hunt is the very thing that threatens life itself.
Now, when I take an animal’s life I say a prayer; and when I see one crushed on the side of the road, I try to do the same.
Image Credit: Conradijn Cunaeus, “Hunting Snipes” (Before 1895) via Wikimedia Commons
