On killing a deer

...I did it in the morning, not long after the sun came up, and I used an old double-barreled 12-gauge shotgun which had belonged to my grandfather...

...We do it--or at least, we used to do it--as naturally and easily as the lion devours the lamb...

...Finally it just disappeared, as lone and useless things do...

...At what point does choice enter these things...

...When you see a deer you must decide that this is one you are going to fire at...

...A moment later it emerged from the brush on the far side of the logging road, a young four-point buck with a sleek coat, surprised but not quite yet alarmed to find me there, less than 30 feet away...

...THOMAS POWERS 2 February 1979:41...

...hunting is more fun when you've got somebody to talk about it with at the end of the day, and I just felt like being with my brother...

...It goes without saying that every hunter lives in dread of doing something similar...

...It was a clean kill...

...I went to keep him company, and I carded my grandfather's shotgun because if you don't have a gun you aren't really hunting, but I remembered the terrible remorse of ten years before and did not think I'd pull the trigger...

...She came up around the barn, took one look at the deer hangil~g there, and burst into tears...

...After awhile I heard footsteps coming from the opposite direction...

...I was very interested in American Indians at that time, American Indians were of course legendary hunters, and it was extremely important to me to prove I could at least shoot a woodchuck...

...JOHN GARVEY Of several minds: Thomas Powers I ON KILLING A DEER IS THERE MORE SUPPORT FOR BOMBS THAN BUCKSHOT...

...I'm pretty sure I never killed another animal for ten years from that day until the morning I went deer hunting with my brother, secretly thinking I probably wouldn't shoot even if I saw a deer...

...So I gave it to my brother, and at Christmas-time was invited for venison stew...

...The Plains Indians, after all, had practiced stealth by creeping up behind prairie dogs and grabbing them by hand...

...But the belief that as we are, we are more or less all right--this is crazy...

...The Ugandan answered that as long as the newsmen thought Amin was sick, they couldn't understand what was going on in Uganda...

...At that point my brother and I split up...

...I raised my gun and fired, knowing this was a mistake...

...Murderers must be worse, of course...

...As time went by the difficulties increased because the field, freshly cut when I began, was growing up to a second crop of hay...

...There is no other feeling quite like going armed into the woods after game...

...The deer would still be out feeding, or heading back up into the woods along their accustomed trails...

...For the first time I understood something I'd often read about years before, that special respect and intimacy which the American Indians expressed for the animals they killed and ate...

...It was easy going but noisy underfoot because the leaves were dry...

...For two weeks I went after that woodchuck twice a day, at dawn and again in the evening, when it was out feeding...

...My grandfather had given me a Remington pump action .22 caliber rifle, a beautiful little gun, and I was a pretty good shot, but for quite a while I just could not figure out how to get close enough to a woodchuck to kill one...

...It is less unsettling to think that a man like Idi .Amin is ill than to think that he might have chosen to be what he is...

...And of course they couldn't...

...There had been a time, when I was ten or twelve, when hunting was something of a passion...

...The point, of course, is that the person whose life is lived at the edge of religious awareness is conscious, moment to moment, of choices which are only apparent to the rest of us (and to the murderer, for that matter) once in awhile...

...They certainly don't want to watch the killing...

...I was thrilled...

...The urge to hunt was fitful at best...

...9H ubert Selby's novel The Demon is a compelling fictional portrait of a real process: a sexual obsession which seems light and innocent enough at the start leads, finally, to murder and suicide...

...Ordinary enough by the standards of Florence or Rome, it is a bit of an anomaly in New York...

...Urban Americans don't like thinking about the origin of the meat they eat...

...It is not enough to look at the economic conditions of post-World War I Germany to explain the holocaust, nor can the bloodshed in Uganda be explained by searching for clues in Idi Amin's childhood...

...When I snapped his shotgun together, sitting in the kitchen with my brother, the barrels were as free of pits and rust inside as they'd been the day the gun was bought...

...it was an acquiescence to evil, which is real...

...L IKE MOST readers of Commonweal I have never killed a fellow human, but I did kill a Whitetail deer once, and it was an interesting experience...

...The entire exercise is a good deal more difficult, but no less deliberate, than picking a head of lettuce or an onion or a green pepper in the garden...

...The power of evil can work its way up from the heart's emptiness to murder...

...It is not exactly exhilarating, but it is certainly not flavorless or dull either...

...When it was fully light I continued up the mountainside through a birch woods, then turned and headed down the valley...

...It is well-known that some hunters go into the woods in a reckless frame of mind and occasionally shoot dogs, cows, or even other hunters...

...I picked up a stick and walked over to the hole, thinking to leave a marker so I'd know where to look the next time...

...We followed an old road up the side of a mountain in the dark and emerged above a large hayfield just as the sky began to lighten...

...I slipped off the safety, raised the gun and aimed at the hollow of the throat where the neck meets the trunk of the body...

...I carried it down the hill and my mother took a picture of me holding it up by the tail, looking as proud as an Olympic gold medalist...

...It sounded like another hunter scuffing through the leaves, step after deliberate step...

...The most impressive Christian I have met said to me once, "If God can save me, he can save anyone...

...When I came to a logging road I sat down on a stump to wait for my brother...

...After 1 got home I hung him by the hind legs from a barn rafter and my wife came up to see him...

...They had been sitting in a clump of brush near deer trail in Maine...

...It was going to be a beautiful day, clear and not too cold...

...Later, when the season was well underway, they'd be spooked, running outside their usual territories, and finding a deer would become a matter of accident...

...that beef is just a word for the flesh of cattle, and that all are killed, drained of blood and cut up into manageable portions so we can eat them...

...I didn't like buckshot, which consists of six or eight lead balls...

...The religious tradition most readers of this magazine are familiar with speaks not only of a good GOd, but also of the "prince of this world," the world's tormentor...

...The gift of that warmth was as stunning as a sunset...

...You don't pick just any head of lettuce or green pepper, but ones which look like they'll make a good salad...

...In the twentieth century (the time of Auschwitz, the Gulag, China's rape of Tibet, Hiroshima) we find it difficult to accept the fact that there is something which does not love humanity, but delights in negation and destruction...

...you were more likely to hit what you were aiming at, but you were also more likely to wound than to kill...

...The first time you encounter the writing of a saint who claims to be the most evil of men, you are likely to think of this as a sort of bragging...

...The deer's eyes were open, large, liquid and brown, and I half expected a sudden regret as I looked into them, but nothing of the sort happened...

...The argument strikes me as weak...

...what is an unkind flare-up, immediately regretted, next to murder...

...On the day of the new department's grand opening the window was gorgeously filled with quarters of aged beef, large white rabbits, a pheasant, suckling pigs, lambs, all hanging from gleaming metal hooks...

...I was stunned...

...In school I had a good friend who had been badly wounded on a deer hunt with his father 2 February 1979:39 when he was twelve or thirteen...

...The point is not to speak of it simply, only to speak of it at all...

...But given Charles Manson's sad foster home rambling, Jim Jones's lonely childhood, and later his being the object (or victim) of an adulation which could turn almost anyone so alone from the start into a false messiah--given things like this, who can speak simply of evil...

...No one is surprised when kids turn up their noses at the idea of eating snails, and can hardly believe it when told that Indians along the Amazon may idle away an afternoon catching and eating flies...

...You are consciously alert, you are inclined to pay attention and not daydream, you are cautious and serious because you are out to kill something but do not want to kill the wrong thing...

...But I didn't get very far...

...I didn't want that woodchuck, I hadn't been hunting, I had simply killed it automatically, th e way a man might idly step on a beetle and turn his foot...

...Not a drop or two, but a great splash, a deep and brilliant red...

...the season opened at daybreak and it wouldn't do to miss first light...

...He was not lukewarm inside, as I'd vaguely expected, but actually hot, and that heat somehow elicited in me an extraordinary sense of kinship with the animal I had just killed...

...They're not speaking simply of "hunters" who don't know what they're doing, but of hunting itself...

...An old stone wall ran up the north side of the field and I sometimes spent as much as an hour creeping up along the far side to get into a position to shoot...

...Both bullets passed through and shattered my friend's left forearm...

...The point is not the argument--one might wrestle with its refinements for 10,000 words--but the intensity of feeling behind it...

...It was still early in the morning, not yet nine o'clock, and she was just finishing a second cup of coffee...

...The kids weren't alone either...

...We kill and eat all alive, three or four thousand calories' worth a day, if we can get them...

...I scraped the hide and salted it, dreaming that one day I might have enough for a blanket...

...It is not at all obvious in most of its workings...

...With the exception of the beef, they all retained both head and hide...

...every great religious tradition is clear about that much...

...he would no more have put a gun away uncleaned, than he would have appeared in his office without a tie...

...Few people ever see what they eat before it gets to the supermarket...

...When I got there the woodchuck was dead at my feet, a bullet through its brain...

...My friend's father shouted and the other hunter ran away...

...My grandfather was a meticulous man...

...The result is a certain fastidiousness...

...I'd been out walking with my gun--not hunting exactly--when I came over a rise in the field and found a woodchuck sitting up in front of its hole, staring at me, not twenty feet away...

...They stopped in front of the window, and their faces gradually registered unmitigated horror as they realized those furry little bodies with the cute cup ears were . . . dead baby lambs...

...The gun fired and the woodchuck, as so often before, disappeared...

...If it's too far away, or moving too quickly, or there is too much brush intervening, or the horns are not absolutely and certainly visible, then you probably shouldn't fire...

...I took out the knife I'd sharpened the night before and field-dressed him, cutting open the chest and belly, pulling out the viscera, removing the testicles and anus and scent glands...

...It fell down dead...

...The slug had entered the lower throat, destroying the heart and a good deal else in the chest cavity, and opening his veins and arteries in a manner which pumped out all but a cupful of blood in ten or twelve bounds down the mountainside...

...That is truly unthinkable...

...A special refrigerated window display was included, stocked in the customary manner of Italy...

...He found demons...

...Perhaps twenty feet away down the hill was another, and beyond that another...

...A sense of life which is too constantly critical can lead to neurotic misery...

...There is no denying that an extreme consciousness of the choice between good and evil can be taken too far...

...The housekeeper of a farmer who lived down the road, an Indian woman, skinned the woodchuck for me in return for the meat, which she made into a stew...

...Suddenly he popped up for a look off down the field...

...There is nothing unnatural in killing Commonweal: 40 things to eat...

...I kept that hide for a long time...

...There was no false piety, there was nothing at all false, in his words...

...Everything we eat was alive at one point, and none survives the eating...

...Fish and fowl are complex enough to struggle to get away, and cows and deer will stare you in the eye, mammal to mammal, with a degree of comprehension which can be unnerving...

...But that is not entirely what I mean when I say you don't want to kill the wrong thing...

...When my brother and I left the house at about five o'clock that morning I wasn't entirely sure I would fire even if I did see a deer...

...No hunter ever leaves a legal deer in the woods because he's had his fun and it's too much trouble to drag out...

...What is new is the fact that kids are not much less shocked or disgusted to learn that lamb chops actually come from lambs, that chicken legs are, indeed, legs...

...I'd be willing to bet, in fact, that there is a broader general support in America for building cruise missiles and the neutron bomb, than there is for the right of men to go into the woods with guns in order to kill deer...

...I picked out a woodchuck living in the middle of a four- or five-acre field above the house and determined that I was going to get it...

...A terrible remorse came over me...

...His body slid easily over the leaves...

...How could he be, really...

...When Saint Anthony went into the desert to face himself and God, he did not find in himself a poor selfimage...

...That first day I stopped to look as a mother walked by with two children...

...For very good reasons killing has got a bad name, but the prohibition has grown general, and there is a popular confusion of the killing of men in anger with the killing of animals for food...

...It was delicious...

...When the deer was dressed I tied a rope around his horns and dragged him down out of the woods...

...The wall was down in places and I had to snake through the grass to keep out of sight...

...Maybe because it defies our current demand for objectivity, for the appearance of hard scientific data (a superstition as silly as any), the question of choice will continue to be ignored...

...Later I tried to explain what killing that deer had been like, the instinctive feeling, with my hands plunged into his hot interior, that I had purchased a part of my life with his...

...Never mind the fact that answering it is quite literally a matter of life and death...

...It means that we are willing to settle for being less than we must be...

...You couldn't ask for a better shot...

...My appetite for hunting evaporated abruptly a summer or two later when I shot another woodchuck in the same field as the first...

...Somehow the woodchuck always heard or smelled me, or I missed on the few occasions when I fired...

...Then the rhythm changed, a whole series of steps came in rapid succession, the gait of a creature with four legs, and I knew instantly it was a deer...

...He was in perfect silhouette...

...It may not be possible to pin that one down scientifically, but it is an absolutely essential question...

...My wife said she was sorry, she couldn't explain it, but she simply could not have anything to do with that deer...

...I found the buck, dead on his side, not more than 75 yards down the hill...

...I was startled by the heat...

...Finally one night I got into position, waited and waited and waited, trying to pinpoint the woodchuck's hole...

...It's a primitive thing, but then so are loneliness, fear of the dark, the love of children...

...His innards steamed in the cold air...

...It's generally assumed that the nervous systems of plants are too rudimentary to register what's happening to them...

...As disturbing as it may be to think that there is a real connection between our own casual insensitivity and the crime of the most vicious murderer, if thousands of years of testimony about the human heart have anything to tell us, there is a link...

...it can enter our lives through our need to be loved, our desire to be regarded as important and interesting, our fear of inner emptiness...

...Adults registered a similar horror and shock, as if it were somehow brutal and indecent to display a dead animal in anything but bits and pieces in snug plastic wrap...

...if it's all right to kill animals in a slaughter house, what's wrong with killing them in the woods...

...But civilization brings refinements...

...My friend had shifted position and a hunter fired two quick shots at the rustle...

...Because Americans don't have to hunt the practice is gratuitous, and therefore cruel, and therefore wrong...

...It's hard to fire something as large as a 12-gauge shotgun, which has a loud report and solid recoil, without instinctively flinching...

...I couldn't believe I had missed...

...I've heard the "sport" of hunting denounced in terms as passionate as those used for the dropping of napalm on villages in Vietnam...

...But it is not a lack which had the power to murder millions under Hitler...

...It did not take a Natty Bumpo to follow the trail...

...I wondered if I'd know him...

...The buck was absolutely motionless, waiting for me topull the trigger, so I did...

...When my eyes opened that morning the buck was gone and for a moment I thought I had missed-incredible at that distance!--until I walked over and found a large gout of blood on the leaves where he'd been standing...

...Around the corner from my house in New York is a large Italian grocer and specialty foodstore called Balducci's, which recently opened a new meat department...

...An element of delberate choice is involved...

...It is there at the center of what we want, or think we want...

...There is a bad, if classical, idea that evil is merely an absence of good, a lack...

...The idea is not simply to kill something, but to bring it back and eat it...

...My real reason for going was to keep my brother company...

...What I was doing did not seem cruel or unnatural at all, but like an exchange for which I ought to, and did, feel gratitude...

...A great many Americans think that hunting, in particular, is willful, cruel and perverse, not much short of criminal...

...I aimed carefully, held my breath, and squeezed the trigger as I'd been taught to do...

...It was dark outside...

...Some we eat while they're still alive--apples and oysters, for example--and others have got to be killed first...

...It was hard to see the woodchuck unless he popped up for a look around...

...Before we left I put four or five shells into my pocket, rifle slugs about as big as the end of your thumb, weighing perhaps an ounce each...