* Reader Warning: There is one black & white picture of the harvested deer I feature in this story (and its heart) towards the end of this post.They live, breed, and die on the mountain tops, far removed from valleys pierced by roads and blotted by houses, shops, gas fumes, man noise, and man scent.
- Larry Benoit, How to Bag the Biggest Buck of Your Life, 1974
The Deer’s Tool Chest
A wise old whitetail buck has several tricks up his sleeve. Sometimes, it walks back on its track, then hops to the side, buying itself time while a confused hunter tries to figure out how this deer levitated away. Other times, a buck will double back while heading uphill, allowing it to look down on its stalker. Meanwhile, the clumsy hunter trudges along on the deer’s track, gazing straight ahead for their big brown target. This pursuer doesn’t know that the buck has switchbacked and is smugly looking down on this poor fella who is likely out of their element.
By the time they reach the spot the deer stopped, looked at the hunter, and switchbacked, the buck will have all the advantages: namely, time and distance. The hunter will then give up and walk home or continue to follow the track, hoping the deer makes a mistake. Hopefully, this hunter will learn their lesson and understand more about whitetail behavior.
This morning, the buck realized I was behind him; he had tried all these tricks but hadn’t lost me yet.
Walking uphill into the Breadloaf Wilderness area, a 24,986-acre tract given a “wilderness” designation by Congress in 1984, I gazed at the steep rocky ridges of the Green Mountains, distinguished by subalpine krummholz.
Another resource in the whitetail deer’s tool chest is to circle a predator (human, coyote, mountain lion, or bear) to get downwind of them. Even if they can’t see you, they can smell you to determine if you’re a threat. If it’s late November and the deer have been chased for eight weeks since deer season began, their senses will heighten, and if they catch a whiff of a human, they’re likely to head for the hills while blowing and waving their white tail.
Since the wind was in my face and blowing strong and steadily enough to create a constant droning sound as it passed over and through the surrounding mountains, I wasn’t as concerned about noise or smell; the wind was in my favor.
“Hunting has been the primary pursuit of animals for more than a million years. Consumption of meat is widely seen as the engine behind our brain development…The pursued have evolved with us, and the eternal chase, man against deer, continues to drive us.”
- Hank Shaw, Hunt, Gather, Cook, p.196
The blowing sound a deer makes is something they do to clear their nostrils, get a better read on the olfactory situation, and alert all surrounding deer of danger. Take a deep breath, then blow out as forcefully as you can through your nose; that’s the sound they make, except louder.
Sound the Alarm
In this way, the whitetail deer and humans are similar. Imagine you’re sitting in your living room reading the news, watching Netflix, or eating dinner, and you smell something that makes you perk up and investigate. Perhaps it’s smoke from a clogged, smoldering dryer duct or the rotten egg smell from a gas burner left on without a flame. For a modern homeowner, all these are cause for alarm and investigation, ultimately leading to corrective action; you realize the propane burner was left on, so you turn it off.
Now visualize yourself sitting on the couch playing Wordle, but your sense of smell is disabled; the gas leak would go undetected until you happen to see the burner knob left in the “On” position. That’s what it was like for the buck I was chasing that day; he was walking around in his living room, unaware of the approaching danger.
The bucks’ brown fur stood out. It reminded me of one of those 3D Magic Eye posters from middle school; if you glance at the poster, it looks like a rectangle filled with repetitive blue shapes and black-and-white dots. But as soon as you changed focus, you’d notice a sports car or dinosaur, a 3D image hovering out of the picture itself.
Seeing him startled me. After walking alone in the woods for three hours, it had become normal for swaying trees or wayward ravens above to be the only movement; both seemed to be dancing with the steady wind. I considered how much more violent the wind was up high, where the birds took advantage of it to get where they were going. Not far away, only 80 miles as the crow flies, the second fastest wind speed ever (231 mph) was recorded on Mt. Washington in 1934.
I pulled the trigger of my Buckstalker muzzleloader, and the outside world disappeared. There was no hesitation. There was no doubt.
The Concentration Within Us All
It can be tricky to describe the state of mind I enter when I pursue wild game. First of all, killing what some people consider an innocent wild creature can get political and emotional. Trepidations aside, here is how I think about (and attempt to convey) this feeling to people:
Close your eyes and think of that one activity you look forward to doing. It could be climbing a mountain, doing yoga, basket-weaving, watching a movie, or traveling to a new place. Maybe it’s hanging out with an old friend or playing pick-up soccer. No matter what you’ve chosen, it will have at least one thing in common with everyone else reading this who’s thought of something: activities you truly love doing allow you to enter the zone.
Athletes and meditation coaches describe a flow state, zone, or moment of transcendence where there is no thinking, just doing. Kobe Bryant described it as everything becoming “one noise.” Thích Nhất Hạnh, the famed Buddhist monk and master of mindfulness, said, “No one has ever lived in the past or the future, only the now.” In Meditations, I believe Marcus Aurelius was getting at something similar when he said, “If the storm should carry you away, let it carry off flesh, breath, and all the rest, but not the mind.”
When that buck materialized before me, I entered the zone. Instinct took over. And in my mind, I was going to pursue and kill this animal; simply put, this task was all that mattered.
My cold hands?
How do I get this deer out of the woods?
My wet socks?
The trash I forgot to take out?
The work meeting next week that I’m unprepared for?
The presidential election?
What if my car keys, which I left hidden next to the interior of the driver’s side tire on the ground, aren’t there when I get back?
In this Moment
I’m typing and glancing at my hunting stuff, a half-put-away mess. I’m procrastinating Not because I’m lazy but because of what the gear represents. Distractions of contemporary society engage us in a dizzying array of choices, activities, plans, meetings, and media that temper our ability to dive deep into the moment. Like I bet most of you reading this, I seek out this feeling of being alive, or rightness, an attenuated concentration.
When I hunt, I’m reaching back in time…
Am I obsessed with hunting? Well, yes, that may be a superficial interpretation. More accurately:
We (all seekers of the moment) are trying to connect to our past. We’re in an edge space, an edge that rides the line between life and death, prey and predator. I’m in danger, threatened (exposed, on a cliff, in the cold, taking a risk), but then hop on the other side of the metaphorical edge to become the danger itself (the hunter).
Society labels people as “thrill-seekers,’ “adventure junkies,” and “dopamine addicts.” But really, we’re just living honest versions of ourselves, a version that’s true to a hunter-gatherer ancestry that we’re designed for, and that’s been the norm for most of humanity’s time on this planet.
How can we honor our inner hunter to become a modern hunter? I realize that hunting mirrors how we should be living. Think, then act, then improve. NOT think, then think, then think, and maybe act sometime with the time’s just right.
“…in order to really figure it out, you need to get out there and do it yourself. And nobody is stopping you but you.”
To be blunt, any person who sat around 100,000 years ago thinking to the point of wheel spinning anxiety likely would have starved.
Hunters must act.
How will I live like a hunter when it’s not hunting season? I will:
try
succeed
fail
lose
win
For all of the above, the focus is on action, which is getting harder to do. This is because phones and Instagram give us a superficial shortcut to thrills that reify a screen-based ecosystem of existence. Without a testing ground of action, we’re left only with thought, a netherworld headspace non-conducive to a hunting existence for which our bodies and brains have evolved. To borrow a phrase from Sam Alaimo: where is our “mind-focusing nervousness”?
Rarely do you have a perfect shot; there’s wind, a branch, or a last-minute shift in the shoulder. Similarly, there is seldom an ideal time to execute a new business idea or take the trip you’ve dreamed about.
I’m concerned for myself and my children; a knowledge-based economy that’s gone too far allows one to spend an entire day digitally immersed in the world through a screen without touching anything outside their house, garage, car, or cubicle.
Instead of waiting for next October, I resolve to act more like a hunter today.
Click here to read Part I of this two-part series.
I think people deride and hate hunting exactly because it’s primal. If we have been engaged in an 8,000 year project to become civilized, then hunting flies in the face of “progress“. Ranchers and similar types in the American West don’t hate the return of the buffalo because they hate the animals. They hate it because it represents a step backwards in their minds, a refutation of all their ancestors worked and fought for. Society at large feels that way about hunting, which represents an even larger step backwards in their eyes.
“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” — Joseph Campbell
Thanks for sharing your rapture, Jesse! 👍