On Deer Hunting

I'm a bit of a sissy, if you want to know the truth. This sometimes made it difficult fitting in with friends and family members who were not sissies growing up. Playing outside of family gatherings as a child, one cousin or another would invariably get the idea of climbing a tree, or over a fence, or up onto the roof, and I'd stay down below on the ground, playing the part of one of the well-behaved children, and telling myself that such running, jumping and climbing was really quite monkey-like, closer to animal than human. But really, deep down, even then, I knew it was because I was not coordinated or lively enough, and if I tried keeping up I'd only end up somehow smashing a finger, getting cut, or falling down off the very fence I was trying to climb, landing on my tail bone, and having to funny-walk back into the house to the adults and confess that, yes, it was my "bottom" that I'd hurt.

Things didn't get much better in high school. P.E. consisted mostly of standing around awkwardly, allowing myself to be sort of herded in the general direction of the physical activity, but not actually participating. I wore glasses then, and they radiated a strange and powerful magnetic force able to draw athletic equipment of all sorts directly toward them, knocking them off my face and onto the floor, where at least one lense would pop out and I'd have to scramble to pick it back up before it got stepped on.  Even on those rare occasions where I myself would take a shot at the basket, or whatever you call it, the ball would, despite all laws of physics, curve back around mid-shot to come flying straight at my glasses.  My only consolation in P.E. was that there were other kids -- some less awkward than me, even -- who also chose to just stand around looking bored instead of participating, affording me the glimmer of an illusion that it wasn't because I was unfit and uncoordinated, but because, hey man, P.E. is lame.

Clearly, I was the kind of kid who needed a firearm. When I was 14, or 15, (I don't even really recall) I received my first hunting license. I took a safety course, received a hand-me-down rifle from my father, and that year joined in on the Big Annual Hunting Trip among the men in my family. On our first night in the woods, we all sat around the fire eating junk food, my uncles drinking beer and telling stories. I have a lot of uncles, and counting them, my father, a couple of family friends, and my older cousins, there were probably 10 or 12 of us out there around the camp fire, and I got the feeling that the annual hunting trip was as much about this as it was about the hunting itself. There was farting, and there were dirty stories; cases of cheap beer and cartons of Camels were consumed. It was fun, and I felt closer to my uncles and cousins than I ever had before, including the uncle who would later tell me, shortly after starting my first job doing data-entry, that he "knew I wouldn't get a job where I had to get my hands dirty." I once rode my bicycle into a very big irrigation ditch. But sitting around, eating, and drinking, I could do.

The next morning was entirely less pleasant. I've never been an early riser -- I attribute this to having been born on the shortest day of the year -- and my father woke me up while it was still dark out. I was of the opinion then, as I am now, that if it's still dark out, it's still night, and when it's night, a person ought to be sleeping. And it was cold. It was that special kind of cold that you only ever feel in the woods in the morning, where you can feel it sink in down to your bones, slowly, as if you were a towel absorbing water. This is what I woke up to. And then we all got into several pick-up trucks and headed down little dirt roads to places where deer were likely to be.

I'll tell you now, 'cause this story isn't going to have the trigger-squeezing, moment-of-decision climax that you're probably expecting: I didn't shoot anything. Didn't even see anything. And I don't know what I'd have done if I had seen a deer. It's not like any of us were starving, or hunting out of necessity. I'm not actually sure what the economic benefits of shooting a deer are -- if the time, effort and expenditures of licenses, supplies, driving to the woods, shooting and then removing the innards from a deer are actually less than just purchasing an equivalent amount of steaks. Maybe you actually do come out on top, but still I am pretty sure that we were there for sport. And I got nothin' against that. "Sportsman." The word even has a classy ring to it. And if you wanna be a sportsman, you go ahead. Either you're blastin' the deer here in the woods today, or they're anally electrocuting the pig on the farm tomorrow; either way, I'm sitting down to dinner. I'm just not sure that I, personally, want to be doing the blasting, or the electrocuting. I recently roasted a chicken for the first time, and just holding the raw chicken in my hands was almost too much for me. The little body, with its soft, wiggly skin, the feel of bones underneath -- it was like holding a baby. The fact that the wire contraption I put him on before sticking him in the oven makes it look like he's standing up on his legs like a little man didn't help at all. If I have trouble sticking a chicken in the oven, how can I blow away a deer? What about cleaning it?* Yanking out God-knows-how-many feet of bloody intestines? Can you imagine? No shit I got the job where I don't have to get my hands dirty.

We all entered the woods at different points, with the vague general plan to meet up somewhere. I have the memory that we were all going to converge on one central location, moving inward in a gradually-diminishing circle, though I know that can't be right as it would, if a deer were spotted, actually involve firing toward one another. However it happened, we did eventually wind up in the same general place, and I could hear, through the brush, two of my uncles who'd already met up gently talking to one another. And I must have made some noise as I walked toward them, because suddenly one of them said, quietly but with an urgency in his voice that said his senses had just snapped to full predatory attention: "I hear something!"

And here I am, the kid who could never climb the tree, the one with the glasses with the lenses constantly popping out, the one who would actually sometimes fall down while merely walking due to a complete lack of coordination, crackling through the brush toward an uncle who thinks I may, in fact, be a deer, and I say...

"'tis I!"

The instant it came out, I wished that he would actually shoot me. "'tis I?" What the hell had possessed me to say that? Was this jolly old England all of a sudden? I may have preferred Nintendo to dirtbiking, but even I had never felt the need to start talking like it was the sixteen-fuckin'-hundreds. Even I wasn't that much of a dork. I knew immediately that this was probably not going to help my image within the family as the kid who will one day grow up and get a job where he doesn't have to get his hands dirty.

That night my neck spontaneously went out on me. I don't know how it happened; I didn't turn or twist my head in any unusual way, it just started, and it was the worst pain I've ever felt in my life, even to this day. It felt like I'd been stabbed between the neck and shoulder. There was no position where it wouldn't hurt; I couldn't walk or move my arms, or look to the left or right. I believe I cried. It was pitiful.

That was my first and last year deer hunting.

* Actually, it's not called "cleaning" the deer, it's "field-dressing" the deer, and it does not, as the name might imply, involve dressing the deer carcass up in any kind of clothing, though if it did I would have an entirely new respect for the sport.