The Hunt

One of life's many conundrums came my way recently. What for some people may be a simple thought process and short discussion can, for me, require an inordinate amount of thought and emotional processing to come to some reasonable conclusion.  This conundrum came from my 15-year-old son in the form of a very simple question: "Mom, when can I hunt?"

This question, at face value, is a simple one requiring only a straight forward answer such as, "next week," but when it was initially asked almost a year ago, it set off in my mind a series of thoughts similar to a Rube Goldberg machine - the eventual outcome will still be simple, but it takes many twists and turns before my brain can wrap itself around the whole idea of hunting.

Quite simply, I don't hunt.  I probably would if I desperately needed the meat to feed my family, but when you have two hundred pounds of pork in your freezer and several very large gardens, it becomes less of an issue.  I do, however, hunt for mushrooms every spring so to claim that I don't hunt is not entirely true, but I am hunting for fungi not animals. Should this make a difference?  The existential dilemma is only made worse by the thought that mushrooms, being rooted to the ground, can't get away from me whereas an animal could flee from a hunter. Hunting an animal does require some skill - patience, intelligence, observation, and marksmanship, but when it is done simply for the thrill of  it, hunting looses some of its credibility. However, when it is done with some thought as to the need for food and with reverence to the animal you are hunting, I have no real problems with the idea of hunting.

My son and I had discussed his hunting several times before and it was suggested that maybe hunting turkey would be the way to go.  Turkeys are something that we can process ourselves and would definitely eat, whereas a deer is entirely too much meat for what we need right now. This decision alone took several discussions and months to come to terms with....not for my son necessarily, but for me.  It isn't the hunting that is the problem....it's the death. Although I have hunted before and seen animals killed in a hunt, I think that at this point in my life, I have seen enough death.  As a veterinarian I see life in many different facets - I see lives honored, abused,  neglected, and loved.  I see lives born and I see them die.  Watching something die that is frightened and wounded is one of the most terrible events to ever have to witness, so I am no longer cavalier about hunting - it needs to be something that we would definitely eat and it has to be something that my son is capable of killing with one shot.

Then, of course, there is the question of gun versus bow. This throws my psyche into paroxysms of anxiety.  I, myself, have hunted with a gun, looked down the barrel through the sights at a beautiful doe and silently cursed my license for being buck only, so I know what it is to carry a gun.  But that was twenty plus years and much naivete ago, and since that time the country seems to have morphed into a gun crazy nation. Guns used to be for hunting, but now owning a weapon  is seen not only as a right, but a political status symbol and necessity.  The list of species that we hunt now apparently includes one more animal, and this thought alone keeps me up nights worrying about my kids in public places like movie theaters and schools. I realize that nothing in life is completely safe, but this obsession with weapons that kill just baffles me...and not only kill, but kill as many as you possibly can as fast as you can.  Hunters of animals aren't even allowed semi-automatics, but apparently when we are hunting humans, it's acceptable.  What my son sees as he waits for my response in this discussion is simply a mother too fraught with anxiety over all the anger, hostility, fear and hate that the world now holds. Guns are too easy, guns are too deadly.... "Bow! If you hunt, let it be with a bow."

He made his own.

I had passed down to him my old fiberglass recurve bow several years ago and he is a far better shot with it than I ever was.  He set his sights on making his own recurve out of wood and fiberglass.  Cut it, shaped it, glued it, sanded it, stained it, strung it and took it to the county fair as his wood project for which he received a blue ribbon.

Then we went camping up north in Minnesota and one of our favorite things to do on the rainy days is to find the local resale shops and see what they have.  My son found ten hunting arrows at a reasonable price.  The only thing left to obtain was the license.

In Iowa, as in most states, the Department of Natural Resources has all the license fees on their websites.  All the rules and regulations are there as well.  We looked these up and noted that, if you own land, you can obtain a land owners permit that allows you to hunt on your own land (and your land only) for $1.  I stalled. We would see the flock of turkeys parading around our property at the end of October and beginning of November - sometimes twelve of them or more, and still I stalled.  Then winter break was upon us and I was faced with five children cooped up inside the house for two weeks.  There is one thing that hunting does well....it gets you out of the house.  I logged onto the DNR website and provided all the necessary proof that I did, in fact, own (at least partially) the land upon which we live and purchased the landowner's permit for the turkey archery season.  Total cost $3.28 - the additional $2.38 had been for the convenience of doing it via Internet and having them send it in the mail - well worth it in my opinion.

The worse part, at least initially in my mind, was that the license had to be in my name.  Minors can hunt under your license as long as you are with them.  In other words, I had to go hunting as well.  We picked a nice morning to head out.  We have 20 acres so it was clear we weren't going to be gone too long....either the turkeys were around, or they weren't.  I sent my son around the north side of the woods and I walked along the ridge of the hill straight through the woods slightly ahead of him to see if there were any that I could startle in his direction.  I carried with me my coffee thermos - my chosen weapon for a morning hunt.  Dressed in blaze orange, not so much for us but for the other hunters that are all too prevalent and trigger happy, I moseyed through the woods.

It was very quiet.

I could glimpse my son slowly walking along, stopping every once in a while to look around him.  I could hear the birds flitting above my head in the trees and chattering to one another.  I saw a squirrel darting here and there.  The snow crunched under my feet and the tracks that raced this way and that were almost entirely of deer with a few rabbit tracks here and there.  No turkey.  The sky was blue with some high clouds and no wind. Beautiful. Just like that, all the stress of the holidays was wiped away and I realized that I was immeasurably happy right in that moment.

Woodpecker listening for insects

My son and I met at the east edge of the woods - essentially the end of the property upon which we could hunt.  We both noted that there wasn't one turkey track in the snow, so we could probably head home.  I suggested that we try the trees on the north west edge of our property just to see if there were any tracks there.  The snow was just deep enough, and just cold enough that with each step you would break through the top inch of hard frozen snow into the deeper soft snow underneath so going quietly was impossible. We discussed hunting and how it really wasn't so much about whether or not it was "successful," it was more about being out in the world and paying attention - listening, seeing, observing - using all the senses that we modern humans have essentially stopped using. The senses that allowed our ancestors to survive for thousands of years.

Among those senses, there is one that lets you know you aren't alone in a wood.  A feeling that there is something else there....watching you.  Just as we entered the small three rows of trees I sensed the movement and the shadow cast on the snow and trees made me stop and look up. A Great Horned owl had flown from one branch to another and sat perched with his body facing away from us, but his amber eyes peering directly at us.

"Wow!" I heard my son whisper next to me, "That is so cool!"  Mystified, we just stood there for several minutes watching as the owl became more comfortable with our innocuous presence and started to survey the land, turning its head almost completely around for a full panoramic view of the countryside.  After several minutes, on silent wings, it lifted off and flew to a large tree out in our neighbor's field where it perched to wait for the silly humans to leave his woods.

A year in the thinking and pondering, a year in the making of bows and collecting of arrows, a year in the contemplation and discussion of "life" - be it turkey or human life, and an hour spent in the peace and beauty of the woods.....  As we trudged back to the house, me with my coffee and my son with his bow and arrows, we both decided that it was a wonderfully successful hunt.