The Ptarmigan wheel up and flush low, white on white, sharp-edged wings tilting and slicing across bare willows. I pick a bird, swing through his flight path and when I shoot he cartwheels and falls, plowing a furrow into the snow. The snow is cold, but the bird is still warm and supple, white except for a black eye and black band on the tail that’s only visible when he’s flying. Snowshoe feet, big and feathery. What a beautiful bird.
But I shot him. Without sentimentality, and before the bird freezes, I stand on the bird’s wings and pull on his feet. There is a ripping sound as the bird comes apart, leaving the breast and wings attached to the head. Without using a knife, I rip out the guts, tear off the crop, and break off the wings. Only the breastbone with the breast meat attached remains, which I drop into a mesh bag with the heart. I wash my bloody hands in the snow.
Barbaric! I admit. It feels so.
Later I will fire the grill, set the bird into a cast iron pan, baste it in oil and butter, sprinkle sage and thyme over it, and set it on the grill to smoke. Then I will eat this bird, a sacrament to life. I will have taken in a little bit of the wildness and made body with his meat. I will wash the dishes and remember the snowy mountainside, white one white, sharp-edged wings tilting and slicing across bare willows, and all those birds that flew farther down the gulley when I turned for home.
We take plenty of flak for this kind of activity, and there have been plenty hunters who have stood on their hind legs to roar and defend it. But if we live, we do this all the time, hunters or non-hunters, participating in death to keep life. It is inevitable; something must die at the cell level for us to live and to pretend otherwise is to maintain a “billowing ignorance” as Barbara Kingsolver has written. Bodies themselves are constantly renewing on the back of death, and the pattern repeats itself in biology from the bottom to the top; die to live, live to die. To try to live without causing some death is anti-life, which, ironically is death, and to pretend that you live without killing is a kind of celebration of ignorance.
I was squeamish about all this, as a boy. I gagged and heaved as my father gutted my first deer. I could not imagine taking that meat and eating it after seeing what we had just committed. The only way I could eat meat was smothered in gravy or chopped up fine as burger. I certainly couldn’t eat it the same day.
And maybe that’s a better reaction. Why wouldn’t we be queasy about taking the beauty of a wild life and reducing it to bones and meat? And yet, when I walk to the grocery store and pick up a package of neatly cellophaned meat, I am even more repulsed. I know that blood and guts were part of this supermarket animal, too, that it had been injected with antibiotics and all the things, and it probably spent its life standing in manure only to be knocked down by a pneumatic bolt gun, mechanically separated with water or an equally mechanized human, traveling across the continent in a freezer trailer and incurring an incredible ecological debt so I can have the luxury of eating meat without getting my hands bloody. No. Either I do the dirty work or not. It is possible, as Thoreau said, to let another man prepare your meat, but it is not desirable.
So no meat at all then.
Why can’t you just go hiking in the woods, and stop killing things? Because I love the created world and want to love it better. To hate something is to destroy it for no purpose, to love something is to participate in its creation. To love is to form a partnership between two entities and to enter that partnership in creativity, looking for a way to create more life. I can hike, I can watch birds, and I can gather food. But it does not offer the same depth of experience as hunting.
How can killing be entering into a creative partnership with the thing you claim to love? This has always been the paradox, and bigger brains than I have approached this question. We will only begin to grasp the paradox until we live it, like all paradoxes.
We “go out into” nature, which is a ridiculous way to think about nature—as if it were something apart from us. Look into the fridge and see the biological forces that lived and died to make our food. We are nature; we are built from the cells and molecules of the fruit of the land, no matter how modernized and dependent we are upon the industrial supply chain. When we kill an animal, we participate in the creation of our own life and the lives we share the food with, stepping in and participating in the turning of the world.
We create life, even as we take it. We will keep alive the specie, even if you kill one of them. You will make sure the source does not disappear, because that would be hate—you will give back because you see your dependency on it, and gratefulness will become your reflexive attitude to such sacrifice.
You cannot spend a week in the high country without a little awe and a little diminishing of your ego, when you encounter the country where wild white sheep fleck the black cliffs, or the canyons where the elk bugle, or the swamps where the moose live, or the tundra where the caribou drift like smoke, or the deep woods where the whitetail ghost through, and you know you have encountered something old, something primal, something fundamental. You can do it badly and hate the thing you came for. Or you can do it well and glimmer the sophisticated stance of paradox and hold two contradictory ideas simultaneously and accept both as true.