On the Eve of a Hunt

When I was a child, I often came home in the fall to find dead deer hanging from my swing set. Western Pennsylvania, where I grew up, is hunting country and my father was a meat cutter. He used to process deer for local hunters, and many gave him packages of venison in return. Venison burger, steak, and bologna were staples of my childhood diet.

I always assumed the first day of hunting season was a national holiday as all the schools and many local businesses were closed. I didn’t know there were people who didn’t hunt. As I grew into my cynical teen years, however, I began to announce my distaste for deer meat.  I started regarding hunters as camouflage-wearing rednecks and hillbillies.

So of course I grew up and married one.

New Englanders, in general, cast a cool eye toward hunters and hunting. Most seem to prefer the dignity and civility of buying meat at the local Stop and Shop, that which has been processed in mass slaughterhouses and packaged in Styrofoam. Many in the Northeast are proud to trace their ancestry to the landing of the Mayflower. Yet these same folks seem to forget how Squanto and his merry band of Wampanoag saved their forefathers’ puritanical butts from starvation by teaching them how to roast a loin of venison over an open fire. In our quiet New England neighborhood, my husband and I keep his hunting activities to ourselves.

My husband is a hunter in the same way he is both an engineer and a Scandinavian. It would be easier to stop a mariner from going to sea or separate a teenager from his cell phone than it would be to keep my husband from the woods in the fall. Hunting is not merely something my husband does; the need to hunt seems encoded in his DNA.

I recognize it in him as the summer starts drawing to a close, the far-off look he gets as though hearing a siren call from the local Cabela’s. He begins disappearing into the woods after dinner, stealing away with his mistress, his Matthews hunting bow. Packages begin arriving filled with things like skin care products designed to mask human scent. The garage becomes a staging area for sorting, testing, and organizing all manner of hunting equipment, some of which defies description and my ability to comprehend.

My husband brings to the sport of hunting the same level of planning, care, discipline he does in every area of his life. Not only does he want to increase his chance of success and fill our freezer for the winter, he recognizes there is something of the sacred in taking the life of an animal for food. The idea of shedding blood that others might live has been offensive since Adam and Eve were first clothed in animal skins. Few things torment my husband like the knowledge that an animal died slowly and painfully because a hunter made a careless shot. He is committed to ethical hunting and to mastering his sport, working to make shots which are efficient and swift.

My husband enjoys every aspect of hunting, from the planning stage to the hours of sitting still in a tree stand to the preparation of gourmet venison dishes. He butchers his deer with my father’s knife, the one he used back in his days at meat cutting school in Toledo, Ohio. In so doing, my husband both carries on a family tradition and honors my father’s memory.  He prepares cuts of meat with the kind of care which optimizes flavor and minimizes waste. Though I claimed as a teenager not to like deer meat, what that man can do with some olive oil, garlic, homemade peach chutney, and tenderloin of venison is pure magic. Because my husband, like Nimrod of old, is a mighty hunter, I eat local, organic, and well.

So on the eve of a new archery season, I want to wish my husband an enjoyable, safe, and successful hunt. After all, he’s the best-looking redneck hillbilly I know.