Thursday, January 08, 2009
Hunting more profound than just filling the freezer
Bill Cochran
Recent columns
It will be several weeks before we have a tally of the 2008-09 deer kill, but right now it appears it could be a record at a time when wildlife officials were hoping it would be declining.
Records are nice for hunters who aspire to have a deer behind every tree, but wildlife biologists are fearful of records because too often they point to an overpopulation of deer. And that means trouble.
A big question this season, how much of an impact did the sour economy have on the deer kill? If we have a record kill, will it be because more people than usual were out trying to put venison in their freezer?
That is an enticing question Mark Taylor, Roanoke Times outdoor writer, asked in a recent column. Taylor underscored the folly of considering deer hunting to be a cheap means of acquiring meat. By the time you figure in your gun, gear and ATV it might come to $79 per pound, he suggested.
Rather than trying to make a difference in your food budget with your hunting rifle, it probably would make more economic sense for you to get a second job flipping burgers and using that money to buy meat. But it wouldn’t be near as much fun.
I guess I’m about as much of a meat hunter as you’ll ever encounter. The kind of bucks that never see the inside of a taxidermist shop make me happy. Does are just fine, too.
Maybe meat hunting is in my genes. My great-great grandpa paid for his mountain farm with venison and fed his wife and 10 kids with the fruit of his gun.
But I don’t think even in his case that killing deer was a chore, not like hoeing corn. He must have derived pleasure and pride from it. When he was in his 80s, troubled by the infirmities of age, his family gathered around him, asking if he would like to live his life over.
He told them no, but there was something he’d like to do, and that was to enjoy one more good hunt on the mountain where he lived.
There was a time or two during the recent late season when I grabbed my gun and headed out the door thinking my major objective was to put venison in our freezer; even telling my wife that. We need to replenish our freezer, that’s for sure.
But once in my treestand, I was not thinking about steaks and stew, chops and roasts, shish kabobs and tenderloin or how much burger I’d be toting home.
Hunting isn’t a grocery shopping list. It is much more profound than filling a freezer. It is fulfillment, not survival.
Hunting is briefly turning your back on domestication and your face toward wildness. Hunting affords you the opportunity to be the predator nature built you to be. It is having all your sensory cylinders fine tuned and firing. It is being intertwined with the sounds, sights, tastes, feelings and aroma of nature, just like other creatures.
It is hearing the birds wake up in the morning and the squirrels go to bed at dark. It is about being too cold and too hot; about dozing off one minute and having your heart almost pound out of your chest the next. It is a beauty pageant of sunrises and sunsets that you’d probably miss were it not for hunting.
It is the potential that any minute the creature that made the deer trail, rub or scrape that you watch will appear giving energy to what was emptiness. It is optimism bordering on obsession.
Shopping for meat at the grocery store never is like this. Still, the meat part is important to hunting. It is a bonus. There is a deep, primeval sense of well-being in having a deer hanging in camp or out back of your house, meat you have provided your family with your own hands.
The difference between grandpa and me is that he hunted to stay alive, while I hunt for the joy of living. That’s why I can have a quality hunt without pulling the trigger. But I have to admit that while such hunts are good for the spirit they don’t do much for an empty freezer.
Back home, I know there is no way to explain the allurement of hunting, or why I have returned empty handed, not even to the one nearest to me. So I don’t try.
“Did you see anything?” my wife asks.
“No,” I say.
