Meditations on killing a deer

by LW Oakley 

The greatest and most moral homage we can pay to certain animals on certain occasions is to kill them with certain means and rituals.  Jose Ortega y Gasset from Meditations on Hunting 

When you see a deer while hunting your first thought is, “it’s a buck” or “it’s a doe.”  

If it’s not looking at you or bounding away you immediately say to yourself, “it doesn’t see me.” 

You instinctively remain still. You don’t breathe. Your heart is pounding in your ears but you hear a small click as your thumb releases the safety.  

You raise your rifle as the deer lowers its head to smell the game trail for any scent of danger. 

Then you see it with one eye and a single thought down the barrel of your gun. You ignore his antlers and find that big patch of brown hair just behind his front shoulder.  

Your finger curls around the trigger when he lifts his nose high in the air to determine if something is coming.  

He is doing what he does best  by staying undetected. He’s living his secret life as he always has so he can have a secret death.

 But you will soon deliver death to him and it will be a terrible surprise.   

 He does not know what a gun or bullet is even after he hears the BANG and feels death inside him. He only knows he wants to stay alive. 

When you pull the trigger you don’t hear the BANG either or feel the gun jolt against your shoulder. All you see is the deer.  

Your lives collide during those few seconds but have been connected since that day long ago when you began your search to find him. You pursued him not just because he didn’t want to be found but because he is so good at it. To be successful you must do better what he does best. You must remain undetected and see him first.   

When hit hard a deer can run a long way on one last breath and final beat of its heart. I have found deer hundreds of yards away from where they where hit.  

One buck was still alive but unable to stand. His four legs thrashed wildly at me. He grunted beneath my stare and I could see that he wanted to kill me for killing him. He had the right. 

There was a soft sigh when he released his final breathe back to the woods.  Then his tongue relaxed and hung from the side of his mouth. He did not close his eyes.  

Only then was it safe to touch him. 

Most hunters spend a long time alone with a buck that they have killed before others in their hunting party arrive. They will ponder what they have done and at times speak in a quiet voice to the dead deer. 

The most common thing said is, “I’m sorry.” 

But you’re not sorry for long and you’re not sorry ever again except until maybe the next time. 

Mostly you’re extremely excited and happy. Hunters call it, “The Rush.” 

The buck is dragged away from the woods where he lived his life. Some part of him remains behind on the ground but disappears within hours. Death always attracts a crowd. It’s no different in the woods. By morning no trace remains that he even existed. 

Hunters often return to the site of a kill. Any place a hunter has been successful will be tried again. They come back the next day, the next week, the next year and for many years after.  

They stand still or hide quietly in the same place. They relive what happened remembering all the details and discover new ones as they see the drama unfold again always with the same outcome. 

Sometimes another buck appears and another story is added to your store house of memories. You remember the time, the day, the weather, the wind direction, and the first sound of an unseen deer approaching. 

You realize that over time you think of these deer more than anything or anyone else, even more than your loved ones. 

Then one day you realize the deer you just killed is a loved one.  

That’s the reason we kill them. We kill them because we love them. 

We don’t kill them because we hate them.  If we were indifferent why would we bother?  

We pay attention to those we love. We want to know everything about them.  

We respect and wish we could be like them especially in the woods where they are better able to survive. They eat the woods to stay alive and we eat them.  

We love them because their flesh is our flesh, because their wild blood runs in our veins and because their spirit lives inside us.  

Most of all we love them because we are hunters. 

LW Oakley lives in Kingston and is the author of Inside The Wild available at the publisher’s website www.gsph,com