Killing Time
Thursday, November 15, 2007
In my line of work, I deal daily with the killing of animals (I mean, not personally, but with the media fallout or hype surrounding said killing) -- from mute swan and Canadian geese population controls to various hunting seasons for a whole slew of different animals. Today it was the asserted inhumane trapping of raccoons. And deer season. Who can forget deer season?
Over lunch, I was reading the news clips, particularly Kevin Naze's article in the Green Bay Press Gazette today -- "Gun Opener Doesn't Come with Guarantees" -- that contained this little passage:
But by and large, the hunter who has the patience to sit tight in bedding cover or along escape routes more likely will be the one to don the gutting gloves after the flurry of opening morning activity is over.Whitetails seem to have a knack for disappearing after the first wave of shots subsides.
The deer that don't high-tail it to thickets either are quickly dispatched, or find themselves running from one area to another in an effort to evade all fresh human scent.
And it made me so sad. The thought of these deer running frantically through the woods, trying to avoid being gutted and hung up by the ankles behind someone's camp.
I know, I know. I was born and raised in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan -- a place where hunting is such a part of the culture that school closes for the opening of deer season. A place where the economy is vitally dependent on this pastime. And a place where you grow up understanding that controlling the deer population with a 9-day hunt is far more humane than letting those same deer starve to death in the frigid months that follow.
But it still makes me sad.
And then I considered what I was eating for lunch -- duck ragu over linguine -- and the way I hacked at and twisted the duck carcass yesterday, trying to separate the legs and wings so as to fit the whole thing into the roaster. And how that duck must've lived and met its eventual fate.
And I thought about my dinner-to-be tonight. My mom has come to Madison (since she's off of school -- she's a teacher -- for the deer season opener), as she always does, with food. Veal cutlets, in particular. Veal is the one meat I won't -- can't -- eat, which started after reading this, but she spent a good deal of money on the cutlets, and I eat meat, and thus, I feel obligated.
And it made me want to be a vegetarian. All of it.
But not really. Because I love to cook. And I really, really liked the duck ragu that I made. And every now and again, I loves me a great, big steak.
So maybe, for now, I'll just continue to be sad about it all. In the meantime, following is a flash nonficiton piece I wrote and just dug up on the same topic that had previously been published in the now-defunct Second Review. Seemed appropriate for today, and this time of year.
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Interspersed with the golden leaves are a few crimson ones—drops of God’s blood that fell from on high. It’s killing time here in Michigan ’s Upper Peninsula. Here in the great north woods.
Soon men, and a scattering of women, will take to the trees and fields. They will look like neon pumpkins. They won’t even try to be sneaky with camouflage. They will lure the hunted with apples and corn, silence and stillness, promises of the good of sacrifice, and few apologies.
My best friend cries at sappy movies: Clueless, The Lion King, For Love of the Game. When she was in sixth grade, her dad took her to see Dances With Wolves. He thought it would be nice, thought it would give them some time together, just the two of them—time to bond. But it wasn’t nice. The wolf died in the end, and my friend wouldn’t speak to her father for weeks. “You never told me that they kill the dog!” she screamed at him as they left the theatre. She was still sobbing, even though the movie had ended fifteen minutes before.
“I didn’t know, Pammy. I’m sorry. I just didn’t know.”
The same friend shot a forkhorn last year. All morning she sat in the deer blind her father had constructed just for her. Cold gnawed at her bones, her stomach growled. But there was a slight rustling in the trees behind her, and then it moved up in front, where she could see it. Slowly, methodically, she raised her gun, leveled it at the deer, and pulled the trigger.
I asked her how she does it, this girl who sobs over dead movie dogs.
“Just don’t look at the eyes,” she told me. “You never, ever look at the eyes.”
In the small rowboat off the shore of Vancouver Island , I can see a flat-as-a-pancake fish nestling in close to my lure. I jig the pole so it can’t latch its teeny fish lips around the hook.
What in the hell are you doing? my boyfriend asks, drawing out the last word longer than necessary.
I tell him that I don’t want that one.
And why not? he asks.
I tell him that it looks like a bottom feeder, that I’m not going to hook it and throw it back just to say that I got a fish.
Erin , he says, it’s a flounder. It is not a bottom feeder. You’ve heard of flounder, haven’t you?
I have heard of flounder, but I tell him that that isn’t really the issue. That even if one of the huge salmon that keep leaping out of the water all around us wanted to suckle on my lure, I don’t think I would let it.
My boyfriend looks at me as though I have lost my mind. As though he just witnessed all of my functioning brain cells leaping one by one from the top of my head into the ocean below like little lemmings.
What is the issue, then? he asks me, badly faking patience.
I ask him if he can imagine what it must feel like to be pulled up into a boat, the full weight of your body hanging from a sharp hook lodged in your lips, in your gums, what it must feel like to slowly suffocate. I tell him that I don’t want to do that to a fish, to anything.
Fish have itty-bitty brains, he says, almost no nerve endings. They barely feel a thing.
I tell him that I don’t care—it still doesn’t feel right. He shakes his head slowly, back and forth, wondering, I’m sure, how he could have misjudged me so badly. Mistaken me for a good girlfriend.
What can I say? I tell him. I am the daughter of a man who brings books to deer camp, and forgets his gun.
Driving down M-95, on the way to Iron Mountain , I end up behind a rusty old Ford, maroon and white, pulling an equally rickety-looking trailer. The Ford creeps along at fifty miles an hour, but I can’t pass in the face of the long thread of cars coming the opposite direction. So I settle in, adjust the cruise, and scan for a decent song on the radio. I look over the trailer ahead of me, attached to the Ford. On it is a four-wheeler and a blue tarp. Cloven-hoofed legs stick out from under the tarp—four of them, sticking straight out, rigid. Then, some miles down the road, the wind whips just right, peels the tarp back. For a moment I think it’s a doe, but then I see two little nubs the size of a man’s thumb on its head, and the soft black orbs below them drink me in. And they tell me, whisper to me, My friend, this is just how things are.
Posted by Erin 11:46 AM
2 Comments:
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- Team Brazo said...
11/15/2007 2:17 PMWow -- you're not only an IronMan but also an awesome writer. Just know that this weekend we'll be mountain biking through the woods with Neon Pumpkins on -- scaring all the deer away from those mean hunters!!- Triteacher said...
11/30/2007 8:18 PMSecond to Brazo's comment on your writing. You have a lot of superb lines in this piece. My fav: "As though he just witnessed all of my functioning brain cells leaping one by one from the top of my head into the ocean below like little lemmings." Lemmings!@$!!!