Dispatch From A Distance - Hunting Season [by Cara Benson]

Look closely

“Rifle’s done.” This from a neighbor I crossed paths with when I was out for a walk and he to shovel out his mailbox. We spoke from opposite sides of the road, occasionally pausing for the wind to die down in order to be heard. Our first big snow had fallen on the hill but “regular season” had only just ended. “Still got a few days of bow, though.” It’s the hot topic this time of year up here, whether one is gunning for meat or aiming to be missed, and I am definitively the latter.

Mostly I avoid my beloved woods walks during rifle season. Hunting stands and abandoned camo tents from previous years tucked into the landscape remind a girl that come a certain Saturday in November through a certain Sunday in December heading out is no casual act. It’s unnerving to see those ladders up into platforms at a height – like a tree house, only deadly. Even walking the roads I wear my safety-orange Carhartt hat. I am, after all, moving flesh.

During some of the shoulder periods that are less populated by hunters I’ve been known to slip further into the trees. Bow hunting is less a risk as an arrow’s reach is shorter than a bullet’s. Nevertheless, I whistle as I go, sharp piercing bursts with my fingers in my mouth like I’m cheering for my team. With the shorter days I’m often caught out and coming back through the woods in dusk, staving off the use of my headlamp to stretch how long I can go in natural, if fading, light. I like that time of day into night, the way the last hurrah of the sun slices the tops of the forests with gold. Apparently, that’s prime hunting time.

FWEET! FWEET! Nothing to see here! Just little ole me, human, walking innocentishly home! My travels often flush the deer. I’ve seen those beauties bound up from bedding in meadows or from under sagging pine boughs on my approach. It’s always a delight. Excruciating to think of a bullet or arrow through their heart, though I might as well say right now that I do eat some meat (I haven’t always). I’m fairly certain that I could never be the one to do the deed. It probably wouldn’t be smart to count on me as gatherer or farmer, either, but fortunately every tribe needs its scribblers.

A friend who walks with me in these woods (she lives down a hill, then up a patch – I can bushwhack to her house from mine) and I wear bells this time of year. Her orange vest has pockets for bullets as members of her family do hunt. She, like I am, is conflicted about it. We process this as we walk. “They have a good life up here.” Better than factory farmed animals, to be sure. We meet by our usual stump then down to a favorite pond to catch the end of the day outside after being online for waaaaay too much time. The two of us walking and talking, bells jangling, are a safer bet than when we part ways to solo it home. That’s when I begin my blasts. FWEET! FWEET! Every 20 feet or so. I know where the one hunting stand is planted between where we split off and the safety of reaching my door. I don’t know if anyone’s on foot, waiting. Watching for anything that moves through a site. It is because I am walking that I am at risk.

Which means I have the experience of feeling like a target. I’m reminded of the Gary Larson Far Side cartoon where one deer is talking to another deer who had a bullseye on his chest. The first deer says, “Bummer of a birthmark, Hal.” More seriously, I think about being a concertgoer (back when we did such things). A churchgoer. To be a target based on who one loves, the color of one's skin, or what route one happens to take on a particular day. To walk through the world knowing there are those who carry lethal weaponry for the purpose of training them on other humans is stretching my capacity for empathy beyond its limit.

Hunting for food is a different story. Rebecca Solnit writes in Wanderlust: A History of Walking that hunting in the United States is typically done by rural poor or Indigenous people to feed themselves and that this is admirable or at least preferable to the UK where hunting is an elitist sport. In fact, access to the majority of land in England came to be denied to the underclasses as a result. Strict poaching and trespassing laws were enacted so these tracts would remain stocked for the few weeks per year that rich landowners took their sporting holidays. Where I live the woods are beginning to feel like something of a commons to me. This could be projection on my part, but the longer I’m here the more I have witnessed the overt and tacit agreements between inhabitants. Creatures pay no heed to posted signs, of course, so living with wildlife (and watersheds and air and airborne viruses and...) isn’t an individual endeavor, even as it is approached in varying manners. And by all accounts it is true that hunters on the hill will eat what that kill. Those lovely creatures sweetly nosing the forest floor for acorns.

FWEET! FWEET!

My neighbor's house

Despite my plan to steer well clear of the woods until after rifle season, I did wind up sidling in – on opening day of all things! I started off smartly enough, intending to walk only roads. I could hear the pap pap pows flaring up like fatal popcorn crackling in the landscape all morning. Plus, there were those ominous vehicles roadside with nary a home in sight. Bordering my small patch is a 200 acre wooded parcel with an abandoned, now dilapidated house. The former patriarch is deceased, and his offspring apparently never agreed on what to do with the property. Relatively young forest is growing up in what had been cleared for subsistence farming long ago. (Of course I love this – both the trees and the fallen-in bones of the structure.) I could see a jeep parked from early light into the afternoon in front of the old battered home. The Pastor from whom I bought the church I live in told me they’re never up on that land except occasionally to hunt. 

So I donned my Carhartt hat and headed out on the road. I was partway along a down and back when I ran into a few neighbors getting ready for their walk. Our party grew to four and somehow it was decided that we’d head into the woods behind their house. There’s a centuries old cemetery behind them and multiple acres of land with former lumbering roads to traverse. At some point, though, we crossed over to where their land joins with others. It’s all currently undeveloped in there, though signs of structures from years past can be read in the landscape. We came upon a guy in a camo tent, staked out to catch the deer movement at dusk. Through the course of conversation first names were thrown around, someone’s cousin, and our walking party moved on. Eventually we came out onto a road we could trudge back to our homes. They were about to point out another path that locals take when out of that very opening came a woman in a bright orange vest, rifle resting in the crook of her arm. It was nearly dark at this point, so she’d called it for the day. “But if you’re going to be flushing them this way I might go back in and give it another try.” (Way to go, Benson. Sending does to their demise.)

At one point, one of my neighbors had asked if she’d had any luck. Luck? I get it, and also ugh. Then I thought, wouldn’t it be obvious if she did? But of course she wouldn’t have hoisted the body up over her shoulders to bring it out on her own. There’s quite the procedure involved, in fact. I'll spare us both the recounting of the details of this process that I’ve become privy to. I will tell you that there is every indication of a healthy deer population on this side of the season. I see their tracks, the unmistakably ruffled forest floor, even heard tell of concerns that the herds would be too plentiful to survive the winter, but that seems not to be bearing out so far.

My first walk back behind my place after rifle ending was in glorious two foot snow. I’ll write more on snowshoeing in another post but will say here that it was a magical wonderland to me, the puffy white clumps clinging to evergreens and caressed by late day pink such a pure delight. I was plunking one foot then the other deep into perfect powder, when I heard a commotion just ahead. A buck! Not 20 yards from a snow-topped hunting stand. Looked like four points on his horns. He roused himself and dashed away through the trees in front of me. I’m so grateful to have been there to glimpse him. Both of us, lucky.

***

Cara Benson's writing has been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, Hobart, and elsewhere. Kevin Young chose her poem Banking for the Best American Poetry 2011. A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, she lives in ancestral Mohican territory in upstate New York. www.carabensonwriter.com.

Read previous posts in this series: Hello From A Distance, Enter Geese, Whose Woods, and Roads And Seeds, A Trace. 

Comments

[Elizabeth Wade]

Love your writing and thank you for bringing us into the woods with you.

[h]

Enjoyed this reading very much. I moved away from the "white puffy" stuff. If I said I missed it, that would be an inaccurate statement. I am happy that you enjoy that. I do miss that time of year, the beauty and the smells. Imprinted in this old brain.

take care
H

[Alex D. Bowen]

Which boots do you use to hunt? I own the Elk tracker 600 G Thinsulate winter version of these boots and they are excellent. I purchased these for summer/fall knowing that the 600g ones fit and feel great I figured I couldn't go wrong with the non-insulated version. Do you have any suggestions? Thanks https://huntingbootsbrand.com/

[Julie Ackerman]

I love the magic of these woods. And the buck!

[wyatt baker]

Enjoy the story very much. keep sharing this kind of interesting story frequently.

[Paul R Jones]

"My neighbor's house" - a fixer upper I see.