© 2000 Michael Furtman

REMORSE AND HONOR  -- An Essay on Evolution, Hunting, and the Environment

by Michael Furtman

There was not much light left to the day. Thanks to a seeking north wind, I had long ceased being merely chilled and now was nearly frozen. Shivers trembled into every extremity. The seat of the deer stand was painfully hard, and the ever-so-small knot on the tree against which I leaned seemed to have grown to the size of  boulder, boring into my spine. Cold and sore, I would not lament the passing of this, the last hour of the last day of this deer season.

About the time I contemplated quitting early – just for once – I heard the sound of footsteps in snow, a quiet, rustling noise like that of sand pouring on glass. Turning slowly, I spotted through the aspens a young buck ambling up the hill to my right. He would pass within forty yards. Forcing my cold arms and shoulders to work efficiently but slowly, I eased the rifle to the ready position and slid off the safety.

In a moment the buck was in an opening. Just as quickly I found him in the rifle’s sights and squeezed the trigger. The November air reverberated, and even before the rifle had settled from the recoil the buck lay still.

Still stiff but now excited, the cold forgotten, I creaked down from my tree and cautiously approached the deer, rifle ready. But there was no need for wariness. In his tracks, his last breath still trapped within his body, the deer  had dropped to the cold white snow. It was a good kill, a swift kill.

Before beginning the task of field dressing him, I paused to look at his sleek form cloaked in a dark winter coat. Though just a young buck, his neck was swollen in rut. Thick fat beneath his dusky hide hid his muscular form. I ran my cold hand against the grain of the hair to feel its warmth and hollow thickness, slid two fingers down the breadth of his muzzle from forehead to nose in silent admiration and thanks. He was as fine a deer as I had ever seen. And then I thought about what I had just done.

In a moment of remorse I wondered where this deer was going, what he had been thinking, what were his intentions.  I thought about his short life, and how I had been the cause of its shortness. And I examined why I had killed this admirable animal.

Detractors of hunting revel in stories of blood lust and uncontrolled death wishes. But I had neither. In fact, truth be known, the season had been long and cold, and I was tired of it all. When I pulled that trigger, I had no sense of lust, no wild passion. Except for making sure that I was performing my task properly – picking an opening, finding the deer in the sights, squeezing the trigger slowly – I can recall no thoughts whatsoever. No, blood lust was not a part of this or any kill I’ve ever made.

Unless, of course, you count the need to eat as a lust. While I dressed the deer in the waning light, saw the tallowy  nodules of  fat surrounding the tenderloins, I did not feel joy in the death of this other – and quite handsome – creature. I felt instead the sun falling on trees and fields, saw this deer browsing on the vegetation triggered by that sun,  heard him drink from the small creek that carries nutrients down from the marsh. This magnificent creature, this wonder of evolution, this beautiful animal shaped by eons of pursuit by wolves, lions and bears, lay still, but collected in him resided the energy of the sun, the nutrients of the earth, the fluids of the creek, and the mystery of his species’ majesty. The sun careening through the universe, the atoms whirling in the clover, and the ages of evolution were the “stuff” of which this deer was made.

In my mind I saw too the parts of this animal on the cutting board as I carefully butchered it and saw my wife’s  neatly wrapped and labeled packages reposing on the shelves of our freezer. There would be joy in the kitchen, pleasure in the eating, and ultimately his energy would become ours, his molecules would join ours. All would happen as the result of the hunt, at minimal cost to the planet, a natural part of the cycle of life and death.

I knew then, despite my lingering remorse, that what I had done was good. It was older by far than any criticism some may fling this hunter’s way. What I had done was to provide for the sustenance of  myself and those that I love and had acted in a manner that honored the deer and the earth.

Among other peoples, and in other times, the act of hunting was esteemed. Hunting spawned art, ritual, and reverence. It was a sacred task, a celebrated task, and we are the result of those who were good at it. In fact, who we are, our success as a species, is inexorably tied to the fact that we are hunters.

Millions of years before we left the continent of our ancestors' rising, we learned to eat meat. Perhaps a half dozen or more bipedal, proto-human, species had evolved and existed at this time, but only the meat eaters – our faint forebears – eventually survived. At first we may have been only scavengers, but at some point we learned to hunt. This meat fueled the evolution of our intellect, the growth in the size of our brain, among the most energy consumptive organs on the planet. The pursuit of meat also shaped how we look. The human body – though one might not think it to look at many of us today – evolved to be that of a swift and tireless predator, one that could, like the wolf, travel great distances at a relatively fleet pace to scavenge over great areas or to wear down one’s prey. The challenges of hunting and gathering demanded communication, cooperation, and technology, each driving the other as we evolved.

As we spread out from Africa, pioneering new continents and into cooler climates, only our ability to procure readily available, high energy animal protein allowed us to prosper. Without hunting, we could not have survived. Without hunting, the remarkable human cultures that have flourished in north temperate and cold climates would not have been born. Hunting, to a large degree, allowed us to be human. To fear it today, to deny its existence, is to deny a fundamentally human trait.

Perhaps it is fear of our own mortality that makes some people loathe hunting. The spilling of blood, any blood, is a reminder of that which courses in our own veins. Better, I think, that we embrace our history as predators, honor our place in the scheme of things, know that our energy can be that of the deer’s, that of the sun. If  hunting is a reminder of our own mortality, or our place in the grand scheme, then that is a good thing.

As I bent to my task of preparing the buck for my family,  such thoughts rattled around in my mind -- another benefit of being quiet and alone in a big woods. Then, drifting down silently, snow slipped beneath my collar, chilling a neck sweated with the exertion of  field dressing.  I straightened my labored hunch and stood to watch as snow slowly hid the blood on the ground but melted on the still warm dark deer. Then, in the growing evening, I looped a rope around my buck, opened every button and zipper to vent the lather that was about to come, and slung my rifle over my shoulder.

As I hauled the deer from the now dark woods, though I was huffing along alone in a dark and silent forest, I knew that I was but one in a long, proud, and utterly human procession.

© 2000 Michael Furtman

(Author's Note: This essay won the "Thinking Like A Mountain" essay contest sponsored by the Izaak Walton League of America, and was published in their Winter 2001 issue of Outdoor America.)