99 ~ Watching Dylan hunt, and the nature of taking a life
[Advisory note: This post includes additional photos of dead animals.]
“We have to initiate the young men. If we don’t, they will burn down the village.”
-West African saying
Opening day of the Wisconsin gun deer season is this Saturday – a time, inshallah, for me to put some more protein into the freezer and onto the drying racks for venison jerky. Herewith some reflections on the grief and beauty of hunting, from watching someone called to it.
My friend Tony and his fine grandson, Dylan, started deer hunting here at the farm several years ago, when Dylan was fourteen. That first season we hunted together (and many since) I hosted “deer camp” at the farmhouse. The night before opening day, after dinner and before Dylan rolled out his sleeping bag near the living room fireplace, I showed him how to grind blue corn into cornmeal, to have something to offer in gratitude to the spirit of any deer he might kill. Later, sitting by the fire, Tony gave his grandson a new hunting knife, and taught him to pay for it, even with just a penny. It is said that to gift a knife to a friend risks inadvertently cutting the bond of friendship; better that the friend pays something for the knife, to camouflage the giving as a relationship-free transaction.
Over the next several seasons Dylan killed some deer, mostly does to start, all taken cleanly with one shot. I showed him how to field dress the first one, then let him struggle in the gathering dark over the field dressing of his next kill. He learned. It was a pleasure and a reward for both Tony and me to mentor this good, gentle soul in hunting, and watch him take to it. The second season he returned, one of the first things he asked is if we could again grind corn for the offerings. It made my day.
One fall, he shot his biggest doe out of a ‘double’ with me. I was hunting in late afternoon on the ground along a ridge, waiting in a tangle of some downed timber close to a trail. Dylan was on stand somewhere down the slope behind me. At about 3 pm, a magnificent large doe, tense with energy, trotted into view twenty yards away, and paused. As I slowly raised my .30-30 to take her, she looked back over her shoulder. I held, both gun and breath, and sure enough, she moved on with nose to the earth, and an 8-point buck stepped into view, trailing her. I shot him through the heart, and he ran 30 yards and collapsed. Within moments I heard a shot from Dylan’s direction – he had killed the doe as it moved past him. Later, when we were comparing notes and swapping our stories, Dylan said, “You’re always just ahead of me: I shoot a big doe, and you shoot an even bigger buck.” Perhaps, but it was not to last – the student would soon surpass the mentor.
Our double, November 2017
The first buck Dylan finally took was the ‘dropped drawers buck’. We’d all gotten up in the dark on opening morning for a breakfast of venison sausages, fried eggs and cornmeal pancakes. After breakfast, Dylan and Tony followed their headlamp beams up a track into the dark woods behind the house, to hunt together – Dylan in a treestand, and Tony on the ground, sitting against a trunk about twenty yards away. Just as the first gentle light filled the world, the prime hunting hour of the entire season, Tony discovered that the breakfast coffee was working its magic on his bowels. He had to go, and his body would entertain no discussion on the matter. So he did what a fella’s got to do, and got up and crunched off over the dead and frosted leaves to find a remove of some secluded modesty from his grandson, and to keep away the scent of what was coming. It was a heinous if obligatory sin at that hour on opening morning, but sometimes we are forgiven. As Tony squatted in bare-assed relief, a shot range out. A fine buck had followed just as Tony left, and Dylan killed it cleanly, for his first antlers.
An autumn or two later, when Dylan was 17, he killed the biggest buck yet taken here at the farm (top photo) - another one-shot, clean kill. His days of feeling one step behind were over – and he was only getting started.
After graduating from Waunakee High School and working for a year, this big-game hunting lad – in fact, now a strapping young man over six feet tall - did a wise thing: he enrolled in Montana State University in Bozeman, and last year moved to Montana.
Dylan being Dylan, he both quickly made friends, and figured out where to hunt. When I was a freshman at university it took me the first couple of months just to learn where my classes met. But for Dylan, by his first Montana October, just a couple of months after being assigned his dorm room and starting freshman classes, he was deer hunting in the western mountains. And he soon sent me a sequence of amazing texts and photos…
He and a new friend Cam had gone to hunt for the weekend in an area north of Bozeman. It was one of Dylan’s first times afield in Montana, and it was not long before my iPhone dinged with a photo of a trophy of a mule deer he shot on Friday - his first muley, on the first day of their trip. The next day they found and stalked, and Cam shot, the 62nd largest typical white-tailed buck ever registered in Montana. Not a bad weekend for a couple of immigrant newbies!
Dylan with his first muley (left), and with Cam and the big whitetail.
This year, Dylan expanded his Montana field repertoire to elk hunting, starting with the early fall archery season. Once again, incredibly, it didn’t take him long. In September he sent me an extraordinary photo – a picture of himself with one of the largest bull elks I’ve ever seen, be it on the pages of Outdoor Life or mounted at Cabela’s. Dylan had put his arrow through the bull’s heart at 55 yards. I know some local Wisconsin fellows who go west to hunt elk ever year, and some of them make the trip for decades without ever seeing an elk this big, let alone taking one (with rifle or bow). For many hunters, Dylan’s first would have been the elk of a lifetime.
I shared the photo with a Whatsapp group I’m on of wildlife trackers. One of them responded: “Why did the elk have to die?” This opened an interesting conversation over the ether. From my perspective, several strands entwine to braid an answer. There was some initial concern expressed that Dylan might have been only trophy hunting. But I know Dylan better, and in fact he’d texted: “Cut all the meat off him except for the ribs gotta leave some for the critters they gotta eat too”.
The first, most obvious answer to the question of the elk’s death is that it had to die because all living things must die. That’s the nature of the world, and also an element of the world’s beauty, given that all life in some way springs from, and is fed by, the death of something else. Most great art can probably trace its root to grief. It was inevitable that the elk would die sometime, and for it to die quickly, shot through the heart by a good, respectful soul like Dylan, strikes me as a good and fortunate death. As writer and thinker Martín Prechtel expressed it (in his book Rescuing the Light, 2021):
~ For a bear, death is part of his living. Trees concentrate on being forests not on being sad if they evolve out of existence. ~
~ No human is supported by anything while it’s alive, only by what has generously died in order to keep you alive and feed you. It’s not about being sad about that reality. It’s not about numbing yourself to it. It’s not about pretending it could be otherwise. It’s about learning to have gratitude, which only comes from the grief of the realization of that generosity. ~
~ The animal killed for food is not a ‘poor thing’. He is a courageous being giving his life to you for your well-being. He is superior to you. This means you have an obligation to become and equally glorious human being with a soul of such generosity that is worth that animal’s gift of having died to support you and your people. ~
Another way to come at the question would be to ask not why the elk had to die, but why did Dylan have to kill it? Dylan could have just stayed on campus, doing homework or playing video games, and left the elk to a more ‘natural’ death by wolves, winter or age. I’ve found part of that answer in Hmong villages I’ve worked with in the mountains of Laos, as part of my biodiversity conservation work. In a Hmong village, like most other villages in Laos (or in Wisconsin and Montana for that matter), some members of the community are more talented at hunting than others. The Hmong believe that skilled hunters in the village have been endowed with their talent by the spirits, and if they don’t use their talent it will constitute an affront – the refusal of a gift generously bestowed. In response, the spirits will stop protecting the non-hunting hunter from accidents or disease. In short, a talented Hmong hunter views his very well-being as dependent on his hunting, on doing what he has been called to do. And by using his skill, he contributes to and feeds his community.
I see in Dylan one of those who have been touched by the Holy with a gift for hunting. The elk had to die, and Dylan had to be the one to kill it, because their magnificent destinies are entwined. This doesn’t mean that all kills made by all hunters are good deaths. Some kills are done shoddily, devoid of respect, awareness and gratitude. We can be sure that the elk and the deer are conscious and alive, and it takes the other side, the hunter, to meet the animal there to make a good death.
If Dylan is also hunting for a trophy (which I’m sure he is), at his age that, too, can be a beautiful thing. Young men in particular need to test themselves (although this is not exclusive to their gender), go out into the wild in search of the Grail (think of Christopher McCandless and Into the Wild). And if luck and the Holy are with them, to return home with it - something not guaranteed, but if they do, they return tested yet triumphant, and no longer quite the same unformed boy who left.
I remember deer hunting at Dylan’s age, and feeling the warm caress of adrenaline up the back of my neck when I heard the first crunch of hooves on leaves and saw the antlers of a buck come into view. In traditional Mayan villages (the culture from which Martín Prechtel comes), young teen-aged men of the village would go into the mountains on long hunting trips with the adult men. When they returned a few days later, the boys who brought back the biggest deer would attract the attention and smiles of the prettiest girls, as they and the other women collected the deer from the returning hunters to prepare meals to feed the village.
By hunting, Dylan is doing one of the things he was put on this good Earth to do. Perhaps paradoxically, by engaging in death through hunting, he is becoming more alive himself - by immersing himself in the essential cycle of death feeding life, and life feeding the spirits of those who have died to feed us. He is also becoming someone who can mentor the next young person behind him.
The elk died, by Dylan’s hand, to keep the world alive.