I didn't start out to be a hunter. I was strictly a city girl, raised in the suburban wilds. I knew milk came from cows and not from plastic bottles; after all, my mother grew up on a farm and we went to see her family every summer. But the idea of killing an animal for food repelled me, and by my early twenties I was firmly vegetarian.
I finished college with a degree in biology and went to work writing 4-H marine science materials. None of my colleagues shared my veggie views; most of them were farm-oriented if not farm-raised. After a while, some of my co-workers started commenting about the disparity between my dietary preferences and my biology degree. To tell the truth, hamburgers looked good to me. My appetite was out of step with my philosophical leanings.
I decided I'd eat meat again, but only under certain conditions. "If I can't kill it myself, I don't have any business eating it," I told my friends. "Buying meat in the store is hypocritical." So I built a little pen, bought a dozen Barred Rock chicks and started growing my own chicken. Soon I was eating red meat again, and trying not to feel guilty about it.
Meanwhile, the grant I was working on ran out of money and I was out of a job. I decided to try freelance writing about environmental issues, something I'd always wanted to do. But I felt constrained by my lack of knowledge; somehow a degree in biology wasn't enough. I went back to school to earn my master's degree in conservation of natural resources.
For the first time, I bumped head on into the uncomfortable notion that hunting is not only a legitimate use of wildlife, in some cases it's far less wasteful than letting an overpopulation of large grazers starve as they attempt to thread themselves through the midwinter needle's eye. Not that I would ever hunt, I assured my friends, but I accepted that hunting is a part of conservation.
A few months later, one of the staff members at the university mentioned that he was going duck hunting. I talked to him for a while about it, half-dreading, half-hoping that he would invite me along. He didn't.
But he did bring me some ducks. I plucked them in the kitchen, leaving little mounds of fluffy feathers in the corners while my cats went wild.
For several years, that was the closest I got to hunting. Then in 1981 I got married and moved to the country. One of my first acts was to insist that my husband remove the remains of someone's old deer stand from a big oak tree on the back of our property. I might accept hunting as a part of conservation, but I certainly didn't want to be reminded of it each time I turned around.
Matters changed little for the next year and a half. I ignored the hunting going on around me; since my husband didn't hunt, it was no problem.
During my second winter in the country, I heard a couple of my neighbors discussing hunting. "You know," I thought, "hunting is a valid part of conservation. How can I call myself a conservationist if I've never tried it? I'm going to hate it, but I owe it to myself to have the experience."
I bought a hunting license, borrowed my husband's .222 and went to the woods. For most of the season I spent every afternoon in a borrowed deer stand overlooking a rye patch on the property where we were living. I regularly saw two does and a fawn but no shootable bucks. I had never seen deer up close and personal before, and I loved it. The fawn had an incredible amount of energy, and always raced around trying to entice the does to play.
The following season, I was ready to hunt. On opening day, an hour after first shooting light, I got my first buck. I was alone on our property, and had to get it onto the truck, back to the house, and field-dressed by myself. Then my husband helped me skin it and quarter it and put it in the refrigerator.
I didn't go out again that season. I believed that I had a responsibility to the animal to make the best use possible of the meat, but I had no idea how to cook venison. I didn't want to kill a second deer before I figured out how to use the first one.
By the time hunting season rolled around again, I finally had to admit I was hooked. I spent every possible moment in the field.
Meanwhile, I'd been talking a lot about hunting to some of my friends. One day one of them said, "You know, I used to hunt when I was a kid. Maybe I should start again." That Christmas, his wife presented him with a brand new .270. He, too, took to the woods.
My husband took a little longer, but he finally gave in as well. Though he enjoys spending time in the woods, he's not as obsessed by hunting as I am. Still, he was out enough last season to kill a lovely 8-point--a better buck than any I've ever taken.
I'm determined that my son will not grow up without exposure to hunting and the outdoors. As soon as he was able to ride in a backpack carrier I put ear muffs on him and took my .223 and went looking for deer. When he was 22 months old, we walked up and deer and killed it. I explained to him that this is how we get our meat; whether he understood or not I didn't know, but he loved being able to touch the deer.
Whether or not he grows up to be a hunter is entirely up to him. Right now he is fascinated by squirrels. He carries his plastic shotgun when his daddy and I go squirrel hunting. And he tries--oh, how he tries!--to keep the "muzzle" pointed in a safe direction. When we get back to the house he looks up at me and asks, "Mommy, where are the squirrels?" And I always laugh and tell him, "They're in the woods," because who can get close to a squirrel with a three-year-old chattering beside her?
Learning to hunt has changed my life. The year after I began hunting I stopped writing about agriculture and started writing about the outdoors. That mid-course career change has allowed me to travel to places I never dreamed I'd go, and have adventures I never dreamed I'd have. It's quite a change for someone who hated hunting.
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