| Deer, going south. It s a Monday in deer huntingseason, and I m rolling north on thehighway, watching deer headedsouth.Buck on a mini-van.Doe in a homemade trailer.Two bucks in a truck. Stifflegs, hooves to the sky,brown bodies lashed and strapped,soft muzzles lying on cold steel. It mvst seem to someone not partof this hunt like a cold, crude thing,the river of deer headed south.There is no tasteful way to haulhome dead mammals the size ofdeer, no graceful way to get thatmeat from the woods to the freezerwithout laying it out there for Godand everybody to look at. Antlers, ears, red slit in thebelly, spindle legs, all in a 55 mphglance. The critter-on-the-truck phenom-enon is almost unique to deer hunt-ing. Moose are usually too big tohaul around in one piece. They remost often cut up and luggedaround in sections. Grouse andpheasants and ducks and othersmall game are tucked away in thebottom of a boat or in the comer ofa pickup bed, out of sight to allexcept maybe the dog that retrievedthem when they fell. But there are those bucks, onetied up on each side of a red all-ter-rain vehicle in a wooden trailerbound for points unknown. What we can t know, can t see,those of us passing in the oppositedirection, are the stories that travelwith those deer. For the hunter inthe truck, that isn t just 130 poundsof venison on the roof of the familymini-van. That s four days of wait-ing for five seconds of activity on aplatform in a tree in the woods.That s three days of walking thewoods before the season, checkingfor signs that the bucks are stillusing the old, familiar territory. That isn t just a mammalstrapped to a machine. That s inter-minable waiting and gray skies anda chickadee on a gun barrel and analarm clock clanging in a darkshack and a hoof crunching on brit-tle leaves and a piece of brownbetween two trees where it wasn t amoment ago. It is heartbeats and aheld breath and an opening and ashot. It is tired legs and a friend shelp and a trail of hope as tenuousas a piece of deer hair on a dogwoodsprig. It is, finally, suddenly, merciful-ly, the brown form on the snow,perhaps a prayer or a tear or atleast a quiet moment on one knee,red forearms in a body cavity, thecontinuing and deeply felt involve-ment with a winter s worth of din-ners. Not just a deer, but a story.Not just venison, but a process. Notjust a life taken, but a life given. It isn t pretty, no, headed south,hooves up. Not nearly as neat asthe Big Mac youql order and havehanded through your window at thenext town. That somebody else hascalved and penned and raised andfed and killed and cut up andtrucked north and tossed on a grill. |
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