Last year, I wrote about how the whitetail deer, with effectively no predators in the eastern United States, has multiplied so fruitfully that its population is now some 14 times the level the ecosystem can sustain. In rural Virginia, where I recently bought a farm, the marauding deer are causing an ecological disaster: They’re picking forests bare, leaving no habitat for birds to nest, no food for insects and no regeneration of trees. The food web is unraveling.
Hunting won’t solve the problem by itself, but it makes a dent in the deer population, and it’s more humane to man and beast alike than hitting them with our vehicles, which we do more than 1 million times a year. So I bought a used .308 bolt-action rifle (readers convinced me that the .30-06 I first bought was too much gun for the task, so I returned it) and set out to do my part for biodiversity.
I took Virginia’s online hunter-education course and signed the “Sportsmen’s Pledge” on my certificate of completion (“be sure of my target before I shoot”). I applied for a hunting permit — only to discover that in gun-loving Virginia I can shoot pretty much anything on my own land without a license. I practiced at the gun range, stockpiled copper ammunition (lead bullets contaminate both hunter and hunted) and shopped for camo at Cabela’s. I splurged on the gear with the special ingredient that supposedly blocks deer from sniffing my scent.
Most important, I found a local guy who agreed to take me hunting with him, and, in the highly unlikely event I bagged my quarry, to handle the dreaded “field dressing,” which is a polite term for gutting. After months of preparation and anticipation, the appointed day arrived — and my hunting buddy canceled. He was stuck at the dentist. In fairness, the dentist’s chair was a less painful place to be than in a hunting blind with me, and certainly a safer one.
So I went hunting with my 14-year-old stepson instead. In high spirits, and at a high volume, we tromped across the fields and into the woods. We crunched our way through dried leaves and branches into position near a deer trail. Then we crunched our way to another spot. A while after we settled in, my hunting companion whispered, “I need to pee.” He crunched away to do that. Some time later, my legs were aching from kneeling on the forest floor. We crunched to a new location. At this point, I suspected that all the deer in the county were watching us from a safe distance, laughing their antlers off. Abandoning any hope of shooting a deer, we took deadly aim at our brush pile. We killed it dead.
Another day, I decided to use an old deer stand that I found in the woods after I bought the place. It was a rusty and bent platform 13 feet up, suspended by three equally rusty and bent legs, with a wobbly chair and gun rail perched precariously on top. It was held together in part by tangled vines that had grown through it. I sent a photo to John Louk, executive director of the Treestand Manufacturer’s Association, to see if he could identify the brand so I could buy new hardware. He said he thought the company that made it was defunct. After asking me a few questions, he added, “I recommend that you remove it from service and destroy it.”
Instead, I took some duct tape and tethers into the woods to reinforce the crumbling tower. I also bought myself a tree harness, which I would clip to a nearby tree in case the platform collapsed beneath me. At that point I would be alone in the woods, dangling from a tree — but somehow I felt reassured. Also, it made the hunt more of a fair fight: If I were going to take a deer’s life, at least I should be willing to risk my own.
Well before dawn on a 30-degree morning, I put on my camo pants and jacket, my tree harness, my blaze orange hat and vest, my goggles and my earplugs, and marched into the darkness with my rifle. Against all odds, I reached the top of the stand unharmed and clipped myself to the tree. Then I waited. And waited. I heard the wild turkeys calling. Cows mooed across the valley. The sun rose, revealing a beautiful white frost in the fields. Faraway dogs barked, a woodpecker pecked, a crow crowed and a Carolina wren sang. Squirrels foraged in the trees around me. After an hour, my fingers and toes were numb. After two hours, my teeth were chattering. I heard some lucky hunter’s shot across the valley. But the deer came no closer to me than 200 yards — too far for a hunter of my meager abilities. After three hours, I climbed down from the tower on rubbery legs, defeated.
Did the deer smell me through my scent-blocking clothing? Or maybe it was my tendency to keep swiveling around in the chair, to make sure the deer didn’t sneak up on me from behind.
On yet another day, I decided to try my luck in the deer stand at dusk. But as I was waiting, alone in the house, for late afternoon, my luck changed. Before I could head out to find the deer, the deer found me. First one, then a second and a third sauntered into the field behind my house. Still in my sweatpants and running shoes, I fetched my rifle from the gun safe, loaded it, then tiptoed to the room with the best line of sight to the field, which happened to be my bathroom. I noiselessly raised the window sash and found the largest of the three in my scope: a hefty doe, about 50 yards away.
I had a broadside shot, and I aimed for the “kill zone” just above and behind where the front leg meets the torso. I fired — and hit my mark. The animal took a few staggering leaps and fell. It was all over in perhaps five seconds: a clean kill.
There in my bathroom, with my ears still ringing (in my excitement, I had forgotten the hearing protection), I began to anticipate the condemnation that would come down on me.
Is it even legal to shoot a deer from my house? Virginia doesn’t have a stand-your-ground law, and in any case I couldn’t plausibly claim I fired on the herbivore in self-defense. I asked David Kocka of Virginia’s Department of Wildlife Resources whether it was permitted to shoot deer from inside a house or on a porch. “There is no restriction,” he told me. “In fact in urban areas we encourage wording that allows just that.” (I neglected to ask a follow up: Urban hunting is legal in Virginia?)
Even though it was legal, was it sportsmanlike to shoot a deer from my house? A hunting purist would probably say that it wasn’t. But I am not a hunting purist. My purpose in killing the deer was not to enjoy the hunt but to cull the herd. What mattered to me was killing the animal humanely — and it didn’t matter whether I was 15 feet up in a blind or 15 feet up in my bathroom.
The deer was down — but now came the hard part. From the bathroom, I frantically called my hunting buddy for help with the field dressing. No answer. Damn that dentist! With a feeling of dread, I put on my elbow-length gloves, picked up my hunting knife, and went out to dress the deer the way I had seen it done in a how-to video on YouTube by MeatEater.
I approached the beast cautiously, poking it with a stick to make sure it was really dead. The how-to video was revolting, but for some reason the real thing was less so. After 15 minutes of surgery, I left behind the animal’s innards, or most of them, for the turkey vultures. Then, with much cursing, I dragged the deer uphill to my car. Real hunters drive pickup trucks. I wrestled the deer into the back of my minivan. I registered my “harvest” on the DWR website, then, with the windows of my Toyota Sienna rolled down, rushed my passenger to the processor.
It wasn’t hard to find the place, which looked like a set of a horror film: a blood trail leading in the door, blood on the floors, blood on the walls and a dozen carcasses already hanging. With some pride, I noticed that mine was among the larger deer in the cooler. But the pride dissipated quickly when I couldn’t figure out how to hoist it with the winch. I knocked on the door of the nearby house, where the processor’s mother phoned her son, who impatiently told me to follow the written instructions. Fortunately, a real hunter — I could tell because he had a pickup truck — arrived and helped me hoist my deer. He thought I did a passable job with the field dressing (I had made a couple of errors, but it hadn’t ruined the meat), and he estimated the gutted doe weighed 90 pounds.
Five days later, the butchered meat was ready for pickup. I paid $90 for the processing, kept the loin — the “backstrap,” as it’s known — and donated the rest to a Virginia charity called “Hunters for the Hungry.” Before anybody eats the meat, it needs to be cleared by the state, which tests a sample of each animal for chronic wasting disease: the deer equivalent of mad cow.
Had the sheriff stopped me on the way home the night of my kill, she would have encountered a most incriminating scene: blood on the carpet of my minivan and, literally, blood on my hands, because I had cut through my gloves. When I stepped into my home, my shoes left bloody footprints in the entryway.
Though my clothes were blood-soaked, my conscience was clean. I can’t say I felt pleasure in taking that doe’s life. I feel bad that I probably orphaned its fawns, even though they are self-sufficient by this time of year. Shooting and butchering an animal is grisly business. But I feel enormous pleasure in saving the lives of other animals — insects, birds, fish, amphibians, rodents and larger mammals — and restoring the health of the forest.
So I expect to shoulder a gun again next hunting season. And who knows? With a whole year to practice, I might by then be able to kill a deer from my bedroom.
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