Hunting season opened a couple days ago, and I live in the country. Also, I hunt, though so far unsuccessfully in that I have yet to shoot a deer myself. I didn't get this one, though I helped track her blood path into the forest, gut her and then carry her out of the woods and hang her from my back deck.
Maybe it's because what I didn't get to share in was that hunter's high I've read so much about, the primal elation after a successful shot, that I was so moved by the milk from her teats. She's still lactating, which doesn't surprise me -- I've been observing this doe, and her fawn, since moving here a month ago. They spent most afternoons bedded under trees near my office window, or scenically grazing the vast sweep of back lawn. I regard deer primarily as overgrown garden pests and also I love to eat venison, so I am not at all sentimental. But I can't shake the vision of that fawn out there in the night, confused, distressed, wondering where its mama went.
A vision that nonetheless did not prevent me from slicing up the doe's heart and frying it in my largest cast-iron skillet with some onions and pieces of a chicken-of-the-woods mushroom from the same woods. I said a silent thank-you to the deer, for giving its life for my sustenance, and to the forest, for sustaining the wider web around us. And ate.
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