X
Deer Week
The wind buffeted the sea surfaces so that they were loaded with whitecaps. A black and white fishing boat was bucking up and down offshore. It was a bold and empty day. Aside from the two men that I could see in the boat, the shore was a world unoccupied, bright, wide, and cold, one about which the mass of us might care or know very little.
On the other side, where marshes and inlets entered from the bay, black ducks cast themselves up into the wind, and mergansers rode the choppy waters. The bay also ran hard with whitecaps; and the wind with a bare fury roared head on at empty summer houses facing the north, and drove across headlands glistening with bearberry where pitch pines on slopes in its lee would suddenly take the hard air with a swish, rocking and shaking, then subside to shake again. The wind brought the whole north with it and the gulls that hung there or rose steeply into it, were allied with its violence in a way that was hard to understand.
Halfway between these two realms there was a great deal of human preoccupation in evidence. It was deer week, early in December, and the pitch-pine woods resounded to the firing of guns like the hard slamming of doors, and down the highway at least every other car was loaded with hunters dressed in red, and on nearly every sandy side road several cars were parked. Later on, I even saw a man standing on the cliff looking out to sea, and I wondered if a deer might have escaped him in that direction.
Regulations now required that men wear yellow-orange luminescent patches on their backs, so when they all trooped out of their cars like spectators at a football game, they seemed as covered with neon lighting as a city street. In fact many of them do come from cities to the north and south of the Cape, which can now be reached in much faster time than used to be the case, and they follow the same pattern as many of the summer tourists, in and out, fire and run. For those who live away from streets and highways, deer week can seem perilous. The lookouts stand blocking the side roads and sometimes park their cars across them. They troop whooping and hollering through the woods where I live. The guns resound from all points of the compass.
Earlier in the season is the allotted time for shooting game birds. One afternoon I met a number of men who were returning from a hunting expedition on the shore. It had been fruitless. One man had managed to shoot a partridge on the way, but he ruefully admitted that someone had stolen it from the back of his pickup truck. Crowds of hunters started straggling back, while guns were still going off in what seemed a completely indiscriminate and probably frustrated fashion.
“Pretty hot around here today!” said one old man with great cheerfulness.
I was helping one of the hunters extricate his station wagon from a muddy hole, and by that time I had a feeling that, like many other human enterprises, hunting was a communal affair which might turn out one way or another, but like a battle, had no certain outcome. It was clear, in any case, that very few of these men had much of an idea about the habits of the animals they were hunting. Some species of ducks, for example, feed more readily after sundown and so are more easily found, and more vulnerable. A half century ago, the population of wild fowl was probably less safe than it is now. A yellowlegs, flying up out of a marsh in late autumn, did not have much of a chance to start south. Some local hunter was waiting in anticipation, someone who probably knew the marshes and the shore as his ancestors had known them.
If the hunters had an unlimited season on this narrow peninsula, Cape Cod would be in a state of siege the year around, regardless of what happened to the ducks, partridge, quail, or deer. We have the universal problem of room and numbers. After all, the human population is increasing at a faster rate than most birds. Perhaps our populatedness results in less concern for the rest of life simply through lack of association with it. Do we know what we are shooting at? Hunters who blast away into flocks of eiders or Canada geese, leaving many of them wounded, unable to retrieve the rest because they are too far out in the water, are not doing anything but getting rid of their feelings, which are not necessarily worth cherishing.
The deer population may not decline because of hunting. Their numbers, their balance between starvation and survival depends largely on the kind of country they live in, on its vegetation. Cape Cod is only a half mile in width in some parts of it, seven or eight in others, but down the middle of it there is a wide belt of low growth, of tangles, shrubs, and low, cut-over woodland which provides good forage for deer and good concealment, even with the human armies in their midst.
Hunting deer is thought of as an American heritage, our birthright, part of the Thanksgiving celebration, handed down from fathers to sons. Since deer are one of those species, unlike their predators the wolf and the mountain lion, that have managed to live abundantly in the presence of man, so much so that they sometimes require “weeding” to save them from starvation, hunting them is as legitimate as it ever was, provided the hunting is controlled; but we no longer need them as we did.
Having left the age behind when venison was our essential meat, we now have an odd relationship with the white-tailed deer. In some states more deer are killed by cars than by hunters. They are directly influenced by human civilization. In turn, civilization is dependent on them to the extent that they provide the basis for a multimillion-dollar industry. We think that it is our hunter’s right that deer should exist, but we are not the hunters that we used to be. What is a deer for? Guns, gasoline, clothing, ammunition, whiskey?
The fact that they are still wild in the midst of us may be more to our advantage than any claims we make on them. They are afraid of man and keep their distant beauty from him. The heritage they keep is wildness, which still has the power to arouse fear in us, and sometimes pity, as we may pity all life, including our own, that is cut short or broken by the inexorable laws of the universe.
On that December day during deer week, full of cold air and the sounding guns, I saw a doe walking across the road, some distance ahead of me and not many yards behind the beach. Two cars had just roared by with hunters in them, before she made her appearance. She seemed either wounded or exhausted, going very slowly, pulling her hindquarters stiffly behind her. When she saw me, that white flag of a tail flew up and she went off the road up a slope into the woods, but with only moderate speed. And then the doe shivered somewhere on the cliffs under the all-mastering winter air, a legitimate prey of men, who turned up their car heaters and sped away.
Later on I found deer tracks on the cliff tops where I walked, and a hollow where a deer had rested and bent down the grass. I could see the hunters sitting or standing all along the shore road, waiting with rifles ready, walking into the woods behind, getting in and out of their cars; and their “ho!,” “hah!,” or “garr!,” sounded across the way. After a while a number of them began to hurry ahead, almost tumbling as they ran, to converge on a deer which had apparently run to the bottom of a hollow. They surrounded the hollow on all sides, many men standing on their car tops with rifles pointing down. Whether there was actually a deer in view, whether it was shot, or managed to escape, I never learned. There were too many guns in the neighborhood for comfort.
The doe moved on slowly through the stunted trees above the sea, not too long for this world perhaps, and the fishing boat—a very rough trade on that day for common flesh and blood—rocked forward through the waves. After a while the darkness began to fall, with a thin smoky yellow and pink band on the western horizon and a new blanket of gray clouds mounting overhead, so that all of us began to turn in under the cold breath of night.
I wonder, in that light which changes for us every hour, every minute of the day, through the wild wastes of the sky, through the countless years of earthly inheritance and change, how we became so overmastering in our numbers and needs, so divorced from the exactions of nature? Shall we meet up only with ourselves?
Perhaps all hunters, those who know their deer, their mountains, and their forests, with an ancient admiration, and even those who abuse a hunter’s “right,” knowing nothing but confusion, are trying to keep in contact with a natural mortality which our world denies. Perhaps we need help from other animals besides the human one.
Everything in this landscape, from gulls and ducks to driftwood, marsh grasses, and deer, had a vital distinction. The beach with its perpetual reshaping and scouring worked on each stone and lifted each grain of sand, so long as there was stone and sand. The gulls hung overhead, colors fitting the shore and sky. Even the boat had a fittingness, a sea size of its own, and so with feathers, logs, or purple stones, all in solitary nobility, but swept and washed into a mutual keeping by the air and the tidal presence of the sea. I asked it to show us light and life which was our undiscovered own to help us through our mutual violence and upheavals, our narrow days.