Venison Tacos 12/1/06

I've been thinking about hunting all week. Thanksgiving morning we woke up to shooting on two sides. For a half-hour or so it sounded like a Baghdad fire fight. Upstream, to our west, ducks and geese were probably falling in a series of shotgun volleys, and to the east, downstream, somebody else had mounted their tree stand to shoot a few holiday rounds at some of South Carolina's estimated 800,000 deer in the dawn's early light.

Most people who don't hunt live their lives in cities or neighborhoods where hunting can easily become an abstraction. We don't have that luxury. Though we live only three and a half miles from Morgan Square, gunshots are not unusual out here on the "Lower East Side." We're barely out in the county, and the area is still blessed with large privately owned tracts of undeveloped land on both sides of the creek. The view from our deck is out into a long finger of timbered wildness pointing toward the asphalt reaches of the urban core.

These seasonal discharges of ammunition assure us the bulldozers or logging skidders aren't coming to our backyard any time soon. Wild land in the South has always meant hunting land. The owners of the land around us are avid hunters, people who care deeply about maintaining stretches of landscape suitable for their sport.

But that's not what I've been thinking about. What I've really been thinking about is why I don't hunt, why I'm not one of the men or women who will bag the 300,000 deer this hunting season. In relation to this I've also been thinking about where we get our meat from and whether I can continue to eat pork and beef and chickens produced in industrial feed lots and hog sheds and poultry houses.

So, I'll take one complex personal issue at a time. Why don't I hunt? I don't know exactly. Maybe it's about having guns around. Even when I've been given a shotgun or a .22, as has happened several times in my life, I've had no desire to keep them, care for them, shoot them, smell gun smoke, and listen to the discharge. I've quickly passed them on to someone who will love them. Guns have never interested me much, and it's hard to develop a joy in modern hunting without an interest in guns.

Is my lack of interest in guns why I don't hunt? Well, not really. I know there's always bow-hunting, or even the archaic art of the throwing stick, the atlatal. I could take these up and go into the woods. But I don't think my not hunting is really about my lack of interest in guns.

I have friends who are hunters with guns-some of them environmental writers-and I know they turn their seasonal outings into rituals and make the killing of deer and birds as quick and humane as possible. I know there is skill and art involved in being a good hunter, and I like ritual and skill and art. So why not hunt?

Come to think of it, it's not the hunting that I don't like. I have "hunted" all my life. I've walked hundreds of miles in search of snakes and birds in a dozen different countries. Actually I've been pretty good at hunting, at surprising snakes on the edge of a field and catching them, at locating rare birds among brush. I have just hunted with binoculars and snake sticks.

It's really the killing and not the hunting that keeps me from joining up. It's the reality of bringing a fellow creature's life to an end that has always stopped me short of shooting at something. Mostly my not hunting with guns is about having no desire to kill the few wild things I have the privilege to encounter.

I know there are too many deer in the state, but I don't see too many. I like to watch deer move among us. I enjoy thwarting their browsing in the yard by planting deer-resistant shrubs.

But hunt them? You got to remember I'm one of those guys who keep a plastic cup on the screened porch so I can remove the yellow jackets caught inside. I drive slower than needed around curves because I know from past experience that there might be some fellow creature-frog, turtle, snake, raccoon, possum, fox, deer-crossing the road, and I think it's my responsibility to avoid killing them.

I don't like killing wild things, but I do enjoy eating meat, so I know somebody's got to kill what we eat. In our family we're not vegetarian, and there's not much discussion of becoming one. We eat meat, and so I feel responsible about where it comes from. I've been experimenting lately a little with free-range chickens and pork and beef produced organically. It's one solution to the problem of industrial meat production, but a hard one at this point to maintain, especially if you eat out in restaurants where bottom-line costs rule everything.

And that brings me to the venison tacos. Last night for one meal we avoided eating meat raised in the obscene conditions of an industrial beef or hog or chicken operation because my brother-in-law, a hunter, opened his family larder and gave us a pound of dark red venison wrapped in white butcher paper. The week before he'd loaded up his freezer with the carved up bodies of two piedmont deer he'd shot. He passed the wild bounty on, and we ate. For a few hours I didn't worry about where our food came from, but I also didn't have to kill it. It was a good arrangement.