Cherishing the Hunted

A story I've never really told until now

Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: the killing of a sacred deer.

The Main Course

Corn-Fed Venison

When the bullet spun out of the barrel, I knew it was the best shot I ever took.

My dad and I were sitting in the back of an old dump truck in an open field on the family farm just outside Hershey, Pennsylvania. By this time, the corn had been harvested, stalk to tassel, rendering the whole space barren, a clear cutting for crows to create feed for cows.

It was my third year of deer hunting at this point, each year coming up drier than the last, except for our hunting gear which always seemed to be soaked. The first day of buck season– a no-school holiday on the Monday after Thanksgiving in Pennsylvania– always brought the most weary weather. As a teenager, getting out of bed was hard enough. Putting on coveralls and beanies and boots to trudge into the treeline and sit for hours was an entirely different struggle. Eventually, the rain meandered through the threads of whatever we were wearing and settled against our skin. This, as we waited for whitetail.

Year after year, my family waited for deer. Unlike my friends who had hunting camps or whose dads dredged them in orange to highlight their bodies as they navigated the crowded state gamelands, my grandparents owned a farm just a mile away from where I grew up. It was a fairly sizable farm; a hundred acres in total, passed down through a couple generations. There were the corn fields and hay fields and cow pastures, but on the edges and in the middle were thickets of underbrush and trees– jagger bushes and gnarled hackberry trees, oaks with poison wrapped in thick cords around their bodies. Raspberry bushes that would make us pay for picking them in July, but would reward us with sweet jelly for sandwiches come January. In short, the farm was an ideal place for whitetail deer to hunker down in the winter, a place for cover with a supply of food nearby from all the corn that didn’t make it into the crib.

Over the course of each fall leading up to rifle season, my grandpa and uncles would report what they saw while they were out working– a button buck towards the back of the farm, a few doe walking through the junkyard, a big nine-pointer making its way from the neighbor’s farm onto ours. This was exciting to me, hearing what was out there. This was before trail cams or drones, it was just a pair of binoculars by the kitchen window and your own God-given eyes that did the documentation. We all dreamed of landing the big one, and every once in a while someone did, as evidenced by the mounted heads on the wall of my uncle’s farmhouse.

Big year for the family farm

Unlike a lot of kids at my school, I didn’t grow up with guns or hunting in my own house, even though they were all around me. My grandpa and uncles and about damned near everyone else seemed to be perched in a treestand hooked into the trunk of the family tree, but most of my hunting as a kid was shooting grasshoppers with a rubber band gun and unsuccessfully picking off rats in the barn with my Crosman pump-action BB gun.

It wasn’t until I turned 12 that I was able to get my Junior Hunter’s License, that piece of paper from the great state of Pennsylvania that would ensure I knew how to use a gun and hunt a deer. Myself and a handful of other kids came to my middle school after hours to receive an entirely different education through the Basic Hunter-Trapper Course, learning about firearm safety, shooting skills, and wildlife conservation and management. At the end of the course, I got my little orange card that said I was now officially a hunter.

Truth be told, I was a hunter in the same way that some people are religious, but instead of going to church on Easter Sunday and Christmas with the family all dressed in suit and tie, I just woke up on the first day of buck season, got dressed in long johns and bright orange knit cap and thick socks and trudged out to the wooded area between the fields with my dad. I’m sure neither of us wanted to be there in the cold and the rain, all that waiting for a shot we both knew I’d probably miss. Peering into the darkness of early dawn for any semblance of a deer with branches coming out of its head, an animal that seemed so elusive on this day but was somehow a car magnet, garden thief, and common household pest on every other day of the year.

The whitetail deer doesn’t match the majesty of the elk and the moose, its lumbering cousins in the west and to the north. Same with its long-lost family members living abroad, the African kudu with its conical twist of horns that seem more art project than defense mechanism, the impalas with slicked back spirals to let you know that it’s both fast and beautiful. But if you’re from Pennsylvania or West Virginia or North Carolina and don’t have the means to travel far and wide in search of big game, then the common deer will have to do. However common it is in population, it still remains uncommon at its core. You know this if you’ve ever encountered a whitetail deer while walking through the woods, the kind of meeting that surprises both of you when your eyes connect, as if neither of you are supposed to be there. The splendor can be stunning.

There’s the shape of it– the sinewy strength of its body shown through every contour as it moves. A map of muscles in perpetual motion. Sometimes, when hiking or trail running through the woods, I’ll see one floating over the landscape ahead of me, outpacing me with no effort, just a simple movement that can take it from one side of a creek to the other. It’s as if I’m watching an animation, too smooth for real life. Tiptoeing with hooves through brambles and gaps in the trees, all that weight on dead leaves and almost no sound. No muscle wasted, the impossibly strong hindquarters propelling it over standing fences and fallen logs. Its fur, a coat of silver and sand with a fleck of white, shifting in desert palettes from its light layer of summer to its heavy winter coat. The namesake tail popping up over tall weeds like a snowy jackrabbit pinned to its rear, following wherever it goes. Then there’s the neck, strong enough to extend out from its chest, to hold a head with eyes that go forever, back to when we hunted them with rocks. Finally, the antlers, the annual crown of jewels offering high value to both our men and their women.

I was looking for those antlers in the back of that dump truck on a cold afternoon in early December. When I got home from school that day– a random Wednesday– my dad suggested we drive over to the farm and head out to the field for an hour while there was still a little light left in the day, and little days left in the season. So that’s what we did, me with my grandpa’s scoped Winchester 30-30 at my side, walking back the lane in my army green coveralls and Walmart safety orange vest and winter cap. My dad helped me up into the back of the dump truck, empty except for the remnants of fill dirt and stale pieces of corn. The bed walls provided the perfect cover to sit undetected, a blind of sorts with just my head and shoulders sticking up. The eastward vantage point gave us a clear purview of the entire field spanning a few hundred yards in width, an unobstructed space from the neighboring property’s fenceline to the left and the wooded section of our farm to the right. And then we waited.

We didn’t wait long. Within fifteen minutes, my dad whispered excitedly, “Look! Over to the right!” As soon as it entered the field, it started running. I’m not sure why. Maybe something else chased it out, maybe it was skittish from the nonstop evasions over the past week, maybe it was just trying to get from point A to point B as fast as it could. But there it was, a buck running at full speed across the field, broadside to me and roughly 75 yards away. I quickly shouldered my rifle and pulled the butt against my cheek, closed my left eye and peered with my right one into the scope, pulling the details of the field into clear focus. I quickly found the deer in my sights, all of the trimmed muscles and sinew strength right in front of me, flying across the landscape. I put the crosshairs right in front of it, hoping the bullet and its chest would intersect in a space not yet occupied by death, and pulled the trigger.

In most cases, hunting doesn’t happen like it does in the movies. A bullet through the stomach or an arrow through the spleen doesn’t render the deer dead on impact. Depending on the location of the shot, it may fall, then get it up again, then run a ribbon of red blood through the fields and deep into the brush, over creeks and down gullies, trying to run as far away from danger as possible, but instead just prolonging its own pain in the process. If you’re gonna remove this body from the woods, you’re going to have to work for it, it says.

This shot, though– it happened like in the movies. The forward momentum of the deer kept it moving for a few more strides, right before it crashed into the dirt. It didn’t get up, because the bullet that came out of the rifle, that was now buried somewhere in the field, passed straight through the heart of the deer, clipping off the bottom ventricle and killing it almost immediately.

My dad slapped me on the back and yelled “You got it!”. We both jumped out of the truck and ran across the field to where it lay. My dad told me to stay there, that he was going to go get the old farm pickup truck from uncle’s house and bring it back. While he went to do that, I stayed with the deer.

This is something I’ve never told anyone in my life, until now.

He was beautiful, he really was. All of the ways I described the grandeur of a whitetail, he was all of those things as he laid there on the ground, his legs and neck pointing at whatever direction gravity pinned them. His eyes were open, black wells swallowing the blue skies that would soon turn dark themselves as the soft light of early evening quickly gave way to night. As the sun slipped lower, I stayed there with him, not knowing he was already dead and wanting him to die faster. I laid my open palm on his neck, the wiry hair so smooth and his body still warm from all the blood moving from heart to hoof right before I stopped it. I told him thank you, that it’ll be okay. I don’t remember if I said sorry, but I may have. I don’t think I cried, but maybe I did. I just wanted to lie down with him, to hold him close and let him die that way.

It wasn’t that I felt bad about killing an animal. It was just that I felt nothing about killing an animal. I wasn’t sure why I was doing it or why I did it. We didn’t even eat venison in our house (though my extended family did). I just didn’t feel like I valued its life enough to take it. I was sorry for that. I still am.

Within a few minutes, my dad and uncle were coming back the lane, so I pulled it all together. After another round of congratulations, they loaded it into the pickup and drove it back to the barnyard where they strung up the carcass on a hanger held high by the skid loader bucket, hooks through the tendons of its hind legs. Gravity, working again, pulled the blood from its body out of its nose into the dirt below. I should have been forced to do this next part, but I wasn’t, as my grandpa and uncle were way more experienced. The long slice from ass to chest, the dropping of the internal organs into a bucket, and then the slicing away of the meat.

The hindquarters that moments ago pushed so strong, propelling it across an open field. The back straps that held everything straight and true, keeping it balanced over those delicate hooves. The antlers it grew throughout the year that would end up hanging in a shed somewhere. All of it cut away and packaged and put into a freezer.

I went back to school the next morning and told all my friends how I got a deer, because that’s what you do. But really, it meant nothing to me, at least in the way it should have.

Here’s the thing– I don’t regret killing it. I eat meat of every variety, I always have and likely always will. I grew up watching my grandma chop the heads off chickens and my uncle slit the throats of pigs. I helped make the sausage on butcher day, my mom would cook the roasts for Sunday dinner, and we’d fry up scrapple with molasses for breakfast. Even if you’re vegan, you have to know that an incomprehensible amount of life is still taken during the process of collecting whatever it is you eat. Rabbit nests with litters of bunnies churned up in combine blades, snakes and mice and fox families run over with tractor wheels, bones broken for your bread. Someday we’ll find out that plants feel pain and we’ll all be fucked.

Death is part of life at every turn, and if we’re going to play our part, at some point we should know what it feels like to take a life. At 15 years of age, I just didn’t know that value. I don’t know if I was too young, or if I just wasn’t taught how to respect the value of all creatures great and small, or if it was something else entirely. But I just didn’t know.

I haven’t gone hunting since that afternoon, almost 27 years ago to the day. But as I grow older and I buy beef that’s delivered at fast food countertops, knowing that the cows lived and died in the same cell of captivity, or chicken breasts so large that I know they were force-fed feed by the gallons, I find myself circling back to myself in the field, my hand on the broad side of the deer, thanking it for giving its life.

I want to be thankful for the food I eat again, not because it was delivered by DoorDash in less than 15 minutes, or because it was on sale for the 4th of July weekend, or because I can buy Atlantic salmon three blocks from my front door in any season of the year. I feel myself wanting to hunt again, because if I’m going to take part in death, I should take part in its life.

I should thank it up close for living these last few years, for eating berries and corn and grass and finding a partner to have children with (even if they are overpopulating every place they touch), for building up his strength so I could take it away and add to mine.

I don’t know if I’ll ever hunt again. Life is busy, there are kids soccer games on Saturday mornings and for some reason I keep running marathons, which means long runs on the weekends. Plus, this whole writing thing. But the more I think about my food and being fed, it feels like I should be there, at least sometimes.

I feel like I should be responsible and grateful and do the work myself, not leave it to some migrant kid in a factory down south to spray the blood off a cement floor in the middle of the night before heading off to school in the morning. I feel like I should shoulder some of the responsibility of death and its harvest. To hold my hand on the neck of a deer as its lungs slow down to a standstill. To feel the dirt on its hooves, picked up and put down over centuries, the ground feeding and growing and accepting an offering of bones and blood to do it all over, again and again, as long as the sun rises and sets.

To tell him thank you for all that he was and will continue to be.

To cherish a life, it’s the least I can do.

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A Repast of the Past Week

As with most of you reading this probably know, this week was pretty eventful with holiday travel and activities of all kinds.

The family and I headed up to Pennsylvania to my parents’ house where we spend every Thanksgiving. Early in the morning, I ran the Sticks and Biscuits 5K, which started in a cold rain with temperatures in the low 40s. I felt surprisingly good and just went out at a hard pace, didn’t look at my watch and just went by feel. Ended up posting splits of 6:35, 6:35, and 6:28 to finish with a 20:55 (the course was long). Turned it around for the second wave and ran with my brother, finishing in a strong 24:59, impressive for someone who only plays soccer and never runs.

Headed back to the family farm with my brother and brother-in-law and shot some skeet with the shotguns and busted up some junked pumpkins with an assortment of other firearms.

Thanksgiving dinner was great as usual, as my mom is a phenomenal cook, especially when it comes to home cooked, traditional dinners.

On Friday morning, I went on a run with a random assortment of friends, including paid Suppertime subscriber Andy, Pri, Joe (whom I met at the race just the day before), and Jill. Ended up going long and did 12 miles over and alongside the Susquehanna River in Harrisburg (even saw some snow flurries!).

Got in a short hike later in the afternoon to Boxcar Rocks, a very underrated natural feature in the mountains by my parents house, featuring large rectangle blocks of conglomerate rocks stacked on top of each others like– you guessed it– boxcars.

It was cold

That evening, Kimi and I went to see Gladiator 2, which I found to be fine just because I didn’t have any framework for it and treated it as a standalone action movie. If you have any expectations of it delivering an acceptable extension of the original’s storyline, well… you will be disappointed.

On Saturday, I went up to State College with some of my best friends from home to watch the Penn State vs. Maryland game. It was absurdly cold and windy, but we still hung outside for a few hours before calling it quits and heading home.

Other things I’ve written or edited this past week:

• The Best Trail Running Shoes of 2024 / Believe in the Run’s Best in Gear Awards

• Holiday Gift Guide for Runners, By Runners / Believe in the Run // This is honestly just a list of some of my favorite gear that I’ve tested over the year, so you should check it out

• A Runners’ Guide to Ruining Your Family’s Holiday / Believe in the Run // I updated this piece that I wrote 7 years ago to make it more relevant, but most of it still stands. Do theses things to ensure your family hates you for life, or at least ‘til the new year.

I also contribute to The Drop, a weekly email from Believe in the Run, where I round up running news and stories in a generally sarcastic (and sometimes heartfelt) manner. You can subscribe here.

I’m also the co-host of The Drop running podcast, one of the top running podcasts in the country, where we mostly talk about things other than running that thousands of people seem to find entertaining. You can listen to this past week’s episode here, where we recap the entirety of The Running Event.

Ingredient List

📖 : “On Killing Turkeys” by Larissa Phillips for The Free Press // This essay kind of set in motion my menu topic for this week, something I had been thinking about writing for some time, but wasn’t sure if or how I wanted to do it. But I enjoyed this perspective.

“Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.” by Hannah Dreier for The New York Times / This is an unbelievably well done investigative piece on the horrors of migrant children working in brutal conditions with little regulation. Oftentimes living with “guardians” who aren’t their parents, thousands of miles from home. Since this was published last year, some sweeping changes have been made, but how did this ever happen in the first place? Clearly something is terribly broken. Anyway, I still think about this piece a lot when I think of where our food comes from and the downstream effects of open border policies combined with lax workplace regulation.

END OF MENU

Thank you for dining with me this evening, I hope the service was acceptable. Tips (whether monetary or recommendations to others) are appreciated, but not expected.

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