Morning of the Hunter

 

Hunting in Woods, Z.S. Liang

Deep in the woods of central Minnesota, I steered the pickup off the gravel road and into the parking area. I got out and relieved myself after the 75-mile drive. It was 7:30 a.m. and my breath floated in the frosty November air. I put on a blaze-orange hoody and over it strapped a broad leather belt that I called my "bat belt." On it I had a multi-tool, flashlight, cellphone, ammo pouch and a large knife. Using a sock filled with baking soda, I powder-puffed myself in an effort mask my scent, then put on my small backpack, the weight of which mostly came from two and half liters of water.

 

I uncased my rifle, loaded five rounds into the tubular magazine and shouldered the weapon. I shut the door of the truck which sounded like a crash in the stillness of the forest, a warning, I thought, to the local wildlife -- the top predator was here. Except it was me who was scared as I headed out on my first ever deer hunt.

The half-mile walk on the gravel road to the trail head calmed me. I hadn't seen any other vehicles since turning off the highway. I was alone. I slipped past the cattle gate that marked the trail's entrance, stopped, unshouldered my rifle and cocked the lever to chamber a round. I clicked off the trigger safety and set the hammer to half cock. That snick triggered something in my brain. The hunt was on and I moved slowly and quietly up the trail.

~

A puff of breeze rustled the boughs of scraggy oaks; a downy woodpecker knocked and fluttered about. The forest was vivid with color and texture, its sounds a never-ending symphony ripe with meaning.

The Dakota people of centuries gone by could read the forest like a book. I could not. Yet the forest they read was something quite different than what I was walking in. In 1850 central Minnesota was home to a vast, ancient forest -- thousands of square miles of huge conifers, many more than 100 feet tall. Commercial loggers called these tracts the pineries and they seemed inexhaustible. But they weren't. During the ensuing decades, they cut them all down. I mean they cut them all down.

I find the forests of Minnesota beautiful and calming; they are places of wonder. But they are only a shadow of their former selves, stunted and cluttered patches compared to the old-growth majesty that once was.

~

Predation had been on my mind and its relationship to human development, both as prey and predators, since reading Barbara Ehrenreich's "Blood Rites" which I've written about *here. In 2008 I went on a pheasant hunting excursion in Illinois with my brothers the day after Thanksgiving. I'm not sure I hit anything but the experience was eye opening and gave me a taste of what hunting could be. I wanted to go deeper so I decided the next season I would go deer hunting

Was it a mid-life crisis thing? Maybe. I was 45 at the time. There was something primal at work apart from my philosophical interest. I was lucky to be a strong and physically capable person. I think at root I wanted to use that strength while I still could, and use it in a way that it had evolved to be used.

Another question lingered. Snap-shooting at pheasants was one thing, killing a large mammal was another. I always felt keenly the suffering of animals. Could I put a deer in my sights and pull the trigger? I didn't know. It wasn't something I was going to be ashamed of if I couldn't, quite the opposite, but I did want to know.

I knew little about deer hunting but being in the grip of an obsession, I devoured everything I could on the subject -- books, magazine articles, videos and whatever lore I could extract from people I knew who had hunted. I had a rifle, purchased in 1998 on whim while I was living in Nebraska. I had fired it a few times on a buddy's country property but it had gone unused since. I took it to a nearby shooting range and started practicing. It was a cowboy-style lever action rifle chambered in .44 magnum. Known as a short-range brush buster, good for putting down deer and black bear, it wasn't a great choice for open prairie country but it was ideal for the woods of Minnesota. I worked hard to make myself at least a decent shot with it.

One aspect of deer hunting I had to think about was what to do if I succeeded. Being a novice, I was unlikely to bag a deer on my first efforts but it was possible. Once you kill a deer, you have to field dress it, i.e., gut it. I found a *video on YouTube that showed how to do it. I watched it over and over, memorizing the details and becoming accustomed to looking at a carcass, entrails and all that. I also carried with me a cheat sheet of the steps, cut from the pages of Field and Stream.

I investigated several areas within 100 miles of the Twin Cities. Minnesota is fortunate to have lots of public land where hunting is allowed. Ultimately I settled on the Mille Lacs Wildlife Management Area, 33,000 acres of woods and marsh just south of Mille Lacs, a huge lake in the middle of the state. I made several trips to scout out the WMA's trails. I saw lots of deer-sign. I knew there were plenty around.

When the time came, I felt I was as ready as I'd ever be. I got up at 4:30 a.m., loaded my step-dad's pickup and headed for the woods.

 

~

 

On the trail a blue jay squawked. I stopped, put my thumb on the gun's hammer, ready to cock it in case a deer flushed. Nothing. The blue jay flew away. I walked on.

 

The plan was to hike about a mile and half into the forest where the trail meets an old railroad grade built more than a century ago when the marshes were harvested for reeds that were used to make matting for dirt floors. A ways along the grade was a rise and a fallen tree near a grassy area, the kind of edge terrain deer liked. I was going to perch myself on the log and wait in ambush.

 

I didn't get there.

 

Shortly after the jay had squawked and I had resumed walking -- I couldn't have been in the forest more than 10 minutes -- a deer flushed in the brush a short distance ahead of me. It jumped into the woods, white tail raised high. Startled, I raised my rifle.

 

I wasn't going to shoot at a deer bounding away from me through the trees. It was a bad shot to take and I'd likely miss anyway. At least I saw one, I thought. I watched it angle off around my position and followed it with the rifle. Then it stopped. I had read that it wasn't unusual for a deer to stop running if it didn't feel like it was being pursued.

 

It was doe and it was about 35 yards away. Trees blocked the standard shot to the forward chest area but its neck was exposed. That was an acceptable shot and preferred by many hunters. I put the bead on it and aligned the sights. This was it, I thought, my chance. I pulled the hammer back and put my finger on the trigger.

 

The blast shattered the silence and the gun bucked up. I cocked it and lowered it back into position but the deer was gone. Shit, I'd missed. Then I saw a leg poke up from the undergrowth and a white tail. The doe was down and struggling. I had to will myself not to rush toward it. If I did, it might get up again and flee, never to be found. Be patient, let it die. I started counting. The doe stopped struggling after a few seconds but I kept counting. My heart pounded, blood pressure probably off the charts. Only after I'd reached 100 did I approach.

 

The doe was still. I poked it with the rifle. It was dead.

 

~

 

I'm not good enough with metaphors to adequately convey the swirl of triumph, sorrow and guilt that I felt. I clicked on the safety and unloaded the gun. I knelt down to pick up the ejected cartridges, breathing heavily, eyes watering. There was a quarter-sized hole in the deer's neck and blood-stained leaves around it. The doe was smallish, probably less than 100 pounds. The !Kung people of Southern Africa, and other cultures, apologize to the animals they kill. Maybe it was a lame bit of faux ritual but I put my hand on the doe's silky brown fur and said I was sorry.

The killing was the easy part, physically. I hung a spare blaze-orange vest on a branch above me to let any passing hunters know I was there, then I flipped the deer on its back and spread its hind legs apart, using stakes and paracord to hold them in position. I'll skip the details of the gutting but I used a very sharp Scandinavian knife called a puukko to do the job. I was a bloody mess afterward. I flipped the doe again to let the blood in the chest cavity drain out then proceeded to clean myself up as best I could with the water I'd brought.

I had a harness that was supposed to make the job of dragging the deer out easier. There was nothing easy about it. It took me nearly an hour to drag it the quarter mile to the trail head and my thighs and calves burned. I could have hoisted it on my shoulders and carried it, and that would have been much less exhausting, but that would be dangerous -- you don't want a jittery hunter confusing you for a deer.

~

I arrived at Anoka Meat & Sausage tired and stiff. The counter clerk took no notice of my bloodstained clothes. Another man came out and helped me unload the carcass. "Ya, that's a good eatin' deer, there," he said.

My buddies at the coffee shop could hardly believe I'd done it. I basked in the glow of success and perhaps strutted a bit with alpha-male swagger. The doe was good eating. I invited a friend over and cooked the tenderloins with butter, pepper, garlic, cubed potatoes and asparagus all in one skillet. It was the best meal I'd ever made.

The Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset, wrote in his book on hunting: "To sum up, one does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to hunt.". 

That's a bit pat, I think, but does point in the right direction. Hunting, I believe, can open the mind and senses in a way like no other activity. The killing, or the attempt, is an essential ingredient.

Was it an unnecessary indulgence? Is it justifiable in our modern age? I'm not sure. But ... anyone who eats meat is kills by proxy. Anybody who eats farmed plants also kills by proxy via habitat deprivation and pest control. It's hard to escape being a killer.

In any case, I had caught the hunting bug and would try again the following year. That experience would turn out to be harder and darker.

The Magic of the Mundane

Not long ago I was watching television and wanted to change the channel but the remote control was on the other side of the room. Being lazy by nature, I decided that, instead of getting up to fetch the remote, I would telekinetically draw it to my hand like Luke Skywalker did in "The Empire Strikes Back" when he was trapped in the ice cave and his light saber was out of reach.

 

Luke was able to use The Force and the light saber flew into his hand. He then cut himself free and defeated the ice monster. Despite my best efforts to let The Force flow through me, to project my will and to believe it could be done,  the remote stubbornly refused to budge. I resigned myself to the fact that I would never be a Jedi Knight, so I got off the couch and grabbed the remote.

 

Then it struck me. Though I was unable to perform a feat of telekinetic magic, I realized that the "mere" act of getting up and reaching for the remote was itself a magical feat, one of astounding complexity.

 

First you have this conscious mind thing that seems to have a will that can direct the movements of its body. How does this happen? Philosophers, psychologists and neuro-scientists have hardly scratched the surface of all that's going on. Then there's the "simpler" mechanics of the actual motions of getting up and grabbing an object. But there's hardly anything simple about them -- there's the high number of movements coordinated by the brain (many very subtle and necessary to maintain balance and fluidity), the subsequent electro-chemical nerve impulses sent to the muscles, the complex chemical reactions that cause the muscles to contract with just the right force, the system of fueling those reactions and getting rid of the waste produced, and so on. One could spend a lifetime studying these systems and still fall well short of a complete understanding. And all I did was grab a remote.

 

This brought to mind a Zen parable of a conversation between two young monks. It goes something like this ...

 

Monk #1: "My master can do many amazing things like levitate 10 feet off the ground, or write on paper using only his mind."

 

Monk #2: "Yeah, my master can do amazing things like that, too. For example, when he's tired he sleeps and when he's hungry he eats."

 

Monk sleeping on a tiger

 

The difficulty of actions that we take for granted can be seen in modern efforts to create human-like robots. Things we find difficult -- like complex mathematical calculations -- are easily accomplished with computers and have been for decades. But activity we find ordinary -- like walking down stairs -- turns out to be very challenging for robot builders. One of the most amazing feats humans do all the time is object recognition. We can walk into a room and almost instantly orient ourselves to the space and recognize major objects in it -- a kitchen: cupboards, drawers, counter, oven, microwave, fridge, chairs, table, spouse, blender, sink, dishes. Years and years and billions of dollars of research have not been able to produce that same capability in computers. But the experience is so commonplace, such a part of our everyday sense of things, we miss the wonder of it.

 

Popular culture in the form of TV shows, movies, books, comics and games is replete with magical elements -- superheroes, super-villains, witches, vampires, etc. Some works are all-out fantasies, others are more subtle. I have no truck with any of it (except I don't, by and large, like superheroes). I indulge the fantastical in my own fiction. It can be fun and even instructive if used to explore themes in ways not otherwise possible.

 

Yet, I think this form of escapism suggests a yearning for magic and the supernatural that can make folks lose sight of the magic that's already all around them and, indeed, encompasses themselves.

 

I intended to write more but I recalled a song written by Antônio Carlos Jobim. There's really nothing I can say that would make my point better than this beautiful rendition by Luciana Souza, -- *Waters of March

 

3rd Ave. Bridge, Minneapolis. Painting by Douglas Ross

Epistemology Today

How do you know?

Epistemology -- the philosophy of knowledge or how people know things --  is a philosophical term that carries the risk of making peoples' eyes roll into the back of their heads. It's associated with imponderables like -- How do you know what you think you know isn't all a dream? -- that sensible people tend to back away from as quickly as possible.

Yet here in the United States we are in a crisis of epistemology and it's significant enough that I wonder if our society can withstand it, if the American experiment's brief run of two and half centuries will indeed "perish from the earth." It's a crisis of what people believe is true, of what they think they know. When the difference in perceived knowledge between various groups becomes too great, it's hard to see how democratic practices can hold up. Politics just becomes a power struggle with no compromise possible and no consent from those not in power.

This is a big can of worms, of course, so I'll focus on how I come to "know" things, particularly with regard to current events.

 

On Saturday Nov. 7, 2020, Joe Biden was declared the winner of the presidential election when it was clear that he had prevailed over Donald Trump. I felt relieved and happy when I heard the news after days of anxious waiting and constant checking of election tallies. Yet the news didn't really sink in and the extent that I had become emotionally invested in the outcome didn't become clear until the next morning when I read it in the New York Times. I actually got teary eyed.

 

Then it struck me: Something isn't really true until I've read it in the New York Times.

 

I'm overstating the case but it does shine light on the fact that much of what I know and understand about the world comes from what are, to me, authoritative sources - well established newspapers and magazines, and books from respected publishers and universities.

 

When I was in journalism school, I wrote a term paper about the managing editor of the NYT circa 1910 named *Carr Van Anda. He was a key figure in moving journalism away from blatant partisanship and sensationalism and toward a gatekeeper role where opinions and value judgments were kept out the news sections and confined instead to the editorial pages.

 

During his tenure, Van Anda was responsible for many scoops. Most famously, in 1912, he used the young medium of wireless telegraphy (radio) to correlate distress calls and signals from nearby ships and concluded the Titanic had sunk when other papers assumed it was impossible. 

 

 

The newspaper earned a reputation for providing quality information and became a gold standard of journalism which persists today. Since my youth, it's been a fond pleasure on Sunday mornings to drink coffee and read the Times. I count myself at least fairly well informed for doing so.

 

Not that the Times is perfect by any stretch. Several years ago they reported that the FBI had opened a criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton. The FBI hadn't. The Times offered a front-page retraction and apologized. They hired an ombudsman, or woman rather, who wrote a monthly column for a while that critiqued the Times' news coverage. The column was interesting in that it showed how biases can creep into the news sections and also that the Times could indulge its own brand of sensationalism.

 

Also, beyond occasional gaffs and subtle biases, I think over the years the Times has short-shrifted certain topics such as environmental issues and racial discrimination. My sense is that they've recently improved on that quite a bit.

 

In any case, I've come to trust the Times. Not in the sense that one shouldn't ever be skeptical of what appears there, or that the paper offers error-free, pure objective truth, but in the sense that its writers and editors are dedicated professionals committed to making good faith efforts to get things right. This can be said of several other news outlets, magazines, book publishers and filmmakers.

 

Yet, while I hold the facts offered in these media to be actualities, rarely can I verify them with my own eyes, so to speak. In a sense I have faith in what they're telling me and my knowledge of current events, history, science and much of what I believe is true about the world is built on the edifice of this faith.

 

When I interact with others who share the same trust in these sources of information, I can agree or disagree on interpretation, policy, etc., but at least we have a common ground of facts by which we can understand each other. However, if someone doesn't accept those facts, it seems like an unbridgeable gulf. What meeting of minds could there be?

 

You'd almost have to go back to something very basic: I see a cup on the table, he sees a cup on the table, therefore we agree there's a cup on the table. But if we can't agree on facts that neither of us can directly verify -- the results of a national election, for example -- then how do we proceed? The authorities he believes are not the authorities that I believe. 

 

Convincing people that their sources of truth are flawed or false is a tough chore and, if a person's investment level in them is very high, it can be almost impossible. Challenging strongly held beliefs induces anger and entrenchment. How does one get through the battlements? 

 

What would it take for someone to convince me that the New York Times is a flawed source of basic facts? Quite a bit, although I'd like to think it was possible. A core philosophical principle for me is that all knowledge is uncertain. Sufficient evidence and sound reasoning should convince me that a belief I hold ought to be amended or abandoned. This flexible take on knowledge is at the core of philosophical liberalism. "American Pragmatism" is a term for it but the notion is rooted in the Enlightenment era and goes back much further than that. 

The approach requires not becoming too attached to one's beliefs. I think that's very difficult for many, if not most, people, who often are fervently attached to their world views and see non-believers as enemies, and intellectual practices that would erode their beliefs as dangerous.

Returning to the question at hand: How do you get back to a point of having a common enough set of facts that democracy is possible? I don't know. I fear it may not be possible short of catastrophic events and social upheaval.

Sorry to end on a pessimistic note. I'm an optimist by nature so I'll keep thinking about the possibilities. But, you see, epistemology is important!