By Blood

The splayed body of the dead deer lay before me. It was a large buck, steaming in the November dawn, with the grass about it frosted and standing like a field of bayonets, each blade icy and sharp. I had begun to cut in already, carefully through the paunch, up through the skin at the sternum, and forcefully in through the ribs. I stood back for a moment. On it’s back, the cauldron formed from the buck’s spread chest held a sea of blood, enough, it seemed, to swamp the world. More than enough. My hands already bloody, I pushed my rolled sleeves farther up my arms with the bridge of my nose. Kneeling, knife in hand, I sank my fists into that red gulf.

The blood was scalding. Half numb from the morning’s cold, my hands burned in the pooled liquid. I was amazed that anything could carry such fire within it, that anything could hold such a heat and yet live. If ever there was a meaning, if ever there was a secret to be discovered, it would be here, I thought, in the once-living fire of the buck’s blood. My hands disappeared to the wrist, running over and across the organs, plumbing the depths of the dead animal’s chest for some mystery, some clue.

I found…nothing.

Well, certainly not nothing. But of the great and romantic ideal I sought, there was hardly a trace. There was blood, sickly bright, clotting here and there, and the close, fecal stench of the deer’s guts rising up into my lowered face. There was bone, and flaps of cut skin, and white hairs plastered, with blood, on my arms. Beyond all that, behind it, I could discern nothing clear. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for.

I had been raised in a hunting family. The sight of a gutted whitetail hanging from a limb was a childhood sight, an unexamined facet of youth, and of home. Yet years had separated me from the practice, first at boarding school, then college, till the hunt became a half-mythologized pursuit of my father, of my fore-fathers. I studied it, and read about it, more than I did it. I came to love Hemingway, the rugged white hunter stalking the green hills of Africa, and the measured philosophies of Josè Ortega y Gasset’s Meditations on Hunting. Both men, and writers like them, romanticized the hunt, turning it into an idealized concept of masculinity and death. I was captivated by it, struggling as I was to place my family’s acts in a context other than redneck gun-love. I heard such literature called hunter porn; I despised the term. Hunting was a sport, an art, the past-time of kings and the heritage left us by our stone-armed ancestors. Hunting was never about the killing. The killing was anathema to the pursuit, a sad byproduct, if anything. It was a dirty word, uttered by the base and unlearned, disrespectful to the sacred sacrifice of the quarry. The chase was all that mattered, the heart-rending ballet of man and beast, the duet of predator and prey, a passion play between equals. Hunting was never about the killing.

Yet I had just killed the deer. It was dead, by my hand, when minutes earlier it had walked, very much alive, from the woods on the other side of the field. It came on with a quickness and a purpose as the dawn was still spilling out around us, perhaps following the scent of a doe, perhaps hungry. Still and waiting in the boll of a tree, I had shot the buck twice. The rifle had been shatteringly loud in the quiet air. The deer had only fallen with the second shot: I watched it go to its knees and fall through the hard lens of the scope. To say that I had done anything other than kill it would be a lie.

There were other cracks in the romantic façade as well. I had not been stalking wapiti in the Wasatch Range or the Absarokas, I had not been tracking cape buffalo along Kenya’s Mau Escarpment; I was on the driving range of a golf course in Connecticut. The whitetail there had become as thick on the ground as rabbits. I was hunting to protect the landscaping as much as anything.

Nor was that deer the first I’d shot. I’d killed several deer over the years, yet always with my father, who, out of habit or impatience, or lack of trust, had always done the messy work of cleaning the carcass. Though I was in my mid-twenties, the buck I was now wrist deep within was merely the first I was attempting to dress on my own.

It proved a sobering task. The first cut had been made with delicacy, wicking the blade of the skinning knife across the abdomen, deep enough to pierce the hide without rupturing the stomach within. In contrast to that care, hacking through the rib-cage had been more of an exercise in shear brute force. As I then knelt, hands in the body cavity, it was the stink that became most immediate. So intimately close to the buck, the mess of scents overwhelmed me. Male whitetails have a musk, carried in glands on the rear legs, strong enough that, hiking in the woods, I’d often known by smell when a buck had recently passed. Inches away, that musk was cloying and sickly. It mingled with the bloated stench of bowel and dung rising from the deer’s exposed gut. Breathing through my mouth, I bent into the odor.

With a knife, I felt gingerly around the buck’s stomach, carefully cutting the fascia that held it in place. I traced down along the intestines, holding back gagging, to the deer’s rectum, unceremoniously and swiftly circling it with the knife as best I could. The entire workings, the means by which the buck ate and lived, became a sloppy armful, a blood-slick sack filled with digested and digesting plant matter. I scooped it up, and plopped it onto the cold ground.

Then, reluctantly, hesitantly, I cut away the deer’s penis and testes, emasculating the buck. It was an important step; the testosterone and hormones found within can sour the meat, making everything a waste. Still, it was awkward. I tried to muster up a journeyman’s nonchalance, but nothing in the world felt more disrespectful in that moment than stealing the buck’s pride. Not sure quite what to do, I heaved the remains into the brush.

I set about removing the rest of the organs from the body. The heavy liver, I picked up in two hands, and then took out kidneys, bladder, and everything else below the diaphragm. From where I had cut off the stomach, I followed the throat up into the chest, pulling down on the windpipe and slicing it out as far up as I could reach. The lungs were two ruins: I had aimed for the deer’s chest, the region of vital organs my father had always called the boiler-room. The slugs’ passing through the buck’s breast had made a mess of the twin lungs. And the heart as well.

It seemed like the heart should have been talismanic, that I should have been able to pull it out fully formed, and hold it in my hand, biting it perhaps as the Cheyenne and Pawnee had been known to bite into bison hearts. At the very least weighing it there upon my palm, hoping that on those scales of balance my own life measured worthy. But the buck’s heart had been left a broken and pulpy thing. I told myself that meant the kill had been clean, the death as sudden as I could make it. I scooped out the pieces of heart in handfuls.

The cleaning largely done, I grasped the buck by his legs, and tipped it over. The body, though heavily muscled, had not yet stiffened, and it turned loosely. The opened torso of the deer spilled out all that blood across the ground, down the slight rise on which the body had lain. The frosted grass melted under the tide, and the earth soaked up the blood. Everything was left red.

I was un-traumatized, I was un-astounded. I took the deer to the butchers, and would receive it back again wrapped in butcher’s paper. The cleaning, the stink and the indecency and the puzzlingly out of muscle and bone, was suitably repugnant; perhaps it should be so. Perhaps such things, killing, dismemberment, need to remain terrible enough to give us pause. It should not be easy. It should not be as easy as cellophane and bar codes. We should choke on it all, a little. We should know the sometimes-awful scramble by which life perpetuates itself, always to the cost of other life. I hunted for the deer, I killed him. I hoped that I deserved the life more. I might not have.

That night, I stood at the kitchen sink in my home. I scrubbed my hands, again and again, with the tallow of the buck stuck beneath my nails. I would smell him on my hands for days to come. The fat also clung to the blades of the knives I had used, and with a sponge I washed it off as best I could. Not paying attention, my hand slipped. The blade ran along the outside of my right index finger, deeply, mercifully not bone deep. Deep enough, though, to make me queasy. I stood there with my hand beneath the cold water, streaming blood down the drain, holding the flaps of my own flesh together. The blood, running out, was as red and bright as the buck’s, as red and bright and precious as anything. I wanted to hold it back inside me, to close up the wound and seal that living-fire back within. But I couldn’t.