For one week out of the year, rural West Virginia returns to a bit of the old hunter-gatherer culture.
It is during this week that all anyone can talk about is deer.
The animals virtually ignored all year round, except for when one jumps in front of someone’s car or when a couple of them raid a vegetable garden.
The exception, of course, are those who consider themselves to be true deer stalkers, ones who go out on the first day of bow season and hunt every chance they get until the DNR closes muzzleloader season toward the end of the year. Those are the serious hunters– the ones whose freezers and quart jars are full of venison.
But they are not typical of the average person in the woods this week.
The average hunter has taken a week off of work. If his or her work is seasonal, then it’s all the better. (Note that I said “her.” Most deer hunters are men, but some women do partake of the hunt.)
This is a time to “get some big horns,” fill the freezer with some meat that so many people find unpalatable after eating it for a week, and get some use out the ATV’s and firearms.
It’s also a chance to reconnect with those parts of us that were meant to be doing this. The human species has spent most of its time on this planet as a predator. Our lives were once sustained by the flesh wild beasts, some of them much feller than a white-tailed deer. The human animal has removed himself from these realities. Deer hunting is that chance to return.
I’m sure very few people out in the woods think in these terms. In my part of the world, I’m sure there are more than a few creationists stalking the big bucks. My guess is they don’t know why they feel so complete when they go hunting, but we all know there are very real evolutionary reasons to why man hunts, even in this age of supermarkets and mass-produced meat.
I’m sure at little cafes throughout West Virginia this week, stories are being told: Stories about the monstrous cervids with skulls festooned with the finest rapiers and daggers ever fashioned by nature. Stories about impossible shots that sound impossible because they are. Stories about old guns and old friends and old dogs that illegally ran deer to the hunters’ guns.
And I’m sure that more than a few children and first-time hunters have fallen for the old “heat-seeking bullet” story.
I’m sure people are complaining about the deer kill being off during the opening day. Too hot, some will say. Last winter killed a lot of deer, others will explain. Coyotes are killing too many deer, goes another theory. Not enough people hunting, the old-timers will lament.
For this one week, the deer are important.
Those that die will most-likely be eaten, if not by the hunter, then by a poor family that cant afford beef at the grocery store.
Those that survive the annual harvest of flying bullets then must face the looming winter, but each deer killed during this week is one more that one be taking sustenance from one that survived.
And those that survive will live to see another rutting season and pass on their genes to another year’s fawns.
In this yearly ritual, the people are fed, both in terms of spirit and food, and the deer are managed.
At the end of the week, the rifles and bullets will be put away. The hunters will return to their more mundane existence.
But for that one week, we become a deer culture once again. During the Paleolithic and Neolithic, cultures developed that relied upon red deer for survival. They managed the land to keep deer numbers healthy, for the deer provided them with meat, clothing, and antlers from which one could make weapons or festive ornaments. The red deer thrived because people valued them.
A century ago, the white-tailed deer was a very rare animal. Centuries of unscrupulous game management and then intense market hunting depleted their numbers. it was only when more scientific management practices became commonplace that the white-tails returned.
Their numbers have continued to grow, largely because we have scientific management practices. These practices never would have been developed had the deer not been valued in some way. And that value is as a game animal.
It is not the basis of the entire economic system, so the hunters of today are only getting a little taste of those deer cultures that once existed. It is not even a taste.
It is just a little drop upon the tongue
But for this one week, they revel in that mere half taste. for in this atavistic ritual. they are taken back in time, in way however distorted with firearms and ATV’s, when the deer was our survival.
In the bleakness of November, they set out to gun for the buck.
They return to the deer cultures of yore for a week that fleets by like a twelve-point into the deep woods, where no one can make a clean shot.
His image distorted by brush, the deer is safe.
The bullets cannot get him.
