OT: Provisional forms of “all will be well”

As background — cut to the three asterisks if you’re looking for the actual post:

Gun season opened in Wisconsin yesterday as the sun came up. That’s as opposed to bow season, for those not in the know, and the target of the hunt is the white-tailed deer population, which can be described as “thriving” and / or “out of control.” This post is not a plaidoyer on behalf of hunting as anyone’s preferred practice of deer herd management. But as long as homo sapiens wants to stay in Wisconsin, the herd will need to be managed (and it can be argued convincingly that the current overpopulation, as a consequence of which people and deer die every year when they collide on motorways during the rut, results from undermanagement). Homo sapiens eradicated the white-tail’s natural predators (wolves, coyotes, bears) in most of the state a century ago or more, and efforts to allow the expansion of the timber wolf population in the northern part of the state have met with controversy insofar as homo sapiens often don’t care to live with wolves — who are territorial, hunt in groups over areas as wide as seventy miles, and if they encounter dogs, will kill them. The jury is apparently still out on whether the increased number of wolves Up North are significantly reducing deer herd populations, but in response to increasing levels of wolf depredation, attempts are being made to delist the timber wolf from the federal Endangered Species Act. No wildlife management unit in Wisconsin prohibits the hunt on the grounds of an insufficient population — the only places not open are military bases, some state parks, an island that’s a nature reserve, and Native American reservations where residents have their own rules governing deer harvest. In the southern part of the state, the penetration of chronic wasting disease means that hunters can get additional permits for antlerless deer.

In my immediate family, my father, sister-in-law and brother hunt, in part for the meat, which we eat, in part to fill crop damage permits, issued in situations where deer populations cause more than $1,000 of crop damage, and the harvest of which beyond the first kill per hunter, as required by law, is donated to neighboring families and local charities. They have collected trophies if they kill a specimen with a particularly impressive rack, but that’s not the primary reason for them to hunt; a box in my parents’ basement holds racks of deer long eaten, but whose antlers no one ever got around to taking to a taxidermist. My father no doubt remembers hunting with his father when the harvest made up an important part of their family’s winter preparations. They also — quite frankly — enjoy the hunt as a social and an aesthetic experience.

Hunting, with all of its traditions and its hazards, some of which, despite the protestations of sportsmen, I agree are absolutely unacceptable, is a widely accepted environmental and social practice where I come from. Despite the role outdoorsmanship has played in my life, I agree strongly that automatic acceptance should be questioned. Almost every year, a handful of hunters or bystanders are needlessly killed by hunters, some of them inexperienced children. And while I’m less concerned about the deer, I understand the viewpoints of those who worry about them, too. I didn’t put pictures of dead deer in this post out of courtesy to the tenderhearted, but the death of an animal — even when every part of the animal is put to some use — is also a death.

What I’m writing about today is how my dad feels, though, and thus I beg license for not exploring the unavoidable moral controversies.

***

Wisconsin deer hunters. Not my family, but the clothes and posture are exactly right.

My cell rang too early this morning. It’s my dad. My dad never calls. Too peripatetic to sit still for a phone call most of the time, even now. And his conversation topics are so heavily concrete that it’s hard for us to have a conversation outside of a specific, very delimited issue (Time to water the pumpkins? Yup. And so on).

“Guess what, honey? We got seven deer — on opening day!”

I’m still in a haze, a bit. In my mind, I see them hanging from the frontloader of a tractor in one of the outbuildings on the farm (where my father grew up, where my brother’s family now lives), aging and waiting for processing. I remember all the pictures of hanging deer we found when we cleaned out my grandparents’ house, a whole history of twentieth-century amateur black-and-white, and then color, photography, written in the figures of proud men standing next to hanging carcasses with shy, barely suppressed grins on their faces. They look happier in some of those pictures than they did in their wedding photos — for which, admittedly, the photographer probably didn’t always allow them to smile.

“O yah?” My vowels revert automatically to their native length, and I’m immediately angry at them the second I notice it’s happened.  “All the tags filled already? Doesn’t that cut short all the fun?”

But I think my sister-in-law will be happy not to have her Thanksgiving dinner disrupted by hunters tromping in and out of the house, just like my grandmother would have been, the whole time she lived there. On the other hand, all that processing; it will take them most of a weekend, I bet, even if they share the work with the neighbors, who will also have their own to process.

“Your mom’s real happy!”

I’m sure she is, since she likes venison backstrap in particular. I’ll be home for Christmas and I’ll eat a small piece of pickled heart, maybe, with some pickled onion slices on a cracker or buttered bread, and think, wistfully, of standing in the farmhouse kitchen, usually late on the morning of opening day, while my grandmother directed me to do the pickling from her position at the stove, where she was busy frying her perpetual Saturday doughnuts, a ritual not to be interrupted by opening day. Pickled heart’s a family treat. The men, who especially loved it, were always extra careful to get the heart home safely when they field dressed the kill.

I’m starting to wake up now, though, and suddenly I remember what’s really at stake.

“That’s good,” I say, automatically. And then I try to put together a tactful question. Show no fear, Servetus. Keep your tone normal.

Because here’s the problem. All of my father’s medical problems suggested to me awhile ago already that certain things that require permits are really not things he should be doing. Yes, I’m that evil daughter who looked into whether she could get his drivers’ license suspended, anonymously if possible. (I couldn’t. I don’t think he should be driving, but he still, barely, fulfills all the requirements.) And, with a heavy heart, whether there was a way to prevent him from getting a hunting license. (There isn’t, yet, short of a competency hearing, which is not on the table. He’s not incompetent. I just don’t think he should be shooting.) He won marksmanship medals when he was in the service, and he loves to shoot. But he’s a leftie — and not much of his left eye is working any more. He said during the summer that he was going to practice shooting right-handed, but this frightens me just as much as the thought that he’d shoot left-handed and near-blind. What I really want to know is what my dad shot — or rather, whether he did.

“Your brother got two bucks, and your cousin used his tag for a doe and filled your brother’s last damage permit, got another pretty little doe.”

“Uhhuh,” I say, encouragingly. There’s a little silence. So finally I say it. “What about your tag?”

“Saw about twenty deer,” he said, “but nothing I really wanted to shoot at. We went in for lunch and took a nap, and then went out again in the late afternoon, but it was the last tag so I told your brother to fill it.”

“O yah?” I say. “You didn’t want to wait awhile, go out next weekend?”

“Nah, it was real nice to be out there with them in the blind, and they all wanted to be done, and ya know, I didn’t feel so comfortable, shooting with all those people out in the field. Couldn’t control where the fire was going and didn’t want to hit a hunter.”

“No,” I agree.

“OK, honey, gotta go, your mom thinks we’ll be late for church. Love you.”

“Love you too.” The call ends.

You know people keep telling me “all will be well.” Maybe they’re right.

~ by Servetus on November 21, 2011.