DEER HUNTING

A long time ago, when I was attending writer’s retreats at Glen Lake, Michigan, I discovered Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lake Shore. It’s a stretch of lakeshore that reaches back into the eskers and moraines, left there from the last ice age. They are steep sided hills and ridges, covered with maples, oaks and ash and their flanks stretch  down onto the shoreline. I go there when I can and walk the slopes, talk to the animals and make believe I belong there. Once, for my small writers group, I wrote a piece about walking this one particular high meadow. I called it “Deer Hunting.” I was hunting deer, early in the morning before the fog burned off. I was wet from dew on the tall grass and had seen deer beds and fresh droppings. I explained how I finally found the deer and began shooting. Shot after shot I took aim and squeezed. In the end I revealed that my weapon was a camera with a big lens and that I had several trophies to take home with me from that hunt. 

Now, over a decade later, I’m still deer hunting every time I go to the “High Meadow.” Day before yesterday I was there in the late afternoon. I drove three hours to get there before sunset, that magical hour of low angle light. But clouds blew in and my magic hour turned into an ordinary cloudy afternoon. I still walked the meadow. I have a better camera now with an even better lens and I was searching for deer. Not even the animals can move through the grass without leaving a trail. You can tell which direction and how fast they were going and I got into a spot where there had been a lot of traffic. Then I saw the large, beaten down circle with a deer’s shoulder and leg. The hide had been gnawed away and stripped of flesh. Chunks of deer hide were strewn about but all of the red meat was gone. Across the way an eight-point buck’s head was set aside, undisturbed. Behind it in the grass was the ribcage and spine. Blood spills looked recent and the bits of flesh still left on white bones had not yet dried. I was fresh on the scene. I reasoned it was probably a mother coyote and her young; they would be six months and between them, they could take down a buck.        
A few minutes later, cresting a low ridge that rimmed a bowl shaped depression I had to look hard but there were five dark spots in the tall grass some two hundred yards down range. They were moving toward the trees. I thought immediately about my writing and about coyotes who were probably sleeping off their big meal. We get nostalgic with the Bambi concept and think of them as nature’s darlings but coyotes need to eat as well. Certainly, cars and highways are a new danger but the struggle to survive is timeless and grim as it might seem, the buck was just recycling the food web a little sooner than he might have wished, if he wished at all. Park Rangers protect wildlife from hunters with guns but the true hunters sleep in the same tall grass as the deer. The high risk business of survival is everyday stuff for the deer and the coyote. I live a charmed life, no worries about hungry predators outside my door. Our predators cheat us out of our money but we get to wake up in the morning.