cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Mass is Ended, Go in Peace Yesterday after work I got the first deer of the year. It was a very small deer and I am grateful for it. The hunt was was an amazing and magical experience. As I walked to my spot I found that the air was filled with thousands upon thousands of tiny winged insects. I could not tell whether they were true flies or members of some other winged taxonomic division of insectia. They did not bite or sting or bother me in any way. The weather was unusually warm for October and perhaps the temperature prompted a massive hatch. There were storm clouds far off and downwind, which had a slight coloring effect on the late afternoon sunlight. An intermittent breeze was blowing. At those moments when it stopped, the miniature gossamer wings of the flies moved around in a great cloud of what passed for a very convincing model of Brownian motion. The effect was utterly magical. I quietly sat down amid the tall grass at the crest of the hill near the edge of the woods. There are large power lines on great pairs of wooden stilts that run through there. Odd as it sounds, I do not find them ugly. There came a slight crackling, humming, buzzing sound from the wires from time to time. Literally, there was electricity in the air. Everything seemed wholly alive. Even the air it's self, filled with these minute life forms and the static charge of electricity from the power lines ('stray voltage' is a myth, by the way. There is no danger from such power lines being close by). With the air filled with tiny moving bodies, my eyes continually registered motion in my peripheral vision. Again and again my brain said 'deer' but then half a second later I would realize that it was just the motion of the flies. I was sitting out there for probably an hour and a half and I was not bored for an instant of it, partially due to that constant phantom stimulus. After an indistinct period of time, I whispered to whomever was in charge of things that today I don't need that buck that I missed last week. We just need some meat. I would be very happy with even the smallest deer. Just enough meat to feed us until I get that $5,000 that is supposed to arrive in the mail in a week or 2 (oh yeah, that's a whole other thing that I should write about). Well, I got EXACTLY what I asked for. You know, the moment that a deer appears is a strange thing. So simple, so obvious and yet inexplicably magical. There is not a deer and then there is a deer. That is the thing about hunting deer. There is just no telling. At any point you may go from zero to 60 in the space of a few seconds. The mind must be ready to leap. You can have literally hours and hours of what amounts to mediation on the nature of a meadow and a strip of trees. And then in space of a second or 2, usually with absolutely no notice, the deer appears and you experience something akin to enlightenment. The deer suddenly presents it's self and the mediation has borne a sort of fruit. Except that the deer isn't exactly the enlightenment. Rather, it represents the opportunity for enlightenment. A catalyst of sorts. Out of your mediation, you are abruptly faced with yourself in the form of the deer. In this case, the deer appeared very, very close indeed. Only about 10 yards distance. It was small. A very small doe. I thought that probably it was one of this past spring's fawns. Instantly I thought that there must be one or more larger deer right behind it. If only I would wait 15 or 20 seconds I would surely see a larger one. But a fraction of an instant after having that thought I realized that I did not have 15 or 20 seconds. The deer was standing facing me. The wind was in my favor but it was so very, very close that at any moment it would surely see me and run, flagging it's tail in the alarm system that would cause the other deer to run as well. It was this deer or no deer at all, this shot or none at all. I balanced the reticle of my scope on the center of it's chest and softly squeezed the trigger. This time I did hear the shot, which is unusual for me. The deer went down instantly. I knew that after hitting it at such close range with such a devastating device as a thirty-ought-six with a 180 grain hunting bullet there was absolutely no chance at all of the deer getting up and running from me. So I stood up immediately and walked towards the deer. Another, larger deer did in fact run from where it had been just out of sight. It ran across the meadow and stopped just short of the cover of the woods and looked back at me. I could have easily shot it but I did not do so. I waved it off and spoke to it. "It's over. Go on." That deer left. I took a few more steps and knelt down before the dying deer. It's chest moved slightly. I removed my hat. I thought about shooting again to finish it, but decided not to. The deer was slipping away very fast. It would be dead in seconds. Under the circumstances, it felt as though it would be more cruel to shoot it again. I spoke in as soothing a voice as I could muster and I thanked it while it died. I told it about how this would provide food for Ida and the baby. And then the chest was still and I could see that the life had gone out of it. I could see no bullet hole as it laid. The deer looked completely perfect. As though it had just laid down and stopped. Then I went to the house to get Ida and show her the deer, because she always wishes to see such things. As we walked together we stopped where I knew there was a vine that bore large clusters of ripe wild grapes. I picked an especially large cluster. Ida asked if she could eat some. I told her no. These were for the deer, not for us. We came to the deer's perfect little body. Ida touched it. "It's very soft," she said. "It is." "So we can have deer steak now?" "Yes. But first I want you to say thank you to the deer. We both have to do that." "But why? It's dead?" "Because it gave something to us. And it had to die for us to get it. And maybe the deer has a spirit or a ghost that will hear us thanking it." "Ok. Thank you, deer," Ida whispered. Carefully, I placed the bunch of grapes into the deer's mouth. 10:53 a.m. - 2008-10-10 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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