A Night's Sustenance

Until I was about in first grade I wanted to be a doctor like our family doctor. Today, after attempting to insert the IV-like pointy straw into a juice pack, only to spray red liquid all over my mail (while tearing the pouch), I realized that it was probably a good thing they never let me work on the living.

I'm not real good with blood in non-professional settings.. But it's part of what I have to deal with, much too often it seemed, for only in getting into the nuts and bolts of a catastrophe could I find out things that might have prevented it from reoccurring.

Seeing a picture of a scene on TV or in photographs in no way prepares you for the real thing. In photos there is no sense of lives snatched from this world, of moments of adrenalin or fear. The victims still feel like strangers. In real life, the scattered pieces of a life invade your very being, and you will bring it home with you for many, many a night. The vision of what you saw will display across the back of your eyelids like an old matinee that plays again and again. It's more than a picture, it's an auditory and sensory remembrance; sight and smell that you can't wash off you and can't put away in a drawer with the photos.

When I got back from the last one, it was particularly difficult. As I shut my eyes I reached out to touch the substantial and warm doggy form of a rescue Lab, who I let sleep on the bed that night, just to hear them breathing. My house was locked, and the smoke, fire and burglar alarm were armed. There was a box of hydroshocks in the nightstand and I had formerly frozen biscuits ready to cook for breakfast. I'd be OK.

Back when I was younger, I was a hunter, bow and firearm I didn't hunt for sport but for food for the table. Growing up, if we didn't have venison or fresh caught fish on the table, dinner would have been sparse.  But I loved it, getting up early, getting into the camo, painting up my face (with earth colored greasepaint, not Revlon) and sneaking through the woods like I was on some sort of covert mission. . .that was a blast. Climbing up a tall stand trying to hold my heavy 20-gauge Belgium Browning semi-auto in one hand was interesting to say the least. I know the friends I hunted with, more than once, took bets to see if I'd make it into a particularly tricky stand without yelling for help. It might have taken me 15 minutes but I got into my stand solo and the view was incredible.

I remember my last firearm hunt. It started snowing early and it was -6 degrees. I had on long johns and two pairs of coveralls and I still had to clench and unclench my muscles to generate warmth as the day wore on. Finally, my friends went back to the house, out on 500 acres in the far North. They'd teased me about being a wimpy girl, so I ate my peanut butter sandwich and stayed out in the blind until almost dark. Right as the last of the days light leeched out of the sky, a big buck came, moving along the tree line in the distance. I aimed carefull, one shot, at near dark, as he ran for the thick of the forest. As the shot cracked into the frigid air, the buck leaped into the woods, as I stared, still, amazed at how a living thing like that will keep going, and how far, when it is already dead from that single shot through the heart. But the snow was heavy and darkness was on me and by the time I got down, out of the blind, tracking him was difficult. The light seeped out of the sky as somewhere ahead, a once living thing cooled, spinning itself into blood and dust from whence it came.

When I finally got to where he lay, the white tail a small sign in the deepening pool of blackness, I stood, hairs rising up along my forearms, my breath hot in my chest, despite the snow and the cold. I wasn't alone. One moment I was standing there,in rapt rumination of my pride and superiority, when something instinctual kicked in and I stopped in my tracks. There, crouching over the remains of that magnificent 12 point buck was a large, darker shadow than shadow, merged onto my kill, hunched over the ribcage, dark on darkness.  I couldn't tell where one shadow began and another ended. Something uttered a low throated growl at me; it wasn't somebody's pet and it was certainly not some cuddley woodland creature from a Disney movie. The stink of something primordial was in the air, more than blood, less than my own pride and fear and I knew that I was moving downward very quickly on the food chain.

Shooting at it in almost total darkness would only have pissed it off, so I slowly backed away and let whichever predator had found my buck have it's due. I'd taken something that, in the realm of the wild, wasn't mine to take, and something more powerful was going to take it from me. I thought I'd captured a citidel but instead found myself in an unmarked battle for which I was vastly outgunned.  So,  In that thin dissolution of starlight, I carefully made my long way back to the safety of the house, the fear seeping out of me like the deer's blood onto the snow.

I  haven't hunted since, for a lot of reasons, now taking my camera to the trees in lieu of a firearm.  The woods are my guide and my witness, the paths I take their postulate. I tread carefully, and silently, knowing that what is underfoot may be as fragile as my own heart.  

We think, as humans, we have dominion over the wild and especially when we are young, we think we are immortal. But when we are in those places, be it the forest or the skies, we are on the edge, and living is accomplished on an edge that is neither a humanitarian or lenient. The slow, the infirm, the careless . . . perish. And there will be blood. I am reminded of that daily. With each scene, each violent stoppage of that which is life, I develop a deeper appreciation of just being here, breathing, living flesh and bone. For it was in that cold wood on that dark night as I stared into the glowing eyes of something toothed and fanged, that I realized that this seemingly sturdy body, that serves me subtlety and so well, is only so much meat, and my thoughts and life history would only be a night's sustenance to some creature of the woods. . . or to fate.

 - Brigid