Cam rentsch

Author’s Note: This essay is, in part, an homage to Annie Dillard’s “Living like Weasels” 

A deer is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in a bed of leaves or patted down grasses that he leaves so warm you can feel it with your hand and guess how recently he was there. He comes out around dawn and dusk to slowly walk around field edges to feed, head bobbing to a rhythm you’ll never be able to hear. He thrives on the corn and soybean fields we all complain about while driving past, but also eats plenty of acorns, apples, berries, clover, and even poison ivy. When he eats apples, it almost looks like he’s smiling, and you can’t help but smile yourself, even when locked in the deadly serious knee–shaking affair of attempting to turn him into meat for supper. When the weather is bad, or a new cold front comes in, he’ll be up during the middle of the day to savor the high-sun, noon warmth the same way you do. In the fall, around late October to November, at least in Ohio, he’ll enter the rut, which means he will drive himself mad trying to mate with any nearby does in estrus. He will do stupid things, he will be active at all hours of the day and the night, he will forget to eat is his single-minded pursuit. He will, if you’re watching his behavior, seem to harass any nearby does not in estrus in a way that reminds you of the guy at the bar who deserves to be thrown out into the street and directly onto his head. 

Except, I think, for this particular deer, because this deer is standing next to the Olentangy River bike path in Columbus, Ohio. While the guys I grew up with would call this deer a “wall hanger” based on the size of his antlers, this deer was looking at me the way a dog looks at you when catch it digging in the trash can. Head cocked to one side, a little mixture of confusion and guilt in the eyes. 

To be frank, it’s not the first time I’ve been stared at, probably not even that day. I’m dressed to run, two-inch inseam shorts despite the cold, a lightweight jacket zipped all the way up, reflective gloves, and a beanie with a pom-pom on the top. I’m not the first person to note that when running you’re a prime target for insults, but I don’t think this deer thought of me the way those innumerable men and women who have shouted repetitive nonsense at me while I’m running did. 

One time, running on the Zaleski State Forest backpacking trail, a woman screamed when I passed her and her husband as they sat on the side of the trail: “Look! A deer!” I wasn’t sure if she was confused, or making a joke about my skinny legs, or if this was the first time she had seen an actual deer, which is hard to believe of anybody who has spent any time in Ohio. 

I could smell the deer staring at me, suddenly. It’s too cold to not be running while dressed the way I am. I can see how wet his nose is, and I’m sure he’s smelling me, but that unlike other deer he doesn’t smell “human” – whatever that smells like to them – and associate it instantly with “danger”. I start shivering; our breath is foggy and sends itself up to heaven in one cloud. He doesn’t blow at me the way they sometimes do when they’re pissed, a sound that very nearly could be mistaken for a dog barking. We don’t break eye contact for what feels like a very long time. I don’t remember if it was me or him who looked away, who turned and ran from the other first, an act that feels oddly like betrayal as I type it out now. 

I often find myself thinking about humans as animals. I don’t have a choice, really, being as that I study anthropology in what I have been told is a high-level, biology-heavy undergraduate program. We aren’t allowed specializations yet, so I take diligent notes in classes that cover minute details of human evolution like Ardipithecus kadabba’s toes and the obturnar externus groove in Orrorin tugensis’s femur while the forensics people have to sit in sociocultural lectures and deal with me prattling about the intersection between immigrant generations, health outcomes, and gang affiliation. 

I like to see deer more when they can’t see me back or haven’t seen or smelled me yet. My eyes slow the world and my limbs down, my heart threatens to thump its way out of my chest. You’d think I would have grown out of this, but these animals have a hold on the animal writing this. One time, running again, I stopped on the Olentangy River bridge and watched the same deer from before graze near a doe and a fawn. I’m in the same outfit – literally the same exact one, I think – and I stop and watch the deer while people crossing the bridge give me odd looks. I’m cold again, but I don’t think to move away, probably because some predator instinct maybe remnant from Homo habilis, or an even earlier ancestor, is helping me to ignore the early stages of hypothermia. While I’m watching these deer, I can also see two carp and a heron in the water of the Olentangy River. It could almost be a damn postcard. I haven’t seen that deer since. 

Once in a writing workshop I was told that I wrote like “a woodsy Joan Didion”. I think that watching those deer was one of my woodsy Joan Didion moments. I assumed I would write nothing but nature essays when I started writing nonfiction – I mean, what else was there for men to write about other than the woods? The important stories, those about race and class and trauma and inheritance, I layered with fake names and called fiction. The woman teaching that writing workshop gave me permission to write one of those stories as an essay that was supposed to be about dall sheep, but morphed into a memoir about masculinity and power, about the insanity and the grief I felt in the weeks leading up to my grandfather’s death. It was the first time I ever strung together a few sentences that meant anything. 

I see deer most often now while running. When I was a boy, I can’t remember how I saw deer the most. They seemed to be everywhere and nowhere, all at once ephemeral and concrete. We hunted them, we chased them through the woods when it wasn’t hunting season just for fun, we would sometimes pull the car over and count shining eyes in the headlights. Now, since I prefer to run in metro parks when I’m forced to stay in the city, I’ve become more and more familiar with deer that don’t seem to be afraid of me in the way the ones from my boyhood were. The Columbus Metro Parks, especially Highbanks and Battelle-Darby Creek, are probably the only things I really like about the city, little plots of supposedly wild land in suburbia where people come to take family pictures and yell at their children the whole while. Maybe I say that because that’s what I saw today when running at Highbanks Metro Park. I also saw three deer, little yearling does that shuffled to watch as I went past the same way the children being photographed did. 

Once, I saw a piebald deer at Highbanks. I was so excited I told two of my professors and my father and imagined calling my grandfather and grandmother to give them the news, the same way I did when I first saw a ruffled grouse drumming. “Piebald” meaning that this deer had a coat that was splotched in brown and white – sort of like a person with vitiligo – carrying a recessive series of genes inherited from both parents. Sorry for the brief science talk, I just need to also tell you that, in addition to the coloration changes, that deer also likely had scoliosis, an overbite, and several internal organ deformities. Less than two percent of all deer are piebalds.   

The Linnean name for whitetail deer is Odocoileus virginianus. They live in environments ranging from Canadian tundra to Bolivian jungle. There are dozens of subspecies of whitetail deer, with almost every geographic region they live distinguished in some way from their cousins who live someplace else. At the extremes of their range, they can weigh anywhere from four-hundred pounds to a little less than one-hundred pounds, the size of either large dogs or small elk. Their coat changes from a reddish-brown to a dark mahogany over the fall, but they always have bright white tails that they flash when they are running away from something that scares them, both a warning sign and a middle finger. They give birth to fawns with white spots – you probably know this from Bambi – but those spots are designed as camouflage to help keep the deer alive by letting it hide. They don’t move at all when they’re young; it’s safer for them that way since they can’t run away yet on their spindly legs. You can walk right up to them and pick them up the way you would a big gangly puppy. I know people who have made them pets this way. 

On a rainy morning, I can see nothing around me but their glowing eyes in the light of my headlamp. Deer have what is known as a tapetum lucidum, something that human ancestors long ago lost, meaning that their eyes glow when exposed to light. Unsure about the beam of light from my headlamp in front of them, the deer are strutting nervously, glancing at me and at each other, wondering if they should run away, if I’m as dangerous as I am to them in that moment. I can’t see their bodies, just their glowing eyes, but I know their tails are twitching. I don’t have an arrow nocked, but I’m thinking about it. A doe steps in front of me, right into the light, and I see a tuft of hair, about a single square inch, right where I would send the arrow. In the front of that arrow is a metal broadhead that I sharpened to hair-shaving thinness; it would slide right through her heart before she even heard the string of my bow. I had seen it happen many times. After the arrow hit her, she’d duck down, the run maybe a hundred yards, probably less, spraying blood from the holes in her sides and nose until collapsing to breathe a few last ragged breaths before dying. It’s brutal but efficient, and the only quicker way is with the pneumatic bolt-gun that Anton Chigurh carries in “No Country for Old Men”, one that I could no doubt find on several farms in this county. 

Looking at the deer in front of me, I decide I don’t want to kill her for a reason I still don’t fully understand. The best explanation I have is that I didn’t want the moment to end, to muddy up the beauty of the thing with worrying about whether my shot was clean, about blood trailing, about willingly causing pain to another sentient creature instead of just using my money to buy any meat that I wanted and shuffling the job off killing an animal off on somebody else. So I just sat, and drank coffee out of my green Stanley thermos, holding the little cup from the top between my gloved hands with reverence, like I’m taking communion from it. I drink and watch the sun finally rise, and by the time I can see clearly all the deer are gone. All in all, it’s a really nice moment, one of those things I remember wistfully, wishing that I could spend more time outside. 

I’ve reached a point in my life where the voluntary killing of wild animals for food is a hobby, which is often strange to think about, especially in regard to how necessary it felt when I was a boy and how necessary it was for humans to become human. I can justify it any number of ways, same as I could explain Aiello and Wheeler’s expensive tissue hypothesis, but I don’t exactly want to do that here. You probably aren’t interested in either of those things. What I will say is that you don’t get to live an American life without killing, without inflicting cruelty, and that you should not be able to live your life while ignoring that fact because it is often inconvenient to how you conceive of yourself. I am not exempt from that reality. I own an iPhone and Nike shoes despite knowing about the conditions of their factories in East Asia, I still buy vegetables, fruit, and chicken despite knowing about the conditions of the migrant workers who make sure that I can keep those things on my plate. I still eat grain products produced by industrial machinery that kill thousands of whitetail deer fawns – among other small mammals and ground nesting birds – every year as they indiscriminately reap crops. All told, I’ve probably killed more deer through the great food chain of capitalism and the consequences of my choices at the grocery store than I have with a bow and arrow or a gun. 

I hunt less and less every year. I don’t let myself do it unless I’m practicing my shooting several times a week, which I’m not right now. I don’t think it’s right, to go out and half-ass something with lives literally at stake – where the goal is killing. Running has taken most of the time I would need to do that away from me, and I don’t really mind at the moment. Having the brutality of killing at an arm’s reach, delightfully shrink-wrapped in the meat section at Kroger’s, is nice. You’re cut off from the reality of it, and so you rest a little easier because you don’t have to confront it. 

Maybe what I really loved about that moment before dawn with the deer all around me was how that moment made me feel more human. I know what it means to be human in less-esoteric terms, can talk till I’m blue in the face about bipedalism and tool-making, about the ability to assign cultural meanings and then share those meanings, but that raw “knowledge” fails to communicate just how that moment felt. I want to take any ancestors, all of them as far back as we are still calling them human, from Mexico and Europe and Africa, and share that moment with them. I want to see I they would choose to leave their bow by their side. If they would understand that one of those moments is not the sort of thing to take lightly, not that between us and the deer, especially then, there was a connection that would last well beyond that moment, well beyond the lives of the animals involved in it.  I believe they would understand it, and that, in whatever way they understand such things, the deer do too. I want the deer to be looking back at me, wondering if I can smell them the way they’re smelling me.