The Hidden Life of Deer Read online

  What if they’d caught up with the bear? Considering the degree of their excitement, they probably would have attacked him. Another bear might climb a tree, but this bear was disabled. If he lacked a choice, he might have had to fight them. The outcome of that would be quite clear—he was ten times bigger than they were. Many dogs have been killed by bears, including the brave dogs that are used to hunt bears. As for my dogs, they go everywhere I go, so I saw myself leaving my office at night with the dogs beside me and a bear somewhere nearby in the dark. The dogs would catch his scent and rush at him before I could stop them, and that would be the end.

  After that, I made sure that nothing was left to attract the bear, including the bird feeder. Even so, early one morning in mid-July we looked out the glass door in the kitchen and saw the same bear on the lawn, coming toward the wooden ramp, just as he had come the first time. I rushed around shutting the other doors to keep the dogs in, and the commotion scared him, so he departed, taking the same direction he had taken before, off toward the pond, and on the way he again passed the place where the Delta fawn had been hiding. By then, it seemed, he had passed this way so many times that he could have worn a path. Did this explain why the Delta fawn was missing?

  I went there later to look for blood or hair, but I didn’t find much. I did find deer droppings and a few deer hairs, but these looked like the winter hairs of an adult, which would have fallen out naturally. A decent sense of smell would have helped, but mine is minimal and I had no way to interview my dogs. I didn’t like to think that the fawn had been killed, but there it was—no Deltas, no fawn, and a disabled bear in the area. To find the silver lining of what seemed like a very dark cloud, I thought that the bear would have had a good meal. The food supply of our area did not increase in size, but he did; each year he needed more food than he had needed the year before. To find a fawn would help him.

  On the morning of August 3, to hugely complicate the question, a partly grown fawn whose spots were fading hurried past my office window on the short grass between my office and the field—the first deer of any kind I’d seen for weeks. He had come from the south, the direction of the bear trail, also the place where I’d seen the Delta doe with her newborn fawn, and he was heading for the north side of the field where in the past, the Deltas slept in the grass. He was alone.

  Who was he? Could he be the Delta fawn, now more than two months old? Could his mother have fed him only at night when I couldn’t see her, as a doe will sometimes do? Wouldn’t this mean that the seemingly endangered fawn as well as the disabled bear were both surviving?

  I wanted to know but didn’t expect to. This was a question from the Old Way, the life of the wild that we see in small pieces. I could do no more than the bears and the whitetails do—keep looking and listening for more information. But in the summer of 2008, this had been difficult. In May and June, the weather pattern that in winter brought snow almost daily then brought rain almost daily, and the flourishing grass had grown so long that it was up to the shoulders of a deer. The best I could do was to search the field for patches of flattened grass that deer make when they lie down. I found many such patches on the north side of the field—the place where, if deer were there at night, we would see their eyes shining in our headlights—as far from the bear’s pathway as they could get without going into the woods. Some of the patches were big and the bent grass was somewhat loose, as if an adult deer had been lying down briefly. Other patches were small and the grass was packed down very tightly as if a fawn had spent hours in them. Thus, to my great surprise, the Deltas seemed to have been there all along if only at night, perhaps having moved their fawn across the field when they noticed the bear’s presence. Perhaps this was why the youngest daughter of the Deltas was searching so earnestly. Obviously, her mother and sister were not where she expected them to be. Perhaps the doe moved the fawn in her absence. Since the flattened-down grass showed that they were using the field, I concluded that she had found them.

  One question remained. Why did the fawn walk past my office? The third of August was a very hot day. Since the Delta doe didn’t nurse him in the daytime, perhaps the fawn became thirsty. Perhaps he had gone to the pond for a drink of water and was on his way back when I saw him. But then again, perhaps not. That’s one of the troubles with wildlife observation. You find questions you cannot answer, and mysteries you cannot solve.

  Chapter Seven

  Drivers, Hunters, and Their Prey

  Deer are most vulnerable as fawns, of course, but they face danger throughout their adult lives too. Most of the danger comes from us. And to a degree, vice versa. An important cause of whitetail death is vehicle accidents. These don’t compare to deaths by hunting, but the number is large just the same. Many people are also killed in these accidents. In fact, deer are rated as causing more human deaths than any other animal, with bees causing the next most. That doesn’t really make sense, as bees mean to sting you and a mountain lion means to kill you, but a deer doesn’t mean to get hit by your car. Still, it’s a statistic.

  These accidents are unfailingly horrible, even if no human being is hurt. Too often the deer is not killed outright, but just seriously injured. Deer hit by cars are not given a chance to recover on their own as was my bear. They are invariably shot by the police or by some armed bystander, as were two deer whose accidents it was my misfortune to witness.

  The first of these took place on the road I take to go to town, where a doe was hit by a car. This was the doe whom I thought might have been the mother of that mysterious third deer of the Betas, the little fawn who might have been adopted. When I arrived at the scene, she was awaiting her fate at the roadside, not struggling, looking at the small crowd of people who had gathered to observe her and were busily telling one another not to let the children who were present witness the sad scene. The children were drooling with fascination and had no intention of not watching.

  The doe’s legs were broken. A doe cannot walk on broken legs, obviously, and I believed that her destruction was inevitable. But did we need to terrify her, as the onlookers were doing? I persuaded a few of them to give her some space. Then I learned that our neighbor Don had seen the doe on his way into town and had turned back to get his rifle. Soon he returned, and to my horror, he and another man grabbed the doe by her head and her broken front legs and started to drag her into the bushes. Why? Because they wanted to spare the curious children the sight of Don shooting her. To me, the sensibilities of the children were vastly less important than the terror and suffering of the doe—just because animals can endure pain does not mean we should inflict it on them—and I did my very best to persuade the parents to remove their children and begged the two men not to drag and thus torture the doe but to shoot her where she was. I was unsuccessful. The two men dragged the doe about fifty feet into the woods, bumping her over every obstacle, making no effort to ease her pain or to move her carefully. Then they shot her. So the children saw an animal being tortured if not shot.

  The second such event I witnessed was just as bad, perhaps worse. In the middle of the day, an antlered male whitetail was hit by a car in the eastbound lane of Route 101, New Hampshire’s east–west highway. This seemed especially tragic, as the deer had come from a fairly open area. If the driver had been paying better attention, he might have seen the deer at the roadside. By the time I came upon the scene, people from other cars had gathered and ambulances and police cars were present, lights flashing. Even the damaged vehicle was receiving assistance—a tow truck was hooking on to it. Fortunately, the driver and his passengers were not hurt.

  The deer was, though. He was right in the middle of all this, very much alive, terrified, and struggling to raise himself on his broken bones. He kept collapsing when he tried to stand, but he could hold up his head—he was desperately looking at the woods where he had come from, woods that would hide him if only he could go back. No one was paying any attention
to him, knowing that the police would shoot him when they got around to it, probably when all the people were safely out of the way.

  I have never seen anything so all alone. I could hardly imagine what it would be like, to be so utterly alone, suffering, unable to stand, surrounded by a crowd of some other species who were busily providing themselves with every kindness, every form of care, even caring for a vehicle, and stepping right over me to do so because to them I was nothing at all. I’d be alive, but my life would be over. The deer saw this too. I left before they shot him.

  I’d rather die from a bullet than a car accident. I’d also rather be shot than experience the terror and pain of being herded into a slaughterhouse and clumsily hit with a stun gun or butchered alive if the stun gun wasn’t working well, as is often the fate of the animals we eat. Thus I have no real complaints against deer hunting. I’d rather be a deer living free in the wild, and suddenly drop dead from a bullet in the heart or brain, than be a cow or pig or sheep in the agricultural industry with slaughter in my future. Wouldn’t we all?

  So I won’t repeat the reasons why hunting is good—population control, no other significant predators than us, etc.—because everybody knows those reasons. But I do believe that tree huggers like myself overstate the reasons why hunting is bad. Hunting is cruel and dangerous, we say. Also we can’t take walks in hunting season, not even if we wear orange vests, because bullets are flying and we’ll be shot. Or so we think. One year I did a little research to find out how many people were actually shot by hunters, and learned that no people were shot, not even one, not that year and not the year before, although hunters had been out there by the thousands. Well, one man was shot in the leg with buckshot, but he wasn’t hurt badly, and certainly not killed. And this, it seems, is normal for New Hampshire. So much for the complaints of we tree huggers.

  Why the impressive safety record? The State of New Hampshire requires every hunter to be licensed, and to get a hunting license, one must either produce a valid license from another state or pass the course on hunting sponsored by Fish and Game. In 1998, I signed up for the course. My friends and family were dumbfounded, but my reason was fairly benign—I often wrote about the dog and cat families, predators all, and eventually realized that since all of these were hunters, their evolutionary focus was something I knew little about. Better to learn more before writing more.

  The course was fascinating. Most of it was devoted to the safe use of firearms, but one also had to learn the rules. You can’t hunt at night, for example, except you can hunt coyotes at any time during their mating season, from January through March. All you need is a license and a gun. This was the one question I missed on the final exam. I was already so horrified to have learned that coyotes were exempt from any meaningful protection that I assumed you didn’t need a license. Even so, in a class of about thirty people, most of them macho types who were surprised to find a tree-hugging grandmother in their midst, my grade was 98 percent, the highest in the class by far. Oh, the good feeling. I was issued a hunting license and have it to this day. When you pass the age of sixty-eight, as I did eventually, you are given a special permanent hunting license.

  One thing the course did not teach was how to hunt. Whatever information I acquired on the subject I got from watching animals hunt and also from our neighbor Don, who had Micmac ancestors and was a profound observer of the natural world. At the time, he lived in a cabin on the mountainside, from which he kept an eye on the local wildlife and was kind enough to alert me if an animal of interest was heading my way. I would watch for it. We also searched the woods individually and together, and remembered what we saw so well that once in 2004 we found ourselves discussing some unusual droppings we had noted in 1997. We both knew exactly which droppings. They had been large and oval shaped, and Don, with hunting forever on his mind, more interested in deer sign than any other sign, took them to be those of a large buck. I thought they were those of a porcupine. In the intervening years Don had been mentally reviewing the droppings and had revised his opinion of the type of animal that left them. By 2004, his wishful thinking had evaporated, and he agreed it was a porcupine. A big porcupine, but a porcupine nevertheless.

  Don was such a good hunter that for him, the hunting season often lasted less than an hour, or it did if he stayed in New Hampshire. He also had a Maine hunting license, and sometimes he would hunt on the Penobscot Nation as the guest of his Indian friends. In New Hampshire, the season opens half an hour before sunrise on a day determined by Fish and Game. A few minutes later the people in our neighborhood would often hear a single gunshot and we would look at each other, knowing that Don got his deer. We would also know he did it with a muzzle loader, not only from the sound of the gun but also because a week or two must pass before Fish and Game allows hunting with a regular rifle, and Don likes to get his deer early. In all the years we’ve known Don, I remember only one when he didn’t get a deer. He is a carpenter and contractor and also a licensed guide, and that year was very busy. Otherwise he got one or more deer annually, and of course he used the meat. In fact, when he wasn’t working or hunting, he was fishing, also very successfully, and he fed himself and others, us included, with his bounty.

  An interesting fact about hunting is that unlike other sports, nobody knows who the stars are. The only acknowledged measure of success seems to be the size of the trophy, which is usually determined by the standards of the Boone and Crockett Club, named, of course, for Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, founded by Teddy Roosevelt, and dedicated to big-game hunting and the assessment of trophies. Thus whoever gets the biggest buck is almost by definition the best hunter.

  This of course is far from true. In reality, America’s best hunters are people like Don, out there without store-bought aids and gadgets, knowing where the deer are and what they’re doing, moving silently through the woods in the manner of the big cats. Any other style of hunting, such as baiting one’s game or using dogs or complicated gadgets, is something like fishing with dynamite and thus is not a measure of skill.

  I realized the scope of Don’s abilities one autumn night when he was giving me a ride home from town in his truck. No other cars were on the road, but to my surprise he stopped suddenly for no apparent reason at the place where, years later, I saw the Tau deer crossing. Don said that a whitetail buck was nearby. He had caught its odor. And he was right. Even with my limited sense of smell I eventually caught it—the musky odor of an ungulate not unlike the marvelous scent of cattle in the barns of my childhood. Why a large buck and not some other deer? Because the rut was starting, and a mature buck has a characteristic scent. Don had caught it through the window of his truck while moving along at forty miles an hour. The only other people I knew who might have done this were in the Kalahari.

  America’s very best hunters are not people. They are animals that range in size from shrews to mountain lions. But Bushman-grade hunters such as Don approach their abilities and use the same skills, or many of them. The first time I went hunting with Don, he noticed the scent of a deer wafting from some bushes we were passing. He quietly pointed this out, and having been told what to expect, I too caught the scent. He eased off through thick brush in that direction, quiet as a cat.

  Gaia put the will to hunt deep into our psyches—there’s nothing like it. I followed Don step by careful step, eyes wide, ears open, hardly breathing, but so far behind Don that I could see no more than a part of his jacket through the leaves. Then suddenly I knew he saw something. I don’t know how I knew this—I just did. I froze. I saw movement as he raised the rifle, then saw him turn, the rifle down. Through the leaves he had seen the hindquarter and antlers of a six-point whitetail buck but not clearly enough for the shot. The buck moved off, and we moved after him until we realized he must have circled around and was following us, feeling safer, of course, if he knew what we were doing. Since he probably knew all about us, we seemed to have no chance of bagging him. We went
home.

  I recall that hunt as an experience of the utmost intensity. Perhaps extreme intensity can cause ESP, which was how I seemed to know for sure that Don had seen something. There certainly was no standard explanation. Even so, I hesitate to offer one that I hardly believe myself. But then, the life of the Old Way overflows with phenomena that we don’t quite understand, and we must accept them as such when we encounter them.

  Don and I went hunting again later, in the woods on the west side of the road. There in an open grove of trees we saw a spiker—a fawn of the previous spring with small, spare antlers. He ran. Don shot him through the chest, but the deer kept running. We tracked him for half an hour, then I had to go—a board on which I served was having a meeting I had to attend—so Don, an excellent tracker who would never abandon a wounded deer, went on alone and found the young deer lying dead on the far side of a stream.

  In general, each hunter is allowed to kill one deer, and each hunting license includes one tag that the hunter must fasten to the deer as soon as it’s dead. Don should have tagged the spiker, but it was an inconsequential deer and he wanted to get a bigger one, and as I was leaving he wondered aloud if I would tag it, so I gave him my tag. (He used his own tag later on a huge six-pointer whose head he mounted on his wall.) I wasn’t sure if you could legally give away your tag, but the hunt we’d just accomplished was more for me than for Don, and I certainly owed him for the experience. I didn’t see that it mattered all that much whose tag was on a deer, and hadn’t fully realized that I would become the named hunter of the spiker.