The Hidden Life of Deer Read online

  By the time I returned from the meeting, Don had dragged the deer out of the woods. Within twelve hours of killing a deer, one must register it with Fish and Game, so Don put the carcass in his truck and we took it to the nearest registration station—a sporting goods store in a neighboring town. As usual in hunting season, a group of men had gathered there to view the deer brought in by hunters, and when they saw me at the desk showing my hunting license and supplying the particulars, they eyed me with suspicion, then eased outside to look at the deer. These men of course were hunters themselves. They didn’t think I’d shot it, especially not with a muzzle loader, and most especially since a guy like Don was standing beside it.

  So they drew me into conversation, hoping that I’d give myself away. One of them asked where I’d shot the deer. A common answer to this question is ”In the woods,” as many hunters don’t like to reveal the good places to strangers. I said, “In Peterborough.” They tried again. “It was standing when you took the shot, was it?” one asked. It wasn’t standing, of course, as these men well knew from looking at the carcass. If the deer had been standing, the bullet hole through the skin would line up with the hole in the muscle below. But it didn’t, because the deer’s reaching legs had stretched the skin of his chest forward, and after death the bullet hole slid back over intact muscle. It is of course much harder to hit something in motion than something standing still, especially with a heavy, awkward muzzle loader, but I had no choice. I said the deer was running. They still didn’t believe me, but they had failed to trick me and they seemed a bit grumpy. I felt I’d won, and added a flourish to make them more grumpy: “Lead them a little when they’re running,” I advised.

  I may have outfoxed them, but not the game warden, who was on the phone when I got home. He didn’t think I’d shot the deer either, and he knew I hadn’t after he tempted me into talking about the gun and I told him I didn’t like the powerful kick. I’d never fired a muzzle loader, and had no idea that they don’t kick. My fraudulence was revealed. But this wasn’t exactly evidence, so there were no consequences to my crime. The game warden, a very fine man named Craig Morocco, is much admired by sportsmen and environmentalists alike, and I regretted my attempt at deception.

  I also regretted the death of the deer, whose skin now hangs on my office wall and whose meager antlers stand above the dog door in my office, an echo of a larger pair of antlers that were given to me by someone, and that stand above the regular door. As a fawn, the young deer had survived his first winter but hadn’t had time to learn about hunters. Before he saw us, he had never seen a hunter. He had not been sufficiently cautious, probably because for the first time in his life he was experiencing the rut with all its distractions and desires, and when he saw us he ran in the direction he was heading. That brought him right in front of Don. A more experienced deer might have wheeled and run the other way, which would have brought him into heavy cover.

  Did I learn how to hunt? No indeed. I had to hit a target with a .22 to pass the firearms portion of the hunting course, and if I say so myself, I’m not a bad shot, because when I was a kid my dad taught me and my brother how to shoot a .22. But I have no wish to fire a heavier weapon, or indeed, any weapon. As I seem to have told the game warden, I don’t like the kick. More importantly, I have no wish to take a life, although a hunt itself is so all-consuming that one forgets about things like that. I didn’t learn how to hunt, but I did learn how it feels to hunt, which was all I really wanted. And I believe I can say with confidence that hunting with a camera or noninvasive wildlife viewing is nothing at all like real hunting.

  As a girl, I used to stalk deer in the fields by crawling through the grass on my belly, and often got quite close before they saw me. If I had been a Bushman with an arrow, I could have taken a shot. I never had such thoughts at the time—I just wanted to be near a wild animal. I wanted to be part of the natural world, to belong to the Old Way even before I knew about the Old Way. Out in the woods on that first hunt with Don, I found I had opened my mouth so I could hear better and taste whoever’s scent was in the air. My eyes felt hard. My pulse was racing. I was almost not breathing. I was in the moment—strongly, strongly in the moment. That’s what hunting feels like. I looked like and felt like what hunting animals look and feel like. Others who live in the Old Way know all about that.

  How do the good hunters learn to hunt? Looking through the lens of the Kalahari where information was passed from generation to generation by shared experience, especially information about hunting, I wondered if some of us in the so-called industrialized world learned to hunt in a similar manner. So I did a little research, interviewing about fifteen hunters from different parts of New England. Most of them didn’t know one another and had no contact with one another, and I met them more or less at random, so they could not be considered a group. But all had one outstanding similarity—all had learned to hunt from an older person, often a father or an uncle who in turn had learned from a father or an uncle. Each hunt is unique, with its particulars depending upon the victim, not the hunter, and this would seem difficult to learn from videos or books. I was told of one man, the father of a friend, who hunted every year but had read somewhere that he should smell terrible in order to cover his natural odor. So every year he went hunting unbathed and wearing filthy clothes, and his hunts were always failures. He never once managed to shoot a deer. Better that he had learned from an experienced hunter who knew that deer are extremely sensitive to odor, and that you cannot mask your human odor by making it stronger and worse.

  But there was more, again thanks to Don. After our second hunt in the woods, when I came back from the board meeting and saw the carcass of the spiker, I noticed that the testicles had been removed. I asked why. Don said he always did that—he put the testicles in a tree. Why? Because they flavor the meat. But why the tree? Because the scent would spread out to attract other bucks where hunters could find them. Don had yet to use his tag, so perhaps in this case the plan had merit, but always? Does one want other hunters hunting the deer that next year one might hunt oneself? Don certainly didn’t, and didn’t quite have an answer. He hung the testicles in the tree because the man who taught him how to hunt had done so.

  This too seemed like an echo of the Kalahari. The reasons that one did certain things were lost in time. Such was the Old Way.

  Interestingly, many of the other New England hunters whom I interviewed also put the testicles in a tree. They too were not sure why. They seemed not to have wondered about it, and were kind of amused when asked. Hmm. Gosh. Why is she asking about this? And then, like Don, they produced a few unlikely and quite different explanations. But all agreed that the men who had taught them how to hunt had done so, and one suspects that the elders of these men had also done so. To me, the custom had a Paleolithic air. Who knew how long it had been going on? Had it anything to do with masculinity? Women hunters are a recent phenomenon, whereas men have been hunting big game for at least 35,000 years. Are some of today’s hunters the most recent link in a chain that reaches back to our ancestors, perhaps even to our savannah ancestors? Have older men been teaching younger men on through time, right on up to the skeptical men in our local registration station who correctly assumed that I couldn’t hit a deer if it was running? Those men knew more about hunting than I may ever know, and probably from an early age at that, which surely is why it bothered them to see me claiming a carcass. Even if they read these words, which I’ll bet they don’t, they wouldn’t upgrade their opinion of me, because the hunting knowledge they accumulated did not come easily, and my anthropological approach doesn’t count.

  The Old Way of passing information is, of course, used by all social animals, including the deer, and is why a population of animals in one place may behave very differently from those in another place. My husband and I once hiked in an enormous state park in the Blue Ridge Mountains and were amazed to come upon a group of deer on the trail, a few of
whom simply moved aside to let us pass, as people might do in the aisle of a supermarket. They had no fear. We could have touched them. They also had no predators. The wolves and the mountain lions had been eliminated long ago, and human hunting had been banned for many years. The deer population had lost all knowledge of predators. For information to pass in the Old Way, a young, naïve deer must be with an experienced deer when the informational event occurs. Years passed without events, and the skills of detecting a hunter, hiding from a hunter, running from a hunter, stalking a hunter from behind to keep him in view, were all forgotten. The deer on Blue Ridge Mountain could not have been less concerned if we were trees.

  Not so the deer in New Hampshire, who have been hunted by our species since the Paleo-Indians arrived. In those days, whitetails escaped from hunters by running away, just as they had been running from their other predators, all of whom were present while these deer evolved, which is why deer can run at forty miles an hour. Running would not have helped much against wolves, who themselves are long-distance runners with phenomenal endurance—deer sometimes escape wolves by going into ponds where the deer, being taller, can touch bottom and the wolves, unable to touch bottom, must swim—but running would have helped against hunters with spears, and also would have helped somewhat against bow hunters as soon as the deer learned the flight-distance of an arrow.

  But running doesn’t help as much against a hunter with a rifle. The advent of modern hunters and hunting laws created new situations for the deer to cope with. They may have thought they knew about our species from dealing with those who called themselves The People of the Deer, but the newcomers from Europe were not like the Indians. If at first they were not quite as dangerous because they lacked the skills, they became more dangerous later, with modern rifles. And by then, the Indians had rifles too.

  Game laws have existed in the British Isles since medieval times, laws that became increasingly complex and carried serious penalties, but when the early settlers came to the New World they brought the game laws with them only as memories, probably unpleasant memories, since European game belonged to rich land owners, and the early European immigrants were more likely to have been the poachers than the landed gentry. In 1646, Rhode Island tried to resurrect some of the game laws, and other states and colonies eventually followed suit, but no one paid much attention to them. By the middle of the nineteenth century, remorseless, nationwide, year-round hunting had all but eliminated every kind of deer, from the moose in the North to the mule deer and the elk in the West to the whitetails in the East. Only the caribou remained, too far north to be available to most hunters. Dr. Rue points out that during the late 1800s in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont, deer were so rare that the sight of deer tracks in the snow caused headlines in the local papers. We had killed off the deer before they could figure out how to elude us.

  It’s said that there were once about thirty different subspecies of whitetails, each adapted to a different area or climate. The most northern were Odocoileus virginianus borealis, or northern Virginia deer—those best adapted to places like New Hampshire and southern Canada. Farther north, whitetails don’t survive. In much of Canada, moose represent the deer family, and north of them, caribou. However, when deer in the United States were facing near extinction, game biologists and others began to subject them to management. It’s probably safe to say that no other mammal in the world has been so heavily managed. And game management, being geared to the sport of hunting, wasn’t always the science that it is today. Just as fish bred in hatcheries are regularly transported to various lakes where they are dumped into the water to be caught by sportsmen, so, in the not-so-distant past, deer were taken from the few areas where they survived and transferred to other areas, either to increase a population or to “improve the breed,” all for the benefit of hunters.

  With so much interference, the subspecies mingled or the indigenous deer were replaced by deer from completely different environments and thus could be poorly suited to the new place. Imagine, for example, deer from Florida being transplanted to the harsh New England climate, where the rut is timed so that fawns will be born in the spring. Florida deer have fawns throughout the year, so their rut would not be set for November. Eventually, nature would sort this out, but until then fawns could be born during snowstorms with no chance to survive. Imagine too the relatively robust northern deer being taken to the South. They would be bigger than the locals, with heavier hair, thus far less able to withstand heat, but their males might triumph over the local males for females, and within a few generations the characteristics of the locals would have faded forever with all the advantages that enabled their subspecies to thrive in a hot climate. The present New England whitetails were introduced in the middle of the nineteenth century, who knows from where? An interesting feature resulting from transplantation was that sooner or later, most new populations adjusted more or less, but the characteristics of their subspecies were erased. According to some authorities, only one or two subspecies still exist as such. All other whitetails are said to be “generic.”

  When meaningful game laws were finally enacted and enforced, hunting was limited to a few weeks in the fall, daytime only. But as recently as 1935, when my father started his farm in New Hampshire, deer were still rare. The New Hampshire farmers never liked wild animals, including deer, except as venison, because wild animals ate their livestock or their crops. Long before the 1930s the large predators had been destroyed, the fur bearers had been trapped, and the hawks and owls had been shot out of the sky and nailed to barn doors as a warning to others. Not until the 1960s, after most of the farms had gone out of business, did the New Hampshire fauna even begin to return to its original condition and by then the deer knew about the game laws. They knew when the hunting season began and when it ended, and then became less fearful of people especially after dark. In other words, they have learned our present customs and have adapted to them, as they had adapted to the Paleo-Indians before us, and to the wolves and the mountain lions before that.

  Male deer are hunted more often than females, and therefore are more cautious. In our area, they normally stay in deep woods in the daytime, and as has been said, they seldom flag their tails because the white is so conspicuous. Not only do they want to avoid a hunter who may be stalking them, but they also want to conceal their very existence. This is their wisdom.

  Dr. Rue provides statistics: “Where there is no hunting, the ratio is 100 bucks to 160 does. Where there is hunting of either sex, the ratios do not change greatly: most hunters would rather take a buck than a doe. Where only bucks are hunted, the adult bucks comprise 10 to 15 percent of the herd, adult does about 50 percent, and the fawns 35 to 40 percent.”[1] Better to be born a doe.

  In our fields, I occasionally see male deer during the rut, when they come into the fields if females are present, and spar with one another, as if they had forgotten all about our species, at least for the moment. As has been said, in keeping with the general pattern of the deer family, young males don’t stay with their mothers and sisters. Instead, they gather around older males, and thus can learn from them. They learn, but they are not protected—when on the move the older males let the younger males go first, so if somebody gets shot, it’s one of the youngsters and not them. The older a deer becomes, the more he knows about avoiding hunters, and because each year a deer grows ever larger antlers, some of the survivors have eight or ten points on their antlers, and some have even more.

  But such deer are rarely seen. They move about cautiously at night, and by day they hide in the deepest woods, in swamps and other dense cover. Some people call them “gray ghosts.” During the time that I was talking with any hunter kind enough to answer my questions, I sometimes heard references to these gray ghosts—someone would mention a rumor that a really large buck might be in such-and-such a place, and all the men present would listen, alert but silent, perhaps planning to go there for a look. I’
d realize that somewhere in the deep woods a solitary buck who so far had managed to elude human hunters was hiding, but hunters were talking about him, hoping to find him and kill him for the sake of the antlers that he could not help but grow. The older he got, the less were the odds of his escaping. In a way, he was doomed, and if he didn’t know all this precisely, he had a sense of it.

  All this, I think, is very important. We think of deer as escaping by running, and of course they do. But they also hide, and this to me is very interesting. Trying to hide would be the worst possible defense against a wolf or a mountain lion, if only because deer are themselves olfactory animals and exude scent to inform other deer. Cats are reasonably good at detecting odor, and the dog family is exceptionally good at it. Hiding would also be a poor defense against the precolonial Indians who, in the manner of the Kalahari hunters, knew more about the woods and were better hunters than most of us could ever be. Yet hiding is an excellent defense against modern hunters, out there with semiautomatic rifles and other specialized equipment.

  Probably there has not been enough time for evolutionary pressure to create an innate adjustment to the rifle. Thus the change is almost certainly a cultural development that the deer have figured out for themselves. Young deer learn from older deer how to escape from human hunters, and pass the information later to next year’s fawns. Thus the practice of hiding may have developed specifically as a defense against hunters with rifles. Did deer across the country figure it out individually or spontaneously? Or did those who survived by hiding have time to teach enough of the others so that the practice could spread? Nobody was keeping track, it would seem, hence as far as we are concerned it’s one more mystery of the Old Way that we may never solve.