This year started with the decision my wife and I made to not plant a garden.
It felt like giving up, not only on carrots and tomatoes but on our shared joy of coaxing life from the ground. In the last two years grasshoppers had eaten everything so that by mid-July our garden looked like a bonsai Argonne Forest on Armistice Day, all shattered stalks and lifeless vines. Faced with another spring and summer of drought, we threw in the towel before germination could give us false hope.
Prolonged drought in my corner of the Northerns Plains is nothing new. The lack of rain shaped our landscapes and hardened our residents, human and otherwise. But when you’re in one it’s like living under crushing debt. All you think about is how much rain you’re not getting, and how much everyone else is.
But then it rained. Too late for most crops but the July green-up lifted a lot of faces in my county. I recall asking a biologist friend if the moisture was too late to grow additional inches of antler on our deer and elk. He paused, and then told me I’d be better off hoping for an early frost.
A flush of moisture in a dry season might not meaningfully benefit habitat or horns, but it can set up conditions for blue-tongue. Clinically known as EHD, or epizootic hemorrhagic disease, it’s the bane of whitetail hunters, a gnat-transmitted virus spreading in late, dry falls following moist summers that infects deer and can wipe out whole herds in a week.
Early rumors of EHD in my county were confirmed in mid-September by pods of whitetail fawns, running aimlessly across open fields in broad daylight, suddenly orphaned and adrift. I was trading texts with a buddy about EHD mortalities when I got the news every child of a certain age both expects and dreads. My mom had died, her body pressed against a garden fence at her Ozarks cabin, found by a neighbor after my sister and I requested a welfare check.
I’ve wondered about her last hours, if she struggled against the failing light or if she curled into the cove created by flowers she planted and tended, astonished at her luck of escaping without confinement or decrepitude.
As I traveled from my home in Montana to Missouri in the aftermath of my mom’s death, it hit me that that moment turned me from son to orphan, if not as wild-eyed as those Milk River whitetail fawns, equally disoriented.
Signs of Life
After sharing what was left of my mom with her friends and family and her lush garden, her ashes sifting down through incandescent Midwestern light to settle on rosebuds and lilies and the irises she dug up and moved from our family’s farm where I discovered that I was a hunter, I returned home, grabbed my dog Nellie and my shell belt, and went hunting.
As an adult, I’ve deflected various traumas and tragedies by taking a gun and a dog and distracting myself with ground to cover and birds to find. After dealing with coroners and morticians, hunting a cackling rooster — my Nellie pushing it into the bright Montana sky — somehow didn’t seem as murderously intentional as waiting in a tree stand for a deer or decoying a goose into a hail of gunfire.
The first covers were a balm, watching Nellie work snowberry patches, sniff up a bird, and anticipate the shot and retrieve. Hen. Hen. Then she rousted out a long-tailed rooster that made me forget that just 24 hours earlier I had been presenting death notices to my late mom’s bank and insurance agent.
But on the next push death shoved back in. A whitetail doe, belly distended and her eyes pecked out by birds, lay grimacing in the orchard grass. Another doe decaying in the creek, then a buck lifeless on the creek bank. In just a hundred acres Nellie and I stepped over seven dead deer, such a grim accounting that we bagged the bird hunt a rooster short of our limit.
A couple years ago my buddy Steve, with whom I’ve killed bucks, packed elk, and shared too many campfires to count, told me after a couple beers that his hunting light was fading. He’d still maybe kill a deer for meat, but his drive to put on miles in pursuit of big racks and high adventure was less interesting to him than spending time with his toddler grandsons. I thought about the statistics I have written about, that most hunters start to slow down around age 60, as hunting drive diminishes and physical limitations increase, and that by age 65 most hunters have hung up their guns and camo.
I could see the point, especially this year, surrounded by death in its various forms.
But I’ve also realized this fall that our narrative of a hunter’s inevitable retirement isn’t quite right. Sure, physical decline is a part of it — a rotator cuff tear reminds me of my fragility every time I pull my bow — but as we age we develop a different relationship with death. In her last years my mother had been cautious about making new friends. She had buried so many old friends that she insulated herself from grief by deflecting new relationships.
Read Next: The Breaths of Birds: What Hunting Taught Me About Life and Death
In the right light, the act of intentionally killing an animal can seem unnecessary, even gratuitously cruel. My kid brother died a few days before Halloween, and the gaudy, casual celebration of death nearly turned my stomach that year. But if time isn’t on our side — after all, each of us are hurtling toward our own death — the old saw that time heals everything is equally correct.
Drought will break. Whitetail herds will rebound. I’ll plant a garden next year.
This weekend I gathered my rifle and hunting pack and sat on the edge of an alfalfa field where I’ve killed dozens of whitetails over the years. For an hour the place seemed empty, confirming my worst expectations of EHD mortality. But then a yearling stepped out of the cover, then a doe and her twin fawns followed by a 3-point buck. As the light lowered more deer entered the field, and I watched their twitchiness temper into nervous feeding and then into familiar family dynamics. Fawns scampered. Young bucks surging with the coming rut chased their sisters and aunts around. Old does nosed yearlings and tried to restore order.
I watched and then walked out after dark, overjoyed at signs of life and extremely interested in the old buck that entered a far corner of the field and waited, watching until all the light was gone.
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