The Deer I Shot

My freezer is a wall of meat. Rump roasts, neck roasts, venison steaks. Shoulder chops, loin chops, loin roasts. Stew meat, soup bones, spare ribs, breakfast sausage, and VHB—venison hamburger.

“You trying to break my saw?” Harold the butcher said after feeding the ribcage to his blade. He pressed two small pieces of copper bullet into my palm—shiny against the blood from the head I was holding. It was a fine head—six points, with personality, three tips broken off from fighting—and my first deer, splayed and broken on the butcher’s steel table.

I had been in my uncle’s tree stand for five hours when the deer snuck in, lured by the scent of store-bought urine. It was snowing, and I’d been playing mind games with myself for hours: fifteen more minutes and I’ll eat a granola bar. Fifteen more minutes and I’ll check my phone. Fifteen more minutes and I’m going home. Then he appeared, ten yards away, sniffing a gauze patch soaked in pee.

The bullet severed his spine, just over his front shoulder. He had tried to step forward but copper stopped him. He fell where he stood, in the snow, his nostrils still pulling for air. There was no blood.

The cell phone in my pocket rang a minute after the deer was dead. It was my uncle. I started yelling. I said Fuck yeah! at least six times. My uncle said calm down. He said relax. He said he wished he had a tape recorder.

All things want to live. Nothing wants to die.

I brought my buck to Harold’s in Canterbury. Pop music blared from a boombox on one of the stainless-steel tables. Sides of beef hung from hooks—literally sides of beef, cows cut in half, their spines making an emphatic red question mark, darker than the pink flesh and white fat around them. When I thought I saw the meat moving, I figured I had been in the woods too long. Then it moved again. “They’re twitching,” I yelled over the music. “They’ll do that,” shouted a meat cutter in a rubber apron, hosing down the killing floor. “They’re still warm!”

It took hours for the adrenaline of the kill to disappear. I called my parents and some friends. I killed a buck. I killed a buck. I killed a buck. Some offered immediate congratulations. Others didn’t know what to offer, then, after some thought, arrived at congratulations. “Is that what I’m supposed to say?” a friend in New York said. “Congratulations?”

As I drove away from the deer’s dismemberment, my thoughts began to shift. There was a moment, as I pointed my gun, when the barrel hit the tree stand with a metal-on-metal cling. The deer froze. His body was still except his nose, except those twitching nostrils. Twenty feet up, I froze, too. He looked at me. I thought we made eye contact. Those big dark pleading eyes, human eyes it seemed, pointed in my direction. I held my breath. When he turned his head to sniff the gauze again, I cocked the hammer. I put the cross hairs on his face, then moved them down and right. When he quartered I saw the front left shoulder and I pulled the trigger. The gun went off with a black-powder blast of smoke. It wasn’t until I was sitting there in the car, driving away from the cutting, that I realized he hadn’t actually looked at me. We did not make eye contact. But in that moment, I thought he did. I thought he looked at me, then looked away. And then I pulled the trigger.

“Just like The Deer Hunter,” my mom said. “Remember that movie?”

“Don’t trivialize this,” I said.

“Did you cry?” my sister said.

“Don’t tell me anymore,” my mother said. “I’m going to cry.”

“Remember when Jason burned a hole in the frog,” my sister said. “We both cried.”

“Maybe I’ll cry later,” I said...