The fact that this year’s deer hunt was my first ever came as a kind of shock to my neighbors on St. Peters Church Road.

“Your first time?” they said, with a mixture of wonder, and perhaps even a little embarrassment on my behalf. “Really?”

Really.

I can’t say what exactly made this year the year. It’s been building slowly for a while.

(By the way, I just reflexively looked out the window in case a buck happened to be ambling by; that involuntary neck-swivel is just one of the many strange symptoms that have afflicted me since the season opened.)

Maybe it was the delicious venison steaks our neighbor Buddie gave us last year; or the explosion of deer ticks we’ve observed, coinciding with a seeming explosion in the deer population around here; or the silent urging, night after night, of the constellation Orion, the great hunter, wheeling overhead as he stalked the heavens.

A great hunter, I ain’t. At least, not yet. On opening day, believe it or not, I actually had a shot at an eight point buck. I had him in my sights and pulled the trigger. In my excitement, I missed, but Buddie got him a few minutes later from his stand, so I had a chance to see, up close, the deer I’d tried to kill.

Seeing that magnificent creature laid out and disembowled didn’t have the effect on me that I thought it would. I was more fascinated than disgusted or upset.

Much more disturbing was the feeling I’d had the moment after I took the shot, when my heart rate went through the roof; the blood rushed up to the back of my head; and my vision narrowed into a kind of reptilian tunnel. “Buck fever” is as good a way to describe it as any other, I suppose. I truly felt out of my mind – with excitement, adrenaline, you name it. There was a sense of transgression, too, and, God help me, euphoria.

All for a deer I missed!

It was a truly awesome feeling – in the original sense of “awesome –” and it helped me understand the passion that drives lifelong hunters to defend their right to hunt. Nothing in my “normal” life, which is largely concerned with the imaginary, the virtual, held a candle to that intensity.

I’d sat through the hunter-trapper education – along with a roomful of somewhat puzzled 11 and 12 year-olds, who were probably wondering what the big bearded guy was doing in their classroom. I knew about safe lines of fire, and hunting etiquette, and the like.

But all of that seemed to fly out the window when I finally, at long last, had a buck in my crosshairs. Something primal took over – or rather, someone primal, the instinctual hunter encoded in my genes, a violent and not-too-cunning fellow that a lifetime of acculturation had managed to suppress.

I’m not crazy about that guy. He frightens me a little. More than a little.

But I’ve eaten meat my whole life, and by doing so, I’ve outsourced the killing, left it to others, out of sight and out of mind. There’s something utterly honest about hunting, it seems to me, especially when it’s undertaken with humility and respect for the prey.

I’m not a complete convert. I don’t know if ultimately I’ll have the patience for it, or the endurance. Maintaining a state of lethal alertness hour after hour, day after day, takes its toll.

But the quickening of mind and body that happens in the critical moments?

It doesn’t get any more real than that.

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 06 December 2012

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com