Gary Cartwright
The Thrill Of the Hunt
What’s the appeal of squeezing off a few rounds into a defenseless animal? We commie liberals may never understand, but that didn't stop me from heading into the woods with my right-wing-nutcase friend.
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That night we meet on the porch of the BigWoods lodge to drink whiskey and listen to our fellow hunters talk about their day, about the hunt, and about their dogs, which they agree are as important as their guns. “I had a really good time with my dogs,” says one shooter, who returned with no ducks in his pouch. Normally, the marshes are alive by mid-December, but the warm autumn has yet to inspire many ducks to make the trip down from Canada. Deer and feral hogs, however, are plentiful, and some of the hunters will work until the early hours of morning, skinning and quartering their prey. I ask if any of them ever have regrets after they pull the trigger. A few admit they do. Doc says that he takes comfort in the knowledge that at least the poor creatures “didn’t die in a nursing home.” Jim Autrey, who has hunted deer all over Texas and heads up a video production company called Texas Deer Hunter, which sells hunting equipment and produces radio and TV shows about hunting, tells us that not once has he regretted a kill. “But I shot an American buffalo,” he adds. “And let me tell you, it was almost a religious experience.” Doc rolls his eyes but says nothing. Later we drive to the processing barn, where a bloodied doe, her eyes permanently frozen in horror, hangs from a hook while skinners undress her. The young woman who killed the doe, a high school ag teacher, drinks beer and talks in an excited voice about her day in the deer stand. As she was preparing to shoot, she accidentally sat in a bed of fire ants, leaped up, broke her nose on the window frame, and made a clean kill. I sense that this is a day she won’t forget.
On most mornings Doc wakes early, reads eight newspapers on the Internet, devours a hearty breakfast of eggs, sausage, and pancakes, then hurries to his office to warn his patients to mind their diets. This Monday morning, however, he sleeps late for the first time in months. We spend most of the day riding the estate in the Rhino, spotting bands of deer but shooting nothing, for which I am grateful. After a time we stop and walk through the woods, overwhelmed by the silence and the sensation that we are the last people on earth. In a recent e-mail to me, Susanna explained, “As to the blood sport, it is not the blood that truly engages me or Bob with hunting. It is the still active quiet of the woods; the sun coming up through the stark woods; the quiet, the listening; the quiet, the listening.” Although the present course of the Trinity River is several miles away, its meandering history is recorded in the diversity of the land where we are walking—alternating parcels of sandy loam, black clay, oxbow lakes, great open meadows, and dense tracks of oak, elm, cedar, and pine trees. Land in the Trinity floodplain is virtually useless for farming and ranching, but that hasn’t stopped people from clearing the woods or draining the marshes or otherwise destroying wildlife habitat.
In this magic setting, where solitude trumps a lifetime of casual beliefs, Doc’s ranting about the evils of the tax code seems to make sense. As an example of how it encourages people to make environmentally destructive moves, he tells me about an old patient of his who clear-cut 12,000 acres because growing grass instead of trees reduced his tax bill. Doc is a practical breed of conservative, one who believes that the death penalty is underused, that drugs should be decriminalized and treated as a public health problem, and that the environment should be protected because, among other reasons, it’s a good political issue for Republicans. Despite his distrust of government, Doc has made huge improvements to his property by tapping the government’s wetlands-restoration programs, which require pipeline, energy, and utility companies to pay landowners to plant trees and replace wetlands the companies destroy. He compares his mission to restore the habitat to Fitzcarraldo’s quixotic quest to haul a boat over a mountaintop.
Since returning to Texas, in 1984, Doc has bought and restored hundreds of acres of endangered bottomland hardwood, including part of what used to be his family farm and boyhood hunting ground. He has organized other land-owners into the Middle Trinity River Basin Conservation Cooperative, which now covers 190,000 acres of river bottom. “Conservatism and conservation are first cousins,” he tells me. “My holy grail is to make money off my land without raising cows. I hate cows.” Trees that took a hundred years to grow and five minutes to fell are being systematically replanted. One acre of floodplain can sequester six hundred tons of carbon, Doc calculates, and if the Bush administration ever makes a carbon market possible, he figures to clean up. That’s not all. He plans to pump groundwater into the river and sell it downstream to the city of Houston. And that wastewater that Dallas is so eager to get rid of? It travels downriver and helps refurbish his bottomland hardwoods. “Every time someone in Dallas flushes a toilet,” he jokes, “I get a new oak tree.” I read somewhere that in the five years from 1992 to 1997, Texas led the nation in loss of undeveloped land; every two minutes another acre of Texas farmland or open space becomes a subdivision or a mall or a road. Until today, I regarded the BigWoods as merely a place to hunt. Suddenly, I appreciate it as the living preservation of our Texas heritage. And if Doc can make a buck saving it, more power to him.
An hour before sunset, Doc’s high school pal Dick Swift, a lawyer and former state representative from Palestine, joins us for one last attempt at bagging a Boone and Crockett—size buck. Swift sits in a folding chair on the small bed of the Rhino, his rifle across his knees. I try to shield my face from the spray of mud as we head for the river, bumping and sloshing through ankle-deep marshes and ribbons of black gumbo. When we reach the river, Doc follows its bank to a wide clearing and parks in a clump of trees where the deer won’t see us. It’s freezing cold. Doc pours cups of straight whiskey and passes them around. There was always a bottle at the hunting camp, Faulkner wrote: “Those fine fierce instants of heart and brain and courage and wiliness and speed were concentrated and distilled into that brown liquor which not women, not boys and children, but only hunters drank, drinking not of the blood they spilled but some condensation of the wild immortal spirit.”
Mercifully, no deer venture into the clearing, and we spend the twilight hour drinking and joking in soft voices and trading tales of derring-do and folly. It’s dark by the time we head back to the lodge. Billions of stars illuminate the night sky. The only sounds are yapping coyotes, hooting owls, and wind rustling the naked treetops. I feel cold but alive and complete and, for the moment at least, pumped by that primal atavistic drive only hunters understand. I started to say we hunters, but you know what I mean.
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