Bloodties

Ted Kerasote

Ted Kerasote has written about nature for a variety of publications, including Audubon, Outside, and Sports Afield, where his “EcoWatch" column has followed the many issues of wildlife and wilderness preservation. He is also the author of Navigations (Stackpole, 1986), Bloodties — Nature, Culture and the Hunt (Kodansha International, 1994), and Heart of Home —Essays of People and Wildlife (Random House, 1997). He lives in northwestern Wyoming. “Bloodties” is a condensed version of several chapters from his book Bloodties.

My back fence happens to be the southeast border of Grand Teton National Park. The boundary curves around our settlement of houses and corrals, surrounds the village, and continues to the big bend of the Gros Ventre River, where it meets the Teton Forest. We are an inholding—inheld within the park, which is bounded by national forests, stretching north to Yellowstone and beyond. Out my windows, I can see its southern boundary.

Marked by long, cold winters, high mountains and big mammals, its a natural order in which agriculture has been a recent arrival. Those who lived here before me gathered roots and berries, and, of necessity, depended on the flesh and blood and the hide and fur of animals to survive. Looking for a way to reduce my reliance on agriculture based on fossil fuels, and the inevitable costs that agribusiness incurs—wildlife lost from wellhead; to oil spills, from combine to pesticides—I have tried to respect the knowledge of these hunter-gatherers.

In my freezer there's the meat of an elk, the being whom I consider the distillate of the country. As I defrost one of her steaks this February morning, the thermometer reading minus twenty two, a crystalline stratigraphy appears throughout her meat. It’s as fine, and lovely, as the ice flowers on the kitchen windows. When thawed she smells faintly of what she ate last summer: grass and sedge, wildflowers, stream water. She smells of this place which, when I eat her, becomes an inholding within me. I guess to another I must smell of her, and of this place as well. We have joined and it’s the hunting that creates the conjunction.

Putting a piece of the broiled steak into my mouth, I remember drifting among the pines, the just dawning air heavy with the scent of wapiti. Hearing the crunch of a footstep ahead of me, I wait to hear it again before taking a step of my own. Then I wait a few more minutes. Another- crunch ... I move a foot. Forty yards off stands an elk: its ruddy hindquarters and left flank facing me. When it raises its head, I see that it’s a spike, bull—a young male and illegal to shoot.

I stand while he paws the snow and grazes. A red squirrel scampers in a tree to my right but, inexplicably this habitual watchman of the woods ignores me. Then I see another elk, perhaps filly yards off and to my right, appearing and reappearing along the forest edge as it grazes. It wears no antlers.

Waiting, I listen to the nearer elk chew. When he takes a step, crunching the snow, I take a step toward the cow. But slowly, ever so slowly, she recedes from me. I go to a knee, and tiy to sight on her. Fallen trees block my view. I stand again, move slightly left, which is even worse for a clear shot. I have to wait a long time before one of his footfalls lets me move back to the right. The cow is now screened by many thick branches.

Several minutes go by, the forest lightens, and I hear more elk in the distance ... in the thicker trees descending steeply to the headwaters of the creek. But I see no way of getting closer to them. The spike bull is twenty-five yards off, and in another two steps I’ll be within his circle of awareness. Moving only my eyes, I watch the cow elk reemerge from the trees. She is large and without calf.

Slowly, she angles away, down the steep north slope. In the many | miles walked this fall, among all the elk seen, she has become the possible elk—the elk approached with care, the elk close to home, the elk seen far enough into the season so that soon the season will be over . . . the elk whom the morning, the snow, and the elk themselves have allowed me to approach. Only the asking remains.

“Mother elk,” I say. “Please stop.” I speak the words in my mind, sending them through the trees and into her sleek brown head. She crosses an opening in the forest, and there, for no reason I can understand, she pauses, her shoulder and flank visible.

It is a clear shot, though not a perfect one — I have to stand at full height to make it. But I know I can make it and I say, “Thank-you. I am sorry.” Still I hesitate, for though I can lose myself in the hunting, I have never been able to stop thinking about its results — that I forget it's this elk rather than that elk who is about to die; that it’s this creature whom I'm about to take from the world rather than some number in an equation proving the merits of wild food harvesting over being a supermarket vegetarian; that this being before me — who sees, who smells, who knows —will no longer be among us, so that I may go on living. And I don’t know how to escape this incongruous pain out of which we grow, this unresolvable unfairness, other than saying that I would rather be caught in this lovely tragedy with those whom I love, whom the ground beneath my feet has created alongside me, than with those far away, whose deaths I cannot own. Not that I think all this. I know it in my hesitation.

Still she stands, strangely immobile. I raise the rifle, and still she stands, and still I wait, for there have been times that I have come to this final moment, and through the air the animal’s spirit has flown into my heart, sending me its pride and defiance, or its beseeching, frightened voice, saying, “I am not for you.” And I have watched them walk away. She sweeps her eye across the forest and begins to graze down the north slope, exposing her flank for one more instant, and allowing me to decide. I listen, hearing the air thrum with the ambivalence of our joining, about which I can only say, once again, “I am sorry.” As she disappears from sight, I fire behind her left shoulder, the sound of the shot muffled by the forest.

She arches her back, and elk stream from the trees, run across a meadow, and disappear into the distant pines. I run to where she, too, fled and find her kneeling in the snow, her head turned over her left shoulder. She looks directly at me with her great brown eyes, utterly calm, and my heart tears apart.

I fire at her neck and she falls to her side. As she kicks her final shudders, I go to her and sit with my hip against her spine, my hand on her flank, feeling her warmth, her pulse, her life, changing states. She is enormous, and beautiful. Her right cheek lies on the snow; her nose is moist; her eye stares into the heaven. There isn’t a speck of blood anywhere. My throat constricts with this loveliness going from the world.

After a few minutes I take off my pack, unload the rifle, and lean it against an aspen. With my knife, I slit the hide on her belly. Using my fingers under the knife as a shield, so as not to cut her viscera, I open her peritoneum and go inside her, up to my elbows. As I puncture her diaphragm, steam emerges around my shoulders with a gasp. Cutting away her heart, I feel hot blood bathe my arms, which is what the old hunter- gatherers knew when, in a cold, cold world, they found improbable warmth ... life ... in the bodies and blood of mammals.