The Vegan Deer Hunter
An immigrant tries to integrate by killing something.
I’m British. My wife, who is American, wanted to return to New York after living as an expat in Amsterdam. I liked the idea of a new adventure. I was also used to being an immigrant in Amsterdam, so I already had the integration skillset.
Everything went splendidly, but as any immigrant or expat will tell you, making "local" friends is challenging. This difficulty in bonding is not something specific to Americans. If anything, Americans are more friendly than most.
But I was never part of that group of best buds from elementary school who go get a beer and watch a game. This deficiency lies mostly in me. All I need is my wife and kids, hang with a few colleagues, and have Zoom beers with friends back in Amsterdam. Besides that, my social needs are filled.
I once accidentally ended up with a bunch of bros at a sports bar and realized I was lacking something. My five bros were all wearing baseball caps, and I not only did not have one on, but I also did not own one.
My bros communicated through their baseball caps, with each visor position indicating a different mood — forward for focus, backward for physical work, and sideways for fun. The visor points like hands on a clock to describe their mindset. Subtle variations in tilt made this an expressive form of communication. The type of cap, whether old or new, carried meaning, skillfully combined with other signs like attire (jeans or khakis), location (home, sports bar, work, church), and circumstance (party, major game, work).
This language is universal in America, a language that American women understand but choose to ignore. I did wonder how many Americans from different states have gotten into a brawl because of the misinterpretation of a cap angle. How many marriages would have been saved if only the wife had looked at his baseball cap?
A bro without a baseball cap is like asking an Italian to sit on his hands.
But I couldn’t just go out and buy a baseball cap. Was it a Knicks cap, Dodgers, or Steve’s Local Garage? Like Harry Potter’s wand, my cap had not yet found me. As I was too lazy to learn the esoteric jargon of American sports, I was happy to be relegated to the sidelines of social interaction.
One day, my bros asked me if I wanted to hunt deer with them in the Catskills. This was because one of them had dropped out, and they wanted to share the costs, so I was obviously thrilled that they had thought of me. I’m always up for new experiences (often to my detriment), and I could show my wife I was trying to be social. This was a potential bonding moment.
As a remote worker, I was glad for the opportunity to get out of the house. Also, I was not planning on killing anything; I’ve never fired a gun in my life, and I was planning to miss the deer anyway. If we found any.
There was one problem, though. My wife and I don’t eat meat. I had never been a great meat eater, and as my wife was vegetarian, I followed. After a while, I found that cooking meat stinks up the house, and most meat is of low quality anyway when looked at critically.
Accordingly, I strategically omitted the trip's ‘deer hunting’ part and called it ‘camping.’ My wife, who is originally from India and Hindu, would be horrified. However, I could show I was making an effort, and as an added bonus, I could retroactively blame the bloodshed for any lack of future social initiatives.
Two birds with one stone, keeping to hunting as a metaphor.
The trip to the Catskills started with the cracking of beers. When asked what type of rifle I had, I just looked blankly. Are there different types? Do I need my own rifle to go deer hunting? I guess I thought they just handed them out at the forest's edge. Well-earned eye-rolling and pointing of cap visors to the front commenced. One of the guys had three rifles, and he reluctantly offered to lend me one. I pulled the cap visor down to hide my eyes. I was getting the hang of it.
The day ended at a lodge, with a lot of drinking, which I correctly assumed was the main reason for the trip in the first place. They sold souvenirs, and I bought a hunter’s baseball cap. I took it for a test drive at the bar, but it felt itchy. It didn’t seem to fit well, and I couldn’t help but be aware that I had something sitting on top of my head. It's like wearing socks again after a long, hot summer. I also nervously kept changing the direction of the visor to match the conversation, a skill set not yet mastered. It seemed to confuse them. I was not yet fluent in the baseball cap.
The next day, hungover, we commenced to hunt some herbivores, innocently grazing in the forest. We went to the location some guy in the bar tipped us to, and we finally managed to find a crowded parking spot filled with a small army of weekend hunters. This problem was exaggerated by the generous size of the Hummers and such like.
Making more noise than a state fair, we stealthy spread out to hunt what, in my opinion, could only be prey that was deaf, blind, and deficient in the sense of smell. We walked quietly for a few hours — a very pleasant walk. The hangover melted away, and we often paused to enjoy the surroundings. Beers were carefully cracked. Attempts at bonding were made.
At one point, the lead hunter signed us to stop, and he put his baseball cap on backward; we were getting down to business. We spread out, and following the team's cues, we split into three teams. I had no idea what was happening but knew enough not to start yelling questions in the still of the forest.
I was delegated to the owner of my loaned gun, and I could see from his expression I was not his first choice. Or last. We sat for a while, and out of boredom, he explained how a gun worked. I practiced briefly with the unloaded weapon, focusing through the viewfinder and slowly squeezing the trigger. He then showed me how to load. I scanned the woods through the telescope, and to my amazement, there was an old deer just standing there. My friend saw it, too, and nodded at me to take the shot. The deer must have heard something and just looked up and in my direction. I aimed to its right at a tree and fired.
It hit the deer right between the eyes, and he dropped like a brick, dead before he hit the ground.
We approached the carcass slowly and prodded it with a stick to see if it was still somehow alive. Then, we stood respectfully around the carcass. It looked majestic, but it was an old deer that had also seen better days. In fact, it looked so mangey that I didn’t feel as guilty about the shot as I would have expected; I probably did it a favor. I was surprisingly sanguine over my act of wanton murder. It probably was deaf, blind, and had no sense of smell. I wanted to do some Namaste prayer as they do in Avatar, but as my stock had just risen, I didn’t want to jeopardize it.
‘That was a good shot,’ said my friend, impressed. The rest nodded in admiration. We stood there for a while, so I had to ask, ‘Now what?’
They looked at each other. ‘Well, we have never actually killed a deer before,’ said one. ‘Plenty of rabbits. I once shot a deer, but I don’t think I killed it because it ran off.’
I wondered what part of ‘it ran off’ gave it away.
‘Well, what we should do is string it up in a tree, then render it. We could take back the meat parts. The honor of that goes to the taker of the kill shot’. They all looked at me. Was this their way of getting back at me for actually hitting something?
One guy opened his backpack and pulled out a large pen knife and rope roll. One of the blades was a gutting knife, and after some searching, we thought we had decided which of the twenty blades was a gutting tool. It was a claw-like, short, sharp blade with a rounded, dull point. The purpose of the blade was to open up the chest through the diaphragm without puncturing the stomach, letting all the acid out, and ruining the meat. After gutting, the deer would be relatively lighter and thus easier to drag out of the forest with a rope around its neck.
I knew they had no idea what they were talking about, but I called their bluff. As a student, I used to work in a restaurant and help render cured pigs, and I thought I had developed some comfort in the process.
‘Ok, each grab a leg,’ I said and marched off, looking for a suitable tree.
The bullet to its head may have taken its life, but it also cured its constipation, and as my friends dragged the heavy corpse to the tree, the deer found its final relief.
By the time the carcass was by the tree, the mosquitos had found us, and we began slapping ourselves regularly. We half-heartedly strung up the deer, and then I started squeamishly hacking at the front limbs. A still warm, bloody deer is different from a cured split half pig without a head. The hacking against the bone and gristle made me feel queasy, but I pretended otherwise. The others looked on aghast, visors semi-covering their eyes.
They stood around trying to get reception with Google to find out what to do next. But I was determined, so I managed to hack off one limb, blood covering my hands. I threw the leg over my shoulder and then struck some postures, waiving the knife around for dramatic effect. I think the adrenaline from the kill was getting to me.
Then I handed the knife to one of them and said — ‘Go on! Help yourself!’ They looked at me as if I was some psychopath.
There were some mumblings about it getting late and how bad the mosquitos were, and the majority agreed it was time to get back to the lodge. With the leg bleeding down my back, we started back, leaving my kill to be devoured by the forest. My cinco amigos kept a respectful distance.
On the walk home, I realized I had not thought it through. I could not turn up at home with a mangey deer's leg on my shoulder and demand my wife make stew, though it might be worth it to see the look on her face.
This dilemma was resolved that night at the bar, where a regular informed us that eating meat from old deer was not advisable because of the diseases they may have. So, the leg ended up unceremoniously in a dumpster, adding insult to murder.
It was an interesting once-only experience, and I learned a lot. My wife was sufficiently horrified to no longer insist on my being more social with the locals. My bros never invited me deer hunting again — or to a sports bar, for that matter.
My bros may be enriched by the tale that they once went hunting deep in a forest with a British psychopath and lived, although one of them did get Lyme disease.
My cap had blood all over it because I had used it to wipe my hands. The stains persisted, even after washing several times, which made it less itchy and comfortable to wear. It was my cap with a story. It had found me.
I still have the cap. It is in a drawer. Every time I see that cap, I’m reminded of my odd journey in fitting into a world so different from my own — and the unexpected ways we find our place in it.
— — — — — -
This story is a patchwork of anecdotes sewn together with a thread of embellishments.
