Reminiscences on the Life of My Brother: Earl's Last Hunt

My oldest brother Earl's 83rd birthday is today, June 11. Since both our birthdays are in June, and he was 10 years, 18 days my senior, I never forgot it as I sometimes did my other brothers’ birthdays. I had planned to mail him a home-made birthday card produced on my MS Publisher program with a hand-written message and a complimentary close of the one word, “Love.” Unfortunately, I was too late because he died suddenly last Sunday, June 5. Take heed.

He willed to me, among other things, his Winchester Model 94, .30-.30 carbine with which I killed my first deer on Red Mountain, East Fork, Trinity River, Trinity County, in 1956. I just realized that I had returned the favor by loaning him my Model 99 Winchester .308 with which he killed his last deer, probably sometime in the 1960s. After that exhausting hunt, he said he realized, "I don't have to do this." He came to prefer to see the beauty of the living animals and rather disapproved my continued willingness to hunt and kill them. Aesthetically, I agree with him, but like biblical Isaac I still have a yen for venison. I last hunted in 2009 and we didn't even see a buck--until we drove back through French Gulch where they hang around on the lawns even (or especially?) in the middle of deer season.

Henry David Thoreau had a similar development. While at Walden Pond he liked to catch and eat the pike. Later, he gave up such fare, but he admitted that if he returned to live on the Pond, he would be sorely tempted by those tasty fish. As a Transcendentalist (Pantheist) like Emerson, he probably had spiritual reasons for renouncing the killing of animals. As a Christian, I am free to take and eat meat, whether that of wild game or of livestock. Since the forgiveness of sins, my very salvation is based on the shedding of the innocent blood of the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, I realize that in some circumstances, the shedding of blood is required for life to be preserved.

Thoreau thought that boys and young men should be allowed to pursue wild game because it brought them out into nature. But he viewed it as a stage through which they perhaps had to pass on the way to maturity. For myself, I'm not dogmatic, but I think those like my brother who renounce the chase have the better part. And perhaps those like my young Christian friend Brian, who never wanted to start hunting have the best of it.

Still, for some hunters, there is another aspect of hunting, the hunter's bond of trust formed over years of hunting together. You always put your life in the hands of your hunting partners and these relationships can become very close. Killing game becomes secondary to the ritual of the hunt, love for the wilderness in which you hunt and the relationships nurtured by the hunt.

Moreover, in gutting and skinning a deer, with blood at least up to your elbows, you get some sense of the reality of what happened to Christ on the Cross when he shed his blood for the sins of the world. And without the shedding of that blood, we all would be lost.