The Mindful Carnivore Read Online Free Page A

dinner at Uncle Mark’s house and I declined turkey, no one said anything. I, in turn, said nothing about the roasted flesh on the table or about the antlered deer head on the living-room wall.
    If I had paused to think about it, I don’t suppose I would have known what to make of Uncle Mark and his pursuits. To me, hunting now seemed like a barbaric relic of the past. Perhaps it had been a necessity in our days as hunter-gatherers, but here in modern America that time was long gone. Mark didn’t depend on wild meat to feed his family. His job as a mechanic and machinist, keeping mowers and other equipment running smoothly on a Cape Cod golf course, put groceries on the table.
    The idea of hunting for trophies—anachronistic proof of Man the Hunter’s machismo, his capacity to dominate nature and shoot down the largest possible animals—appalled me. So did the idea of hunting for “sport” or “recreation.” What excuse could there be for taking pleasure in the act of killing? As a boy, I had read Jean Craighead George’s Julie of the Wolves. In the novel’s climactic scene, the young heroine’s friend and wilderness foster parent, the wolf Amaroq, is killed on Alaska’s North Slope. The men who shoot him from an airplane do so not for the sake of protecting livestock, nor for his pelt, nor even for profit. They kill solely for amusement. When I put the book down, I had no words for the grief lodged in my throat.
    Yet sadistic fun wasn’t a motive I could have attributed to Mark. He was tender with his wife and kids. He doted on his dog. Driving, he swerved to avoid squirrels or turtles crossing the road. And, though there was that one deer head on the wall, I couldn’t have imagined Mark—who seemed quiet to the point of timidity and self-effacement—getting all puffed up about trophies. So why did he go to such lengths to pursue and kill meat on the hoof?
    I might also have wondered why Willie fished. We had lost touch after my father’s sudden, devastating death in an accident when I was seventeen. But toward the end of college, I called Willie and we met for lunch in Boston. He was just as I remembered him: big, warm, full of that funny, high-pitched laughter, at ease with himself and the life he had crafted. He had no vicious streak. And his custom furniture business, while not lucrative, kept him fed. Why, then, I might have asked, did he feel the need to catch and kill fish?
    Repentant, I looked back on my own boyhood with a mixture of regret and sympathy, wishing I hadn’t been a killer, but chalking it up to hot-blooded ignorance. I hadn’t known any better.
    Now, with the unassailable certainty of youth, I did know.
    Peregrine falcons, well on their way to recovery, had begun nesting in New York City. But living there wasn’t going to suit me for long. In my small apartment, I felt separate from nature. It was all around me—in the trees that lined the streets, in the gray and black squirrels that loped through Washington Square Park, in the grass that sprouted in the cracks and seams of the pavement—but it felt too fragmented. I wasn’t touching soil. I wasn’t hearing the sounds of water, of wind in the trees. Unlike the farmers whose trucks I visited in Union Square, I had no contact with the earth from which our food sprang.
    Along the sidewalks of Brooklyn and Manhattan, I picked up pigeon feathers. I read and reread the Wendell Berry poem pinned to the wall of my apartment, “The Peace of Wild Things”:
    When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and