MY SON, JIM, was born on May 9, 2010, and by the time he was a month old he was drinking two or three ounces of breast milk every two or three hours. What was surprising to me was that Katie produced milk even more prodigiously than he consumed it. Between feedings, she’d spend fifteen minutes pumping the excess milk with a little pump that resembled the device I use to purify creek water when I’m camping.
After pumping, she’d pour the milk into sealable plastic pouches about the size of a T-shirt pocket. She’d then label each pouch with the date, the quantity of milk in ounces, and the boy’s name—James Rinella. Finally, she’d deposit the pouches according to date into master containers with sealed lids. These would go into the freezer. Every few days, she’d announce with pride that she’d put away enough milk to feed the boy through x period of time in case of some emergency that incapacitated her or her breasts—first it was a day, then five days, then two weeks.
Generally, my wife is not a food-oriented person. She does not enjoy cooking. As for our vegetable garden, she derives more pleasure from simply knowing it’s there than she does from actually working in it. So I was surprised by the care and attention that she gave to the milk. I think she was surprised, too. One day, she was organizing the pouches of breast milk in the freezer and she turned to me and said, “I think I finally understand what it is with you and hunting. It’s really satisfying to stock food away for someone you love. It’s good knowing it’s there, and that I did it, and that it was done right.”
I wish that it hadn’t taken Katie four years of us being together to finally understand “what it is with me and hunting.” However, I can hardly criticize her lengthy delay in recognizing the inherent and inseparable connection between hunting and food. After all, it took me about twenty years to figure out the same thing. It happened in the fall of 1994, while I was hunting deer from a tree with a bow and arrow. The set of circumstances was remarkably similar to the first time I missed a buck, except for a few notable things: One, this buck was coming at me through the woods with more antler riding on its head; and two, I was sitting in a tree with a lot more responsibility hovering over mine.
In order to give that moment the attention it deserves, I should probably back up and explain the time period that preceded it. It’s fair to say that at around that time my lifelong goal of becoming a professional trapper had crumbled into soul-sucking mayhem and I didn’t know what to do with myself anymore. I needed to find a purer and more deliberate hunting life, and to do that I needed to go someplace that was fresh and new.
For guys from Michigan—or at least for those who love to hunt and fish—someplace fresh and new has always been the UP. That’s Michigander lingo for the Upper Peninsula, the portion of the state lying north of the narrow strait formed where Lake Michigan feeds into Lake Huron. Michigan acquired it back in 1836 as a consolation prize after losing a bitter border dispute with Ohio over a chunk of land known as the Toledo Strip.* That area turned into … well, Toledo. Meanwhile, the UP proved largely resistant to development. Today, it’s a kind of miniature Canada, but without the self-righteousness, progressive politics, or Draconian gun laws. In other words, it’s possible to sit on the ice in the UP and watch a pack of wolves kill a moose while you fish for muskellunge, a collection of occurrences that you would certainly not experience in the woods where I grew up.
For us, the Mackinac Bridge was the equivalent of Daniel Boone’s Cumberland Gap. It separated us from a mythic hunting ground, a place that oozed with adventure. A lot of my dad’s friends would spend all their vacation time up there, living out of camper trailers while chasing fish and game. In the spring they’d bring home coolers full of walleye fillets and so many smelt they’d end up tilling them into their gardens as fertilizer. They’d come home in the fall with whitetail deer stacked in the back of their trucks like cordwood. It was an annual tradition of toll operators on the Mackinac Bridge to count how many deer headed south out of the UP on trucks and trailers. In 1994, the year I finally moved there, the total was 8,903. No one even bothered looking for deer headed in the opposite direction.
What kept these Trolls—that’s UP lingo for people from below the bridge—from moving to the UP full-time was the lack of work and professional opportunity. To actually live there wouldn’t have occurred to me if my brothers hadn’t tried it first. In 1991, they both moved to the UP to pursue biology degrees at Lake Superior State University in Sault Sainte Marie. Our dad, who’d dropped out of high school and later earned a GED, described his two sons as having “majors in hunting and minors in fishing.” His assessment wasn’t far off. They lived way the hell away from town, in a cabin along the St. Maries River. In order to stretch their meager student loan incomes, they motored their johnboat out from their house and landed it on Neebish Island to hunt deer. They each killed a doe out there on public land with their bows, and then fed themselves on the meat for a couple of months. Their venison diet was supplemented with fish and ducks from the river and snowshoe hares from the cedar swamps that stretched away from the river. Later, they would lose the security deposit on their cabin for getting blood all over the carpet.
Matt moved away from the UP after one semester, in order to attend his third college as an undergraduate.† The next fall Danny moved into a cabin closer to town in order to save on gas money. He was joined there by our friend from back home, Matt Drost. That year, Danny and Drost each won the lottery drawing for a black bear permit. They made bait piles in the cedar swamps using fish guts and expired food that they scavenged from Dumpsters behind restaurants in town. By mid-September, just a few weeks into the semester, they were feeding themselves on a two-hundred-pound boar black bear that Danny killed with his rifle. More deer followed. Then, after the fall hunting season, Danny and Drost maintained their stash of wild game by spearing whitefish and menominee through a hole that they sawed into the ice of Lake Superior.
My introduction to this new form of subsistence lifestyle came when I visited Danny the following year, in the late summer of 1993. I timed my visit to coincide with the pink salmon run.‡ The fish travel upstream out of Lake Huron to spawn in the large rapids formed where Lake Superior drops some twenty feet into the St. Maries River. The day I got there, Danny and I walked with our fishing rods to a dock not far from the Edison Sault dam. Giant freighters hauling coal and iron ore slogged past in the river. The pink salmon came by in pulses, sometimes in scattered batches of four or five fish, sometimes in schools containing dozens of fish. Some of the schools were so dense with the two- to four-pound salmon that they looked like aqua-green submarines cruising beneath the river’s surface.
Danny’s first bear, from the UP.
Using spinning rods, we cast out lures and dragged them through the schools. The fish would usually clear out of the way of the lure, but when you got lucky, one of them would bust free from the school in order to slash at it. Whenever we hooked a salmon, the fish would zing out line and dive hard and fast toward deeper water. When it wore out, it would rise back up toward the surface and we’d scoop it up with a landing net.
Like that, we managed to catch our limit of twenty salmon. I remember how excited Danny was by the catch. We immediately took the fish back to his house and began filleting them. We selected a few fillets for our own dinner that night and wrapped the rest in a double layer of plastic wrap and waxed freezer paper. Danny then packed them into his freezer, equating their preciousness to the bars of gold stacked in the vault at Fort Knox. That night, we sat around a plug-in deep fryer on his picnic table and gorged on cubed fish.
I thought about that meal constantly as I drove back home from the UP. I was supposed to be readying myself for the upcoming trapping season, but over the last year I’d found myself getting depressed and disillusioned every time I was forced to think about trapping. For the past decade, I had devoted myself to studying the animals I trapped. I knew their habits the way that most people know their pets. That form of intimacy inevitably breeds love and respect, in the same way that the Native American tribes that most revered buffalo were those that spent the most time hunting them. But the thing I kept returning to in my mind was the notion of value. What, exactly, is an animal’s life worth, and who is responsible for setting the price?
Consider a skunk. The market value of a skunk’s pelt depends on a cryptic collection of economic factors and fashion trends as well as the color, size, density, and luster of the animal’s fur. After the fur boom, this value was established at two or three dollars, absolute tops. But you couldn’t just stop catching skunks, because they were a common by-catch species that inevitably turned up in traps set for fox and coyote. Complicating this was the fact that it was basically impossible to remove a live skunk from a trap without getting yourself sprayed. To avoid their wrath, you had to shoot them. The best way to do this was to hit the skunk in the heart with a .22 bullet, because then there was only about a 50 percent chance that the skunk would spray when it died. But a skunk’s heart is not big, and you can’t get too close when making the shot because you don’t want to get sprayed while you aim. So hitting the heart was maybe a 50/50 proposition, which meant that there was a 75 percent chance that the skunk would spray on itself.
Since the animal ended up being dead anyway, I always figured that I had an obligation to skin it and sell it. To do this, I had to wash the hide in a bucket of gasoline in order to neutralize the odor. I remember a day when I was washing a skunk hide and realized that I was actually losing money on the animal due to the cost of the gasoline. Looking back, it’s disturbing to imagine that an animal’s life could achieve negative value.
What Matt and Danny had begun to achieve through hunting was something far more primal and self-contained. What they were doing transcended the notion of commerce. While I was heading into the woods in order to put fur coats into stores, they were heading into the woods to put food on their plates. It was an utterly simple equation. For them, the value of an animal was fixed. It did not change according to markets and trends. A 110-pound deer provided about thirty thousand calories of energy and five thousand grams of protein. Of course, that deer has a potent spiritual significance as well, but that potency was supported by the universal usefulness of its flesh. We need to eat to survive. We need to kill to eat.
After that trip, I began focusing my energies on a move to the Upper Peninsula. For that I needed cash, so I took a full-time job doing construction work. In the evenings and on the weekends I cut and split firewood and heaped it into a garage-sized mound across the street from my parents’ house. By late summer I’d paid off the debts that I’d accrued while trapping and I’d put eighteen hundred dollars in the bank. I figured this amount could get me through until Christmas break, when I could come home and sell my mountain of firewood at high-dollar wintertime prices. When I shared this budget with my dad, he had just one question.
“What are you going to eat? You didn’t really account for that.”
“That’s the point,” I explained. “I’m gonna live off wild game.”
He was incredulous. “You’re going to attend classes and hunt and fish enough to feed yourself?” he asked.
“Well, not just me,” I said. “There’s Danny, too. And Matt Drost.”
The three of us, along with another guy, secured a dilapidated four-bedroom house in Sault Sainte Marie that cost only $110 apiece in monthly rent. The paint on the place was so old that it hung to the structure in brittle flakes that reminded me of what it might look like if you glued potato chips to a vertical surface. The yard came furnished with a squatter who lived in a trailer on the alley side of the house. This guy poached our electricity from an outlet that you could access from the outside by reaching in through a fissure in the wall that was created when a third of the house slumped away from the main part.
The inside of the house was worse than the outside. The upstairs shower leaked through the living room ceiling in small rivulets that we captured in five-gallon buckets. We asked the landlord to fix this, and he eventually came over to apply an ineffectual thread of caulk no thicker than a strip of toothpaste. Eventually I bought a gallon of roofing tar and used a paint stirrer to apply it in strips about as wide as an adult’s hand. This stopped the leaks with much authority, though the tar was slow to dry. Soon the bottoms of shampoo bottles had tar on them, and then all of the surfaces that the shampoo bottles touched had circles of tar on them as well. Even our bar of soap got tar on it, introducing us to the idea of dirty soap.
Living there, I enjoyed some of the best days of my life. While I don’t intend to disparage the level of academic rigor required of students at Lake Superior State University, I can say that about 90 percent of our waking hours outside of the actual classroom were devoted to the issue of food acquisition. Luckily for us, the pink salmon spawning run coincided almost perfectly with the beginning of school. We crossed International Bridge to fish the Canadian side of the Sault Rapids with such frequency that the border patrol agents started asking us how the fishing was instead of asking where we were coming from and where we were going. We were each allowed to bring home two pink salmon per visit to Canada. One of these fish would feed one guy for about a day, so we should have only needed to fish three times a week. But our household soon had a reputation for serving fresh, wild-caught salmon, and we were inundated with nightly dinner guests. The result was that we consumed fish as fast as we caught them, no matter how many we caught, and we never managed to freeze a single ounce of salmon.
The lack of salmon in our freezer was a problem, for sure, though it was a refreshing one to have. Growing up, we rarely killed something and then ate it on the same day—unless it was the symbolic meal of a deer heart cooked on the morning it was shot. Instead, game and fish were usually tucked away in the freezer for some special occasion or another, when we’d thaw a bunch out and share it with family friends. We kept game meat in a separate freezer, down in the basement. Next to that freezer were the canning shelves, where we stored produce from the garden and fruit from the U-pick blueberry and raspberry farms that abounded around our home. My family lived a weird double life. We had a hidden pioneer existence, with wild meat and canned produce in the basement, while store-bought veggies and frozen chicken breasts lived upstairs.
Because our family didn’t rely entirely on game, it was sometimes possible for us to overharvest. I remember a stretch of years when the bullhead§ population in our lake exploded. The water was really high then, and in the early summer the fish were spawning inside every submerged crack and crevice they could find near the shore: cracks in seawalls, in the mouths of abandoned muskrat dens, inside the holes of the cement blocks that neighbors used to support their fishing docks. My brothers and I would go around with D-cell flashlights at night in order to peer into these hiding places for fish; spawning bullheads are so aggressive that they’ll hit a lure even if you’re standing within arm’s reach of them. I remember one night when we caught nine of them in a couple of hours. They all weighed around two to three pounds. In the morning, we went through all the hassle of nailing their heads to boards and stripping their skin off with end-cutting pliers and then filleting them with Rapala knives. Then all the fillets went into the freezer, which served as something akin to a fish and game purgatory.
When something ended up in the freezer, it was up to our parents to pull it out and cook it up. Whether or not that happened in a prompt fashion depended on many variables, including how we labelled them, where in the freezer we put them, what else was in the freezer, and whether we had any big fish fries planned. I hate admitting it, but a lot of that stuff inevitably went to waste. Every year or so, we’d clean out the freezer and get rid of the freezer-burned stuff that was never used.
I now see this sort of behavior as an atrocity, the kind of offense that should be punished by having your hand nailed to a board, skinned with end-cutting pliers, and filleted. I refuse to hunt and fish with guys who routinely lose frozen game because “the freezer got unplugged” or because it wasn’t wrapped properly and got freezer burn; that is, I refuse to hunt with guys who practice the freeze-it-and-forget-it wild game management strategy. There is no excuse for it. And while I hardly think that being poor is the only way to break such wasteful habits, I can say that my initial economically impoverished experiment with living off the land was like a form of shock therapy. Drost and Danny and I had inadvertently become a three-man tribe of hunter-gatherers. For us, the wild fish from the freezer had gone from being a treat to a daily necessity. As a result, the act of fishing took on a vital sense of immediacy. And our appreciation for the species that sustained us blossomed into something that resembled religion.
With all that said, we were still faced with two significant problems. One, we had an empty freezer; and two, we knew we couldn’t live much longer on a diet of wild salmon. Besides the fact that we were getting awfully tired of it, there was also the issue of a deteriorating source. Salmon die after spawning, as everyone knows, and as the run progressed through September, the fish got continually nastier and nastier as they began to approach their inevitable demise. They were as silver as aluminum foil when they first showed up in the river, with pinkish, translucent flesh. But now their skin was getting as dark as a cigarette smudge and their flesh was the color of white bread that’s been floating in the sink. Soon the only fish left were in such bad shape that you could catch them by hand—not that you’d want to.
Danny and me with a catch of fish from Lake Superior, laid out on our kitchen table in Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan.
What these problems meant for us was that our experiment in wild game living was threatened within just a couple of weeks of starting. And our blossoming tribe of hunter-gatherers was faced with hard times. When small-game season opened we tried to round out our diets with a miscellaneous assortment of ruffed grouse, snowshoe hares, woodcocks, and even beaver meat, but the difficulty of hunting them only stressed the importance of the one thing that was on all of our minds: whitetail deer.
The opening day of the archery season was about a week away, on October 1, and that date began to hang over our heads in the same all-important way that exam week hangs over the heads of normal students. The opener happened to fall on a Saturday that year, which meant we had a two-day weekend when we could hunt deer without having to tap into the tightly limited number of absences we were allowed before the school would start coming after us with disciplinary action.
Obviously, you don’t just walk into the woods one day and kill a deer with an arrow. It takes massive amounts of preparation: locating hunting areas, scouting for sign, selecting places for tree stands, hours and hours of archery practice, tweaking and re-tweaking equipment. The first of these issues, a hunting area, had been addressed a year earlier when Danny and Drost secured hunting permission from a plaque-toothed, jovial farmer south of town whose property looked more like an untamed wetland than an area of agricultural production. He had a fallow field that stretched back a half mile from a county road and abutted a tract of state forest that was dominated by cedar swamp, beaver ponds, and dense stands of poplar. It was deep woods back there; at night, deer would pour into the field like sparrows coming into a spilled bag of popcorn in a shopping mall parking lot. At least they would do that up until a day or two after opening day. Then, having sensed trouble, they would mysteriously vanish back into the bush, where it was next to impossible to find them. Danny and Drost had watched it happen the year before, without managing to kill one first. They then went meatless until rifle season, a full six weeks later. Those were some lean times they weren’t eager to repeat.
We set up three tree stands, one for each of us. Danny and Drost set theirs on the edges of the field, which weren’t really edges at all because of the way that the forest was gradually reclaiming the land. Mine was way back behind the field, where a collection of deer trails emerged from some bedding areas and converged into a single super-trail that followed the edge of a marshy creek bed.
I spent the opening morning of archery season in that stand, shifting my weight from foot to foot and wishing that I’d rigged up some kind of seat. In the afternoon I found some distraction by marveling at a ruffed grouse that was working the area around my tree. It looked like a diminutive and cautious chicken as it scratched and pecked at the leaves on the ground and emitted a popping sort of cluck that wouldn’t sound out of place if it were attributed to a piece of hardware in an outer-space movie. I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t think about having this bird for dinner, but at the time I was worried about making noise that might scare away an unseen deer.
The grouse, a male, passed out of sight behind a cluster of trees and started to do something known as “drumming.” They do this by beating their cupped wings against their bodies in order to emit a sound like that of an old lawn mower starting up. Presumably it’s meant to announce their territory to other male grouse. It’s their way of saying, “Back off, suckers!” Grouse are famously finicky about their drumming sites. They insist on logs or stumps that are about ten or twelve inches off the ground and centered in an area where there’s about a sixty-foot radius of fairly open surveillance in any direction. It makes them easy to hear but extremely difficult to sneak up on, and it’s possible to go your whole life without witnessing the scene. So I was obviously working my ass off in an effort to see it. I was leaning this way and that and getting down on my knees and climbing a little higher in my tree.
It’s amazing that I didn’t spook the buck that was headed my way. When I did register his presence, it wasn’t so much that I saw him as felt him. Maybe it was a sound, maybe it was something in my peripheral vision, but suddenly I just knew he was somewhere off to my left. I froze in place and twisted my neck slowly around. The buck had a dark mane running down his back, an unusual though not unheard-of feature. His eight antler tines were like a tightly wrapped basket that would have been perfect for holding a cantaloupe. He was standing dead still about seventy yards away. Then his hoof came forward and he was moving again, heading toward me.
There were tremendous similarities between the way this buck was approaching and the way that the buck had approached all those years ago when I was hunting with my dad near Peacock, Michigan. He was going to pass by just about the same distance away from my tree. The animal was moving at the same speed. His body was about the same size. But there was a fundamental underlying difference now, because I was preparing to kill this animal for the specific purpose of feeding myself. This was not about pleasing my dad, or proving my mettle. This was not about fear. This was about food. I pulled back my bow and looked down the arrow. The specificity of my purpose made everything seem clear and straight. I could almost see that deer’s heart—I could almost taste it, even—and my profound desire alone was enough to guide the arrow true. I saw a flicker as the fletching disappeared into the hide behind the deer’s shoulder. The animal jumped almost straight up, then bounded forward and to the right and splashed through the creek. I heard the first couple of leaps but then the sound of the running stopped. Not faded away, but stopped dead. I then did as my dad always told me to do. I waited an hour before climbing down.
At our house in Sault Sainte Marie, 1994. Our motto was “Burgers for lunch, steaks for dinner.”
By then it was dark, so I had to use my flashlight. I walked until I hit water, and then continued on. The deer was lying just forty yards away, its hide looking black and slick with water. I approached its body quietly and I felt moved to do something that I’d never done before. I got down on my knees and buried my nose into the hair of its still warm neck and I breathed in its smell. I thanked it. I told it that it would be used well. And with respect. And soon.
*The Toledo Strip measured 468 square miles. Each state wanted it because they figured it would be a perfect location for a shipping canal connecting Lake Erie to Lake Michigan. Ultimately Ohio got the strip and Michigan accepted the nine-thousand-square-mile Upper Peninsula despite their characterization of the land as “a sterile region on the shores of Lake Superior destined by soil and climate to remain forever a wilderness.” Then, thirty years later, my home state sat back and laughed when Ohio’s canal was never built and the UP became the nation’s leading supplier of iron ore and copper.
†If Matt seems like a fickle college attendee, consider this: He ended up getting a graduate degree from the same school where he got his bachelor’s degree, which isn’t too common. Then he spent four years at the same institution while getting a PhD.
‡The Sault Rapids had three actual fish runs and two rather mythical fish runs. The first of the actual runs every year was the steelhead run. (For a refresher on steelhead, see this page of this book.) They’d come up out of Lake Huron sometime in late May or early June, depending on weather, and then hang around until July. Then there’d be a lapse of activity until the pink salmon, which constituted another actual run, starting in late August or early September or thereabouts and petering out in October. Finally, the king salmon would come up in late September and hang around for a month or so. Atlantic salmon and a strain of steelhead known as Skamania represented the mythical fish runs, though both of these mythical fish populations have undergone significant developments in the ensuing years and interested parties would be wise to consult updated information sources on their current status. One final note: None of the fish I’m discussing here are actually native to the Great Lakes. They are all oceanic transplants. But that’s a whole other story.
§Bullhead are very similar in appearance to catfish, and closely related taxonomically.