First-deer rituals come in many forms, and usually involve some kind of eating or drinking. The movie Red Dawn popularized the ritual of downing a cup of blood dredged from the deer’s chest cavity. Others say you should bite out a hunk of raw heart. A friend of mine from Montana described being forced to eat a slice of raw liver topped with a sprig of sagebrush. In Scotland it’s a ritual to smear the hunter’s cheeks with the blood of his first deer. When I hunted there and killed a red deer, the guy I was hunting with smeared his hand with blood and reached toward my face. I explained that I’d killed many deer before. “Not in Scotland,” he said, and then gave me a swipe on each side of my face.
We didn’t have any particular ritual in my family, as my dad wasn’t big on symbolic acts of bravado. But he was big on eating deer hearts, the fresher the better, and when the heart came from my own first deer the meal was treated with even more respect than usual.
I killed it with a Iever-action Winchester rifle, a year before I was old enough to do it legally. (Back then, you had to be twelve to hunt deer with a bow and fourteen to hunt them with a gun.) It was late in the morning, and we were doing something called a drive. Basically, a bunch of “pushers” head into an area where deer are known to bed during the day, and a “stander” positions himself where he thinks the deer will pass through as they run out. In this case, the bedding area was a deep ravine with a brushy creek bed at the bottom. My two brothers and a buddy of ours were the pushers who had to go down there and bust the deer out. I was the stander, and it was my job to hide on a hemlock-covered ridgeline that angled down into the ravine and provided a good vantage point to see what was going on below.
I saw the deer coming from way off. I expected it to pass below me as it followed the creek, but instead it broke away from the bottom and turned right up my ridgeline. It kept coming and coming, closer and closer. It didn’t even know I was there until it was so close that we could have conversed in whispers. It then stopped behind a bent-over tree. All I could see was its head and a bit of its throat. I aimed for the throat but hit the jaw. The deer fell hard and then scrambled down the side of the ridge in a somersaulting flurry of legs. I was right there behind it when it reached the bottom of the ravine. I kept expecting it to die, but suddenly it regained its feet and started to make some progress. I was carrying a Green River beaver skinning knife on my belt like the mountain men did. I pulled the knife and threw an arm around the deer’s neck and laid it down on its side like a cowboy in a roping competition. Then I put the tip of the knife into the deer’s neck and sliced its jugular. Only later, after my brother pointed it out to me, did I realize that I could have just shot the thing a second time.
I used that same knife to gut the deer, which weighed damn near what I did. When I was done I dug through the entrails to find the sac—it’s called a pericardium—that holds the heart. I could feel the warm firmness of the heart inside, about the size of a man’s fist. When I sliced through the sac the heart slid out into my hand as though something were being born rather than killed. It wasn’t until later that I would read about how some indigenous hunters fed the hearts of their quarry to their young children, so that the children would inherit the strengths and attributes of the animals they relied on. But I did know I was holding the core of a creature, the essence of its life, and that its life was far bigger and more meaningful than any squirrel’s. It was impossible not to see just how serious the business of killing was.
Me with my first deer.
I took off my blaze orange vest and wrapped the heart in it and put that into my day pack. My brothers then helped me drag the deer up out of the ravine and across a bunch of farm fields and through some windrows to where we’d parked that morning. At home my dad showed me how to take a thin-bladed fillet knife and carve out what are known as the great veins at the head of the heart. This left the heart looking deflated and a little hollowed out. I then started slicing the heart crosswise into slices about three-eighths of an inch thick, beginning at the narrow, pointy end. At first the slices were round and solid, like if you sliced a tree limb. But as I got deeper into the heart I began to hit the open pockets of the ventricles. These pockets started out small, just big enough for a pinky to fit through, but deeper into the heart they were so big that the slices looked as hollow as crosscut slices of a bell pepper.
My dad often deep-fried game in an electric fryer with a basket, but on this day we put a pan on the stove and filled it with a quarter-inch of oil. While the oil heated we spilled out some flour on a dinner plate and then dredged each of those slices through it. They sizzled when they hit the pan, and the oil came bubbling up through the holes of the ventricles, and the edges of the slices curled away from the heat. We took them off when they were crispy on the outside, though not so crispy that the juices didn’t still run with a little blood.
In general we weren’t allowed to put catsup on deer meat. My dad said it ruined the flavor. But with heart he made an exception. The meat was a little rubbery but snapped like a good hot dog when I bit into it. The flavor was similar to liver, though it wasn’t as strong. And there was something kind of metallic about it, too, but in a pleasing way. In all, it was a strong and identifiable flavor that I would grow to love, and that I would enjoy for many years to come. Yet it would never become something that I’d want to eat every day or even every week. Why not? It’s kind of hard to say. It was too … something. Perhaps the best word is one that some Vietnamese used to describe a meal of dog meat that we were sharing. They called it a “hot” food. Not hot like temperature or spicy hot. But hot as in volatile, in that you could feel it burning into your soul.