“Write it down,” she said, preoccupied.
I jotted it on the clipboard where, as it occurs to us, we write down tasks to remember to do and supplies to buy. Then I went on without noticing, “Oh, and Jim says we’re low on diesel. He said I should remind you to call Agway.” The tractors are refueled from a pair of 250-gallon tanks on the other side of the old barn, which Agway refills from a tanker truck every now and then.
Diz nodded, putting it on her mental to-do list. Neither of us noticed my grammar at the time. Of course, I had many times used “we” in reference to Diz and myself, as in “Do we need to bring a shovel?” But this time, I’d used it in reference to the farm itself, the collective effort, which in some recess of my mind had apparently come to include me.
Now I am wondering about it and marveling at it. So many questions to ask myself. What does “we” mean? Who is “we”?
Chapter 22
Deer hunting is another of Vermont’s important fall rituals, and like so much else that first year, it demanded some adaptation on my part. Having grown up in the city, I was at first taken aback at the sight of people openly carrying guns. There was also more visible blood and guts than one would hope to see on a city street: eviscerated, empty-eyed deer lolling and leaking on truck tailgates or hanging outside the general stores that serve as Fish and Wildlife Department weighing stations. And some of this gore I experienced at much closer range, in more personal circumstances, than I would have preferred.
Once the rifle season opens, you see pickup trucks and station wagons pulled onto the shoulders of every rural road. Men in brilliant neon orange vests and hats, rifles over their shoulders, stalk the roads, looking for sign. Gunshots pierce the quiet. Conversation at the hardware store shifts from baseball to guns, scent lures, skinning tools, venison smoking techniques, and tales of magnificent bucks sighted from afar.
Will gave me an overview of how it works: By the time the season opens, there’s usually a little snow on the ground, so it’s easy to follow a line of paired-crescent tracks. The trees are bare, so you can see a long way through the woods, and with binoculars you can spot a deer before it spots you. You want a clean shot through the lungs because otherwise you have to follow a blood trail for who knows how long, and carrying the carcass back to your car can be tiring. When you bag a deer, you field-dress it: You slit it lengthwise along the soft belly, then scoop out intestines and organs until the abdomen is empty. This makes for a lighter load on the trek back.
Some hunters track deer, but others put up blinds in trees at places where they know deer will pass. They crouch, “freezing their butts off,” and if they’ve correctly scoped the deer’s habits, they get their buck. Most seasons, you can only “take,” or “harvest,” bucks, not does, and the more “points”—branches of the antlers—the greater your glory. Easily half the importance of the ritual is social: Groups of friends spend weekends at somebody’s shack deep in the woods, hunting during daylight and drinking into the night.
Will seemed like a gentle guy, and I was surprised at how casually—callously, to my urban perspective—he related the bloody ritual. I had often seen deer weaving delicately through my woods and bounding across the roads, and could not imagine killing these graceful, timorous creatures. Then again, I was new up here, and I was a hypocrite—I was perfectly happy to eat a pig or cow if somebody else did the gory work for me. Will said Vermonters ate the venison they brought home; he didn’t know anyone who hunted just for the trophy.
According to Will, the law says that unless a landowner posts the borders with no hunting signs, hunters can roam freely anywhere. Knowing my sentimental tendencies, Earnest had bought me a fat roll of brilliant yellow plastic-paper signs and lent me his staple gun, and in the weeks before the season opened I had signed each one of them with a laundry marker and posted them around my borders.
I had still been making occasional pilgrimages to my land, because I missed the place and because I wanted to witness it in all its seasons, its varying raiment and mood.
During hunting season, I dressed in orange from head to foot before heading out. That day was unseasonably cold, the snow brilliant but only an inch deep. Heading up, I found the bends and switchbacks of my trail utterly unfamiliar, as if the topography, the geology itself, had been transformed by the leafless trees and blinding white carpet. A starker, simpler place.
My little clearing was especially strange to me. Without leaves, it had no real borders. The sense of its being an enclosure of any kind, a sort of room, was gone. It was just an area without bare tree branches overhead. Plumped by snow, my tent platform looked like a big mattress somebody had left outside.
But the beauty of it grew on me. Spacious, keen, Spartan. Trees dark but certainly not dead. A sense of latency: I could feel the plants hiding and hoarding their vital force, all the creatures burrowed and curled somewhere, wrapped around winter dreams as they began to ride out the harsh caloric economy of the cold season.
The only sign of animal presence was a deer trail that I followed up toward my spring, one set of split-hoof prints joined by another and then another, their tracks braiding together and then apart again. I almost couldn’t find the spring—it was just a long, shallow dent in the snow. But when I scuffed at the surface, I found a thin, rippled layer of ice with the water running quick and vivid as
