NORTHERN ENCLOSURE: KILLING IN THE NAME OF...???

I am not a hunter. My father was a hunter, I come from a long line of hunters, I am living in a land of hunters, but I am not a hunter. Now I know I am going to catch some heat for my ideas here, to be labeled the soft city boy, but please just hear me out.

I am dog-sitting this week, a lively and sweet golden retriever by the name of Penny, and we are outside. I am sitting off the end of the landed dock writing, enjoying the company of the long estranged sun and Penny is rolling about in the snow in such a genuine display of joy and health that it is all but impossible not to be pulled into an equally contented state. We play fetch with a stuffed cow toy I bought her, and she pounces on it and upon bringing it back I give her a "good girl" and an approving scratch behind the ears.

I let her wander off down along the lake shoreline and when I whistle she obediently comes loping back with a big grin. This carries on for sometime, but then I whistle, and nothing. I whistle louder, still nothing. "Penny" I shout and then again with authority. I can see her now coming from way down along the trees, working her way towards me but stopping and lowering her head to the ground occasionally, and when she finally gets close I see she has something in her mouth. "Crap, she's been chewing on a dead bird" I think and jump down to get it away from her, but when I meet her she drops what is in her mouth, barks, and leaps about in ecstatic pride. A little chipmunk lies at my feet.

He is wet and matted, and hoping to find him stiff and long since dead, I tap him with my boot, he cringes, opens his eyes for a second and then winces them closed again. Broken into pieces as tiny as his quivering paws is my heart. Reasonably, logically, sensibly I know it is just a tiny chipmunk, a rodent even, but in that moment he seems to hold all the world's pain and suffering in his little pulsating chest.

I pull a frenzied Penny away and being as this is what she is trained to do I have to tell her "good girl" as I lead her back up to the front of the cabin to be chained up again. I go to the garage for a shovel, it being my responsibility not to let him suffer. Ready to finish Penny's work, I come back to my little martyr, bend down to examine, nudge him to assess the severity of his injuries. He is in pretty tough shape although not bleeding. I stand and lift the shovel, locking my elbows and tensing to deliver an unquestionably finalizing blow. I hold, I hold, I lean into it, I can't do it.

Cursing, I throw the shovel aside and sprint back to the garage, greeted by a barking and frustrated Penny. I grab an old towel hanging inside the door, then sprint back. Quickly I wrap him up and holding softly the fleeting life that seems to weigh nothing, I raise him high and hidden from Penny as I pass by entering the garage, tuck him in a box wrapped up in the towel. If I can just keep him warm. Thinking practically long since out the window, if there is a chance that my warmth, my concern my care could be enough to heal him then I have to give it a shot.

He is out in the garage and I am inside the cabin. Concentration is impossible, I keep checking on him, finding his little body still responsive yet his eyes cease to open anymore. "What am I doing?" I think as I pace the cabin. My own weakness is continuing his suffering. This carries on until I check on him for the last time, finding him still this time, lifeless. I am relieved and saddened by the finality. It is then I know for sure that I am not a hunter.

Being immersed in the hunting culture for the first time in my life, it has been an idea, a moral quandary mulled over in my mind since my arrival. In November, I accompanied my uncle on a profitless day of deer hunting, and I even saw the last stages of a deer being butchered, from which meat I have dined on many times this winter. I came to the realization that there was no difference between eating a hamburger in a restaurant and shooting a deer and eating it, and to think otherwise would be hypocritical of any meat eater. I still respect the long standing traditions and the use of wild game to feed yourself and your family.

However, especially influenced by what I witnessed today. I do vehemently rail against the lack of respect for life and nature that is the sport of killing. It was not seeing a dead dear on the table or a raccoon in the ditch that struck me, but watching the process of death, the physical departure of life, no matter how small, that shook me. All life is of value, a gift and to watch it slip away frivolously I feel should incite deep frustration. Even the death of this small chipmunk that came at the instinctual jaws of the circle of life seemed like a waste. Penny would eat her store bought dog food and biscuit treats tonight, not feast upon her kill, which admittedly fosters the highly debatable idea of man's own continued need to eat meat at all.

The Lakota Indians of the Dakotas would bow before every kill and graciously thank the animal for the life that would now help sustain their own. Reverence for life is what I am pleading for in the hunt, which I find embarrassingly absent in nowhere near all, but many parts of this culture. Satisfaction in a successful hunt is one thing, but to kill with such boisterous joy just seems to be loaded with a bloodlust that needs to be conditioned out of mankind.

So, Penny and I held a ceremony of reverence for our lost chipmunk. We held our heads and sustained a moment of silence to honor the small passing in our small piece of the world in one small moment, seemingly trivial but when we stop honoring these small moments from when and where do we start.