It’s a label that turns people off me instantly: hunter. Yet, I never knew what a hunter was until I was one. The same goes for every label I’ve ever known or thrown. Amid misunderstandings, demystifying labels might alleviate some pain.
After I filled my deer tag, the first thing I said was, “Now I get to go home!”
I could have said, “Why did I buy a sleeping bag? Because I can be in my own bed tonight.” I could have said all kinds of things, but stopped cold when I saw the look on my partner’s face.
I imagined cuddling with my cat that night, but being there was supposed to be a reward, a privilege, a gift—not merely a way to fill the freezer for the winter. To me, it was a job to do.
Everyone else was paying or working, but I was a genuine guest. I had one of the two cozy chairs, I noted, as it was always empty, and when I caught them getting out of it as they saw me coming. With experience, I realized it was “mine.”
Good thing I shut up.
Instead, I set out to act as a good guest, doing the dishes, tending the fires, playing peacemaker in drunken disputes.
Coulda Been Twice
When I texted someone to let them know a spike horn was headed his way, I was later asked how I saw it and didn’t fire.
I made up a lie about how I couldn’t get positioned properly.
It was so close that I could see not brown fur, but hairs of many colors with my bare eyes.
In truth, I didn’t have my weapon loaded. I agreed not to go home, but I didn’t agree that I would fill anyone else’s tag. As such, all my bullets were in my pocket.
That deer was safe with me.
There have been many deer safe with me. Others said they wished they could just see one to know that they were at least there.
When I heard from one of the other hunters that she’d had eight misses over the years, I was shocked and told her that I’ve only had three chances, and only the first was a miss. Apparently, once she used her gun to cross-check a buck off of her. I wondered if she knew that’s not how that weapon was designed to work.
Another hunter decided to set up shop directly behind me. Not being there, I knew someone would want to use my spot, and I sent directions in advance. No. Once, I let someone use it, and he pissed all over the place, marking his territory for all the deer to know to stay away. This fact came up in casual conversation, as if he didn’t know how I’d feel about that, or he did want me to know.
One day, I decided to investigate this shop directly behind mine. I set down the buck trail until I could see him. I texted, “Can you see me?”
“No, you’re safe,” he replied.
And Many More
Apparently, so are all the bucks still headed toward me.
Impossible chances are easy to spot when you’ve done your research and learned what all the experts know after generation upon generation of learning.
Further to the conversation of me celebrating earning First Buck that year, and by a woman, ever in the history of the camp, I was told that I wasn’t allowed to celebrate until every tag is filled.
Fine then, I decided, and I set about the research. Through the following winter, I read everything I could find on deer hunting, and that’s a lot considering I have five library cards and no responsibilities. I read several years’ worth of magazines, books, manuals, etc. You get the idea.
I was well aware that no one else was given this “no-partying-until-the-work-is-done” directive.
To that end, I was going to fill my tag and anyone else who wanted to go bow hunting in October, followed by systematically ticking off everyone else’s when they arrived in November.
I studied Google Maps and decided where to put my three ground blinds and two tree stands. The weekend we caught the uninvited guests was the weekend I was heading in there to put up the blinds and build the stands.
With their presence, I decided that they could tag their own deer, or not at all, for that was enough for me.
It turned out, not at all.
But The Buck Stops Here
I’m not going to reveal the details of my plan because, in retrospect, it was more deer than I want on my hands, and people who don’t deserve it.
Hunters do more than simply show up to pull a trigger. That’s what makes them hunters. In learning, you develop deep respect and humility. In harvesting, you know what it takes to continue your own life, and you do it with more reverence than you knew before. It’s not simply “meat” but what you had to take to get it.
When I first hunted, my fairy godfather let me use his tree stand. One day, I got up after sitting all day only to see a mouse crawl out of the cushion I’d been sitting on. It must have been warm and cozy.
After a few years of pretending to hunt, which consisted of sitting there and reading, listening to audiobooks, or doing crossword puzzles, I finally ran out of battery and pages and started paying attention.
It was difficult because icky thoughts kept coming up in my head, and I had no distractions available. I had to listen to them. It was forced meditation, and I needed it.
If you’ve meditated, or tried to, you know this experience. That voice in your head that remembers all the scolding, the rejection, the suffering, the pain, the trauma, the drama, and the hurt.
Yeah, hunting wasn’t fun. But I kept at it.
As With Four-Leaf Clovers
For years, I “hunted” while I was really listening. I started to see the birds flying around, then landing on me. Noticing that birds are not identical, I named them.
When the buck goes by, it’s way over there, and I didn’t have that range. When I noticed they are all going by way over there, I decided that’s where I wanted to be next year.
After a year of arguing about whether or not I was allowed to be on the highway instead of creating another small town eatery, hoping to redirect the oncoming flow of traffic with yummy offerings, I won.
I picked the intersection where the bucks go to meet the does, and vice versa, where the bears approach from a different direction and leave in their own, and where the moose roam to and fro. On my game cams, it’s a veritable clover-leaf of main highways carved through the bush.
These locations exist, the details of which I came to recognize. Just like four-leaf clovers. The trick is to realize that a four-lobbed leaf makes a white square on a green background while the normal one makes a triangle. Let your gaze soften, and there is the square in amongst all the triangles. Everything is easier when you know the trick, and someone always does.
With the internet, the trick today isn’t finding that person with the answer; it’s that person knowing that they have it.
“What, this?”
Yes, that which is natural, invisible, and reliable for you isn’t that way for others. Do you know which answer you have?
I have a few, most of which I worked hard at learning and polishing. Only now do I know what was always there, easily, stubbornly, and naturally, all along.
Completely ignored but waiting to be noticed.
To Know Thyself
Get out there and start comparing with others until you figure it out. Comparison is the intention—not to figure out where you rank, but to learn the valuable differences that only you have. It’s a comparison, not a competition.
I didn’t know my mother well enough to help cure her cancer. I didn’t even know her well enough to know she was dying of it. If this is your prognosis, I hope you know yourself well enough to have the insight to save yourself. If not, you may have to go hunting.
A hunting we will go for that destructive thought that doesn’t look malicious, but blends right in with what you think of as “normal.”
Someone, though, knows it isn’t normal and might tell you. Another person may demonstrate the opposite, and you will observe the shock between what you expect according to the rules of your world and what happens.
Shadows are not enemies but teachers. Spirit isn’t out to get you but to help you. You have to know yourself well enough to trust your intuition, to hear your narrative, and to connect the dots between the internal and the external.
Maybe what you say in your head is heard. It’s what people are hoping for when they pray. Do you think you have a master mute button for when they hear and when they should disregard the words?
In my experience, the simpler the rule, the more likely it is to be God’s and less mankind’s. Mine are most certainly complex and convoluted, but time and introspection can undo decades of knots.
And at the end of that rope is you in your purest form.
To Be, Do, and Have
Likely because of romantic movies, I always wanted a bear skin rug. One day, while snowmobiling, I happened upon one. Thank you! If I knew who lost it, I’d return it. I know if I’d hunted that bear, skinned it, tanned the hide, and sewn Velcro to the back of it and brought it snowmobiling, I’d surely regret that last step.
I secured it firmly in my luggage. One year, I am going to do those first three steps myself. Will this be the year? Maybe, I don’t know.
I wasn’t raised to be like this. I was raised to eat meat, but to get it from the grocery store and use words that divide consumption from life. Beef, not cow. Pork, not pig. Poultry, not chicken. Hard to hide the reality of that last one, though.
At home, we talk of going deer hunting and eating venison, something I’d never previously tried. I was taught that certain things were distasteful and to be ashamed if you pursued them. Disgusting, dirty people.
What a terrible category in which to find myself, yet I look around, and no one fits the stereotype. No one. Do they ever?
When you look beyond the stigmas and into the stereotypes, the simplistic way of dividing the world no longer makes sense, like how a table disappears into nothing when looked at on the level of molecules. Instead, we keep judging people quickly and tossing them aside.
During my inaugural year hunting with this gang, I only made it to 2:30 on the fourth day. By then, I was starving. I decided to tap out and go home for a cheeseburger, only to discover they had taken a lunch break but hadn’t invited me.
Feelings as Messengers
The following year, I thought I knew what I was getting into. I packed protein bars in my pockets appropriately.
I know what hunger feels like, but I know that not everyone does. My partner doesn’t. When asked if he is hungry, he asks for the time of day. Having had meal times dictated to him since forever, he eats when he can and not when he’s hungry.
As a desk jockey, I eat when I’m hungry. Actually, I also ate when I was anxious, bored, nervous, tired, about to go into a long meeting, or whenever the free food looked yummy. I was overweight, of course, but not anymore.
Other people I know act like the feeling of hunger is going to kill them. They say they are going to die if they don’t eat something. It’s very dramatic, but not real. But don’t laugh, because they aren’t doing a comedy routine – they genuinely believe this.
Whether we over-react, under-react, or cross-react – as I call it when we do the 180-degree opposite to what the situation dictates – we tend to get it wrong often. The point is to learn what is consistent about it.
When you discover that common thread, then you can pull it, and it’s a lot easier to pull a thread than to use willpower, muscle power, and brain power to make change happen.
Like when you want that deer to turn for your target, ask, and if it’s the deer for your dinner table, it will.
When you’ve been the virgin who has been led to the volcano to sacrifice yourself to save everyone else, and you’ve done it willingly and with a smile on your face, you learn a thing or two about sacrifice and the natural order of things.
True Colors Shining Through
As a hunter, you’d call me violent, but I believe in editing the thoughts in your head instead of taking a weapon to your skin and launching chemical warfare on your body.
Whatever works to cure that cancer, I say, and so far, I have no complaints about my way. It might take more effort, but it’s peaceful and perfect – no lasting or collateral damage.
I say that time passes anyway. While going down the route of best advice, consider tuning into your thoughts while dialing out the details. What’s the bigger picture and the inner truth? That’s a question that only you can answer, and no one can argue with you about it. They may try, and that’s how you will know their true colors. Better now than never.
It’s ridiculous to think of it as “my way” because it’s not my own, it’s the way I’ve adopted as the dominant force in my world. People like Bruce Lipton, Dr. Joe Dispenza, Louise L. Hay, Dean Radin, and more are loud voices who caught my attention and helped change my reality.
Let Lynne McTaggart introduce you to a cool gang of people who are scientists not out to prove what is already known to be true, but to venture into the unknown and return with insights that help us all.
Isn’t that what we need right now? A return to “all.” Awe and wonder will crack open your world and let the light in so your true colors can dazzle us all.
What if the true spirit of violence was robbing us of the contribution only you can make? To provide the answer only you know? Now that, that would be bad for everyone, and that must qualify as violent, for we couldn’t begin to count all the victims.
The Universal School of Life
To sit with yourself and the truth of your stories, and not the parts you leave out because they don’t flatter, or the parts you draw out because they entertain, but the real parts and all the emotional baggage they trigger.
Maybe that’s all we are here for in this school of life, because you cannot accept anyone else if you cannot accept yourself. You cannot hold others to a higher standard than your own, and you realize that you, yourself can’t reach the bar – not without editing, spin, or excuse.
Whether your bars or horizontal or vertical, you are the only one who put them there, and you are holding the key. You need to ask whether they are keeping you in or keeping you out. Say the things that have to be said, no matter how obvious the statement.
Know yourself – and not just the good parts, for maybe what you think of as good or bad aren’t dividing lines in anyone else’s world, but merely evidence of a biased perspective.
Be careful how you throw around labels, or how superficially you understand a category. Not all is only ever what it seems. Try to remember that there’s always so much more that you simply cannot know.
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