suc cessful that fewer
my way into the store.
It is a discomfort others share.
Every autumn, during deer season,
many of my friends and acquaint ances become indignant. For some,
the indignity has to do with loss of services: a large proportion of the
native population here hunts, so much so that if it weren’t for the urban refugees (the vast majority of
whom are members of the profes
sions), the economy would come to a
grinding halt. As it is, commerce suf
fers, and everyone comes to under
stand that certain things are impossi ble during deer season: you cannot
get your car repaired today, you can
not get that extra cord of wood deliv ered before it snows, you cannot get a
plumber or an electrician or a fuel-oil
delivery this week. But others have a resentment whose origin lies deeper than mere inconvenience. For two
weeks the hunters own the woods
and are an unavoidable presence in
much of the public space of Ver mont?not only in the general stores
but also on the backroads, where they are found walking, and where their vehicles are parked in the high weeds or tucked into small clearings and old
logging roads, a litter of metal that marks the passage of predators, like so much mechanical scat. It is not hard to see hunters as an invading force. Many people resent the feeling of insecurity this creates, and some
among them would like to prevent these men with guns from killing “defenseless” animals. But in this belief they have transposed their
knowledge of domesticated animals onto the wild: deer have not been
selectively bred for stupidity. As wild herbivores their primary defenses are stealth and flight, strategies so suc cessful that fewer than ten percent of the hunters here take home any
meat.
In their attitudes toward hunting, anti-hunters reflect the conventions
of our culture and their class. suc cessful that fewer: in the moral
universe of our culture’s folk tales
and children’s stories, herbivores are
always innocent, and carnivores dan
gerous or downright evil. It could
