The wind chill was -25 degrees when I left my friend’s cabin. It was the second week of December. As if they were powered by the howling wind itself, the stars of Orion’s belt had just begun pulling a dim smudge of dawn above the jagged, inky serration of pines that formed the horizon. An hour later, as the sun finally broke through the trees, I lost all feeling in my fingers and toes. I was freezing – literally – and I had to be honest with myself; it was my own fault.

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Wisconsin’s regular gun deer season – only four weeks before – had been unseasonably warm: warmer than anyone could remember. As a result, I will confess, I did not hunt as hard as I should have. The sunlight was so purely golden, and its radiant heat was so delicious. They were both such welcome and unexpected gifts; it seemed inconceivable not to take advantage of them. So, I did things that I had never done before during a regular gun deer season. I fell asleep many times – wearing nothing but my shirt sleeves, no less – in the pools of sunlight that spilled from acre to acre among the pines. I propped up my lever-action Browning and sprawled out on the soft, dry blanket of pine needles so I could watch the clouds float by like I did when I was a boy. After all, I reasoned in my head, in almost two decades I had never not seen deer, and I had never not come home with meat for my family. There is a first time for everything, of course, and nothing in this life comes without a cost. All my sunny, delightful indulgences during those halcyon days in November were now biting me on the ass, and I was definitely paying the price for my hubris. The consequences found me 17 feet up in an unsympathetic old oak with the wind whipping violently and the bitter cold gnawing at my bones, freezing my flesh.

They received what we as humans usually wish for ourselves: a free life, a quick death, and someone to be thankful for us after we’ve gone.

First I felt them. Then I saw them. Two large doe – spooked by something – were racing down the creek bottom, through a maze of smooth-skinned maples, on a flat sprint. The wind whipped so violently I couldn’t even hear their hooves punching rhythmically through the young ice. My brain sent a signal for my right thumb to cock the hammer of my rifle, but my thumb was frozen. It refused to move; so I used my entire fist to pull the hammer back. When it clicked, I pulled up and swung the barrel. The air shimmered, and I stopped thinking. I don’t recall aiming, but I must have. I don’t recall my finger squeezing the trigger, or my hand working the lever, or my finger squeezing the trigger again, but it happened. I had to “thread the needle,” as they say, with a small, fast, scalpel of a round: the .243. Unlike larger calibers, the .243 isn’t exactly known for being able to muscle through dense brush without losing its mark. Yet I was successful – twice – without blinking or being able to feel my extremities; the deer both dropped where they were hit. They received what we, as humans, usually wish for ourselves: a free life, a quick death, and someone to be thankful for us after we’ve gone. Everything about that morning was a gift – nothing short of miraculous, in fact – but I was too cold to see it that way…or any other way for that matter. My vision started to blur and narrow. I felt myself listing like a torpedoed ship. I was losing consciousness, and it was happening fast.

Through some grace of physics, the thin shooting rail of the deer stand broke my fall forward. My weight was just far enough back that, when my knees buckled, I fell back into my seat instead of tumbling 17 feet to the frozen ground below. These were the old days, before harnesses were really a thing for gun hunters, and I struggled to keep my back upright against the tree. I fought the urge to pass out by forcing by eyes open and coercing deep breaths of icy air into my lungs, systematically, with ragged gulps.

It was in that slow time, in that sudden space, that I saw the souls of those two deer – the pure energy of their beings – leave their bodies: translucent forms, rising and roiling on the wind, disappearing above the treetops into the early morning.

Perhaps it was the hypothermia; perhaps it wasn’t, but, after I recovered my bearings, time seemed to slow. There was a sudden space in the woods that had not existed before the shots rang out. I had the distinct feeling that I was in the process of being either forgotten or accepted by the forest, and I still recall the inadequacy that I felt when I couldn’t tell which it was. It was in that slow time, in that sudden space, that I saw the souls of those two deer – the pure energy of their beings – leave their bodies: translucent forms, rising and roiling on the wind, disappearing above the treetops into the early morning.

I spent a few moments attempting to process what I had just witnessed and gingerly made my way down the ladder. By the time I arrived at the creek bottom, my friend, having heard the shots (and also having enough sense not to hunt in weather like this) left the warmth of his cabin’s wood stove. I could see his form cautiously traversing the eastern flank of the ridge and knew that he would arrive in minutes. I put tobacco and sage down, as my ancestors had done for millennia before me, and I gave thanks. It was difficult for me to handle my knife properly – I was afraid I would end up cutting my own fingers without realizing it – so we worked together. Once the hide had been slit from sternal notch to hindquarters, steam poured from the animal’s body. Instead of field dressing the animal immediately, I slipped my hands in the warm, bloodless space between the abdominal wall and the thick khaki membrane that held all the organs together. My fingers burned with pain as they began to thaw. My friend and I spoke quietly at first. Then we did not speak at all. I had just taken two lives, and the gravity of that act – for every serious and respectful hunter – is always heavy. It reminded me of why, aside from witnessing the birth of my sons and the deaths of loved ones, hunting is the closest thing I’ve known to a spiritual experience. Hunting is, in fact, one of the few activities that allows an individual to participate directly in the life and death cycles upon which all natural systems depend. There is something sacred about that.

Different people hunt for different reasons, but it needs to be said that those who do so without respect for the lives they take, and without responsibility to the land from which they take, are not true hunters. They are merely killers. Simply put, if killing is a “sport” to you, then you don’t deserve to call yourself a hunter; you’re a cancer to every serious and respectful hunter in the world. True hunting is an art; it is demanding – physically, mentally, and spiritually – and it exists to provide sustenance.

Thus, first and foremost, I hunt to provide clean protein for my family. Due to the hormones, antibiotics, pesticides, and negative environmental impacts associated with industrialized factory farms – not to mention the horrendous suffering those animals endure from birth to death – our family tries hard not to buy much meat from the grocery store. Conscientious family farms and small organic operations set up at the farmer’s market? Sure. I have, however, always found it sadly ironic that many people who are critical of hunting don’t give a second thought to the cellophane-wrapped meat they buy from store. Rarely must they face the disturbing reality that the genetically altered animal their tidy package of meat came from was never able to enjoy a free life, never contributed to any functional ecosystem, and most likely died a horrible death at the hands of some minimum-wage worker with a bolt gun or on the electrified hooks of some soulless machine. The thoughts of rubber aprons and knee-high boots, the thoughts of stainless steel slop troughs and concrete floors awash in blood and feces, the thoughts of animals being “processed” (sometimes still alive) are inconvenient to most. These thoughts spoil the modern experience of shopping, which seems to have become a form of recreational therapy.

Oddly enough, this is why I have always admired and respected vegans and vegetarians; they are honest people, who, like true hunters, have enough respect for life – and the quality of life – to source their food differently from the masses. The outcomes look different for the two groups, of course, but, like true hunters, vegans and vegetarians live their lives with intention and altogether differently from people who mindlessly pluck processed bits of plants and animals from store shelves, cleverly hidden inside brightly colored boxes and shiny stackable cans. Like true hunters, vegans and vegetarians are not fooled by the industrial illusions that we can have food without harvest, that life can be maintained without death, that our existence is separate from that of the earth, or that we are fundamentally different from other organisms. Like the vegan or vegetarian lifestyles, hunting as a means of sustenance creates an acute awareness of being, sustained by the plants and/or animals who necessarily die to feed us.

As technology (and addiction to convenience) slowly alienates and distances the human animal from its original home – the outdoors – true hunters have resisted. They have resisted the sterilization of modern culture that separates us from the natural world and its cycles of life and death. But hunters are not alone in this resistance. I believe that anybody who makes a conscious, responsible decision about where his or her food comes from – whether that food be plant or animal – inherently resists. And I believe he or she is better off for it. With an intimate understanding of the landscape into which I melt every season, and the instincts of my ancestors swimming strong through my veins, I choose to accept personal responsibility for at least some of the deaths that nourish my life. But that doesn’t make it easy, and there isn’t anything romantic about it.

In some traditional Anishinaabe homes, young hunters are required to give away their first deer; this is so the hunter understands that the deer is a gift. These were not my first deer, but they were certainly gifts. My freezer was empty, and so was my friend’s. I had two tags, of course, but it was understood without speaking that the second deer would be his. As he looked on, I knelt on the snow – elbow deep in the steaming body of the deer I had just shot – and the oldest silence in the world fell upon us. In that silence, we saw ourselves for what we really were: part of it all. Not comfortably removed. Not distant relations. Neither delegators nor sanitized voyeurs. Responsible. Responsible, and part of it all. Many years later – and still to this day – I don’t know of anything more humbling, more beautiful, or more terrifying in the whole world.