Sunlight spills through the back windows of the black box that sits on the edge of the woods. Wrens twitter and flutter cheerfully in the pine limbs above us. The sunset lights their edges up golden, and their backdrop is silhouetted trees against the reddening expanse of sky. Of course, we, the hunters, are in the black box, keeping quiet as mice, glancing at a phone screen, commenting on distant noises, marking the distance and size of the animals grazing peacefully in the green field.
A doe flicks its ears and raises its head, quick. We stop any movement, almost hearing our own hearts thump and stare back, unseen. Her fate has been decided, maybe.
The black rifle is on the "window" sill, and we must hold it steady with our hands, waiting. The scope on top of the gun magnifies the life grazing across from our lives, exposing it to our eyes' judgment and allowing for accuracy, for painless precision. Who are we exposed to? Not the deer, not that doe. But we are in the sight of God, attempting to steward the gifts He has given, to utilize this life He has allowed into our sight and within the range of the gun. The magnifying scope, does it magnify the life of the deer? Not just its image, but its importance, its nature?
I keep peering through the scope, nervous, alive to the fact that I am about to take an animal's life. It is right, but it is weighty. I want to do the thing appropriately, though I don't know quite what appropriate means in this situation. I want the moment to be full with gratitude, to shoot well and not to cause the deer unnecessary pain.
Nerves signal, fast as lightning, adrenaline dances through the body in a wild shout, racing from eye to brain to finger to trigger. The report of the rifle. The doe dropping into the grass and out of this life. The high five and small cheer are muffled by the box's walls. The sky grows redder.
The doe lies where she stood. Her ears flicker a final time in the grass, and my heart pricks. Others take her place, creeping out of the line of pines and nibbling on green stalks. Dusk is settling in, seating itself in an armchair and picking up a book. We watch quietly and step softly out of the stand once the sky fades from red to gray. It is twilight.
The four wheeler's hum is relaxing, but we are excited, driving to pick up the doe.
She is small, easily enough lifted onto the rack of the ATV. She feels almost alive, flexible and soft in our hands, and I am sad for her short life. A sense of future embarrassment crawls over me; her size will draw some comments, some good-humored mocking. She looked bigger through the scope, magnified. Her small life was not small to me. I have killed my first deer.
The shot that split her heart has marked mine. Sorrow and joy flow in the stream of blood that leaks down from the small animal.
Things must die in this world, and we must sustain ourselves with meat, but here a tension should always lie. A sorrow for how things must be, and a hope and rejoicing at the way things will be, one day. The blood of God ran down a cross, that human blood and even so that animal sacrifice and blood, would not fall freely forever. It's a promise, the smeared blood of the lamb and the Lamb of God, that death will soon die.
We heave the doe on the ground beside the other two deer killed that day. Their lives given for our lives, and I don't think I'll be able to eat meat again without thinking of my doe, about the gravity of the situation of death in life and for life,
of the sadness and unnaturalness of sin and death,
without thanking Christ and hoping for heaven.
The deer are hoisted up in the lamp-like glow of the farming building, a large tractor silently standing watch. We gut them, slicing through fur and skin and bodily linings, though fascia and muscle that once twitched and leaped and lived. The meat is pulled out and slapped down in a cooler. We laugh, and we joke, smiling at the moon and stars and friends, but there is still a solemnness is our thoughts, in our movements.
If the death of a deer is sorrow to our hearts, how much more quaking and mournful should be the death of God?
So often, I think, read, of Christ's death with little to no emotion. My heart could be as dead as the doe's to the Savior's sacrifice.
Oh, that He would smite my heart of stone, that He would "smite a rock." (Christina Rossetti)
I am thankful to God for the doe, and I hope its death will not be in vain, mentally to me as well as physically in its meat.
That the meat of truth and experience would strike me with new joy in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, that I'll always remember the deep, red color of blood and of that joyful sunset sky as the pastor speaks, quoting scripture before communion, as we remember His body and blood.
Death doesn't just point to the ground.
"This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me." — Luke 22:19
"Am I a stone, and not a sheep,
That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,
To number drop by drop Thy blood's slow loss,
And yet not weep?" — Christina Rossetti
