[Disclaimer: this article contains graphic hunting photos.]
My hands were coated in dirt, among other things. I hunched over a thin aluminum folding table, dull gray and textured like a frozen creek. The stars shone brightly, and the cold night would have been a bit warmer with enveloping cloud cover.
In a pasture outside of Silver Creek, Nebraska, guided by my headlamp, I set up my cooking station. My dull knives, tongs, paper towels, and a handful of basic ingredients were kept dry in a purple Tupperware tote. I turned on the propane for the two-burner range, which, as my father proudly let it be known, was secured for a reasonable price. Finally, I grabbed the plastic shopping bag to my right, half-full of quickly congealing blood. Deer heart was a last-minute addition to the evening’s menu.
I grew up eating meat. I choose to currently eat meat. Eating meat involves death.
You can sanitize the language, but at its essence, you’re supporting your life through the involuntary acquisition of another life. In my early 30s, still under the sway of the less-than-nuanced ideals and earnestness of my 20s, I was just sure that, if you were a meat-eater, you must also be willing to go through the ordeal of processing carcasses.
More recently, I’ve chilled the fuck out.
It is a disorienting sensation to hold something raw and warm. Like, alive warm. Or maybe it’s just-dead warm. A deer’s internal temperature is around 100 degrees Fahrenheit. If I had to guess, the deer’s heart I held in my hands that night was radiating 80-degree heat from the inside out.
I shot my first deer in my mid-30s. Hunting didn’t interest me much growing up. I still don’t care for trophies; I care about the poundage. Deer has a terroir, as all naturally existing animals should. I grew up on venison—wild, funky venison—which has character. As I got older, and the meat around me tasted more of a faded memory of meat than actual food, I missed that taste of my youth. I missed eating something that had a life—not just a human-managed existence.
That night under the stars, I cooked for my dad, my brother, and my two older cousins. Together, they had over a century of hunting experience between them. In that century, only one had ever eaten a deer heart. They sat patient and quietly skeptical, as all Nebraskans do. There would be no hiding this heart: the recipe would be salt, pepper, butter, and the most vital organ of a formerly living thing.
Watching someone clean a carcass, you quickly learn that a lot of life comes from death. As the chest cavity is opened, thin wisps of steam escape. This is followed by a crescendo of deep-red blood. There’s so much blood that one of the final steps of field dressing is tipping and pouring out any that remains inside the animal.
It smells. It smells like nothing else I can describe. It smells like fucking guts.
The process is delicate at times—you have to expertly run a knife across the skin that covers the ribs, then the stomach. You need to puncture the skin, but not too deeply. The process is also violent. You have to grab the esophagus and rip out the organs and the rectum. The diaphragm tearing away from the ribs sounds like fleshy Velcro being slowly and methodically separated.
Finally, there you are—surrounded by piss, shit, blood, life, and death. It’s respectful. You learn how to put a bullet in this living thing, either killing it as fast as you can, or not killing it at all. Then you immediately go about trying to save it.
Fresh deer heart cooks quickly. All those lessons I read on blogs and heard on Top Chef that became cliches—freshness is the most important thing, the quality of the ingredient allows for simple cooking, etc.—were finally realized through a tangible example. The heart didn’t taste dead, the way some piece of pork on sale at the store down the street does. It still had life in it—life you could taste.
I’ve killed more deer since then. It wasn’t easy the first time, and it isn’t easy now. But that’s the way I want it. Killing something shouldn’t be simple. Choosing to pick up a gun is complicated. Seeing something beautiful and peaceful and lining it up in crosshairs to put it down is a paradox. I want those whom I cook for to realize the costs are more than something I put on a credit card.
That night around the campfire, the five of us ate the deer’s heart, haphazardly sliced. (There's a joke here about this being the only way Midwestern men can share their heart.) These particular men, husky and of substantial appetite, were shocked that they were pretty much full from this single organ. That little bit of meat was satisfying.
Five or so years later, I met a friend at a Chicago bar. It was cold that night, too, but the burnt-orange light pollution of the West Loop meant the status of the stars was unknown. She hadn’t lived in Chicago for almost a decade, but we maintained a friendship through social media. I also maintained just a few embers of the torch I once carried for her. She was in from New York, flustered from dealing with an emergency in the art world.
The conversation was easy, as it always is, and without thinking, I mentioned, “When I was home last, hunting…” and the whole thing stopped in its tracks.
“Wait, you hunt?”
“Yes.”
“Mark.” She sounded disappointed, and more than a little repulsed.
“I choose to eat meat,” I quickly justified. “And by doing that, I want to get away from this food system we…”
“Mark, you kill things.”
I stopped, thought about softening my answer, thought about obfuscating, thought that the last thing I wanted to do was disappoint the woman sitting across from me, but I had to answer truthfully.
“Yeah.”
