AERO KUFM Commentary Archives

AERO KUFM Commentary

February 2006

By a Strip of Skin

by Rob Schlegel

As a teenager growing up in a non-hunting household in western Oregon, I considered the activity of blasting away our animal friends as slightly barbaric. I held a strong, albeit unfounded opinion that hunter’s were somehow less civilized than those of us who unwrapped our ground beef from plastic, not to mention those of us who sustained ourselves with rice and broccoli which, I did exclusively for a month after watching a film on the life of Gandhi, and which, due to my informed nutrient-naive-idealism, grew quite ill.

Six years later, and only a few days after devouring my first wild-duck dinner at a friends house and becoming obsessed with procuring more of the melt-in-your-mouth meat, I found myself walking alone along a narrow stream in northwest Montana wearing hip-waders and carrying a shotgun, all the while anticipating a duck taking wing. With ideologies just as fiery as they were in my college days, I had grown more concerned with eating locally and less concerned with just eating simply.

After an hour of walking, my heart finally settled into a recognizable rhythm until, from the middle of the murky creek, a duck lifted and seemed to be gathering wingy momentum as it hovered four feet over the water. I lifted my gun and shot and to my surprise, the bird fell.

Weeks earlier, I had watched a friend do the same thing on a different stream. He shot a duck and retrieved it to ring its neck, so I knew the initial impact of the pellets wouldn’t kill it; what I didn’t know was that the bird I shot could still swim, which it enthusiastically did-across the narrow creek and directly into a complicated willow thicket. I followed, carefully tracking it with my eyes as I stepped awkwardly toward the thicket. I laid on my stomach, my face pressing into the frozen ground and tried reaching for the scared bird. I considered its small shape. The teal-colored stripe along its wing was as wide as my two fingers pressed together. My body trembled. We laid there for a while, the duck and I, until I began convincing myself that the female mallard appeared to be unscathed; perhaps my shot missed entirely and that a jolt of shock at the sound of the guns blast, not my steel pellets, had sent the duck down. I began thinking that I should stand up immediately, walk away, forget about the duck and head home to put my shotgun up for consignment. Perhaps something needs to be said here about my weak character considering the abandonment of that wounded bird as though I had never implicated it with my decision to shoot. Or perhaps I was just learning my place in the food chain-a place I had grown quite detached from.

I reached further into the thicket. When the ducks beady black eye swerved to meet mine, I nearly wept. And then I did as I grabbed her wing, and felt it connected by a strip of skin. Finally I saw the small scab of blood in the tuft of its breast feathers.

As I dressed the bird, its downy feathers scattered slightly in the wind. I realized more fully that I was as close to my food as I would ever be. And to think I had been moments away from turning my back on that wounded bird, turning away from the responsibility of understanding the beautiful pain defining this system of energy.

Recently, I read an elegy for the poet Bill Anderson, who once opted out of attending a Black Panther conference on the United Front Against Fascism to listen instead to tape-recordings of a lecture about the individuals struggle for self-realization. Was this a cop-out, Bill wondered? No, instead, he writes, he came to understand it as an occasion which ”seemed to show a desire to take care of the real business of the revolution, to bring about a change in behavior in our own lives, to communicate better, to love better”. In some ways, it seems like a thick, too-many-feathered lesson to say that I learned to better love from one scared and dying female mallard, but, actually, I did. I also learned that taking more responsibility for my own place in the food system can be a painful, though ultimately, beautiful thing.

I’m Rob Schlegel for the Alternative Energy Resources Organization. AERO welcomes your comments and perspectives. AERO is a grassroots membership organization working to help create farm, food, energy and growth solutions for communities throughout Montana. For more information about our programs call us in Helena at 406-443-7272.