A response to Mira’s latest, “of gummy-worms and larger creatures.”

Let’s start with the easy part: I love gummi worms.

While I was running along Skyline with Kjersten tonight, I got to thinking about how I’m actually thinking about taking a pheasant-hunting lesson in November.

I don’t hunt. Never have. I trudged alongside my dad once after pheasants. It was a cold fall morning, and my six-year-old stride couldn’t keep up. He didn’t slow down for me, nor did he explain much of what was going on. The only punctuation in the long, hard, all-day march (he probably remembers it as a few hours, but this is my story) was a lunch that was too brief and featured not nearly enough hot chocolate. And a moment when a weird flapping sound to our prompted him to grab up his gun and point, only to drop it again. The pheasant had flushed too quickly.

I don’t have any desire to hunt. Never have.

I don’t know if I could actually pull the trigger on an animal. Never have.

And yet.

I eat meat. My hunting dad still stocks my freezer with wild game, and I love cooking it, eating it, sharing it with friends. Recently I served our mutual friend a beautiful Viennese-style pheasant, seared off and then roasted in little bacon boxer shorts, disassembled into parts over wild rice, and drizzled with a gravy made from deglazing the dutch oven with chicken stock and thickening with roux. Her pleasure at the new flavor tasted even better to me than the pheasant itself. I enjoyed her delight at hearing it was a bird that Flicka, the dog Mom and Dad got after Candy retired to live with us in California, had helped hunt.

Kjersti is an exquisite young chocolate lab in the tall, athletic, high-spirited, intelligent Canadian labrador retriever style. This is not to be confused with the English lab style that we mostly see around here: dopey, mellow, short, pudgy, block-headed barrels with paws. Kjersti comes from a long line of field trial champions. She was bred to hunt, and I see her hunting intelligence every day—how she freezes into a quiet point at the sight of the wild turkeys that wander through our neighborhood, and holds it until I acknowledge them and she knows I know. How she tears after a fallen tennis ball, carries it back to me at top speed, and drops it at my feet. How when I walk her off-leash at Redwood or Sibley, she fans the area, running quietly ahead of me and sweeping from one side to the other, looking back frequently to check my progress. How she holds our youngest Siamese cat’s head in her mouth, ever so gently—dampening her fur, but not frightening or injuring her—not mangling any fur or feathers, not bruising any meat.

Meat.

I eat animals all the time. I don’t mind cleaning and butchering them, when they’re already dead. But can I hunt them myself? Kill them myself? I doubt it. But because I love my dog, my beautiful brown animal who works the brush ahead of me with such intelligence and enthusiasm, I’m actually considering it. It almost feels like an obligation to her, my animal, to go kill animals with her. I don’t begin to know how to unwind this conundrum, so I am likely to convince myself that I’m too busy even to consider it and then move on quickly.

I suppose it should be an obligation of my carnivorous ways to join in the violence of my reality. Dad always talks about the sacred connection he feels with the game as he kills it. I have spent much of my life thinking that’s a creepy, horrible cop-out, but when I buy my meat already dead, nicely sliced and wrapped on hygienic-looking white styrofoam trays, my complacency is shaken. If I’m even paying attention. Usually I am not.

My Japanese friends are good at mindful reverence at the table. They say “itadakimas” before starting to eat. Translations vary, but the way my favorite translators, Masako and Tomoko, explained it to me, it means thank you to the animals and plants, the farmers and ranchers and fishers and butchers, the truck drivers, the grocers, the cooks, and everyone else who brought the food to us. At the end of the meal, they say “gotso sama deshita,” which thanks the food directly, using the same respectful particle, sama, that is used for addressing the Shinto gods.

A kaddish for everybody I have eaten. Gotso sama deshita.