Pleasures of the Hunt / We Must Be Creatures

Pleasures of the Hunt / We Must Be Creatures:Toward an Ecofeminist Hunting Ethic Cynthia Belmont (bio) I don't know how a stag turnsinto a stream, an arc of water.I have never felt such accurate envy. Not of the deer: To be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me. —Jane Hirshfield, "The Supple Deer" I was no longer freed from the earth, buttoiling and overburdened, as befits a humanbeing. And it seemed a good thing to me, andI gladly assumed the heavy load. —Marlen Haushofer, The Wall dressing for work at dawn this morning, my vision skimming the window was snagged and pulled outside, drawn by a gaze: in the gray October yard, twenty feet or so from the house, was a young whitetail doe watching me. You get used to this, living in the forest—creatures manifesting in your line of sight. The doe was visiting our apple tree, as the local deer do, working their circuit, even weeks after the last [End Page 202] apples have fallen, in hopes of a surprise, some gift of sweetness that might appear because you never know, and you really don't since trees drop what they will when they will. She was staring in at me, watching my backlit form put on clothes, her body expression cautious, curious. Vigilant. What was she witnessing? What was I doing here, inside my human place? What was I going to do next, and could I do it from there, at that close range? We watched each other for a few seconds, and then I moved my arm and she turned and ran for the woods, so I was not so much inside after all; returning her gaze through the window, I might as well have been outside, or almost outside, or coming outside, or reminding her that I could. Nearly dressed, I felt glad that I had not been naked when I saw her because then I would have had knowledge of some (impossible to know) knowledge of hers of me, and that might have felt a little bit like shame, and what would that have meant? What would it mean to be caught unclothed by a deer? I follow Derrida here, naked, facing his cat, considering what it means for who he is: "The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there."1 And now I turn and take a detour around this masculine (if not masculinist) section of his path, because I'm not a man with phallic anxiety facing a female domesticated feline; I'm not a man with "pussy panic," as Susan Fraiman calls Derrida's interspecies relation in that moment.2 No, my shame, my "I," would not be about latent fear of the subjugated Other, but it might be about inhabiting a female/feminine body that is constituted as an inherent site of shame within a patriarchal culture. If, facing the doe naked, I would have been (courtesy of Jack Halberstam) "not dressed for conquering," it's also true that I'm never unequivocally dressed for conquering, in the sense that Halberstam's (masculine, male) sovereign has to become [End Page 203] vulnerable through being undressed, rather than, as in the female/feminine body, already being so.3 From the doe's perspective however, I might have been dressed for conquering no matter what I was (not) wearing, being a member of a predator class from which she ran. I feel no shame for that, having already been constituted as such by the deer; free, untamed, healthy whitetail deer run from humans. And I have no answer to the questions posed here outside of my physical entanglement with the deer in my ecosystem—" wild" creatures who share the land, our home—an entanglement that might be organized around themes of appreciation, sharing, and eating. One thing, perhaps the most intensely physical thing, that I am in my relationship with deer is a hunter. A girl hunter, I always say, because my position with respect to hunting is a specifically gendered, marginal one. Queer girl hunter. And I ask from this position: when we in this

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