In November, countless families across Texas head out for the annual deer hunt, a ritual that spans generations, ethnicities, socioeconomics, and gender as perhaps no other cultural experience in the state. Rick Bass's family has returned to the same hardscrabble piece of land in the Hill Country--"the Deer Pasture"--for more than seventy-five years. In A Thousand Deer, Bass walks the Deer Pasture again in memory and stories, tallying up what hunting there has taught him about our need for wildness and wilderness, about cycles in nature and in the life of a family, and particularly about how important it is for children to live in the natural world. The arc of A Thousand Deer spans from Bass's boyhood in the suburbs of Houston, where he searched for anything rank or fecund in the little oxbow swamps and pockets of woods along Buffalo Bayou, to his commitment to providing his children in Montana the same opportunity--a life afield--that his parents gave him in Texas. Inevitably this brings him back to the Deer Pasture and the passing of seasons and generations he has experienced there.
Bass lyrically describes his own passage from young manhood, when the urge to hunt was something primal, to mature adulthood and the waning of the urge to take an animal, his commitment to the hunt evolving into a commitment to family and to the last wild places.
I choose the books I read in January for their kind of prayerful quality. It’s important to listen to January— to quote Barry Hannah, whom I’d never read in January— as it whispers, “cancel your duty to the outer, get fetal, think of caves.” It’s different from December, even. December, with its shortest day of the year for us in the Northern hemisphere, can still hold a little celebration. January is such a wonderfully sacred rite.
There’s not a book I could have chosen to suit that purpose more perfectly than this one. The hunt. The ritual and sacrament, the joy and loss, the life and death.
Considering its subject matter, maybe you’d think that it belongs more to the season of hunting itself, to October and November. Maybe, if I had read it then I’d agree with that instead. But right now, it belongs right here. That stretch of January devoted to the end, and to other beginnings, and to the quiet, private reflection on such things.
Or, it did for me. And it will, I’d wager, year after year, from now on. Put this up there with Oil Notes, in other words. Even though that is my summer book, even though that is for when it’s time to wrestle some happiness.
“We would do well to remember, I think, that all the world was once wilderness— the world that shaped and sculpted our brains as well as our bodies, and our systems of logic. It was and remains the baseline, the foundation of whatever we choose to call “nature”— the place where all the rest of nature first came from.”
Reading updates
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5 January, 2014:
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5 January, 2014:
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