Mietzke's POST Holden Adventure

Dave shot a bear today. I was walking through the dining hall after dinner and as I passed a table my friend Steph said “so, I hear Dave got a bear today.” It was the first I heard of it and she told me that Andrew had seen Dave while out hiking and carrying the bear back towards the village. I told Mary and we walked down the road to meet them not realizing that they were already back in the village. As I walked my imagination got the better of me and I began to think of how I might feel if I had killed something. Was Dave changed because of the experience? When I did see him back at the village he was carrying a cooler filled with bear meat. He was quiet and I experienced a long moment of shyness as if I was meeting a part of him for the first time. I opened the cooler and looked in at the ribs and a leg, muscle and ligaments perfectly formed around the bone. It was beautiful in a strange way. The colors were brilliant; reds, purple, and white molded carefully into the recognizable shapes that made me think of my own internal workings. I wanted the whole story before anyone else got it. I wanted a little piece of his change, his adventure, I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to know him in a new way.
I wanted to know how he felt, was there adrenalin? Was he scared? Did he have any moments of regret or sorrow, or did he experience joy, accomplishment, triumph? Did it make him feel more like a man, and if so, what does that mean? What was the work of gutting and skinning it like? Was its fir soft? The questions coming from me all were based in wanting to know his emotional process around his first kill in fifteen years.
His hands had a fishy smell from the bear fat that I could smell all through vespers. I kept taking glances at him wondering if we were separated by this experience. I also wondered what other people thought about it. You can’t do anything in this village without everyone knowing about it.
When we went back to the house I asked for the story. I wanted to know how you skin a bear, how you pull out the innards, what do they feel like to the touch? Was there lots of blood? Was it strange to take the bear from a living creature down to four packs of meet that you carried down the mountain, separating bone from bone and flesh from flesh? I wanted to understand him to be a part of what he experienced.
Dave and his Dad shared the work and the story, and this evening after vespers we sat and talked and I was able to ask all of the questions that I could think of. The details about the gutting, skinning, and sawing were all answered, but the question of feeling still sits on my heart. Can you really be neutral when it comes to the taking of a life, or do you have to enter in and feel the thankfulness for the kill, and the regret for the life lost. Is that dichotomy living inside of Dave and where will it take him? Where will it take me as I am eating bear burgers?
I am still trying to decide how I feel about all of this. I also want to know the process of where my food came from to see it from start to finish so that I can really appreciate both the life and process.

Ok, so the first part of this entry was all of two weeks ago and since then I hiked up to Holden Lake with Dave to retrieve his pack and see where the bear story took place. It was good to be with Dave and I have been trying to put a name to my feelings around it but I can’t.
I have been a meat eater for most of my life but aside from fish and a duck or two I have never really seen the process of taking an animal’s life, so this has been a good experience for me. I felt a strange thankfulness towards the bear, a thankfulness that the bear is an animal who had lived a healthy natural life free of restraint, and that it’s diet was healthy. There is something in knowing that the food you are eating had a good life and that the energy that it provides is good energy. I was also thankful for the adventure of learning how to cook something entirely new. I also had a good time with Dave talking about his experience and there is something good in having the ability to provide your family with good food. I was amazed at how much work went into the process of skinning the bear and gutting it, and carrying it down the mountain. I am also glad that Dave and his Dad got to spend so much time together up at the lake.