It was 1968, the fall of my second year in college, and I only had one chance to hunt. On the last day of the season I joined my father and Hartie, a cousin-in-law, mentor, and surrogate brother at Aunt Gert’s camp in the Allegheny National Forest.

The territory was loved and familiar, so I knew where to go and found the opportunity I sought fairly early. I blew the shot and lost the arrow. Back at camp for lunch, I was feeling discouraged, indulging in self-pity, and thinking of taking out a borrowed shotgun to hunt squirrels when my father emerged from the woods dragging a doe and smiling broadly. It was his first kill with a bow and arrow. He, too, had missed a deer earlier, but that had only sharpened his focus instead of diminishing it. I picked up my bow and quiver and returned to the woods with rekindled hope and renewed determination.

I had been standing motionless for only a half-hour when a lone doe approached at an angle. The closest the faint deer trail she followed was likely to bring her was thirty five yards—a shot I wouldn’t take now, but, in those days, chancy shots were a widely accepted practice, and I was young—six weeks shy of my nineteenth birthday. The doe was walking slowly. As she took the next step, I swung with her and released the bowstring. The shot felt bad even as the string slipped from my fingertips; I just wasn’t quick enough to stop it. The arrow struck the deer’s hind quarter.

The bow was reasonably stout, a fifty-five pound recurve, so when the broadhead hit the hip joint, it had enough force to shatter it. The deer went down, rolled over, rose unsteadily to its feet, and fell again. I drew another arrow from the quiver—I only had two left now—and shot again as the deer rose to its feet once more. The shot was well-aimed, but the deer fell again before the arrow flew through the space formerly occupied by the deer and embedded itself in a tree. I had one arrow left and no room for mistakes.

I walked quickly toward the deer. As I drew near, she stopped struggling and looked at me with dark, frightened eyes. At three feet, just out of hoof range, I drew the bow and drove an arrow through the deer’s heart. She gasped and died. I was shaken. I sat awhile, with trembling hands, apologized to the deer and the forest and regained my composure before beginning the work of field dressing and dragging.

Those who don’t understand what it means to hunt often ask, with a plaintive air and rhetorical intent, how we can take pleasure in killing. We often answer that the kill is not primary, that we hunt for a constellation of reasons and satisfactions; in fact, we often hunt without the success of a kill and find great satisfaction. While it’s true that we do often find great pleasure and satisfaction without the kill, our standard response is a transparent dodge that fails to answer the question. Today, hunting cannot afford that. We are under siege, and obfuscation does not serve our cause.

After I stood over that young doe and did what had to be done, the kill, and consequently the hunt, became something different. I had grown up with hunting and I had been raised to be purposeful, pragmatic, and goal-oriented. The kill was the goal of the hunt, and as such, its achievement was a triumph, an affirmation of self-worth and personal prowess. Such an outlook is easy and perhaps natural for the young and driven, but once we grow beyond the naiveté of youth, the failure to recognize the simplistic inadequacy of such a response to the death of a wild creature is a failure of maturity. What I realized that day was that the kill is not a triumph, a pleasure, or a personal affirmation. It is a hardship. The realization that the very focal point of success could be, in itself, a hardship, rippled out through my life like the waves from a pebble tossed into a still pond. The realization that life’s truest satisfactions lay elsewhere than the achievement of goals took awhile to mature and rise to consciousness, but it began that day when I sat down, with racing heart and shaking hands, beside a fallen doe.

There are other hardships and many pleasures in the hunt, but the kill is one of the hardships; one that defines the very nature of the hunt, just as the hardships of wind, cold, and thin air define much of mountaineering, but are not intrinsically loved or sought in and of themselves. If killing was a pleasure, slaughterhouses would be selling tickets, not paying wages, game farms would have reduced hunting to obsolescence long ago, and an eccentric Siamese cat named Buddy would not have been one of my very best friends for the past thirteen years.

That the kill is a hardship is belied neither by the eagerness that powers its seeking nor by the exuberance that accompanies its realization. Indeed, the sharp-edged poignancy of death pierces the habitual layers of emotional defense we all carefully maintain in order to function reasonably well in our families, schools, and jobs, releasing a varied flood of emotion. We are elated because we have transited through many hardships to a successful result. We are empowered because we have faced a climactic moment of great tension and, in that moment, summoned skills patiently cultivated through months or years of apprenticeship and practice. There is a sense of pride and achievement, especially for young hunters who seek a parent’s or mentor’s approval and for acceptance into the world of adults. Many hunters continue to seek that approval and acceptance by substituting a record book for a parent, mentor or the world of adults, but most let that need naturally subside into eagerness to tell and retell the story by the campfire in order to taste and savor its meanings while softening its poignancy with camaraderie and beer. Hunters may also feel a certain vindication for past failures: blown shots, stalks that unraveled with a clumsy step, or times when they yielded to cold and fatigue too soon because they drank too much telling stories by the previous night’s campfire. The great satisfaction in bringing meat home for our families by our own efforts in essentially primitive circumstances is  as ancient as humanity itself, one of life’s most fundamental satisfactions.

All of these satisfactions are tempered by the hardships that precede and follow them and by the wild climactic hardship of a wild creature’s death. The momentary mix of feelings that erupts from the kill summarizes, with great, tough clarity, the poignant, impossibly beautiful nature of life as a conscious being on this Earth. The range of feelings that encompasses a lifetime are summoned and released as we transit a brief drama of hardship, grief, excitement, poignancy, determination, death, beauty, and sustenance.

The killing is tough. It is painful and sometimes it is frightening, and on its far side, as on the far side of many other voluntary hardships, we find growth, courage, and the healing of our own hidden wounds.