Killing Dinner

DURING A TRIP to England two years ago, I casually agreed to join a group of English friends on their biennial stag hunt at a lodge in the farthest reaches of Scotland. The place was called Loch Choire, and it was a most beautiful and desolate-looking spot, far away from everything except the tiniest neighbouring village. Consisting of thirty-thousand-odd acres of grounds with one rustic yet well-appointed lodge, Loch Choire sounded like the quintessential British hunting estate.

Exclusive hunting lodges are not among my usual haunts. As a documentary filmmaker, I have, over the past three decades, tended to focus on themes of social and political inequities. I’ve travelled to such places as Nepal, the Philippines, South Africa, Bolivia, and Chile, and a number of my films have to do with complex issues facing women in different parts of the world. True, one or two have entailed witnessing a hunt: I followed Cree families on their fall goose hunt in James Bay one year, and once accompanied a group of Thais on their hunt for carp and lizards in Thailand’s boggy, flooded flats.

But no one would mistake me for a huntress. The nearest thing I have to a credential in that area is a painting by Paraskeva Clark, called Diana Hunting in the Caledon Hills. It shows several immodestly covered women bearing bows and arrows, and it was painted for an Eaton’s window in 1940 as an advertisement for underwear.

In fact, at the time I accepted my friends’ invitation, I knew nothing about hunting. A friend who did know something about hunting expeditions told me to be sure to take a Barbour jacket. I said nothing. I didn’t know what a Barbour jacket was. I had never even fired a gun.

So what in the world was drawing me all the way to a remote part of Scotland to hobnob with this crew over lavish dinners and fine wines, and then join them on a hunt? It was hard to think of many places in the world that would feel more alien to a gently ageing, Jewish, instinctive feminist from Winnipeg than going hunting with a group of mostly male Brits. I was curious as to how I’d fare.

This would not be the first time my curiosity had led me down an unexpected path. During a short stint in the Northwest Territories, my lifelong love of all things edible led me to partake of a Dogrib Nation delicacy – the cheeks, tongue, and brain of a caribou. I have delighted in a plate of “rotten walrus” set before me in Arctic Bay. (To prepare the dish, a walrus is buried underground and left there until it achieves a ripe-cheese texture and flavour.) I’ve eaten, and even enjoyed, crunchy roasted cockroach in northeastern Thailand.

The stag hunt would give me a window into the world of that self-styled highest of all civilized beings – the British male – on this most British of activities. I knew only that shooting, as hunting is known in that culture, had for centuries been the purview of the privileged. Now I had the opportunity to investigate this tradition from the inside. I found I mentioned my forthcoming trip delicately, leaving out the word “hunting” most of the time. My sister-in-law looked horrified when I explained what I would be doing. “Just deerstalking,” I said. I was aware of the almost automatic response that most urban people have to hunting, that it’s savage and simply wrong. I, myself, have felt that way at times – and then, at other times, not at all. For me, as for most people, questions about hunting, killing, and eating animals are shrouded in moral equivocation.

I suppose that, as a gourmand who has gleefully devoured all sorts of meat, as a defender of Native hunting traditions, and as a woman who has never sought to be the hunter herself, I wanted to find out, too, how far I could go.

Hunting simply didn’t exist in my childhood community of Winnipeg in the 1950s. Jewish people, traditionally urban and historically denied land ownership, didn’t hunt – not to mention that the demands of keeping kosher made it impractical to stalk your own dinner. For me, hunting was somehow exotic.

My link to the world of meat was the kitchen table. The veal chops, rib steaks, and even the hot dogs were prepared with meat from a kosher butcher, “bled” in accordance with Biblical instructions. It would not have occurred to any of us to hunt our own meat. As for fish, no one in my family had ever caught one. My parents’ attitude would have been, “Why catch a fish? What’s a fish store for, then?” I often accompanied my mother to the butcher’s on Main Street where I saw the big raw cuts of beef suspended from hooks above my head, and the blood stains on the aprons of the men. Still, the meat on the table felt disconnected from all that.