Dusken Deeds

Through my bedroom door, Nonno calls for us to get ready. We’re leaving. 

My cousin and I don olive-greens and layers, as the night will be cold and may last anywhere between a half hour and five. Fastening belts, zipping up rucksacks, tying the laces of mud-caked boots. We set out at half past 18:00. 

I have been staying with my Nonno and Nonna for the past week now, in their house just north of Milan, a few hills away from the border of Switzerland. Nonno, a stout man with the face of a hawk and the voice of a crow, has been a hunter since boyhood. His walls boast antlers, taxidermy, and countless glittering medals from the shooting competitions he has won—medals being the enduring prize. That more ephemeral laurel, and often the more valuable, is Italian in the extreme: a large prosciutto or salami, which I have seen him cut into on many occasions. He is tough and gruff and sometimes his lunch is ten or twelve roasted songbirds—bones, brains, and all. But he is kind also, and I love him deeply. I have requested that, for the first time in my life, I accompany him on a hunt. We are off after cinghiale, wild boar. 

In the car-ride to the hunt, I sense various feelings writhe against each other within me. My premature sadness at witnessing a death wrestles with my wish to experience something so deeply a part of my grandfather’s identity. More importantly, I wish to know what this other half of life is. Having been fortunate enough to lose no loved ones beyond a great-grandmother who, being 105 years of age, had lived a great deal of life, I feel I have little understanding of death. 

But I would be lying if I said that part of me did not regret doing this. I consider whether Nonno would disown me if I made a loud noise in the forest to frighten the condemned boars off. Reading my mind as only the old can, Nonno tells my cousin and I to keep hushed voices when we get out of the car. I try to recall why I wanted to do this in the first place. Because I am looking to the hills ahead through the windshield, and their dark groves of chestnut and hazel are not reminding me. The late Sun lies his tired fallow body upon them in fragments. I try to think about what the boars are doing now, how the unlucky one is spending his or her final hours. Low cloud lays over the Lombard woods, its bottom encrusted with the crushed shells of robins’ eggs. I seem to have swallowed one too, for I speak no words the journey over. 

We have arrived in the shadow of the wood. An exit of the car; a quiet closing of its doors. Autumn began three days ago, by my personal count, and there is a clarity to the evening’s breath that Summer sunsets lack. Cool, clear humidity hangs close above the still branches, and we pass under them wordlessly. We walk slowly, deliberately, over the sodden earth. The hunter’s tread. There is something primal in the familial aspect of this: the three of us, bound by blood in the past—and by blood in the future—heading off into hills as our ancestors have done for ages. Wafts of medieval poetry echo in the head, the hunts at Hautdesert in Gawain and the Green Knight, or Odysseus with boar-spear in hand, loping over Mount Parnassus. But I feel no chivalry, no Hellenic vigour, only gloom at what is to come. 

The dregs of the day are peaking over the ash-beams, but it is twilight here in the wood. Rightly so: we are committing dusken deeds. We walk under hazel and black locust and warlock-fingered cherries until we reach the platform in the trees. We climb up, set up, and sit down, ready for the wait. The loudest noise is Nonno loading his gun. A few minutes in I cough, and he darts me a barbed look. Though it was involuntary, I hope my noise has frightened the herd off. Silence settles over the ears like velvet. Now and again the eerie wet echoes of woodfowl clot the soaked air of the forest. Silence again. 

The first hour’s half trickles by with leaf-patter and the drip-drip of old raindrops. I sketch my cousin by the half-light to pass the time. Nonno, though, never takes his eyes off the spot where he has laid food out for the boars. I stretch my legs, revealing much-too-red socks for the thicket’s murk. A silvery call sinews through the air, and I ask Nonno what it is. A moment’s listening, then—“Picchio”. Woodpecker. His knowledge of the forest was one of the reasons why I wanted to come along to this. Everytime I walk under trees with him I see things I would not have before: a hidden mushroom, the tusk-furrows of boars on a search for food, the roads that rabbits cut when threading through the undergrowth. 

The hour fills out and then passes, with no more boar than before. But among the chalky auburn of autumn leaves, the birds are getting louder. Their frenetic choirs, sweetly and disparately sung, prod holes in the evening’s heavy air. The trees are tightening a drawstring of gradual gloom around us. The lips of the chestnut-leaves mimic the changing of human mouths, going from toothed to dull as the darkness rubs away my ability to see. Having sat without motion for so long, my body grows chill, the air’s moisture coagulating into a tickle of phlegm in the throat. My bladder presses full against my belly. My tailbone aches. I think I have never waited in the woods for so long. Ceaseless silence. Once or twice I catch myself slipping into boredom—Pray that this ends in boredom, I chide myself. And not in boar-doom.  A distant gunshot sprays loudness over the neighbouring hill, reminding me that the opposite is a likelihood. A louder silence follows. 

An hour and a half have gone by since we arrived, the light a dim dun pulse in the West. There is something in the waning of the day that parallels the imminence of death. The world under the wood has become dim as a crypt, the sharp-fletched ash-boughs shivering against night’s starry skin. Then the herd is seen. 

BANG. Ears ringing. Body numb. Mind numb. 

I follow cousin who follows grandfather who follows the path of the bullet to the boars. The herd has scattered, their dead left behind. I think that I expected killing to be cleaner. With a gun, especially: bullets are small. But bright blood--bright blood (I expected not so bright either)--polka-dots the dead ground. As Nonno flips one over, I see a tattered, shredded mass of shoulder-flesh a palm’s breadth wide, rubylike and glistening. The bullet has passed through one boar and struck that one behind, too. So this is death. This is killing. This is what I have come for.

I am glad that I did, but it is not enjoyable. It is a strange emotion, or rather a strange mixture of them. But this feels necessary to witness for some reason, under these trees, under this night. I am the son of a chef and have worked in restaurants for many years, and yet this is the first time I have witnessed the ending of a life that will soon be put on a plate. That does not feel right. “Behind every dish there is death,” says Brazilian chef Alex Atala. “And people only close their own eyes to it.” Though I don’t know whether death lurks behind a bowl of fruit salad or a bread-loaf, Atala’s words still occupy a place in my mind because our culture does have a habit of sheltering itself to killing—despite the fact that we live cheek-by-jowl with it and most people directly support it. They are children—these boars, I mean—two children who moments ago were turning up the leaves for chestnuts, in the company of family. I feel ashamed and guilty for not having stopped this. 

So I carry one. Over my shoulder, in a sack, trudging down the stony slope in the full dark. A butcher’s Saint Nicholas, Krampus in camouflage. The child is heavy, despite his youth. But I wanted to carry one, for the feeling of penance it evoked. We are much louder going down the hill than up, slipping on slick loam. Our breaths fog in the flashlight-beams like puddles of ghostly milk. 

Much like the journey here, the journey back finds me quiet and thought-riddled. Much like the journey here, I am full of mismatched feelings. I feel changed, too. Only slightly, but I do feel I am more aware of the life of that dark blurred world that’s racing by the passenger-seat window. Despite the many feelings simmering away, I feel clear-headed too, slap-sobered, serious. Whatever it is, it feels valuable, like holding a cold and precious stone in the pocket. I feel like one who has swam in warm waters and then enters a cool current. So that was death. That was killing. That was what I came for. 

There are lessons in death that the living can learn. And while I am unable to neatly extract some distilled drop of essential information from this experience to put upon the page, I think that it is fitting that way. Death defies meaning, defies tidy summaries. Death is messy and necessitates slow resolution. As everyone writing about a forest inevitably is at some point, I am tugged towards Thoreau now. Thoreau made for the woods around Walden Pond so that he might come to the throbbing core of life, to ‘live deliberately’, as he put it. I made for the woods to come to the hushed heart of life’s finality. I do not know how different that is.