Image of the Week: Hunter's Sleep
© D. Yael Bernhard
Today was the first day of deer hunting season here in upstate New York. For me it's a day that brings back memories. For nearly two decades as an active hunter, November was all about "opening day." This was the morning when hunters everywhere would rise before dawn and creep into the woods, climb tree stands in the dark, and wait for sunrise to bring light to the long-anticipated day. Months of preparation hung in the balance – especially for a female hunter like myself. In order to build upper body strength, I had to practice with my compound bow much longer than my male counterparts, starting back in April. In addition to target practice, every arrow had to be balanced and tested; deer trails had to be scouted; tree stands mounted; shooting lanes cleared; camouflage de-scented – and in my case, childcare arranged. Venison was the only meat I fed myself, my kids, and my dog. I was fortunate to have comrades who helped me with tracking, dragging, and other heavy labors involved in the hunt.
A successful hunter must learn to think like a deer. We learned the patterns of their behavior – where they bed down; where they graze before dawn; where they cross streams, fences, and roads. In heavy storms, they would seek shelter in the pines down by the river. When hunting season started, the wiliest bucks made their way into the cattail swamps, where no human could approach without making their presence known. Personally, I didn't care if I got a buck or a doe – I just wanted wild, forest-fed meat.
Part of the hunt was tracking – for even a perfect shot with an arrow can take half a minute to bring a deer down – long enough to power many leaps of those powerful legs, taking the deer far – always into the deepest, thickest brush the animal can find. We were on our knees for hours, searching the multicolored leaves for drops of blood, scanning the brush for broken twigs.
The entire process knitted me not only to the deer but also the land that gives them life. In darkness and dawn, daylight and twilight, under stars, snow and rain, I walked, crawled, climbed, ate, breathed, and slept in their world. Sitting in silence, I heard owls call to each other, and felt a weasel crawl over my leg. As a trucker sees white lines flashing through his mind at night, I saw deer arc across my dreams, felt their fur brush against me and their silent shadows pass over me. I awoke from one such dream with a vision of being stitched into a quilt – a square filled with the graceful silhouettes of whitetail deer – stately and dignified, flesh of my flesh, life of the forest, my wild nourishment and most intimate link to nature. The deer were in me, and I was in them.
Out of this deep immersion came this image of human and deer, shifting and weaving together.
I paint a lot of transparent shapes in my art. It's partly a nod to Cubism, which breaks objects into shifting, overlapping forms. It's partly my way of translating line drawings into color. Let two outlined shapes overlap, such as you see here, and you've got several choices of how to fill them in. In this case, the technique helps express the point of the painting – the merging and blending of human and animal – a happy union of content and form.
The painting is done on a small piece of rice paper, not much larger than the image shown here. I had only one piece with this fine-toothed grain, and this was the perfect image for it. The paper lends a feeling of aged parchment, but still allows for blending. I began with the medium brown, first creating a tonal composition, then darkened and lightened selected areas to create more contrast, and finally added the rosy hues of sunrise.
These days my dwindling hearing, diminishing cold tolerance, and other practical matters make it difficult to hunt. Gone are my hunting buddies of the 1990s and early 2000s, as is my access to choice private land. Instead, I wait for one of my daughter's hunter friends to bring me a deer. I'm still able to butcher them myself – a two-day project that yields enough meat to get me through the winter. Fingers crossed that I'll be blessed with a fresh kill this year – and maybe some new inspiration. Art emerges from experience – and for that I'm doubly grateful to the deer, who have fed both my body and my soul.
A good week to all! And if you live in a rural area, be sure to wear bright colors while out walking for the next three weeks. Rifle season is followed by muzzleloading, then one more week of late archery.