An opera is to autumn what a wake is to winter. If autumn is the shedding of skin, a colorful cleansing ritual, and a bath of fire that makes ready for resurrection, then winter is the Sabbath. Winter is sleep. Winter is death, its music full of woe.

In winter, I hunt. I take to the field and I kill. It serves as my own small cleansing ritual. Burnt gunpowder is my incense and my slaughtering knife is a tube of black burnished steel. My dogs are my priests. My sacrificial lambs can fly.

I have an intense intimacy with nature, so it may seem self-contradictory that I might have great respect for life, and yet still be able to kill. Killing is survival, though. As does every other link in the food chain, Man must eat, and eating means killing. In nature, when someone gets hungry, someone else must die.

To me, a part of respect for life lies in knowing how it ends. It is never pretty when living things are born or when they die. At either of its ends, life is messy and no one wants to watch. Being witness to death reminds us of the unpleasant fact of our own eventual mortality. Denial is too easy when dinner is delivered from kitchen to table by a bow-tied bowing waiter, and it is a safe wager that most would settle for a salad if restaurants made their diners kill their own meals.

Hunting is a tiny taste of murder that gives me a conscience and keeps me honest. It is the means through which I force myself to acknowledge my own death, and through such acknowledgement, I gain a greater appreciation of life. It makes me aware of the fact that the chicken I bought in the supermarket once rode down a conveyor belt to a machine that popped its head off like a champagne cork. It makes me aware that the steak on my grill once belonged to a cow until someone fired a bolt into its skull.

A hunter understands the nature of sacrifice. A hunter knows that spilled blood is precious and that food is a form of holy sacrament. No hunter would ever allow food to go to waste. Waste devalues all life, including his own.

I read an article not long ago about a native tribal community in South America that believes a hunter who takes a life must ultimately replace it upon his own death. In their culture, killing creates debt. I like that. I like the idea that I owe something back to the cycles of life, that my soul will be a bequest to the living after my death. It seems only fair. No one eats for free.

The ritual of hunting, then, is one of conscience-building remorse, of guilt and sin which must be confessed and repented. Each year when I raise my shotgun on the first quail of the season and fell the bird in an exploding cloud of feathers, I feel a strong sense of shame.

It's the Shame of Cain. The first always feels like a brother.