I am in a temple of trees, an arboreal sanctum of primeval heft and gloom. The trees knit the earth below, they comb the air. I taste their tangy scent – giant spruce, some fir, butter yellow larch. This is late stage timber, an aged forest blanketing the upper drainage of this Idaho creek. I sit with my back to a fir. Below me a tree has fallen, opening the understory to sun. 

My rifle, a Ruger M77 in 270 short mag, lies heavy in my lap. The exhalations and snaps of the winter forest surface in the deep quiet around me. Roving flocks of chickadees and siskins chitter in the needles. Pileated woodpeckers whicker, squirrels scramble and scold. 

I am a hunter. I am also a follower of Jesus. The mountain ecosystem, the animals, the trees and plants. I love this community of life yet I lie in wait to kill. I believe in life, peace and love, yet hope my day ends with blood on the snow. 

A doe walks into the clearing. Her tail flicks, her ears swivel. She tests the air. I slowly stand and lift my rifle. We are mid-November, coming into the whitetail rut. There will be a buck with her. She walks across the clearing. The buck trots out after her. She darts away, coy. The buck is in my crosshairs, moving, turning, alive. He turns broadside. I whistle. He stops and I slowly squeeze off the shot. The detonation that crashes through the trees is followed by the silence of stunned forest save for the sound of the buck running his death run, out of control, plowing into the snow. 

A Christian hunter. How can this be?

I bolt another round into the chamber of my rifle and watch the deer. He is dead, down. The forest is quiet. 

Christianity is the giving of undeserved life through an undeserved death. The gift so full and free is only free to us. For the Lamb of God, the Giver, the cost is everything. For us to live He died. I kneel in the blood-stained snow, understanding this with the bloodied hands of direct participation. Life is not free. When I watch an animal die, I know something of the cost.

I lean my rifle against a tree, unbuckle my pack. The buck is likely 3½ years old, 4 points to a side, in perfect health. I open his belly from his brisket back. His guts steam and gurgle in the cold air. 

There are different realities to inhabit, different levels on which to engage our world. There are celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial, says the apostle Paul. There is the spiritual and the physical. Christianity is an experience of integration. It is the marriage of both the seen and the unseen, the ultimate union of flesh and spirit, heaven and earth, heart and hands. The fields and forests offer parallel experiences. In the wild I both kill like a beast and care like a angel. This interface is familiar to me, the overlay of spirit on flesh, of the sacred on the profane.

The gray jays are here now. They can scarcely contain themselves. Warm liver, soft kidneys, and no coyotes! They murmur and fidget over my head.

“Except a corn first die it cannot live.” These are the words of the Giver of Life. Death is the cradle of life in the forest. The wild landscapes we hunt are seamless fabrics of life and death. From the highest needles to the deepest taproot, death and life are bound to each other inseparably. From where I’m sitting, I can see the nursery trees, the fallen giants that lay mouldering on the forest floor. Some have only recently fallen, their bark is still tight, their branches rigid and strong. But others are only long shadows marked by a row of young trees growing from the rich, warm compost of the mother tree whose death, while it brought the end of her life, provided the nurture and nutrients for the young trees that would take her place. Death in the forest marks only the passing of the baton, not the end of it. The deer that died today will give life to myself and my family. A Christian hunter, bent over the still warm body of an animal, cannot help but think of the death he carries in his own body, the death of the old that makes way for the new. 

I reach deep into the bucks diaphragm and cut, by feel, his windpipe, pull his lungs and heart loose and in a gush of blood I roll the steaming pile of organs into the snow. I wipe my knife and my hands. I hook his front legs between his brow tines, tie a rope to his antlers. My rifle goes back on my shoulder. The truck is half a mile away, uphill, but the snow is wet and the buck follows me easily. 

Behind me the white snow is scribbled with crimson stains.