The Mindful Carnivore by Tovar Cerulli

and popping up neatly in the middle of the garden. I filled in the mouth of the burrow several times, but it was futile. No way would this infrastructure be abandoned. The animal wasn’t merely snacking. It was gorging, wiping out pounds of produce at a time. I had to either stop the critter’s depredations, or buy more vegetables at the store and admit what I hadn’t been ready to face at Bird Cottage five years earlier: I was farming out the dirty work to growers like Joey. They were doing the killing, keeping the blood off my hands.
    Recalling my showdown with the woodchuck on the lawn back then, I didn’t fancy repeating my antics. Intimidation wouldn’t work this time either.
    Ever so briefly, I considered digging all the way around the garden and installing deeper underground fencing. But there was no telling how deep the burrow ran, and friends had recently told us how they had watched a woodchuck climb up and over their ten-foot garden fence.
    No, I was out of realistic alternatives. Chuckie’s number was up.
    Smoke bombs didn’t appeal. Why deposit noxious chemicals in our garden soil? Just to avoid the actual moment of the kill? So I borrowed a .22 rifle from Paul, and one weekend, while Cath was away, I put a bullet through the bean-raider’s skull. Ashamed that I had no idea how to make use of the meat, I buried the body. When Cath came home and asked about the garden troubles, I told her, “I took care of it.” Her look said, You? Killed?
    Willie nodded as he listened to my story.
    “You remember your father’s chickens?” he asked.
    “Sure,” I said. My father had kept a few Rhode Island Reds.
    “You remember the trouble he had with raccoons?”
    I did. The hens had provided eggs, but hardly ever got old enough to be retired to the stew pot. Despite the nighttime protection of the rugged henhouse my father had built of rough-sawn lumber, the birds usually met early ends. Most of their untimely demises involved happy raccoons.
    “One night,” said Willie, “a raccoon got into the henhouse by pulling open the little door the chickens used during the day. So your father put a heavy latch on it. He figured he could outsmart that raccoon. But I told him, ‘You’re going to have to shoot him.’”
    My father’s next report to Willie was that the raccoon had dug its way in underneath the henhouse. So he had put chicken wire down around the edges.
    “I told him,” said Willie, “‘Look, twenty-four hours a day that raccoon is figuring out new ways to get to those chickens. You can only spend a little time here and there trying to stop him. You’re going to have to shoot him.’”
    Willie shook his head, smiling wryly. “But your father said no, he wanted to live in harmony with the land.
    “Finally,” Willie said, “your father called me and said he’d heard a bunch of noise in the henhouse one night. He went out there with a flashlight and opened the door and there was the raccoon right in the middle of the place. ‘What’d you do?’ I asked. And your father said, ‘I shot him.’
    “Mmmnnnn-hnnh!” Willie grunted, nodding his big head and grinning.
    I grinned, too. When, as a kid, I heard my father’s version of this story, he seemed matter-of-fact about it, showing me the skull with its small hole, saying he had made raccoon stew instead of chicken. I never guessed that he had tried so hard to stave off the inevitable. Though it seemed to me that a henhouse should be easier to secure than a garden, I shook my head and chuckled with Willie—at my father, at myself, at the futility of our parallel efforts to segregate domestic and wild, to impose our rules and fantasies upon the world. And I wished again that I had known how to gut, skin, and cook that woodchuck.
    Later that day, when Beth went to Saturday evening Mass, Willie and I went fishing.
    Down the road a few miles, we parked his station wagon by a bridge and carried rods and tackle box to the middle of the span. The