The Ethical Art of the 'Kill Permit'
Legal spotlighting is on the table for this Virginia deer hunt.
Print Excerpt: The Spring Issue
Print Title: Shot in the Dark
Author: Matt Cunningham
I park in an inconspicuous spot by the airport hangars, the air thick with the smells of cut grass and warm cedar. A thin camouflage shirt sticks to my back as I walk past an open hangar. Four pilots sit in lawn chairs, swapping stories in front of a vintage Cessna. I hold the rifle sling tight, keeping the gun tucked close to my back as I wave. They casually wave back and sip their drinks.
It’s 300 yards from the hangars to a point where the treeline bumps out toward the runway. Two days ago, I watched a buck walk out of that spot, oblivious to my presence. He sniffed the air and loped across the asphalt to the woods on the far side of the airport. If the bugs don’t send me running at dusk, I’m hopeful I’ll get another sighting. This time of year, I suspect hunters are the last thing on that buck’s mind.
I tick off the list of rules I’m breaking: hunting way outside of any normal season, staying out well past sunset, into the long summer twilight. But I’m also thrilled. I have access to an almost unhunted spot, with all but the most basic rules waived in the name of population control. This is an open season beyond anything I’ve experienced before, and I intend to put it to good use.
A coworker told me about the kill permit. The county carved this airfield out of the woods decades ago at the edge of labyrinthine marshland feeding the Chesapeake Bay. Clearing acres of open space in lowland forest makes for stunning edge habitat, a blend of shrubs, vines and young trees that are perfect cover and food sources for wildlife. Consequently, the area is so overrun with deer that the Federal Aviation Administration’s airport directory includes a warning note about this place in clipped pilot-speak: “Deer on and invof [in the vicinity of] airpt [airport].”
State biologists decided it was necessary to cull 50 deer a year to cut the risk of collision to an acceptable level. Each year, a small network of hunters gets permission to do the job.
Now, I’m one of them.
The airport manager is thrilled to have another eager hunter. He sends me out with a handshake and a basic set of guidelines: check-in and check-out procedures, hunt boundaries, and a few notes on where he’s seen the most deer movement this year.
Enthusiasm tends to land hard on its first contact with reality, and this is no exception. Beyond battling swarms of dog flies, ticks, and mosquitoes, there’s the matter of finding the deer. True, they’re less wary than the ones that slink around my favored public-land spots during the general season, but the endless string of easy shot opportunities I imagined fail to appear. I sit a series of makeshift ground blinds around the field perimeter, ending August and September with strings of bug bites and nothing in the freezer.
Then, one night, a coworker invites me to patrol the airport in a UTV equipped with a quadruple set of light pods. We’ll be spotlighting, trying to freeze the deer in the blast of light long enough to get a shot. Anywhere else, it’d be about the most illegal thing a hunter could do. Here, it’s just another tactic to achieve the end goal.
And the deer are everywhere.
We see their eyes first: sharp dots of light scattered across the field. At one point a herd bounds away as we approach, an undulating, winking string of Christmas lights across a quarter mile of tree line.
I miss two sub-100-yard shots that night. Maybe vibrations from the UTV’s engine throw me off as I use the light bar as a rest. Maybe I’m unaware of some trick to judging distance through a scope at night. Either way, I can’t tell if I’m missing high or low as the deer run off unscathed.
I’m thrilled by the novelty of seeing so many deer in the open and getting multiple shots in one night. But the hour-long drive home leaves me space to ruminate on the experience, and a little unease creeps in.
What’s more attractive to game species than miles of edge habitat carved into 300-plus acres of lowland forest? What’s worse than wildlife flocking to the very spot the county is eager to develop into an airport industrial park? This is flyover country. Cardboard patches the doors of moldy single-wides and people walk to work along the highway in the rain, dark stares on their faces. The cost of bringing in new industry is easy to justify. But I squirm as I consider how I’m complicit in a slow roll of human progress over the land, pinching and pushing wildlife out of a place we’ve deemed no longer worth leaving wild.
I head out again on a cloudy November night, spotlighting solo in my truck with the brights on. There, I catch a doe broadside in a brushy gap between trees. I lean out the window, brace on the mirror, and knock her down with my shot. As I start the excited half-prayer-half-celebration self-talk that bubbles out when I’m successful, she struggles to her feet. I think I see blood high on her shoulder, but it’s impossible to tell as I fumble to reload and she steps into the brush.
I tell myself she’s bedding down and I just need to sit still and let her expire. But I can barely hold back the need to act, to fix this giant mistake, to pull back the bullet and place it a few inches lower where it’ll do the job. I was stupid to think I could break so many rules and not pay for it.
When I can’t stand it any longer, I get out of the truck and creep in from downwind. Rain sparkles in the light from my headlamp. There’s almost no sign; maybe a few divots in the mud, but no blood, no broken twigs.
The rain picks up as I turn back. Within seconds, I start to run as a ripper of a storm strikes the airfield. Wind rocks the truck as I slam the door and flip the wipers to high.
I creep forward in four-wheel drive, pushing my luck on the muddy grass while scanning the woods. Nothing. The wind screams as I get out for one more look on foot.
I can barely see through the sideways rain. Gaps between swaying trees make black maws, triggering the lizard part of my brain. I think about all the fairy tales where something hungry waits in the forest shadows, eyes glowing as the little child takes one step too close.
This is madness; all of it.
I drive home as fast as the rain will allow, then spend a restless night as sheets of rain beat like fists on the bedroom window.
When I do sleep, it comes with a hard and vivid dream: I find the doe lying next to a mossy creek in the fog. As I approach, she unfolds to become a pale, dark-haired woman with blue eyes and a look of deep, resigned sadness. I’m cold and can’t breathe. She pulls her long hair back, exposing the skin over her heart, and waits.
I fire the shot and jolt awake.
The next morning, I feel better about my chances as I return to finish the search. It’s a small stretch of woods bordered by roads and a tall fence; there’s no way she could’ve run far. But two hours of combing the brush turns up nothing. I retrace my steps with guilt-sick dread, and all I find are three skulls from other long-dead deer.
An unsettling logic unfolds in my head as I drive home. This is population control, after all, not hunting. A hobbled deer that doesn’t make it through to spring is as good as a deer collected in the bed of the truck, right?
Shame that I’d think that. Shame that I’d take a shot from a lousy rest at night in the rain. Shame over the incident nags me, and I find excuses to pass on night hunts the rest of the winter.
Over time, I consider the situation from a different angle: Maybe my being out here — over-thinking my shots and sweating over my missteps — at least brings a level of conscientiousness to the situation. The difference between hunting and killing lies in the rules and rituals, after all. We deploy these structures to give meaning to our actions, to elevate hunting above base, heartless killing. I’ve pushed too close to that line. So maybe my grief over an unrecovered doe is a step back toward those norms, a way to pay back a little dignity to an animal the human world deems expendable.
In the fall of my second year on the permit, I decide to re-embrace the norms. Well before sunrise one October morning, I set up under a tree in a shady patch by an old farmhouse. Beyond preceding firearms season by a few weeks, there’s nothing rule-breaking to my strategy. I sit still, observe as the day wakes up, and watch for the little telltale movements in the spaces between the trees.
The sit proves unproductive. I still-hunt my way back to the truck around 9 a.m. when fog rolls in off the river, dropping the visibility under 50 yards.
Movement to my right. A yearling doe ducks into the woods not 5 feet from where I’m standing. Startled, she cuts 90 degrees and runs straight away, freezing at 15 yards with her head half-hidden behind a sapling.
It’s one of those times you pray for. Something crosses the liminal space and grants you a moment of contact with wildness. You receive it with respect and awe, and do the best you can to play your part well.
Kettle-drum heartbeat and breath speeding up. I whisper to myself.
“Settle.”
Breath half out, pressure on the trigger.
She leaps at my shot and crashes into the pines, dead within seconds from a shot through her shoulder that pierces her heart.
I walk slowly to where she lies and take a moment in quiet wonder, running my hands through her coat and praying wordless thanks and apology. Then, after a long breath out, I stand, bring the truck over, and go to work.
Matt Cunningham writes essays, poetry, and nonfiction from a small town in southeastern Virginia on the Chesapeake Bay. His work has appeared in Smithsonian Air & Space, Fur-Fish-Game, Cincinatti Magazine, and a variety of online publications. His poem ‘Skim’ appeared in the January 2025 edition of The Roundup.
Interested in learning more about Fair Chase in hunting?
We love how The Boone and Crockett Club breaks down this ethic simply online.
We also highly recommend buying a copy of the late, great Jim Pozewitz’s book “Beyond Fair Chase: The Ethic and Tradition of Hunting.” This compact classic should be on every hunter’s shelf.
This first appeared as a front-page feature article in The Westrn’s quarterly print newspaper.
Annual Substack subscribers receive four issues per year, in addition to our regular digital long reads. We’re currently offering 20% off annual subscriptions through April 30th, or you can purchase the inaugural (and affordable!) Spring Issue with the same discount using this link.