Do no harm. Do not kill. My heart accepts this on a profound level, yet the rest of me was there, sitting in the snow under a tree with my .44 magnum lever-action rifle, waiting for the deer whose tracks had carved a path further below in the coulee.

Through clouds of breath in the uncertain dawn, I gazed across a patchwork of semi-cleared land where pasture met the Rockies. Beside me was a copy of Pema Chodron's When Things Fall Apart - Buddhist literature to help the time pass, and perhaps answer a few questions - which, I thought dryly, would probably benefit the deer more than me at this point.

In those moments of solitude, thoughts inevitably filled my head and swirled around like ice crystals carried on a north wind. It never seemed fair that something had to give up its life just so that I could go on living mine.

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From this perspective, the whole food-chain idea sometimes makes me stop and shake my head at the absurdity of it all. Indeed, I was once one of the many who deliberately choose to knock themselves down a few notches on this cruel hierarchy by becoming a vegetarian.

It was a tough decision. I was in my teens, with the metabolism of a hummingbird, and always hungry, never able to put pounds on my thin frame. Peer pressure was often worse than the culinary deprivation to which I subjected myself.

Two years later, a summer job at a placer gold mine in the Yukon forcibly put an end to my meatless diet, and subsequent university studies dealing with human prehistory ensured I never went back.

The question of the inherently violent aspect of nature has always troubled me, just as it surely had the early biblical writers who were forced to come up with the myth of the Garden of Eden (where the lion lay next to the lamb in perfect harmony) in order to sidestep this issue so they could believe in a loving creator.

Though, for the most part, the famous Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you) works fabulously as a tool for keeping order and harmony within the structure of our own social species, it is strictly a human thing - it has no followers in nature.

Teeth and claws have been around for hundreds of millions of years, and anyone who has witnessed on television or in real life the grisly spectacle of water turned red by churning crocodiles, or a pack of wolves running down and tearing apart a live moose, might agree.

Life has no problem killing in order to sustain itself, yet at the same time life does not want to be killed. What does this basic observation mean?

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It means that biological existence is rooted in a deep sense of hypocrisy. And despite this being the driving force of evolution, which has admittedly led to much beauty and variety in all life forms, the repulsiveness of the mechanism involved still can make one wonder if, at some level, it isn't a deeply flawed system.

Or is this point of view just a relatively modern concept, ingrained by millennia of post-hunter-gatherer philosophies bred in the minds of societies that became more and more divorced from nature as they started to live in artificial environments?

In the end, I fear, there is nothing. There is just "is." I don't know if that's cool-sounding enough to be Zen or if I'm flirting with the razor edge of nihilism, but it doesn't matter.

I'll admit I was secretly relieved that the deer never presented itself in my gunsights that wintry day as I sat beneath the tree. No violence shattered the calm air, and the morning was left to a man having a conversation with his soul.

Though at times I am a reluctant participant in this life and the way things are, all I can do is try my best to live with my eyes, and heart, wide open.

The difficult part is deciding which one to believe when they contradict each other. The other day I drove 60 kilometres to bring a sparrow with a broken wing to a veterinarian. I didn't have the heart to put it out of its misery.

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Yet this hunting season I will again pick up my rifle. Before setting out I will give thanks and gratitude to the animal whose life and body will sustain my family and me.

I will make it a clean shot so that there is no suffering.

And I will become part of a tradition and a way of life that goes back thousands of generations before me, long before our separation from nature led to the comforts of civilization, and also, perhaps, to self-deception.

A much-younger Dalai Lama once took a potshot at a passing bird with his slingshot. To his immediate and everlasting relief, he missed and the bird flew away unscathed.

In reading this story I felt his relief. But did the universe care?

Luc Bouchet lives in Calgary.