Killing Animals for Fun
I’ve always been really into hunting. Back in Kansas when I was a boy, my father would take me out at the crack of dawn, and we would go out to the edge of the pond where everything was very still, and a light mist rose up off of the mirror-like surface of the water. Such beauty! Then we would lay out poison bait for the swans. It tasted like bread, so they seemed to really like it. Within a few hours, the last one would stop moving, and we would collect their frail bodies and burn them in the yard, taking care not to inhale the fumes from the fire. It was a lot of fun, and the golf course paid us to do it! I treasure those memories of a simpler time, when cruelty could be put into action with barely a thought, and I think those memories speak to something in all of us. Nowadays, people scold you for shooting squirrels with a pellet gun, but when I was a boy, we used to make masks out of their dried skins as a testament to our prowess. You can go to jail for sticking knitting needles into a rabbit now, but in the good old days, no one minded so long as you stuck to animals. But ours is a dynamic culture, and will continue to adapt as people’s sensibilities change.
The noble craft of hunting still thrives today, though, and last week I went on an expedition with my wife’s brother Cletus. You may have heard of him, since he owns several large conglomerates: J. Cletus Merriwether III. He’s super rich like myself, and owns a great deal of land in the Adirondacks. The trip was a lot of fun, and rekindled those old treasured memories of my boyhood roots. We woke up early on a Saturday and packed up the Jeep with a bunch of beer, guns, and pizza, then headed out to the other side of the property, which lies on the side of a mountain and provides an unmatched vista of the breathtaking Adirondack sunrise. There were several stands that had been permanently erected in some of the more strategic areas, and were difficult to see due to the large quantity of military-grade camouflage netting that covered them.
After we loaded our cache of weapons and provisions into one of the stands, we settled down into that familiar old pastime of the hunter: the waiting game. Luckily, because Cletus has several automated deer feeders about 100 yards from the stand, we didn’t have to wait long. A majestic buck entered the scene and approached the feeder, which was dropping soy pellets onto the ground beneath the boughs of a stately Silver Maple that I admired through my scope as I brought the crosshairs to bear on the buck’s grace-ridden throat. My breathing quickened as I tightened my grip on the lightweight ballistic carbon forestock on my Heckler & Koch PSG-1 semi-automatic sniper rifle. I steadied myself, and on my exhale, I slowly squeezed the trigger, sending a 7.62mm NATO round into my prey. The spray was incredible, as was the look of sheer disbelief in the eyes of this beast. For a second, we seemed to share an intimate–almost sexual–connection, that of predator and prey, but then he was dead. In this battle, I had been the victor, but next time? For that answer, we would have to wait and see.
But again, we didn’t have to wait long. The rest of the afternoon was pretty much the same way. With each kill, Cletus would radio his men to come collect the carcass, which saved us a lot of inconvenience. They even sprayed down the area so that the other deer would not smell the fresh kill on the leaves that lined the forest floor. We had pizza, beers, and some manly conversation, and in the end I got pretty lit. I don’t know how many beers I ended up having before I used that 50-cal to bring down that pregnant doe, but I can say one thing: I was feeling no pain. That was a messy one, for sure, because I was using some new ammunition that one of Cletus’ companies was developing for the U.S. Military. It was made of something called a “prestressed ceramic maniform” that pretty much explodes when it hits bone. The technology may be high-tech, but the result is something anyone can understand: A shot to hell deer. Cletus was a bit surprised to see her, since the synthetic pheromones his people spray are only supposed to attract bucks. I guess we’ll file that one under “Bonus!”
After we killed all of the animals that had been placed that morning, we packed up our things and drove on back to the lodge. There, we continued drinking and having a good time. He asked if I knew about the “most dangerous game.” I said yes, that I was well acquainted with jai-alai. People get hurt all of the time in that game, because the balls are very hard and move very quickly. He told me that he was actually talking about killing people by setting them loose in the forest without weapons and then following them and shooting them like deer. I told him that didn’t sound very dangerous, and he got frustrated and went to bed. I was tired too, so I hit the bunk as well, where I slept like a goddamn baby.
When I got back on Sunday evening, Peggy told me the she sensed a change in me. I think it must be the thousand-yard-stare. That’s the thing you get when you go to war and when you come back, you have a faraway look in your eye because you saw such cool shit. I think that the three hours I spent in a well-hidden deer stand did something special to me, like maybe I connected with some primal self that lies within all of us, but which we all keep hidden. A self that is born of the battle for survival, the tooth-and-nail struggle in which one dies so that the other may live. With the acceptance of this self came the respect for life that so often comes to those who have gotten life’s precious blood on their hands. Of course, in my case, that would be figurative blood; because Cletus’ staff keeps his weapons so tidy, my hands didn’t actually get dirty at all. Besides, there was quite a supply of moist towelettes up there in the deer stand. We were eating pizza after all, and that can be messy.