2004 Entries
2003 Entries
2002 Entries

2002-06-04 - 7:53 p.m.

Guns.

Slaughtered animals.

Chilling memories.

Cold realities.

A recent evening with friends turned ugly when the homeowner shot a raccoon foraging for grubs in his manicured lawn. I’m an animal lover, and although I fully realize the damage a raccoon can do, to me the shooting was murder of an innocent animal.

The shooting brought back memories of a day when Dad took me on my first hunting trip.

My eyes blinked open before sunrise. Outside the winter morning was pitchy and shrouded in a frosty Midwestern cold. From my bed I could see a thin yellow thread of kitchen light slice the hallway. The thunk of iron skillet against stove top and jangle of silverware brought me fully awake.

A tall pine blazing with many-colored lights and shiny glass ornaments stood in the picture window in the living room. Packages, wrapped in red and green and plaid and gold and silver foil, mushroomed from the tree’s base. But today I had no time for thoughts of Christmas--a short three weeks away.

I rolled out from under the thick layer of cotton quilts, oblivious to the chill of the hardwood floor on my feet, and peeled off my flannel pajamas. My eight-year-old legs danced into a pair of jeans and I wiggled into an undershirt. Flopping on the bed, I pulled on two pairs of heavy wool socks. As I careened out the door and down the hallway I tugged my Disneyland sweatshirt over my head.

I skidded to a stop next to Dad standing at the Westinghouse scrambling eggs. Small stacks of bacon were piled on plates on the counter, the sweet smell of hot toast and butter filled the room, and my mug of coffee milk--Dad’s concoction of one part coffee, three parts hot milk that was my special breakfast treat--sat steaming at my place at the table.

I was bouncing, left leg to right leg and back--and back again. Mom, in terry robe, joined us for coffee before we suited up and packed our gear to leave. She smiled at Dad, and he must have read some uneasiness there, because he assured her again our safari in the woods stalking wild game and wilder adventure would be safe.

In the garage, Dad unlocked a plywood cabinet and removed his 16-gauge shotgun and my Daisy BB gun and bullets for both. Although Dad had his shotgun and rifle, I rarely saw him remove them from the locked storage. He enjoyed treks through the timber, not for the thrill of the kill, but to absorb the serene beauty of the wilderness. Along with the BB rifle as a birthday gift four months earlier came a lecture on never using it to harm a living thing--Campbell’s Soup or VanCamp’s Pork and Bean cans were to be my only targets, and only when Dad was with me in the woods.

We loaded the 1953 Ford Country Sedan wagon with our gear--including a bag of tin cans and Dad’s dented black lunch box filled with sandwiches and a thermos of hot chocolate--and rode down snow packed city streets, out along the empty highway hemmed by mounds of plowed snow, and, finally, cutting tracks through the virgin powder of the country lane leading to our adventure.

The winter sky was colorless. Our breath huffed out in clouds in the raw air as we hiked the gullies and slopes, winding and weaving through the timber. Twice we stopped in a gulch to line up some cans. Clickpoof clickpoof on each miss, the BB lodging in the snow. Clickping and a whoop and jump when my BB hit the cans.

We had been sitting quietly for several minutes warming our hands on cups of hot chocolate and watching a gray squirrel leap from tree to tree and skitter along branches. He came to rest on a lower limb and watched us with tiny, questioning brown eyes. He chittered his displeasure at us for interrupting is world, his bushy tail beating an up-down rhythm to his screeching chatter. I watched him a while longer before asking Dad if he would load the shotgun and let me have a go at the little critter. In the years since that bleak day, I’ve never been able to dredge up an answer as to why I asked to shoot at the squirrel, but I suppose it had something to do with the impulsiveness of youth and my naivete of death. My adventures with Dad were part of my play, lighthearted and carefree, with no regard to consequences and not bound by adult realities. Taking the shotgun was part of my play.

Despite the humanitarian lecture months before when I opened my birthday gift, Dad shucked a stubby, red shell into the 16-gauge and spent time showing me how to hold the hefty weapon. The incongruity, a gentle, nonviolent man handing off a shotgun to his young daughter and pointing her toward a small, harmless animal, came to me in adult years; it wasn’t something my unwitting and unquestioning eight-year-old mind was given to worrying over.

I yanked off sodden mittens, snugged the walnut butt into my face, sighted and jerked the trigger. The gun bucked and slammed a large pain into my nose and across my face. But it was a long time before I felt that physical pain. I was watching the squirrel tumble from the branch, upside down, tiny feet twitching and grasping at the thin, cold air, his small head limp on a rubbery neck. My world went to slow motion as the tiny animal dropped from the tree and bounced once on the snow. Then he lay motionless in a growing red stain.

I stumbled through the snow and stood staring down at the squirrel through a haze of tears. The buckshot had torn into his shoulder, the flesh ripped and bloody. His eyes, bright and playful as he watched me sight down the barrel, were now small, hard marbles. Blind eyes. The small animal’s life was bleeding out at my feet. Guns and savage behavior were the make believe stuff of movies and television. Death wasn’t of my world. Nothing had ever bled out before me. Not Roy Rogers. Not Gene Autry. Not anything in my safe and secure world.

I nudged the still warm body with the toe of my rubber boot, a boot as red as the bloody snow bed under the squirrel. I willed the squirrel to get up, skitter up his tree and chatter at me again. But its breath was gone, emptied out by a small fistful of hard metal pellets. A warm, sticky ooze ran down my lip, dripped and mixed with the patch of crimson on the ground. Then I started crying. Deep, shuddering sobs.

Dad put a handkerchief to my nose to staunch the bleeding. I looked into his face, a face as pale as the milky winter sky, and knew he was sharing my shock and guilt at the death of the innocent gray squirrel. Using the frigid snow and the stained handkerchief, he cleaned my face and assured us both my nose wasn’t broken. Self-reproaching silence hung between us, the understanding we shared implicit: he would never be able to mend the break in my heart.

I sat on my heels several yards away, tears freezing on my cheeks, while Dad did the best he could to bury the dead animal in the frozen ground. Then we trudged back through the gelid wilderness to our car and drove home in silence.

Later, in the shelter of our home, Dad unlocked his storage cabinet and stacked the shotgun and BB gun in the homemade rack at the back. He closed and locked the door. Neither weapon was ever taken from the cabinet again. In the years since that cold December morning, I have never held a gun, sighted down a barrel, or squeezed a trigger.

Previous -- Next