I grew up in a family of hunters. My grandfather on my dad's side owned a sporting goods store and amassed a large gun collection that included several Walker-model Colt revolvers, the weapon the Texas Rangers used to tame the west before the Civil War, and a pistol with a provenance that included the outlaw Jesse James.
I have two uncles on my mother's side who are also enamored of guns. One, a trauma surgeon, also owns a World War Two-era tank; the other one, an electrical engineer, has a full alphabet of machine guns, from an AR-15 to a Sterling L2A3, the battle axe of the British Army for many years. As for my father--who grew up in a house with the parlor walls covered in firearms--he himself owned nothing more significant than an old Fox 20 gauge, the only thing that was left for him to inherit by the time my grandfather sold everything to an Oklahoma wildcatter. That didn't really bother my dad. It wasn't the air-splitting bang of black powder that thrilled him. It was silence. Especially the kind he could find standing hip deep in a cold stream with a fishing rod.
Not until much later--culminating in a fly-fishing trip I took with him to the Four Corners of New Mexico shortly before he died--could anything have been more boring sounding to me than passing an interminable day under the broiling sun, searching for a tug on the end of your line. Against guns, however, a boy's imagination is helpless to defend. It's as though a gun's constituent parts aren't springs and screws and lacquered wood and brushed metal, but a puzzle of psychic fantasies in which such things as danger and violence and manhood converge.
My first experience killing something besides a spider was in my backyard. My uncles had taken me deer hunting through the years, but I had always been relieved when the deer never appeared. Still, the question lingered in my ten-year-old brain: would I or would I not have pulled the trigger had the moment of truth arrived?
It was on a Sunday morning one spring, the grass green and sun-dappled, when the curiosity to discover the answer became so strong that I put the crosshairs of my bb gun on a friendly Mocking Bird. He was whistling from his perch on the rim of a garden urn, as I crept up to within striking distance. I could only have had a second to fire before he flew off, and in that flash a momentum surged that I could not stop, even though I well knew that shooting the state bird of Texas was against the law. When the bb hit it made a loud crack, knocking the twittering creature, still, to the ground. For a moment, I too froze, equally confused as to what just happened.
Immediately, the regret of having wantonly attacked something came over me, and then the shame of having perpetrated something worse. The bird wasn't dead it turned out. He had just been stunned, his wing perhaps broken. Before I could re-cock my gun, he had gotten back to his feet, and frantically hopped away from me on those long legs until he had reached the fence, where he dove to safety. It was a terrible sight to witness.
I would be lying if I told you I believed he didn't die later that day. It would also be dishonest not to add that I've since hunted other things--ducks, quail, and wild boar. I think it is ethically defensible to hunt what you eat; I would, for instance, not be too conflicted about dishing up a few members of the deer population near my house in Connecticut who vandalize our landscape and presumably are the link between me and the ticks that have twice given me Lyme disease.
On the other hand, the epic rhino rescue story in the October issue of Town & Country and the web quaking news of other majestic African animals--most notably Cecil the lion--being killed for suburban wall trophies has made me wonder if there's not a fine line to be drawn.
The issues surrounding the hunting of big game are complex: conservation efforts, for better or worse, often rely upon the hefty checks hunters write; and who wasn't made to feel uncomfortable at seeing the life of a lion equated to a human's, especially considering how great the need is for so many in Africa? Then again, what kind of woman or man--in the age of scarcity and extinction, environmental worry and natural disaster--would volunteer to be the hangman of such majestic creatures? Whatever the drive might be--exhilarating danger, machismo, the irresistible allure of a given sport--such an activity in this day and age has essentially become the equivalent in moral carelessness to black-marketers who fetishize the magic powers of rhino horn.
But sometimes, to gain true clarity on a contentious subject, it's best to consult an outside jury, and so I reread George Orwell's "Shooting An Elephant," his account, when, as a sub-divisional police officer in lower Burma, he found himself having to confront a rogue pachyderm that had ransacked a local village and killed one of its inhabitants. This was back in the 1920s, when Englishmen like him hunted the exotic fauna of colonial territories with the carefree relish of a cricket match. True to his time, Orwell was, as he writes, "not squeamish about killing animals."
Yet suddenly finding himself cast as the executioner of such an animal "beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have" he can't help feeling the deeper significance of what he was about to do. "Somehow it always seems worse to kill a large animal," he writes, before proceeding to do so. But the small ones can sure haunt you, too.
