This is going to take two chapters to tell this right, so please hang in there with me.
I was an avid hunter until I was in my early 30s. I had my own .22/.410 “over and under” single shot rifle/shotgun when I was twelve years old. In my mid teens I graduated to a 20 gauge shotgun and a semi-automatic .22 rifle. Later, as an adult, I added a 12 gauge shotgun.
I was a small game and bird hunter. I never hunted deer because there were few of them where I lived. I did hunt rabbit, squirrel and the occasional ground hog if it was messing with my vegetable garden. And when the possums or raccoons got into the trash more than once there might be a dead one in a day or two.
Growing up in Kansas I often hunted pheasant, which were abundant, and quail which while not abundant, were plentiful enough. Turtle Dove was an abundant game bird in those days, but I never cared for the taste of it so I only hunted dove once. And there were occasional Prairie Chicken (grouse) to be had. During migratory bird season I hunted duck and geese.
Mostly we ate what I killed. And what we didn’t eat I tried to give to someone who would. But it would be a lie, that many hunters still tell, to say that I hunted because I had to in order to eat.
There are some in these hills that believe they are actually doing that because they say so with real conviction while buying their case of Bud, packages of chips, and jerky and $40 worth of lottery tickets at the drive through. I think that sort of queers their case, but the idea that the $75 a pay period they blow on lotto and booze could buy a lot of meat never occurs to them. In any case, it was never true with me.
Yet in spite of really enjoying hunting for the most part, there were four very specific, vivid events that were indelibly branded in my heart through the years where my hunting was being undermined by something that I could not recognize applied to me for over 20 years. I knew that these incidents were not just casual events for me, but I did not know why. I just knew that they deeply disturbed me and that it was impossible to completely forget them, as hard as I might try.
They would pop into my head at inconvenient times and give me a very uneasy feeling, a queasy sick feeling that did not quickly go away. But I could not see the obvious place they would eventually lead me. When I recall them today they still give me that feeling. Eventually the obvious caught up to me and I felt really stupid that I had not seen and acted on it much sooner. That, of course, guarantees one hell of a guilt trip when you figure it out.
The first event was when I was around 10 years old and had made some money at 40 cents an hour cleaning out the chicken coops and barns of a neighboring farmer. It was hot, filthy, sweaty work but it was the first job I ever had that wasn’t Dad just telling me to do. And I had a dream of buying a Daisy B-B gun, one that held 100 bbs and had the lever cocking action just like the gun on the Rifleman TV series. So with that goal in mind I would have done any kind of work for 40 cents an hour.
I would walk the section line the mile to get to the farm, work six hours and walk the mile back. $2.40 a day was a lot of money to a kid who never had an allowance. We couldn’t have afforded that. The work was done after about a week and a half and I had plenty of money to buy the gun.
We lived on a tenant farm outside of Pauline, Kansas, about 15 miles south of Topeka. At that point it was my Stepdad, my Mom, me and one baby brother. The next Saturday we went into town, a tiny place, but it had a grocery store where I would later work for a while when I started high school. And it had a hardware and farm supply store, in the window of which I had decided was my bb gun.
I walked into the store with Dad and told the man behind the counter what I wanted. The man started to go to the window and Dad stopped him. “No. We don’t want that one that is all dried out sitting in the sun.” I had no idea what exactly was going on but I thought that was the only bb gun in the place, and I surely didn’t want to wait for another one to come in.
Dad knew better and the man went into the back room and came back with a brand new gun in a cardboard box that had never been opened. Dad opened the box, removed the gun and checked its action, handed it to me and told me not to touch the trigger. I was thrilled beyond comprehension. We bought three or four tubes of bbs and the gun and headed out. I didn’t so much walk out as float out.
Over the next week Dad would set aside time for me to learn how to work the lever action; how to load the bbs, and, what he emphasized the most: shooting and gun handling safety. He would set up tin cans on the fence in the back and I would try to knock the cans off. At first I couldn’t hit anything but I got the knack of it pretty quickly. As we moved back from the target further and further I learned how to shoot above the target to offset the trajectory of the bb as it lost speed and fell.
Dad set only a few rules. Never break the rules of handling or safety. Never shoot at any living thing. Only shoot at targets, and never shoot in a direction where I could hurt something behind where I was shooting at. Then he pretty much turned me loose.
Everything went well for a couple of weeks. I was learning and getting good with the gun. We had a small pond down about a hundred yards from the back barn and I was responsible for a flock of White Pekin ducks that I would let out in the morning and they would parade single file straight to the pond. In the evening I would call them and they would reverse the parade. I guess ducks are programmed to do that because they are otherwise pretty stupid.
One afternoon I went down to bring the ducks back and feed them and I took the bb gun with me. It was getting late in the summer and the cat tails in the pond were starting to change to brown from green and when a bb hit the brown head it would puff out seeds. I thought it was neat and liked to do that.
Red winged blackbirds loved to sit at the top of cat tails and sway in the breeze. One lit on a cat tail clear across the pond from me and I decided to see if the gun could shoot that far. So I eyed the blackbird and lifted the bb gun a long way above the bird and shot. The odds of hitting it were infinitesimal. It literally took a bit of time for the bb to get there and I assumed I had missed it. Then the some feathers puffed off of the bird’s head and it dropped like a rock!
I was at first in total shock. I had no idea I could actually hit the bird at that distance. I was mortified. I just sat down on the bank of the pond and bawled my eyes out. Dad came in from the field about that time and saw that the ducks were not in the pen and had not been fed. He came down to the pond and saw me sitting there crying. I had no idea what he would do but I knew what I would do if I were him and it wasn’t pretty. So I cried all the harder, for the bird that I had killed and for what was going to happen for me.
He stood there for an while and then sat down next to me and took out a cigarette and lit it. "What’s wrong?” Between sobs and sharp intakes of breath I managed to tell him. I had no idea if he would kill me or what. If he did I figured I deserved it. But he just put his strong working man’s arm around my shoulders and didn’t say anything. He held me that way for a while, got up and told me to come on up with the ducks and feed them. I did. And managed to get my emotions sort of under control. He was sitting on the porch waiting for Mom to call us in for supper.
He called me over and had me sit next to him in the glider. He asked me what I thought he ought to do about this. Lips quivering I told him that he should take the gun away from me and restrict me to my bed room. He didn’t say anything for the longest time. Finally he said “I don’t think so. I think that you know what you did was wrong and you are already punishing yourself enough. Now go and see if you can help your mother set the table.” That was the last he ever said about it.
To be continued………….
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