Rabbit Killer

Perhaps you do not know this about me. Perhaps you may have guessed from my fictions. Possibly you may have heard rumors about it on the Internet, or in the corridors of power in this great country, or on the streets that have no names. Yes, it is time for confession. It is said that confession is good for the soul; I pray only that it is good for the souls of those I have sent to their Maker.

All kidding aside, what I am talking about is killing rabbits.

Only two fell because of me, it is true, and after the last (both were claimed on a drab and overcast March day in the Meadowlands, New Jersey) it is also true I threw away the shotgun in disgust. Well, metaphorically, at least, since my father would have shot me if I threw a potentially loaded and expensive gun into the dirt.

How did this come about?

From the awkwardness of the father in a divorce, I suppose. Suddenly whisked out of the picture, my father sought to connect with me and my brother, who he now only saw every other weekend. But only on his terms. He was an interesting figure, complicated only in his simplicity. In a vague and shadowy way, though, as my memories of him have faded irreparably and exponentially over the years. He died a dozen years ago, suddenly and unexpectedly, though I had not really seen him for ten years prior to that. In this post I mean no disrespect to the dead. He is in my prayers every night.

However, as a powerless young teen, I had no choice but to follow my father’s demented foray into armed hunting.

Shortly after my parents separated, my father suddenly became interested in hunting. He was an avid fisherman before that (nothing against fisherman, but I absolutely hated the activity). Maybe it was the blue collar guys he was hanging out with. He bought a twelve-gauge and a twenty-gauge, as well as a Beretta handgun which he carried in the trunk of his car in a hard black case with red spongy foam on the inside. I fired the shotguns and a .22 rifle, but never that Beretta.

It started off innocently enough, I suppose. Early that first fall, he would take us hunting with his friend, Mr. G. Mr. G. had two sons he hunted with and two beagles to help flush out game. They usually went down to the cattail swamps of East Rutherford, New Jersey (a.k.a. the Meadowlands) but occasionally they went to a lodge on some mountain I forget, about an hour’s drive away. We would go with them originally to the Meadowlands and help them flush out rabbits. This entailed spreading out in a long line and following my father’s instructions on where, when, and how fast to move through the brush. If all went as follows, based on the baying of the hounds, a rabbit would rocket out and the G’s would all blast away. We’d repeat this over and over for six or eight hours, covering a good chunk of the Garden State.

After a couple of fortnights of this, my father suggested that me and my brother try our hand at blowing away some glass bottles set up on a rock. Mr. G. handed over one of his boy’s .22 and instructed us on its use. I remember quite vividly the first time I squeezed the trigger and felt the recoil against my shoulder. The acrid, detergent-like smell of gunpowder wafting over me. The sharp retort and the crisp clean sound of breaking glass a split-second later.

Before long, my father had us firing the shotguns at clay pigeons. This, strangely enough, I really, really enjoyed. It was very Zen, this thing called marksmanship. And equally surprising, I was very good at it. I would probably hit over 90 percent of my targets, with most of my misses coming at the beginning as I got adjusted to the gun, weather conditions, who was watching, etc.

In fact, a couple of months after that, at my father’s prodding, my brother and I applied for a hunting license and/or gun permit. I don’t remember what exactly we filled out and what we got and what we legally were required to have to shoot small game in New Jersey, but whatever it was, we did it. Including a couple-hour course over a couple of days. Boring recital of laws and safety tips and the like for about a dozen of us. A few kids like us and a few adults. The best part was a slide show where you had to identify the hazards in each picture. My favorite was a photo of two yokels: one throwing empty beer cans over his head and the other, ten feet away, trying to shoot them out of the air.

There was a written test, which my brother and I both passed, as well as a field test, which involved, yes, clay pigeons. You needed to hit something like three out of four. The only caveat was that if the instructor loaded a red pigeon and launched it, you had to lower your weapon. If you fired at it, or, God forbid, actually blasted it apart, you’d fail. My brother went first, and he hit his 75 percent. No problem. Then, my turn. I hit the first two, and then, unbeknownst to me but visible to all the spectators behind me, the wily old instructor loaded a red pigeon into the launcher. My father held his breath, and I pulled the gun up to my shoulder and sighted through it … but did not fire, and lowered it. I passed.

It went downhill from there.

It may be that the first time we went hunting in the Meadowlands I didn’t bag anything. It may have been similar the second and third times. Certainly by the fourth it had to happen. I remember it was a cold, dark and cloudy day. Snow had come and gone, but piles of it still remained here and there, crunched under my Timberlands. When it happened, it happened as a quite literal blur: a blur of peripheral movement, fantastically fast, activated my body but not my mind. Before I knew cognitively what was happening I raised the shotgun and fired. God help any man who may have been scavenging the brush next to me. But there was a sound and a movement like someone had thrown a sack of baseballs into a bush. It was the mottled gray body of the first rabbit I killed.

How I got the second one I don’t remember.

A week or so later we went up to the mountain. A year later my brother would bag his first and only deer here. I liked the mountain because often they would ask me to go over it, by myself, and make a lot of noise, flushing any deer over to where they would be as the circumnavigated the base of the mountain. I liked it, because I would be alone for a half-hour or an hour. I hated it because of all the creepy crawlies, especially in the spring and summer. Once I walked through a wide gap between two trees and still got entwined in a massive spider web. And those spiders are as fat as golf balls. Believe me, I made plenty of noise that day.

But this time we were hunting birds – grouse and pheasant, I think. As the hours wore by, we had no luck. We hardly saw any birds to even aim at. Finally, in the lengthening shadows, my father spotted a bird high on a tree branch. I’m so bad at this I don’t even remember what type of creature it was. He told me to fire at it. Doesn’t it need to be flying? I asked, remembering the laws we went over at the licensing class.

He told me to just shoot it.

It was above me, about twenty or thirty feet, sitting still. I aimed at it and squeezed the trigger. It fell off the branch, dead weight, and hit the ground silently.

Unexpectedly, before we packed it in that day, one of the dogs kicked up a whole bunch of birds from a clump of vegetation. Again, reflexively, I pulled up, aimed, fired. One bird tumblesaulted to the ground. We all went over to see what I had bagged. It was a pheasant, I think, but it was not dead, only wounded. My father picked it up and killed it by twisting its neck around and around and around.

That was the last time I picked up a gun, physically as well as metaphorically.