I’d been hunting for what seemed a long time before that day. I was given my first gun, a .410-gauge shotgun, by my father when I was ten. My .22 rifle had a pump action and could hold eight rounds, and was fashioned from a new alloy that made it so light it almost seemed toylike.
On a typical spring day of that year, when the four of us got off the school bus, we’d go our own ways. Bill would close himself in his room and listen to records or pop music on his radio. Jon and Peter would wander off to play together or maybe watch TV. Mom was usually busy with Nancy, who was only four. I’d change out of my school clothes and, while still in my stockinged feet, slip into the library where all three rifles were kept on a pale pine gun rack. (My father’s loaded pistol was in his office desk drawer in the next room.) The library was a dark room, three walls floor to ceiling with bookshelves; the fourth had a green floral couch with the gun rack mounted above it. As I balanced unsteadily on the couch cushions and reached up for my rifle, the pine supports were like open white hands emerging from the wall to offer it to me. The ammunition boxes were in a small, unlocked drawer at the base of the rack. I’d slip a box of bullets into my windbreaker pocket, put on my sneakers, and be out the door in minutes, headed for the woods that bordered our yard on two sides. I’d roam the woods for hours, until dusk or cold forced me home. These excursions were motivated half by a passion for wandering in the woods, half by a desperate loneliness that weighed me down. When I was in the woods, I felt free and released from a vague misery I didn’t understand. My dream of being in the woods involved absolute silence, and every footfall that crackled leaves or snapped twigs bothered me. I wasn’t happy until I found a fallen log where I could sit for a long time without moving or making a sound. I wanted to be so still I would become invisible, so that the woods would return to the state they’d been in before I arrived and the animals would move about as if I weren’t even there. I wanted to sit so still and breathe so softly that I became only a pair of eyes gazing out into the woods, alert to the fall of a leaf or the distant call of a jay. That much of my dream was benign—the fantasy of my body becoming transparent or vanishing entirely, to be replaced by nothing but focused wonder and the will to observe. It was a desire and pleasure I’d felt for years growing up in the country, miles from the nearest village. But now I carried a gun and that weapon aroused a counter-spirit from somewhere inside me—something as dark and hard as the rifle itself. Now when I sat on a log, the rifle across my lap had the feel and weight of a king’s scepter, and I felt the terrible thrill of power. Now when I was successful at blending into the woods, and a gray squirrel, scrabbling about in fallen hickory leaves for nuts, blundered close enough, I’d shoot it.
Why? For the thrill of power. For that terrible and awesome moment when I altered the world with the littlest movement of my finger. I, a shy, tongue-tied kid, might have been the czar of all Russia and the squirrel some fur-clad peasant trembling in my terrifying presence; I might have been Zeus himself unloosing thunderbolts on some unsuspecting mortal. But why had I killed the squirrel? I had no use for a dead squirrel. I wasn’t going to skin it, or eat it. It wasn’t a trophy I was going to bring home. There wasn’t even anyone I could brag to about my prowess as a hunter. Every time I shot one, I felt the same thing—even as I stood there holding my prize in my hand, I felt my pride draining away faster than the heat of its small body and, flooding in to take the place of my brief vanity, a guilty remorse and self-accusation.
3
The Accident
What were Jonathan and Peter doing up at this hour? It was only six in the morning, still dark out. They should be asleep; they didn’t have to get ready for school for another hour yet. Bill and I wouldn’t be going to school today—the first pleasure of a day that promised many more. Already, the two of us were bundled up in sweaters, coats, and hats, with flashlights stuffed in our pockets. Padded like that, we looked fat as snowmen in the small front hall. But why were Jon and Peter standing there in their pajamas, getting in the way? As Dad came down the stairs with his own rifle, Peter yelled out:
“Why can’t we go? It’s not fair.”
“What do you mean it’s not fair?” Bill snapped.
“Go away.”
I did my best to bat one of them away as if he were a small, yapping dog, but the room was too crowded for anyone to move easily. Mom was there, too, retying Bill’s bootlaces. “Why can’t we go?” they both howled at once. “Because this is for grown-ups, and you’re just kids,” I said with utter contempt. And as if to prove my point, they both began crying.
By now, Bill and I were both shouting that they were just crybabies and should shut up and get out of our way. Dad had stopped on a lower step of the stairs and surveyed the chaotic room as if it were a puddle he’d meant to cross, but suddenly had the thought that it was deeper than he’d anticipated and maybe wading in wasn’t such a good idea. Bill’s and my screams weren’t having the desired effect of silencing Peter and Jon, and it looked as if they might go on indefinitely, when Mom looked up at Dad and said: “Jim, maybe they could go just this one time.”
At that suggestion, Bill and I were even more furious. As if there would be a “next time”—wasn’t this our only chance to have a first day of deer-hunting season? Wasn’t it something so special that Dad, who never took a day off from morning house calls to be with us, had done so today? Why should we share it with them? They didn’t belong and we said so.
But we could sense that shift taking place that so often resulted when Mom entered into our childish bickering with her reasonable justice that tended toward compassion for the weaker party. Bill and I had no choice but to start whining ourselves, as if we were the more righteous and injured. But Dad cut it all short from the stairs: “OK, they can go. But everyone pipe down. And the two of you—get dressed pronto.”
They whooped their way up the stairs, while Bill and I muttered and shared one of our rare moments of communion and agreement: the kids, we were certain, were bound to ruin the trip. With them along, we might as well invite Mom, too, and even Nancy, who was only four. Why not bring the dog and the cats, too? Why not have a picnic?
It had been a clear night and was still dark as the five of us started our march along the dirt road and then out over the frosted field grass that made a crunching sound underfoot. To keep my ears from the bitter cold, I’d pulled my hood down so that I had no more than a small, fur-bordered porthole through which to view the world. I kept my eyes on Dad’s boots silhouetted in his wavering flashlight beam and tried my best to ignore the frigid air that fit like a thin mask of ice over the exposed parts of my face.
A faint gray light was just seeping up from the eastern horizon as we arrived at our trench. Our whole group paused there as Bill, Dad, and I removed our gloves and each loaded a single shell into his rifle. My hands trembled with cold and excitement as I slid the hollow-point bullet into the chamber of my .22 and clicked on the safety catch that would prevent any accidental firing until I was ready to shoot. We set the rifles on the ground beside us and began the awkward clambering down into our hillside excavation that had been dug by two somewhat lazy workers to hold three and was now being asked to accommodate five. It did so somehow and packed us in so tight that what we lost in mobility we gained in body heat.
Now, all was silence broken only by whispers and the occasional distant caw of crows. As the gray light grew, I watched the frost flowers scattered across the dirt mound a few inches from my face melt like the stars going out overhead. I watched my breath rise up in wisps like the mist off the dew-drenched reeds. I waited as patiently as I could. And then we saw it: a deer slowly working its way along the trail through the powerline swamp and out into the field below us, where it paused to browse the short grass. An antlered buck! Dad whispered that Bill would shoot first. This order, if a whispered statement could be called an order, stunned me. What could he possibly mean? Was this another one of those “you’ll have your chance when you’re older” routines? Did he mean that if Bill missed, I could shoot? Or did he imagine that our luck would be so extraordinary that if Bill killed this deer, a second one would