By Vivian I. Bikulege
When it came to killing animals, I was a failure. Other than a couple of squirrels, my single biggest trophy was a diseased groundhog. It wobbled toward my dad and me as we rested against a split rail fence during a September hunt.
“He’s not right,” my dad said.
Underneath sparse wisps of coarse brown hair, the top of the rodent’s head was purple and he was weaving in the browned-out grass like a drunk trying to find its way home.
“He’s sick. You need to shoot him.”
So, I did. Point blank. Put the creature out of its misery. We couldn’t eat him. Didn’t give him a proper burial. There’s nothing heroic in mercy killing.
I started handling weapons when I was nine years old. My dad belonged to a sportsman’s club. Call it a gun club. Semantics. On weekends, our family would pile into our Ford LTD station wagon and drive to the rifle range where my dad would sight-in his guns for deer season, or shoot a few rounds of target practice. Under a metal canopy, seated on a wooden stool, he taught me how to load a rifle, cradle it, pull the gun snug into my right shoulder, rest my cheek on the stock, pinch tight my left eye and look down the barrel with my right, click off the safety, inhale, and then, slowly exhale, until the post at the end of the barrel settled under the black bullseye to resemble an inverted exclamation point.
“Don’t jerk it,” he’d whisper, his breath warming the back of my neck as he hovered over me, both of us focused down range.
“Just breathe out and squeeeeeze.”
Dad taught me to shoot two rifle calibers; a .22 for competitive shooting and small game hunting — squirrels and rabbits — and a .30 caliber to hunt white-tailed deer. The higher caliber gun would recoil after each shot causing my shoulder to ache the next day. The first time I shot the .22, the bullet pierced the black magic marker bullseye my father had drawn on the lid of a department store gift box. He rubbed the top of my head swishing the crooked bangs of my pixie haircut.
“Good shot.”
When I turned twelve, the legal age for a minor to hunt when accompanied by an adult, my dad signed me up for Pennsylvania’s Junior Hunter Safety Training at the club. The social hall was trimmed in trophy heads of glassy-eyed buck, heavy with antlers and deaf to the nervous laughter of pubescent boys. I was the only girl in the class.
The game warden instructor ushered us through the course flipping through a stack of overhead transparencies. Subject matter included hunting etiquette, gun basics, and outdoor safety. I passed the exam, got my junior hunting license and safety patch, and a tight hug from my dad.
“That’s my girl,” curled from his lips into my ear.
I was a licensed hunter just like the gangly boys raising congratulatory bottles of Orange Crush and chomping on Butterfingers. In constant pursuit of making my father proud and beating my male counterparts, I would go on to become captain of my high school rifle team and a state champion.
Monday following Thanksgiving is opening day for firearms deer season. Before sunrise, my dad would hoist me into the branches of a tree, or leave me to sit at the base of its trunk to spend the day alone in the dead quiet of the woods. My red-plaid lunch box contained a white bread sandwich with Kraft mayonnaise and leftover turkey, a thermos of hot chocolate, and store-brand vanilla creme-filled cookies. Maybe an apple.
As I watched and waited from my solitary lookout, I’d begin to hallucinate. Swaying tree branches morphed into deer antlers. The rustle of fallen leaves would startle me into consciousness only to witness a gray squirrel sniff out the treasure of a buried acorn. During my vigil, I would eat, nap, and play with my binoculars. Sometimes, when positioned on the ground, I would pull my arms in from the sleeves of my hunting jacket and hug myself to keep warm. Reinserting my arms to reach for my rifle would have spooked any animal, and I never bagged a buck or a doe. I did learn to be alone in the woods.
I was fortunate to have never shot anyone. I came close during a pheasant hunt nearly missing my dad’s friend Dan when a bird flew between rows of depleted cornstalks and us. Wings lifting from the earth, the pheasant’s cough, and a rush of adrenaline pumped my arms upward to trace the bird’s flight path with my shotgun. Oblivious to Dan’s position, I pulled the trigger spraying 12-gauge pellets in his direction. If Dan recognized the carelessness of my aim, he never said anything. I didn’t either.
On most autumn Saturdays, we’d come home with a couple of birds, maybe a rabbit or squirrel, or skunked — hunting slang for empty-handed. We’d clean our kill in the garage, and rinse the raw meat in the utility sink. Gutting and skinning animals fascinated me. The labor of peeling fur from sinew crossed a fine line between life and death, killing and being killed. My dad saved the hearts and livers for Heidi, our Weimaraner. If he didn’t freeze the meat, he’d brine it in a spaghetti pot, prepping the game for my mom to cook for dinner.
“Meat’s in the sink, Irene,” Dad would say, like the pot of cloudy red water and carcass was some kind of payoff from a bounty hunting expedition. She’d rinse and butter up the meat, flavoring the strange limbs with salt and pepper before roasting. She rarely ate what she was charged to cook. She didn’t like the taste.
“Now that’s good eatin’, right Vivy?” Dad would swipe the juice from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand, lick his fingers, and then use his napkin.
“Sure is Dad.”
I’d agree no matter if the fare was tough, or dry, or just right, and then I stopped agreeing because I quit hunting when I left home for college. Fall semesters replaced small game season, and the Mondays after Thanksgiving kicked off preparation for final exams. I was hundreds of miles away — from Pennsylvania, from our family dinner table, and from my father. My sister didn’t like to hunt, but my brother did, and for a while, I lost my place beside my father.
Close to Due West, in a flat sprawl of cleared fields bordered by pine trees, my brother owns over three hundred acres of South Carolina forest. A few years ago, he invited me to a dove hunt with his son and a few friends. Forty years had passed since I aimed a gun at a living creature, but the idea of spending time with my brother, and being in the company of men, attracted me.
After weeks of consideration, I purchased my hunting license at a local hardware store, and bought a cheap pair of olive-green pants at Walmart. I didn’t fully understand why I was going hunting. It was reminiscent of who I used to be, yet in conflict with who I am now.
October afternoons in South Carolina are still hot. The sunflowers my brother had planted on a square plot of land had withered, and seeds from their low hung heads peppered the ground. The black kernels set a plentiful buffet for dove taking respite on their migration south. I feed dove in my wooded backyard. Their early morning coo and quiet repose on my bird bath are soothing. Now, I was taking aim. From tall trees on the perimeter of the field, birds descended to feed. Hunters shot. Birds tumbled and fell like wounded acrobats. I fired an entire box of shotgun shells — twenty-five — killing two mourning doves.
To my right, about fifty yards away, my nephew sat as my hunting companion in the afternoon sun. Sweat rolled from the base of my hairline down my neck and back. Neither of us had packed water. Toward the end of our time in the field, Stanley shot a bird but lost sight of it. I walked the field for him, searching, and found the dove. It was still alive, injured, the small head tilted sideways. I looked at a single, black eye. I called for my nephew.
“Here she is.” I waited with her until he arrived. I pointed.
“I’ll take care of her Aunt Vivian.” Sensing my sorrow, he knew I couldn’t kill the bird. I was already walking away before the decision on who would break her neck could be made.
I put my kill into a plastic grocery bag I’d stashed in my back pocket, and left the sunflower field. Arriving at my car, I placed the makeshift body bag on the back-seat floor. I would clean them at home. I thanked my brother for his hospitality and gift of a commemorative camouflage baseball cap, and settled into my three-hour drive. I noted the odor of my salty body, and the smell of gunpowder on my clothes. My shoulder ached and was swelling into black and blue. I guzzled water. An hour into the trip, my brother called to check on me, ask how my ride was going, and if I enjoyed the day.
“It was fun, wasn’t it?”
“It was hot,” I said.
When we hung up, I took a deep breath. The aroma of spent powder reminded me of the old wooden desk my father used as his workbench where he taught me to reload shotgun shells and bullets. An AM/FM radio hung on a coat hanger from the garage ceiling. Music set a rhythm to the punch of spent primers and the flick of a small metal hammer against the hard plastic of a powder dispenser. I would load red and green gun shells with blue-black beads of shot, and crimp the tops to seal inert energy until that time when a gun’s hammer would strike the primer and release a scatter of pellets. The work was collaborative and devoid of conversation.
As my drive home wound down, I began to understand why I’d gone hunting. I wanted time with my brother and nephew, but mostly, I needed my dad. It had been a long, long time since I’d been with him, riding together at dusk after a day in the woods, talking about school, or boys, or what I wanted to do with my young life.
We’d lounge in the family room after dinner and watch TV wearing nothing but our long underwear; Dad on the couch, and me on the floor with Heidi, the small buds of my breasts just beginning to push against the gauze of creped cotton. Time and death separate us now, and in that lonely car ride home, grief, kept under pressure in corners of my body I presumed vacant, burst and transformed into sobs of longing.
I arrived home after midnight. My husband and dogs slept as I cleaned the birds under our driveway spotlights. Red-gray breast meat in the shape of tiny hearts popped whole from under the feathered skin of each dove. I squirted water from the garden hose over my hands and under my fingernails to rinse the blood.
I’d gone hunting to reclaim a part of myself, who I was when I was captain of the rifle team, who I was with my dad. I would eat the dove tomorrow. Tonight, I thanked them.
Vivian I. Bikulege is a Pushcart nominee and Gilbert-Chappell poet in western North Carolina. Her work appears in Presence, Broad River Review, The Petigru Review, Pinesong, and the upcoming storySouth. Her essay, “Cuttings,” will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in Reading as a Writer by Erin Pushman. She holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte in non-fiction.