A-Hunting We Will Go

by LiveOnAPlane

TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³/Creative Commons / CC BY SA 2.0

When I was growing up, we lived within walking distance of the woods. I’m not talking about a thin patch of scraggly trees here, I mean a real forest. And this was in the’50s, when parents didn’t worry about their children playing in the woods unsupervised. It may sound like child abuse, or maybe only benign neglect, but parents back then didn’t worry about things like their precious offspring falling out of a tree and breaking something. Consequently, I spent most of my childhood doing rural, woodsy things with my friends, like cutting down trees with my little hatchet and making makeshift forts, playing in the creek, and building tree houses.

What I was sorely lacking at the ripe old age of five was the experience of Real Hunting. I wanted to go Real Hunting. With a Real Gun. I wanted to go out there and kill something. And bring it home and eat it.

My father, unfortunately, was an ex-city guy from Up North who had married a country gal from Kinston, Alabama and came to live in Niceville, Florida. (In Niceville, folk were polite and said things like “He’s from Up North” instead of “Damn Yankee.”) He didn’t know crap about outdoorsy things. Of course, at five, I did not realize this: I thought he was the root source of the flowing waters of wisdom. I pestered him day in and day out to take me out and teach me how to hunt.

And, one day, finally, he did. This is the story of that first hunt.

Dad borrowed Uncle Raymond’s single-shot 12 gauge shotgun, since he didn’t own a firearm himself, and off we went on that fateful sunny morning: Me with my trusty BB gun and Dad with Old Thunder Throat.

We walked about a mile into the woods where the deer might be hanging out, got onto a dirt trail and prepared. I cocked the BB gun and Dad broke the action of the shotgun and cradled it in the crook of his arm. He took the 00 buck cartridge out of his pants pocket and put in his coat pocket where it would be handy. “To be safe, you never load a gun until you’re ready to shoot,” he said. Now I’d never heard this from any of my uncles, all of whom were avid hunters, but who was I, a mere five-year-old who had never been Real Hunting before, to question this? I guessed it was okay to have the BB gun loaded and cocked since it wasn’t, you know…a Real Gun.

Thus prepared, down the trail we went.

It wasn’t long, maybe ten minutes, before the good Lord told His angels, “Cue the deer,” and we heard a crashing in the woods coming closer and closer to us. We stopped and looked in the direction of the sound. And, OMG, here came a buck with antlers and everything, just like the pictures I’d seen, right up to us! That rascal could not have been more than 15 feet away when he saw us and came to a shocked halt. He spun around and was preparing to put it into double low gear when Dad got over the surprise and started grabbing for his pocket. In his haste he fumbled the move, and dropped the shell into the dirt. So there we were, the deer about to go to Warp 9, Dad scrabbling in the dirt, and me screaming “Shoot him! Shoot him!”

When the deer started to accelerate, I saw that that was just not gonna happen, so I did the only thing I could. I threw the BB gun to my shoulder and shot him myself (the deer, not Dad) right in the left rear haunch. I know I hit him, too, because I saw the muscle twitch where the BB stung him.

A second later, the deer was out of sight and Dad was holding the sand-covered shotgun shell in one hand and the open shotgun in the other, looking at the trees where the deer had disappeared. Me, I was looking at Dad. I don’t know exactly what the emotions were that I was feeling right then, but let us just say they didn’t include worshipful adoration. However, I was kinda stoked by the fact that I had scored, so to speak, while Dad was playing in the dirt.

“Well, at least I shot him,” I said.

And that was the end of my first Real Hunt.

When we got home, Dad told Mom that we had actually seen a deer and what had happened with him trying to load the shotgun, and how at least I had managed to hit the deer.

“Right in the ass!” I said.

Silence ensued. Mom and Dad both turned and looked at me.

And Mom said, very quietly, “What did you say?”

I knew, I just knew, that I was being given this one chance to somehow redeem myself for my terrible language before the wrath of God Himself descended upon me.

And in a harbinger of the persona that would one day become my adult self, I deliberately and with wild We-Who-Are-About-To-Die joy said: “Got him right in the ass!!”

Mom looked at me for maybe a half second, then she slapped her hand to her mouth and turned quickly away. Her shoulders started shaking. At first I thought she was crying. But she wasn’t crying. Nope. Although I think some tears were starting to flow.

She managed to choke out, “You deal with him!” to my dad as she rushed from the room. With Dad following her, going, “Aw, damn it, Merle…”

And there I was, alone in the room, waiting for one of them to return and finish this. But no one did. I finally realized that this particular episode had, in the way that only true Southern folk can do such things, already been erased from the collective memory and would never be spoken of again.