I got my first gun when I
was nine or ten, a BB gun with a hand pump under the stock. It fired metal BBs sold by the thousand
in cardboard boxes, and I remember the BBs shot from the barrel at such low
velocity I could visually trace their arc through the air. In fact the gun was so weak that if I
was wearing blue jeans I could shoot myself in the leg without feeling much of
a smart. Regardless of this
weakness, my mother considered the gun dangerous because at close range, if
fired from just the right angle, it could doubtless have "put out an
eye." Close range in this
case being about three inches.
Though my BB gun was weak, I certainly tried my best to kill things with it. I grew up in a wealthy suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, near a town called Hartland. Across the street from our house was a forest and on the other side of the house our back yard butted up against an 18-hole golf course. This environment ensured that I had animals of all kinds to shoot at: rabbits, gophers, raccoons, chipmunks, squirrels and birds of every sort. Deer could even be seen sometimes. I shot at all these animals, and occasionally I'd even hit one, but none ever dropped down dead. The BBs coming from my gun were far too weak for that. Once hit, the animals would just stir, then run or fly away.
My situation as an aspiring hunter was thus annoying to me, and it
became only more annoying as time went on. I remember once in frustration I snuck up on our neighbor's
dog, a golden retriever, and shot her in the side. She turned her head, looked at me and began to wag her
tail. Not even a yelp. That was the last straw.
During the many months I hunted with that BB gun I'd managed to kill
only one thing: a frog. It's true
I hit quite a few frogs while down at the pond near my house, but only one had actually
been slain. Probably I'd hit it
just at the place where the spine was weakest. Or maybe it was already dead before I shot it.
In despair I pestered my parents to buy me a proper gun: a .22 rifle,
for instance.
"There's no way," my father said. "You could kill someone with a .22."
"Then how about a pellet gun?" I asked.
"You don't need a pellet gun," my mother said. "They're too dangerous."
"Mike Schroeder and Doug Omen both have pellet guns," I
replied, referring to two other boys who lived in our whitewashed, country-club
neighborhood.
"They're both older than you," was my mother's answer.
"Only by one year," I said.
"Well, we'll have to think about it."
So at my next birthday I got my pellet gun. It was a Sheridan rifle with a silver barrel, quite a high
quality make in fact. It had a
pump under the barrel that one could pump up to ten times. The more you pumped it before shooting,
the more powerful the shot would be.
Although my BB gun would only make a "ping" sound when fired
at a glass bottle, my pellet gun would smash the bottle outright. Now the killing could begin in earnest.
My first real kill was from my bedroom window, which was on the second
floor and looked west over a small stand of trees. Already during the BB gun days I'd made a small hole in the
screen so I could shoot at animals from my room. The day after I got my pellet gun I saw a woodpecker on one
of the trees outside. "Rat
tat tat. . . Rat tat tat tat. . .
." I took aim and shot. The
bird fell to the ground. Tossing
the gun on my bed, I rushed downstairs and outside to see the kill. As it turned out, the woodpecker wasn't
dead. I'd only shot its beak
off. I found the beakless bird
flopping around on the ground at the base of the tree. What could I do?
I picked up the bird and held it in my hand. I could feel its warmth and the speed of its heartbeat. I was surprised at how incredibly light
the bird was. I held it that way
for a moment. Two little drops of
blood fell from the bird's wound onto my hands. Carefully putting the bird back on the ground, I went to get
a rock. I smashed the bird with
the rock, putting it out of its misery.
But what to do with the corpse?
Carrying it to the edge of the yard, I tossed it into the high grass.
During all this there was a lump in my throat. Although elated about actually finally
killing something, I also felt bad the animal hadn't died straightaway. I felt something sickening about it,
that I'd done something wrong. But
soon I forgot this feeling.
Over the course of the following months I shot a handful of chipmunks,
two or three rabbits, countless sparrows and robins and red-winged blackbirds,
a crow, two squirrels and dozens of the gophers that lived in holes and stuck
their heads up along the fields edging the golf course. It was mainly while shooting the
gophers that I had the company of Mike Schroeder and Doug Omen, who also lived
on the golf course and whose houses were near a large stretch of field the
gophers seemed to like particularly.
But they couldn't much have liked that field during the first summer I
had my Sheridan. I believe the
three of us depopulated the whole neighborhood of them. While we were busy at this gruesome
work, the fat summer-dressed golfers would yell curses at us and wave their
clubs in the air because we'd hunt just off the margin of the fairways and
disturb their game. Finally word
of our hunting got round to our parents, who were also club members, and I was
told I could no longer hunt along the edges of the golf course. So we hit the woods and went after
chipmunks and birds instead.
I remember once while out hunting with Mike we cornered a squirrel at
the top of a dead tree trunk. The squirrel
clung tightly to the trunk, about thirty feet above us, and scurried round from
one side of the trunk to the other.
But Mike and I took turns shooting and managed to hit it a couple times. Eventually, weakened by its wounds, the
squirrel couldn't scurry round the trunk any more. But still it clung tightly to the tree, refusing to
fall. I remember how we then sunk
another pellet into the squirrel's back, then another, and finally a
third. It was only with the third
or fourth slug sunk into its body that the squirrel's claws finally gave way
and it fell down to the ground with a heavy thud. Mike and I laughed at our triumph and I carried the squirrel
back home, where I intended to use a heavy-gauge wire cutter to cut its tail
off. I collected them.
I think I got that first pellet gun when I was eleven. I later got another pellet gun, a
pistol that used CO2 cartridges, and I also occasionally went
pheasant or duck hunting with my father, when I'd get to use an actual 12-gauge
shotgun.
Between the ages of eleven and thirteen, I must have killed several hundred animals and birds with these guns. Then suddenly, at age fourteen, the lump in my throat returned and I couldn't kill them any more. I even stopped fishing, which was another one of my favorite sports. I no longer wanted to kill even the fish.
By the time I reached the age of sixteen, I felt a horror of all the
animals I'd killed. I remember
once coming upon some boys trying to electrocute a gopher they'd caught in a wire
cage. I thrashed one of them and
chased the others away, finally setting the gopher free. I also mangled the cage they'd made so
it couldn't be used again.
At age seventeen, just before my last year in high school, I decided to
spend the summer away from home. I
set up a summer job in northern Wisconsin in a resort town called
Minocqua. I'd be bussing and
waiting tables at one of the resort restaurants.
There was an Indian who worked in the same resort. He was in charge of the boats they
rented out and he also did work around the resort grounds. He'd drink a few beers in the bar every
night and talk quietly to the bartender.
Once I overheard him explaining to another man that white men's hunting
was a terrible thing, that it was in fact a terrible sin. When the other man left and I'd punched
out I decided to talk to him a bit.
He explained to me how white men just kill animals for sport, that they
have no use for the animals they kill and no respect for the animals'
souls. The Indians, on the other
hand, only killed what they needed and would balance the deed of killing with
the proper rituals of respect. The
Indians had maintained harmony with all the souls of the world's living things,
whereas the white men were corrupted to their core and understood nothing about
the souls. He also explained that
such disrespect for the souls of nature meant that the souls of these men would
end up in hell after their deaths.
I told him I had respect for these ideas, that for years I'd felt there
was something sickening in killing animals just for sport. I also told him my story, how I'd
killed hundreds of animals with my pellet gun when I was a kid. I told him how I'd felt sickened that
first time killing the woodpecker at age eleven, but that somehow it hadn't
stopped me from going out hunting again the next day. I explained about all the gophers and robins I'd shot, about
how I'd cruelly sunk pellet after pellet into the squirrel's back until it fell
from the tree, about how my friend and I had laughed after the kill and how I'd
later cut the animal's tail off with a wire cutter. I told him about the pheasant's head that got shot off,
about the rabbit I literally blasted into two pieces at close range with my
father's 12-gauge. I asked him if
there was something I could do to atone for all the animals and birds I'd
slaughtered, if there was some Indian ritual that could set things right with
nature.
The Indian took a sip from his beer and shrugged sadly. "There's nothing you can do,"
he said quietly, gazing at the bar.
"You're going to hell."
My regrets about killing animals continued into university. I became a vegetarian my freshman year
and began to study political science.
And then I learned about cultural criticism and Marxism. I began to understand why the
country-club neighborhood I'd grown up in had always so annoyed me: why I'd
never wanted to golf or play tennis with the other rich kids but was always
interested as a child in guns and hunting and later, as a high school student,
in Jim Morrison and marijuana. It
was the hypocrisy and inauthenticity of that ridiculous bourgeois place: the
church-going hypocrites who claimed to worship Jesus but thought only about
their countryside estates and their ever more expensive, ever flashier
cars. All through my childhood I'd
watched them out on that golf course with their beer bellies and fat asses
wrapped in plaid. On Sunday I'd
see them at church listening to sermons and singing hymns to an ancient
Palestinian spiritual leader they claimed as their "Savior" but whose
teachings they didn't make the slightest effort to follow. Even a kid like me, even a kid with the
weak, milquetoast American education I'd had, could see how ridiculously out of
tune it all was.
The neighborhood I'd grown up in was neither urban nor truly
rural. It was that indefinable
nowhere land called "the suburbs." And being a richer suburb than most, it proved to be all the
more alienated from real life. It
was a neighborhood where each home stood apart like a miniature aristocratic
estate. This meant there were no
sidewalks, no real place where the community of kids could gather. One rarely saw one's neighbors, who
entered and left their houses in their expensive cars. Or if one saw them it was out on the
golf course, where they pretended to enjoy themselves playing a sport that they
liked mainly because of its prestige factor.
So as I continued in university I started to analyze more and more my
experience growing up, the kind of culture I'd grown up in, how it had shaped
me and distorted my sense of the world--or rather how it had tried to distort my sense of the world, for with my
intellectual awakening I'd in some measure escaped from it. And eventually my regrets at shooting
all those animals started to pale next to a different regret, one based not on
things I'd done but rather on things I'd neglected to do. It was a sin of omission that began to
bother me, one that could be formulated as follows: During all those years
living in that neighborhood I'd had a perfectly good pellet gun at my disposal,
so how was it--I asked myself--how was it I'd never thought to use that gun to
sink a few pellets into the fat asses of those overstuffed pseudo-Christian
slobs who showed off their ridiculous plaids every weekend on that golf
course? All those fat asses
bending over to take their shots and never a single shot taken by me. How was it I hadn't been smart enough
then to leave the poor gophers alone and shoot the culpable golfers
instead? This eventually became my
central regret, and it still burns in me today.
Eric Mader
Taipei
May, 2004
Email: inthemargins03@hotmail.com
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