KILLING ANIMALS

I was raised with men who hunted, fished and told tales about their adventures. My father always wanted a swordfish over the big fireplace in the living room. He and my brother hunted together once my brother was old enough. I was never old enough, although I do have a brown and white Polaroid of me sitting on a dead deer in the trunk of my dad's cadillac. I almost remember the day; at that age (5) it was not distasteful. I was curious, needed to touch the hair, look in the buck's eye, check out the tongue.

I spent many summers on a farm where animals provided food, and we had "the sausage house" down by the road where once a year there were enormous amounts of sausage produced. I heard the gunshots when they slaughtered the pigs, but I wasn't allowed to watch. I helped process the meat with the promise of "the best steak you've ever eaten" at the end of the day. I didn't find it tasty, unfortunately, especially with sausage herbs on it. It was just pork.

There was another event on the farm several times a year: slaughtering chickens. At one point it was decided I should hold the chicken down, while my uncle brought the hatchet to her neck. I felt important. I was helping out with adult tasks. Apparently I was too young to connect the dots: hatchet to neck meant death. Once we were all set up, it suddenly dawned on me he was going to kill one of my favorite playmates, and I went screaming into the kitchen, never to peek out of the house till the next day, when all the feathers and blood had been removed. (I checked out the spot, first thing.) Of course we had chicken that Sunday after church for dinner, but it didn't register that the events might have been connected.

Many years later, I was hired to cook for a hunter's camp up in the Mission Mountains, northeast of Missoula, Montana. I prepared for an adventure that would include living in the cook tent for a week after a horseback ride eleven miles on a little-used trail. My husband and I decided I should be equipped with a .357 magnum pistol, since the camp was in grizzly country where no hunting had taken place in over twenty years.

We went out to the shooting range where I learned the basics of loading, unloading, cleaning and carrying the blue steel weapon. We set up a target and my husband stood behind me as I began to aim. He put his hands around mine on the pistol, and we both brought the gunsights to the bull's eye. Suddenly a bird landed on the barrel, maybe a black-capped chickadee, and sat there quite contentedly.

"Pull the trigger," my husband whispered.

"No way!" I answered back, and the bird flew off.

I knew this was a sign that I was not to use weapons, but I surrendered to the rest of the lesson, discovering I was a pretty good shot at cardboard targets. Should I actually meet a grizzly, I felt prepared.

The hunter's camp is another story. Sufficeth to say, I never used the .357 again, except in target practice with my son. Up there in that cook tent it occurred to me, if a grizzly came at night, there was not light to aim by; and reaching for my glasses to actually see clearly would give my position away, and invite the bear to investigate. I chose to sleep under the table. Well, actually I got very little sleep the whole time!

I recognize the need for rifles and hand guns, not for automatics and submachine guns outside of a war setting. It seems a quaint point of view given the proliferation of horrendously violent weapons, and men to shoot them, in our country. But it's mine, and I'll defend it, with my truth, my intelligence and my compassionate heart.