As I enter the eighth decade of my life, I find that I no longer want to kill anything.
Anything at all.
This dawned on me one recent night as I was brushing my teeth. A fly was buzzing around, in the chaotic path that makes sense only to flies, and I absent-mindedly swatted at it with my free hand. It was an arguably lucky swat, sending the fly in a spiral down to the drain hole of the sink. As it lay there, weakly flailing alongside the stopper, a perfect victim waiting to be washed away, I reached for the faucet handle … and stopped myself, feeling a twinge of misgiving.
About a fly.
How did I come to this? Growing up in a family where hunting season meant putting food on the table, I often hunted with my father, and I killed numerous creatures, including deer and antelope. I would join in the field-dressing of the carcasses (these were not fancy hunts facilitated by a guide; it was just my dad and me, bumping along snowy gravel roads in a battered Chevy pickup), so I was immersed in the visceral aftermath. Whatever misgivings or remorse I had were overwhelmed by the work at hand.
Courtesy of Larry F. Slonaker
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My father had no remorse. He grew up in northern Montana over a hundred years ago, one of eight children who lived on a homestead in a shack without electricity or running water. Hunting was an intrinsic part of life for him and his brothers — a never-ending exercise to bring home protein to feed a large family. Beyond that, though, they took joy in the act itself — the rush brought on by pursuing, shooting and killing. I know it’s unbelievable (unfathomable, really) to many, but for some it’s undeniably true.
That’s the boldface dividing line between those who hunt and those who find it repulsive. As a kid, I had none of the privations my dad had experienced, but I was introduced early to that thrill of the hunt and the kill. In my childhood home, autumn was enlivened by football, Halloween and deer season.
Then the day came for me to leave that home. I went off to college in a big city, and then started a career in journalism, where co-workers were almost all anti-gun and anti-hunting and not timid about saying so. Within an otherwise like-minded bubble, I was an outlier who thought it was OK for a person (that is, a demonstrably sane person who has had safety training) to own a gun, and to shoot an animal for food. While I didn’t hide my feelings about it, I didn’t go out of my way to advertise them, either.
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Courtesy of Tom Van Dyke
This changed one September, when an in-law who was a veteran hunter persuaded me to go deer-hunting with him. I thought it would be interesting to revisit that experience, and at the same time, reexamine this whole notion about the joy of hunting. I pitched a story to the editor of my newspaper’s Sunday magazine, the late Jeffrey Klein (once of Mother Jones), who signed off with enthusiasm.
The story ended up being a lot about the nature of hunting, and not very much about the hunt itself, except for a description of two or three confused minutes in which I ended up shooting a buck. When it was published — complete with a woodsy photo of me carrying a rifle and wearing a Natty Bumppo-like scowl — it elicited an onslaught of reader response, including the most hateful mail I’d ever received. (When you write a weekly column, as I did, you sometimes are a convenient target for the angry, the disgruntled, the anal grammarian, etc.). Workplace reactions were more muted, but I did detect a subtle shift among my colleagues.
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The larger shift occurred internally. I spent a lot of time reviewing the hunt and brooded over one part in particular. As is often the case, no matter how skilled the hunter, there was a lapse of several seconds or longer between when the animal was struck and when it drew its last breath. As somebody with easy access to countless sources of humanely processed protein, I asked myself: How could I justify that lapse, just for a taste of some vague atavistic thrill?
I couldn’t. And that’s the realization that started my transformation.
At first the change was gradual. Because my wife and I live in a semi-rural area, we have numerous critters hanging around. When we moved in, our horseshoer — a lanky old cowpoke who loved to hunt and shoot — warned us about diurnal skunks, which he claimed are inevitably rabid.
“If you see a skunk in the daylight, you better shoot it,” he told me.
He said this with such conviction that I was ready to shoot any skunk under the sun.
But one afternoon as I was entering an outbuilding with one foot on a step and the other on the ground, I froze. A decidedly non-rabid skunk had suddenly materialized from behind me, and proceeded to casually waddle directly between my legs, and thence into a small gap under the building. (It did not emit that acrid, sense-shocking odor usually associated with a skunk… just a whiff, maybe akin to that of a slightly flatulent and embarrassed elder relative shuffling to a corner of the room.) I was no more inclined to shoot that skunk than my own dog.
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The image of this creature going about its business — and, it seemed to inquire, why didn’t I mind my own? — awakened in me a sensibility of whenever-possible-live-and-let-live. As time passed there were more skunks, then possums in the garage (mama and four or five babies, all aghast at the site of me), bold and kind of scary raccoons, raucous crows, and so on. We cohabitated without incident, though the lawn and the dogs’ water bowls did suffer some.
Courtesy of Larry F. Slonaker
This became the rhythm of life for months and years, until a sudden change. Maybe intensification would be a better word. A time came when I swung drastically to where live-and-let-live became more like live-and-let-everything live. Not only that — help them live.
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There was the mouse that had been fetched indoors by the cat, who relinquished it only after considerable coaxing. I gently swept the dazed creature into a dustpan and transported it to a reasonably safe spot outside. Soon after, there was another mouse (wait, was this the same mouse?), whose best-laid plan to get a drink from the edge of the swimming pool had gone agley. As it desperately swam, I scooped it out and deposited it to another safe spot, adding a gratuitous admonishment to be more careful.
There was the wolf spider that I collected with the same dustpan; the lizard, also packed in by the cat, also relocated via the dustpan; and the hummingbird, which trapped itself in the garage and chose the cobwebby window as the only way out, despite the garage door whose gaping openness, in hummingbird dimensions, must have been akin to the Grand Canyon. (The process of shepherding it out the door required a full 15 minutes of slow-mo walk-and-talk-and-wave action.) There was even the nest of pesky yellowjackets gingerly hauled from the barbecue area to the back pasture, which mitigated their peskiness not at all.
And then at last there was the fly, dazed at the sinkhole, my hand poised at the faucet handle, bringing me back to the question: How did I come to this?
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Answer: I got old.
Courtesy of Larry F. Slonaker
After age 30, the ensuing birthdays were inconsequential. Just another day. But surprise! The 70th, the ol’ seven-oh, wasn’t another day, but that day. At 70, a heretofore gossamer notion was revealed to be fact. Everybody must die — shockingly, even me.
Facing this reality, I realized I had no interest in hastening others to their own fate. I kept thinking of Robert Burns’ mouse, and those self-referential lines:
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…thy poor, earth-born companion, / An’ fellow-mortal!
Yes, on this earth, we far-flung and disparate fellow-mortals are all crowded together onto one ineluctable path to the same end. So don’t let me rush you.
Some will want to remind me that as we proceed on the path, there always will be blood. Old fools cannot change the immemorial dynamic of dog-eat-dog and cat-eat-mouse and kill-or-be-killed. Albert Schweitzer’s “Reverence for Life” is delusional, laughable. I’m unmanly, sentimental, weak.
Yeah, I’m good with all that.
As for the fly: I wrapped it up in a bit of tissue, took it outside, and lay it on the porch. The next morning — where, how, who knows, didn’t matter — it was gone.
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Larry F. Slonaker is an essayist and the author of the novel “Nothing Got Broke.” He was born and raised in Great Falls, Montana, and worked as a writer and editor at the once-renowned San Jose Mercury News, and the still-renowned Stanford University. There were a few stops at never-renowned places as well. He and his wife now live in California on five acres, which is just large enough to contain three horses and several semi-feral (all neutered!) cats.
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