shovel some coal and get out… Then, hanging my coat and sack with the dead bodies of the animals I killed in the cloakroom, I remove my hip boots and enter the classroom in my stocking feet and wait for the rest of the students.
Later, about ten, there’s a thumping sound from the room where one or two of the animals I thought I had killed were only stunned and have come alive, beating their wounded feet on the wooden walls. The teacher, a life long spinster, who had taught my Mother in a previous generation, says to me “Robert, you better whack those critters.” The girls squeal, I go and beat the outside of the sack until all inside is quiet.
At three, school lets out into an already darkening dreary and cold afternoon. I walk the few blocks home with a light snow falling silently onto the frozen ground. I clear a layer of fresh snow, emptying the damp sack on the picnic table. There’s a small pile of dead animals with wet fur and some blood. I slice each of them down the inside of their legs with a very sharp knife, cut off their heads, gut and skin them quickly with never missing a beat. In about thirty minutes, with frozen hands, I finish and wrapping the small bodies in wax paper, dump the feet and heads into a garbage pail where they freeze with sightless eyes staring at the dark grey skies... Now it’s dark, the wind and snow have picked up, I’m really cold and head inside…
I scraped the fat off the inside of the bloody hides and fastened each one to wire stretchers. I freeze the little bodies and later trade them for shotgun shells to a guy who eats them – he swears they taste just like chicken! I hang the hides to cure on the hot water pipes in the basement. Once a month, I place the dry ones in a box mailing them to Monkey Wards. After about ten days, I get a check back paying me a buck and a half for each one. What do they do with them? I have no idea. Perhaps they use them to make fur liners for leather gloves? Perhaps some pairs of these gloves exist even today, their fur warming the hands of the wearer just as it did the small critter those many decades ago? I’d like that…wouldn’t you?
So, you ask, what earthly use is this stark and dark memory to anyone? Fair question. To me, there is a lesson here worth passing on. It is this. At age fourteen I learned that actions have consequences and that many actions have consequences so profound they can never be undone. The taking of life is one such action. If you shoot a duck or kill some furry animal, the life that was shining so brightly in the eyes dims, grows unfocused, becomes sightless and cold.
For whatever your reasons may have been, once your have killed for the first time, you learn this bitter lesson. The dead, at least in this life, don’t come back. One has to accept this responsibility and get on with it. Whether you kill on purpose as a trapper or hunter or just hit a dog with your car- you have taken a life. The hunter does it knowing that he is setting out to kill while, of course, a driver hitting some animal can say to himself; it is just an accident, and I didn’t mean it. That is, of course, a huge difference.
So, as one like me, sets out on those cold mornings to take life for personal benefit, in this case for money, one might ask; what separates me from a hired killer? My customer is the department store. They pay me to murder and my victims are the poor warm-blooded animals I kill. One small consolation may be that I’m not killing for sport. Those who blast birds, lions, elephants and hook great fish, that they then have stuffed, make into rugs or mount on their walls; it seems to me, are far worse than I. Would you agree?
Before leaving this, I should say that growing up in rural New Jersey, I, and many of my friends, carried shotguns and rifles. I often hunted ducks and pheasant in the swamp behind the old school and brought my gun to school, leaning it against the wall in the coatroom. Imagine doing that today? It purely boggles the mind and gives you an idea of how far we have come and how incredibly things have changed!
We are discussing death. The cessation of life, the end if cellular reproduction and cognitive thought. Yes, animals do have cognitive thoughts. They dream, they love and care for their young, sharing many human attributes. The guy who makes his living as a tracker or professional hunter, leads his clients into the bush for money, where he shows them how and where to slaughter the animals. Is he profiting from death- you bet! Is he better than those who pull the trigger, yes, again, you bet! He, at least, is doing this to earn his living, to feed his kids, to pay for a home for his family. He has valid reasons and is not motivated by the simple-minded and immature ‘sport’ of it. One can never, and must not ever, escape the responsibility for being an agent of death but, for it to have some purpose does seem a mitigating factor if nothing else…
So, to me, this lesson is one well worth articulating and, to some degree or another, preserving. To further the conversation, since we are writing about death and the lessons of yesterday, all of us represented in this book, meaning those of us of some certain age, have already lost a few of our childhood friends and of course, most of us have also lost our parents.
We sometimes sit by the fireplace staring into the flames and remembering… Christmas’ past, loves and friends lost, roads not taken….that is one thing all of us, those with many yesterdays, most certainly have done and will do, until our own passing and then, who knows…Reminiscing, if you choose to call it that, can be what this book is about. My story, about my days as an animal trapper and hunter taught me about death at a relatively early age. Of course, kids who grew up on a family farm learned all this even earlier than did I. As children, they watched their Dad slaughter hogs and their Mom wring a chicken’s neck and clean it for dinner. Death then is no stranger on a farm.
As a boy of fourteen, I knew what I was doing and I accepted the responsibility. I however, hadn’t matured emotionally to where I comprehended my own eventually demise. I hadn’t understood that one day, my eyes too would glaze over as did those of the animals I killed, and that I too would become still and inert. No, this lesson was still far off, waiting for me in the deadly jungles and skies of Vietnam.
One day, in the mid 60’s, while still a naive young man, I was flying south of Saigon. The aircraft, a single engine Pilatus Porter, was level at 8500 feet when the suddenly, engine quit cold. I reacted from training following the restart checklist. I understood it wasn’t going to run. I feathered the prop and called for help. The aircraft was silent, there was only the soft swishing sound of the wind, as it slowly glided down to the burning war torn earth. There were hostile eyes looking up. They would kill me for sure, as they already had other luckless pilots. This time, I managed to glide into a safe landing where a helicopter flew me back to base.
Not until that evening did I become fully a human being. I was sitting in my rented home with a glass of scotch and ice under the slowly turning ceiling fan, relating my harrowing story to a fellow pilot. Suddenly, it hit me! Only by the slimmest margin was I alive. Another few minutes and I’d have been forced into the trees, perhaps shot climbing down if not killed in the crash. From that moment, that very second, I have never been the same! So, another lesson! I had come to terms with my own mortality and once that was clear, there was no going back- never!
I would argue that the knowledge of ones ultimate and unavoidable demise creates a final threshold of emotional maturity. Like leaving grade school, once you have walked out and the door closes behind, there’s no going back. I would say to you that the essence of being human is the sure and certain knowledge that you, your family and your friends are only here on a temporary basis and that, to be human, one must love and cherish them all- and tell them so. Further, I believe that one can’t really know and understand this until one comes to terms with this knowledge -don’t wait too long!
CHAPTER 2
Friends of a different stripe
Most all of us have known the joy of sharing our lives with four legged animals, dogs and cats and perhaps some others. In my experience, few things can compare with the love of a good dog for his master and the remarkable joy they take
