About the Time I Was A Hunter

"Ah, so a bear does shit in the woods. Oh, wait, that's me."

When I was young, my father forced me to engage in several activities that were supposed to make a man out of me. Little League and Boy Scouts and karate lessons were all things I had to do to ensure my father that I would grow up to be a strong, responsible adult with zero desire to put any kind of penis inside my mouth.  My recent marriage to a live female human has been the latest attempt to prove this once more to the old man.  Around the time I was twelve (12) or thirteen (13) my father decided that my brother Dale and I were to become hunters.  I'm not exactly sure where this came from.  I had never shown any interest in hunting, in fact, the very idea of hunting appalled me, as it went against all of my principles.  Not so much the stalking and killing of innocent animals, but the having to get up early and walk and walk and walk, were things I was genuinely opposed to.  I'm sure that somewhere along the line my older, much-heralded brother showed some kind of mild interest in wanting to hunt, and my father, taking note of my growing number of Batman action figures and video games decided that, yes, I too shall become a hunter.  So, before I had time to futilely protest, wail and gnash my teeth, and cry to my mother, "Please save me!" I was whisked away, along with my brother Dale, to a hunter safety course far off in another town.  This hunter safety course was an eight hour, two-day course, spread over a Saturday and Sunday.  My weekend had been completely ripped away from me.  Every once in a while you'll hear a gruesome story in the news about a pregnant mother being attacked by a psychopath and having her baby cut out and stolen, while she is left to bleed to death.  Well, that is EXACTLY how I felt having to take this damn course.  I had never once shown any desire whatsoever to be a hunter, and up to this point in my life had already proven that I could not be trusted with a BB gun or a pocket knife.  Now, apart from myself, the class was packed with kids who did want to be hunters.  Their dads were hunters, and these kids were excited to finally be allowed to go out with Dad, learn the ins and outs, wear the gear, stalk the prey, bond with their fathers, kill, skin, cook, all that bullshit.  By this time I understood that Dale was the runaway favorite, and my father perhaps felt the need to mold me into my brother's image, as Dale enjoyed sports and the outdoors, and I did not.  Now, I would also like to say, that I did not oppose hunting on moral grounds.  To this day I am a proud meat-eater and am friends with avid hunters.  Sometimes I hear liberal arguments against hunting.  That it is cruel and unfair and why should these animals have to die, and all this bullshit.  Well, the truth is, Mankind has not needed to hunt since the first person planted the first seed tens of thousands of years ago and the first farm was created.  But as a species we continue to hunt and kill wild animals.  For what purpose?  Well, for food, to form bonds with one another, for the sport of it, for money (selling meat and pelts), and for population control.  In a state like Iowa that is dependent on agriculture, it's good to be able to control the populations of certain animals who would otherwise run rampant.  Plus, some animals, are just made to die.  Like cows.  Cows are so stupid their only purpose in life is to be eaten.  They can't survive in the wild, so why not kill them and eat them and keep humans alive?  I have no issue with vegans or vegetarians, but those animals are still going to be killed, might as well make their deaths relevant by enjoying a nice T-Bone on the grill.  See cattle are like the supermodels of the animal kingdom.  Cows are bred for food, supermodels bred to wear designer clothes.  Sure, we can just hang our designer clothes on mannequins and show them off that way, but then what would the supermodels do?  They don't know how to do anything else.  I highly doubt that the only thing holding Kate Upton back from writing the next great American novel is that pesky modeling career.  Why take away something's sole purpose in life just to make yourself feel better.  Now you're just being selfish.  And you know who else was selfish?  Hitler.  OK, what was I talking about?  Bewbs? No. Hunting!  So instead of getting to spend my weekend writing my Angela's Ashes fan fiction, my brother and I are in this class filled with other boys who are actually excited about the prospect walking through the cold woods at ungodly hours like a goddam pedophile (You think you're scared, I have to walk out of here alone! You know that joke?).  This is like a vacation for these kids, this is something they've been looking forward to for years.  Going hunting with Dad!  But for me it was hell. Sitting at a cafeteria table, on a hard seat with no back, hunched over, listening to a fat walrus of a man go on and on about shells and guns and gauges and technique and this season and that season and Jesus H. Christ when do we get to hold the fucking guns already????  It was an endless barrage of poorly produced videos, quizzes, demonstrations.  I feigned having to take a shit just so I could stand in the bathroom and stare at the tiled floor.  By the second day I was positive that this class was being taught in some kind of parallel dimension where time had no meaning.  Or perhaps I had died a long time ago, and this was hell: an endless lecture on how to hold a rifle if you are the second person walking in a straight line.  Is the gun the instructor is using loaded, I wondered.  Maybe I should try to grab it.  Maybe he'll kill me if he thought I was psychotic.  That would be one way to make this end.  But then, suddenly, it was over.  The nightmare was over!  I had managed to survive being taught all there is to know about something I had absolutely no interest in! And what was my reward for such a useless and time-consuming endeavor?  A little orange card to keep in my pocket.  A nice little go-fuck-yourself for my troubles.  OK, so Step Two in How To Be a Man is get a gun, which my father had plenty of.  He gave my brother a .22 and me .410, a gun which you might give a kid with Down Syndrome if you needed him to protect the short bus from a horde of zombies.  But let me tell you this, when it comes to guns, I get it.  I fucking get it.  Holding a gun was like someone handing me the keys to the entire universe and unlocking all its secrets.  It's such a powerful feeling to hold that metal in your hands like it's a magic wand that performs only a single spell: DEATH!  So I got the certification, which I didn't want, I got the gun, which I didn't know how bad I needed, the only thing left was to go out a kill a bunch of things.  So over the next few weeks, my father would come down to the basement where my brother and I had our rooms, turn on the light switch and bellow "Rise and shine!"  It would be early Saturday morning and still dark outside.  POWs were treated better than this.  I would rifle through my drawers putting on an assortment of clothing designed to keep me warm, giving no thought to the idea that maybe I should wear something that blends me into my surroundings, that's what a good hunter would do.  But if the jacket that kept me the warmest was bright red, then that's what I was wearing.  The three of us, Dale, Dad, and I would pile into the Chevy Lumina in the wee hours of the morning, set the guns in the backseat with me and drive off to the hunting grounds.  My dad knew a few people who owned land that we could hunt on, but they lived over an hour away, so while my dad sipped his coffee and talked with my brother in the front seat, I was relegated to sitting in the back and staring out into the darkness thinking up ways to make it look like an accident.  As we neared the farmland, my father began traversing the gravel roads instructing my brother and I to keep a look out for pheasants.  Pheasants?  Pheasants?  What the fuck was a pheasant?  My dad had made me sit in the back passenger side of the car so he could easily turn around to check if I was sleeping or not.  If he would have caught me falling asleep he would threaten me with more hours of hunting, so I tried desperately to keep my eyes open, or I would try to position my head a certain way against the window so that he wouldn't know if I was shutting my eyes or not.  Eventually we would pull into a field and park.  We would take the guns out, put on our safety vests, and load the guns.  Before me lay what seemed like an endless countryside of timber, fields, tall grass, creeks.  Or as I saw it: walking, walking, walking, walking, and just to catch our breath lets just walk for awhile.  As soon as our march began everything I might have learned in the hunter safety course flew right out of my brain.  It didn't take long for the gun to feel like a barbell in my hands, its weight forcing me to accept comfort over safety.  I began to use the gun like a cane, smartly putting the barrel end up in my hands to mud wouldn't get into hole.  After that grew tiresome I threw the gun over my shoulder and held it the way a ball player might hold a bat walking to the field.  It was a very unsafe way to hold a gun, and may have killed me, but at least I would have died comfortably.  We would approach the timber and Dad would send Dale off some other direction to try to scare up the birds.  I often volunteered to go off on my own, but Dad made it quite clear that I couldn't be trusted.  Instead I tried to make a game out of it.  I would maybe pretend that I was a Nazi American soldier scouring the French countryside looking for the enemy.  Or maybe I was Edward Delacroix, owner of the finest plantation in Louisiana, in search of a runaway slave.  I would tromp through the snow and the mud, really not giving a shit how much noise I was making.  I don't have any recollection of actually shooting anything, which is probably a good thing.  Like I said, any safety lessons that I once learned were completely gone, and had a pheasant, or anything else for that matter, flown out of its hiding place or scampered across the ground in front of me I would have had no choice but to begin firing blindly into the general location of the wild beast.  To this day I am sure that neither Dale nor my father actually know how close they came to death.  Obviously the best part of the day for me was getting back into the Lumina and leaving.  Before this, though, Dad usually let Dale and I fire our guns into the distance or at a lonely tree.  My chubby thirteen (13)-year-old self would walk up to a tree and say something badass like, "Let's see if your bark is worse than your bite." And I would blow that motherfucker away.  Now, on occasion, getting back into the Lumina was just a plow.  Sometimes we would just leave one hunting area only to have to scour the back roads and gravel roads in the car, looking in the ditches for these pheasants, which at this point I was convinced didn't even exist.  At one point my father saw a prime spot for hunting, but didn't know who owned the land, so he pulled the car into the driveway of a nearby house.  There were two or three cars in the driveway so it appeared that someone was home.  While my father went up to the house to see if the owner knew who owned the farmland, I in the backseat, pulled my stocking cap down over my face in order to block out the sun so I could fall asleep.  Dad returned a minute later saying that nobody came to the door.  "Probably because they saw the fucking psycho with the mask on in the back seat," he lamented.  Luckily, my hunting career didn't last long.  By employing a strategy of being so shitty that eventually I was allowed to quit, my father let me enjoy my Saturdays and just took Dale with him instead.  This tactic would be something I would employ throughout my life, from getting out of lawn work, football practice, to not exploiting the best deals at the grocery store and my wife insisting she do all the shopping.  I still love holding and firing guns, but mostly at imaginary targets which some psychologists might insist are stand-ins for my father.  And I still love to eat meat, so I guess my father was unable to keep the sausage out of my mouth in that regard.  Though I will occasionally go fishing because I find that the sedentary nature of fishing outweighs the mind-numbing boredom, I will let the real hunting be left to the experts.  But any time I read in the paper about a hunting "accident", I can't help but wonder, you must have been forced into this as well.

The Moore You Know:  It's official, I am addicted to YouTube.  Some people have drugs, or booze, or sex, or shopping, but my vice is YouTube all the way.  I've heard that if you try crack once you are immediately addicted, or that doing meth once causes permanent brain damage, but those effects are nothing to what I experienced the first time I saw a nut-shot compilation on YouTube.  I watched that video and it was like the drug-taking montage from Requiem for a Dream: video loading, pressing play, eyes dilating, guy on the monitor doubling over in pain.  It wasn't long before I stopped showering and shaving, using any free time to waste on that precious YouTube.  Whether it was skateboarders biting it, people fucking up the National Anthem, returning soldiers surprising their families, I was watching.  I would spend hours typing random keywords into the search box: fail, blooper, nuts, tits.  It didn't matter.  Every day I'm chasing that dragon, searching for that high, that one YouTube clip worthy to be posted on Facebook and Twitter.  My YouTube addiction has gotten so bad pretty soon you'll find next to the dumpster behind your local Casey's blowing guys for clips.  "Hey man, I'll suck your dick for K-Mart's Big Gas Discounts commercial.  I'll swallow for the Top Ten Pixar Easter Eggs of All Time."  Somebody please help me.

© Eric Moore - 2013