Living in the Texas Hill Country, the changing leaves and brisk 80-degree afternoons signal a shift in our attentions. The days of weekly(hah!) lawn mowing, lazy summer afternoons watching baseball, weekends at the Gulf coast, and barbecue have given way to the days of raking, football, weekends at kids’ soccer games, and hunting.
However, as you rascally title readers may have inferred, I don’t hunt. It’s not that I have some deep-seated love for animals or the sanctity of life. I’m like every other red-blooded Texan in that regard. In the immortal words of Denis Leary, meat tastes like murder, and murder tastes pretty goddamn good. I have no compunction about eating an animal, whether it be cow, deer, rabbit, squid, lamb, dolphin, or baby seal. I just won’t shoot ‘em.
When I was five, my dad came home from work one day and asked me I’d like to go with him to kill a deer he’d found caught in a fence. Considering that attention from my dad usually ranged from exasperation to rarely-concealed rage, this was a pretty sweet deal. I broke land speed records enroute to the truck. A short drive later, we encountered the unfortunate beast. It was a medium-sized doe stuck in a barbed-wire fence. As soon as she caught sight of my dad, she started kicking furiously. It seems that word gets around. Dad headed over to the tool box in the bed of his truck. I knew that he kept a pistol in there, and didn’t give it a second thought.
Only he came back with a hammer. Yeah, a hammer. A few brief moments of struggling and screaming (the deer, not me) later, Dad was tossing the carcass over his shoulder and carrying it back to the truck. On the way home, I didn’t say a word. Back at the house, he hung it up in the garage and began to clean it. Mom, who was a little perturbed, watched as I took it all in. It was then that I made my only comment on the matter:
“Now you’re just being mean to it.”
Mom was satisfied that he hadn’t completely transformed me into a serial killer. Dad was satisfied that mom was done yelling at him, and hey, free deer. I had brought peace to the household. That’s right; I’m the chosen one.
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[...] been amply demonstrated in the past that my dad was a father of the century candidate. Granted, he did finish near the bottom with Marvin Gaye Sr. [...]
“If I killed all those deer and the people cut their eyes out, I would put them all in a paper bag, and collect them, and then sell them to a mean dog.”