I pull the trigger and the shot thunders into the surrounding trees. My breath is visible in the cold November air, and I look through it to where I was aiming. Nothing. I probably missed. There’s a ditch down there though, so I can’t be sure. I heft the strap of the bolt action .30-06 over my shoulder, grab one bullet just in case, and stiffly climb down from my perch and start walking.
It is the fall of 1987. I am fifteen years old. My father, brother and I have traveled to Longview, Texas to hunt deer. It is the first (and last) deer hunt of my life. We are hosted by my dad’s oldest friend Mont, an older man who was also my grandfather’s friend. Mont is short for Montgomery, but maybe also for Mountain. He is a Redwood of a man, with a barrel frame and frying pan hands. His deep voice booms like something out of Jack and The Beanstalk, and he drinks sweet tea by the gallon out of a giant Dallas Cowboys cup. I am intimidated by this man, not because he’s Hagrid-sized, but because my father loves him. Or perhaps more accurately, because my father wants his approval. I can’t explain how I know this, but a son can sense these things – especially a son who wants that same kind of approval from his father. And I fear that if I do the wrong thing, I might disappoint my father in front of Mont.
I will do the wrong thing.
We arrived the day before. There was football on the television as we all sat down to eat. My dad asked Mont “who’s playing?”. This question was significant to me. Not because it was a generally dumb thing to ask – anyone with even a passing understanding of the game can look at the uniforms on the screen and figure out who is playing even without the score displayed. This question was significant because my dad had never before displayed even the remotest interest in football, or any other sport for that matter. My dad did not play catch with me. My dad did not throw a football with me. My dad did not show me how to shoot a basketball, swing a bat, hit a golf ball, fish, hunt, build a rocket, throw a dart, or any of the myriad other things that my peers took as fundamental aspects of their respective childhoods. The fact that my father was now asking about a televised football game meant he was feigning interest. It meant we were playing pretend in front of Mont. It meant I had to stay alert, and maybe be prepared to follow his lead. To be someone I’m not.
As the meal progresses, my brother and I speak when spoken to. We say “yes sir” and “no thank you” with quick, quiet voices. By contrast, Mont’s seventeen-year-old grandson Sam is loquacious and confident. He’s also a braggart. I dislike Sam immediately. A year or two later, I will make a disparaging comment about how Sam is kind of dumb, and my father will look at me with naked disgust and say “he rebuilt a Chevy engine by himself – what have you ever done?” And I will spend the rest of my life answering that question.
That night, my brother and I sleep in Sam’s room with him. He keeps us up telling highly detailed stories about all the sex he has allegedly had. He weighs about 250 pounds, and looks like he was regularly hit in the face with a shovel, so I am confident that these stories are total bullshit. Bastardized versions of something he has read in Penthouse forum. Nevertheless, the tales make me wistful with longing for the attention of a girl – any girl. Will there ever be a girl?
We get up well before sunrise the next morning. I am dropped off by myself, in the dark, at the foot of the ladder to a deer blind. My dad hands me the rifle and a box of bullets. He says “Aim for the chest. Got it?” Then he drives off, taking Patrick with him to the next deer blind. There’s not enough room in that blind for me to be with them. There’s barely enough room for me to be in this blind.
I climb the ladder and sit down. I pull out my Walkman, and play the Def Leppard cassette I have brought. “Your kind of woman got a heart of stone, but watch it break when I get you alone . . .” I doze. I wake and eat a granola bar. I doze some more. I don’t really want to be here, but nobody asked me. I don’t really know what I’m doing here, but that’s not unique. I’m at an age where I never feel like I fit, regardless of where I’m at. This is no different.
When the sun rises, there is enough light to read the few comic books I have brought, and then a Piers Anthony novel. I don’t know what makes me look up when I do, but suddenly I see a deer.
A deer! Oh my gosh, I see a deer!
I don’t really think about what I’m doing. Indeed, I was told at the start that it was doubtful I would even see a deer at all. So I didn’t really consider this moment as a real possibility. But I’m on a deer hunt – that’s what Dad has us doing – and you shoot deer when you’re on a deer hunt, right? At no point do I ask myself whether I want to shoot this deer.
As quickly as I can, I drop my book and grab the rifle. I am lining up the sight, but too late. The deer was crossing the dirt road in the distance, and it has made it to the thick brush on the side. Damnit.
But wait, there’s another deer! Smaller, right behind the first! I can hit that one. I don’t realize at the time that this is a fawn, following its mother. This fact will devastate me later. But for now, I just aim and shoot.
Convinced that I missed the shot, I trot toward where I think the deer was. As I draw nearer, a horrifying sight comes into view. The fawn is in the ditch, struggling to stand with a shattered back leg. It is making a noise that, as I remember these thirty-two years later, was a terrifying cross between a bleat and a shriek.
Oh my God! This deer is suffering! Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God! Adrenaline courses through me, making me shake. I yank on the bolt of the rifle, slide a bullet into the chamber. I fight back tears of horror at what I have done to this animal as I raise the gun and aim at its chest. I am shaking very badly as I pull the trigger. The rifle rings out again.
Oh God, did I miss?!? I have never seen a deer felled by a bullet, and do not know or realize that the entry wound from a rifle is much smaller than the hole it makes on the other side. I am looking at the deer and I see no blood, no wound where I was aiming. Its eyes are still open and there is breath visibly leaving its nostrils. As I reflect today, I believe back then it was dead with that second shot. But fifteen-year-old Mike thought he had aimed and missed, and that the deer was still in agony but not moving – maybe from fear or shock.
I drop my Dad’s expensive rifle onto the rocky dirt road. It clatters as I sprint back up the road to the deer blind. I climb the ladder and grab the box of bullets, spilling them everywhere as I leap back down. I race back to the rifle, hastily loading another round. I fire again from point blank range. No bullet hole appears. Now I suspect something, but load yet another bullet, and fire again right into the carcass. No blood appears. But now I see blood in the grass behind the deer. I step closer to see that there is a gaping mess on the other side of the deer, as if it’s been torn open and partially devoured. My gorge rises. At least I know it’s no longer in pain.
What have I done?
Despairing, I stumble back up the road. The tears come now. Alone, I don’t fight them. Later, it’s hard to say how long, two vultures or similar birds circle and then land near my kill. I can’t bear the thought of yet another indignity being visited upon this poor dead fawn, and I shoot at the birds. They scatter, then return. I shoot again.
I am cold, miserable, and ashamed. I want my dad to come and get me the Hell out of here. I want to be home. I want warm feet, and a sympathetic ear to hear my awful story.
I don’t get what I want.
Instead, a man I don’t know but who is also part of our larger hunting group arrives in a Jeep. He has been sent to fetch me. He pulls up and immediately begins yelling at me from the driver’s seat. “How many Goddamn deer did you shoot, boy?! Jesus H. Christ! It better be half a dozen with all those fucking shots I heard! Were you fighting the Goddamn Battle of Bull Run over here? Fuck! You scared all the deer for miles around with all your shooting. Ain’t nobody gonna bag a deer for the rest of the weekend ‘cuz of you! I hope you’re proud of yourself!”
I don’t know how to respond to this angry stranger. So I laugh weakly, as if he were telling a joke instead of verbally abusing a child. I point toward the carcass and explain I got one. This infuriates him. “One fucking deer?! And look! It’s gut shot! Holy Hell, what a Goddamn mess! You’re cleaning it. You shot it, you’re cleaning this fucking deer.”
He straps the carcass to the front bumper, and drives me back to camp. As we drive, he grumbles about “waiting all Goddamn year for deer season for this shit.” I don’t really know what’s entailed in “cleaning” a deer carcass, or the precise implications of a “gut shot”, but I do know that I’ll eat shit before I’ll do a damn thing this cruel redneck tells me to do.
In front of the other hunters back at camp, I am careful to keep all emotion out of my voice as I briefly relate what happened to my father. Not all the details, just enough for him to get an idea about what went down. I hide the fact that I am shaken, but he knows. His face is a mask in front of these other men.
Someone throws a rope over the branch of a tree, and they loop one end around the neck of the deer, stringing it up for cleaning. I have now officially had enough of this shit. My dad hands the keys of our 1976 Jeep CJ-5 to Sam, and asks him to take me and Patrick for a drive. While I’m gone, he pays the redneck who abused me to clean the deer and lets him keep the meat.
Sam takes us on backroads and through muddy fields. We do donuts, we spin out, we splash through creek beds. With wind whipping through our hair and mud flying off our tires, we have something not unlike fun. But Sam is driving the vehicle. Oafish, blowhard Sam, driving the Jeep that next year will be mine. And as he drives, he “remembers” more sex he has had, and gives himself a boner inventing perverted stories.
We pull back into camp about an hour later. I had momentarily forgotten the horror of the screaming deer, but then Sam points and says “Looks like someone did the dirty work for you.” My eyes follow his finger to a ghastly site: the deer’s severed head dangling from the tree.
Shame crushes me anew. I look away, willing myself to forget all of this. I pull out my Walkman, slip the headphones on and hit play. “Let’s toast the hero with blood in his eyes, the scars on his mind took so many lives, die hard the hunter!” Ugh. I pull the headphones off.
We pack up, say our goodbyes and depart. We make the long drive home to Houston mostly in silence. The only thing my Dad says about the incident with the deer is “I didn’t really think you’d see one, son.” That’s it. We never speak of it again. I don’t volunteer the traumatizing details for fear of his disapproval. And he doesn’t ask. Why the Hell doesn’t he ask?
Thirty-two years later, that’s what bothers me the most. And it’s why I can drive my kids crazy with questions, all the time, about seemingly insignificant things. Because their stories matter. Even, and perhaps especially, when they’re not telling them.
Back home, I relate the events to my buddy Tom. He has kind words for me. “That’s not your fault, Mike. Hell, you can’t be expected to know how to hunt if nobody ever showed you. Forget about it.”
But one does not forget about these sorts of things. They live in you. They change you. And while you’ve made mistakes as a parent – so very many mistakes – you’ve done your damndest not to make the same mistakes your father did.
And you’ve done your best to forgive him.
And one of those objectives was harder than the other. But you got there. As you hope your kids will one day with you.
Also, fuck deer season.