RABBIT HUNT

I begged my mom to let me go on the hunt that weekend. She thought I was too young, but, inspired by Ralphie in A CHRISTMAS STORY, I had gotten a BB gun for Christmas, and I wanted to use it somewhere other than trying to snipe birds in the creek across the street. Besides, Joe was going hunting with them, so it was totally unfair if I was left out.

What I didn't know about hunting was how early you have to wake up. So when John, my step-dad, jostled me in my bed at 5AM, I tried to roll over. My blanket was so warm, and I decided right then and there that actually what I really wanted was to spend the morning playing Mario instead.

Then he bellowed “Réveillez-toi!”, and I knew it was time to get up. Whenever he spoke French, he meant business.

It was autumn. Dew on the grass. Tree leaves maroon and yellow. Still dark out when we got in the car. Joe and I sat in the back seat, our breath visible in the cold air. John drove, smoking Marlboros he lit with the cigarette lighter that you had to push into the dashboard and glowed orange when you popped it out. We took country roads to his brother Jim's house, somewhere outside Oxford near one of the small villages that are little more than a scattering of houses and a church or a bar where two country roads cross: Reilly. McGonigle. Millville. Okeana. Chandon.

By the time we arrived, the sun was coming up. Jim and his wife Judy had a little bit of land, a big back yard with an above ground pool, a patio with a picnic table, and an envelopment of forest on the edge of the property.

Jim was a bear of a man. When we got out of the car, he greeted us with big hugs in his huge arms, his coffee-colored beard scratching my face, his booming voice welcoming us.

“Ready to shoot?” he asked.

He had set up bright red targets in his grey gravel driveway by the side of the house, and once we collected all the guns, it was time to practice.

The first part was boring: how to be safe. Making sure the safety was on the whole time, treating the gun as if it was always loaded, double-checking there's only your target in your line of sight, putting your finger on the trigger when you're ready to fire, only pointing the gun at something that you're absolutely sure you're willing to kill.

I tried to act grown up by listening to everything and nodding along and saying “mmm hmm” every once in a while, because that what I had seen adults do when someone was talking about something serious, but really mind my and my eyes kept wandering over to the targets.

“How old are you?” Jim asked.

“Seven,” I said. He nodded, looked at Joe.

“Ten,” Joe said. Jim squinted his eyes, reached for a shotgun.

Joe shot first. Jim positioned my brother's body in front of the target, put the gun in his hands, then stepped away. Joe squared his shoulders, looked through the sight, and squeezed the trigger in a flash.

The boom was deafening. My ears rang. We checked the target. Joe had bucked his shot. Jim passed out ear plugs. Joe tried again. This time, his legs were jelly, his arms were shaking, knowing now how loud it was going to be. This time he took his time. This time, when we checked, he had hit the target.

Joe smiled. Jim clapped him on the back. John congratulated him.

Now it was my turn.

Jim gave me an old .22 rifle. Jim positioned me in front of the target, fixed my shoulders, reminded me to close my left eye and look through the sight.

The gun felt heavy in my hands. My arms began to quake. The earplugs felt they they were going to fall out of my ears. I was scared of how loud of the boom would be.

I pulled the trigger, but not hard enough. It didn't shoot. I looked back at them, shrugged.

“Try again, press harder.”

I squeezed as hard as I could, and felt the gun kick back against my cheek. I set it down on the ground, a little wisp of smoke coming out of the barrel. We walked to the target and it was clean. I had missed.

“It's all right,” Jim said. “Go again.

I shot again, missed again. It was getting late. Time to gear up. We put on camo coveralls and orange vests and hats, thick black boots, then got into Jim's truck.

For as long as I had known him, my step dad John would drive around the country roads outside of Oxford looking for deer. At Christmas and Thanksgiving, Jim would go with him after we finished dinner, past endless soybean and feed corn fields and patches of woods near those small towns, scanning the middle distance, looking for their tan animal bodies contrasted against green grass or blue sky.

Now the fields were fallow and brown and they were taking us to hunt rabbits. It was a way to ease us in before deer hunting in a few years when we were older.

The hunt was in the woods at an old dairy farm near where Judy's daughter lived. Jim opened the bed of his truck and handed out guns: .22 for himself, .410 for John, shotgun for Joe, and he gave me my BB gun.

“Aww,” I said, my voice high-pitched. “Only my BB gun?”

“Baby,” Joe said. And I didn't know if he was talking about he gun or my reaction to it.

“Shut up,” I said.

“Boys,” John said. “Come on.”

“You know,” Jim said, holding up his rifle. “A pellet or even a BB will fly the same speed as a .22 bullet. Used to kill squirrels with them in our front yard when we was kids in Kansas. Right, John?”

John nodded.

“Can you get a rabbit with them too?” I asked.

“Well, sure,” Jim said. “But you gotta shoot them in the head. Otherwise you mess up the meat, blow all the meat away. Think you can do that?”

I shrugged. John laughed.

“Ready?” Jim said, then led the way.

Jim walked through the woods and we followed, down the trails, in the fields like he owned the place. He seemed like he was home. Looking back, I imagine his breathing deepened, his heart rate slowed, his head felt clearer. I walked behind him so I couldn't see to be sure, but I'm guessing he had a big grin on his face the whole time.

No one talked. I could still see my breath in the air. I shivered, put the gun under my arm and blew into my cupped hands.

After a time, Jim lifted his arm up, motioned for us to stop. I peeked around from behind him, his big thick body. There it was, in the middle of the trail, a rabbit. It was white and grey and tan, looked like it was chewing on something. In my mind it was a carrot, but that can't be right.

Jim turned around, looked at my brother in the eye, and mouthed his name: “Joe.”

Joe lifted his gun. I watched him, hot with jealousy. He did it slowly, methodically, tilting the shotgun up, putting the butt in the crook of his arm, closing his left eye and putting his right cheek near the sight.

The sound was loud, seemed to echo out in the clearing.

The rabbit’s butt hopped up, then he ran off. Joe started to chase after him, then John yelled out for him to stop.

“Don't go after him. Just wait. Turn around and wait. He's going to come up behind us.”

“How do you know?” Joe asked.

“They circle,” Jim said. “It's what rabbits do.”

So we stood in middle of the trail for what seemed like an hour but was probably really only ten minutes, the cold coming through my thermal underwear and right into my bones. I looked up into the trees to see birds perched, and I wished I could shoot at them.

The rabbit came around the other side, just like they said it would. Before the rest of us could react, Jim raised his gun in a quick motion and shot it. It fell to the side.

“Well, there goes that rabbit,” Jim said, and picked it up by its legs.

It was a clean kill. Joe stood nearby frowning. I was surprised at how unaffected I was by the rabbit's death.

“Can I get the next one?” I asked. “With my BB gun?”

Jim laughed. “You can do whatever you want with that thing.”

We didn't see any more rabbits that day. Before we left, I tried to shoot at a few birds and missed, drawing laughter from my brother.

When we got back to Jim's house, he laid the dead rabbit on his picnic table, pulled out a large knife he kept in a dark leather sheath he kept on his belt.

Judy brought out two black cast iron pans and left them on the table.

“First thing you gotta do: you gotta cut his nuts off!” Jim laughed, then did.

I felt like I was going to puke, but I held it back somehow. I wanted to feel like one of the grown-ups, and grown-ups don't get sick at the thought of a little game.

He sliced the rabbit down the middle, took the guts out, cut around the feet, and then brought the knife down along its leg, cut the skin off and peeled it back. He lifted it and pull it down off the rabbit, peeling it right off, all the way down to the front legs. Then he cut around the neck, quartered it.

How did he know how to do that? I wondered. Then I remembered that John and Jim's dad, who we all called Pop, had been a union butcher, told stories about slaughtering neighbor's pigs when they were kids in rural Kansas.

Jim and John grew up there, then joined the service during Vietnam. John was in the Navy, trained to be a missile technician on air craft carriers before getting in a horrible car accident before shipping out, spent the rest of the war in military hospitals and moved to France in the mid 70s. Jim was a submariner, spent the war in Europe and never saw action.

They all, save their middle brother Jack, eventually found their way to Ohio, where Jim worked for the automotive workers local when he wasn't out fishing or hunting. One time, in 2008, Jim dozed off in a deer stand and fell, broke his back in five places.

He was never the same. He lost weight, walked with a hump in his back, took too many painkillers, and after awhile he seemed to subsist only on bowls of ice cream. Pre-tree fall Jim probably would not have recognized the man he became after his fall.

But back then the man before me in his backyard was standing up tall and straight, broad-shouldered and big-muscled and thick-bearded, grinning as he dredged his kill through a mixture of flour and egg. He fried it up and presented it to us on an ancient porcelain plate with a piece of white paper towel underneath to soak up the fat. He placed the rabbit meat on the table and served me the first piece.

To Jim.