The Death of a Goose

On Saturday morning, I walked through the garage, out into the garden to have a cigarette. While passing my father's pick-up truck, I saw two dead geese frozen into grotesque postures, riggered to the cold metal, their feathers pocked with blood. I felt something snap inside, a quickened grief I was unable to readily explain. The complication came not in the emotion itself, but in the knee-jerk reaction, almost retraction, of empathy in proxy, a mutated, reversal of Schadenfreude. I knew my father to have hunted, recently. He roves over coyotes on his snowmachine, but he is not cruel. The slippery context of the situation resides in decades of hunting, fishing, trapping, and surviving in a often cruel landscape. For years of my childhood, my family survived off the animals my father killed. Venison, elk, and beef filled our freezer, and the kitchen stewed with the meaty smells throughout the fall, winter, and spring. After mistaking a fawn for a cow elk, after blowing its leg off and watching it suffer until shot in the head, I renounced hunting, but not the right to hunt. But here is where my problem begins.

There was no need for my father to kill the geese: no hungry children or starving neighbors. In my estimation, hunting thrills him. I find a certain satisfaction in simply shooting a gun at non-living targets, but could not, at this point, bring to end a life.

It just so happened that Saturday began the seasonal deer hunt. Small pops drifted from the mountains behind the house all morning. My brothers were up there, somewhere, tracking and waiting for a buck or doe. Although, I knew they hunted at the same moment I smoked my cigarette, I felt no anger at them, no animosity, no judgement. In this area I am passive, or more specifically, I have no opinion save my own adamant desire to forgo hunting all together. Or I did, that is, until I saw those geese. To add insult to injury, four days later my father took the birds out of the truck, threw them on the ground close to the riverbed, and said: "Some animal will eat them." What a waste! Why kill them, these geese that are purported to mate for life; why simply point, shoot, and toss away?

What instinct, manufactured or innate, brings into being the desire to kill? I understand they are animals, mere animals, so beneath us as humans....fuck that. It is not simply the killing that boils me, but the desire that proceeds it, the idea that you do because you can--end of story. The privilege, the desire that can lead us so far away from stewardship, from the symbiosis of being upon this earth as a participant, not an avenger, makes me truly disappointed in my father.

There is always in the back of my head this voice, this speck of skepticism that I am making a mountain out of a mole-hill here. That stopping to inspect this scrim of brutality keeps my attention from the REAL problems. Then I stop, I think, I reorder. To ignore this beginning, to behave as nothing comes from blind, orgiastic pleasure like this is, means that I am allowing myself to suffocate. It is a slow bleed, a long way from my heart, my brain, my liver, but somewhere inside of my body I can feel the slippage, that small tug that could drown us all.