Rabbit Hunting

We were going hunting with my cousins, my father's brother's boys. Eugene picked us up at sunrise and drove us out of town. Somewhere along the way, we stopped at a diner for breakfast. In the coldness of the morning, the hot eggs and bacon and toast and coffee were perfect. There were no diners like this where I lived. There were no waitresses like this. There were no hills nor fields nor woods like this. We were in the north and there was snow on the ground. People wore plaid jackets and hats and huddled themselves for comfort. The dawn was long and the shadows travelled forever. Going north was going back in time. That was my theory. Nothing here seemed affected by current events. Those things arrived differently, by some slower and more minor delivery like a lost postcard that arrives some years too late. I looked out the window at an old stone wall. The waitress smiled at my cousin and asked if he wanted more coffee. She had her hair put up in bobbie pins and her face was slightly crooked. Eugene held his cup up before he looked at her, then he cut his eyes to her quickly like a movie star. She wore a pin with her name on it. Clarice. Her smile got wider. Eugene had been here before.

I was nervous and would have liked to stay in the diner longer. I had never been hunting before nor had I ever shot a gun. They had given me an old rifle my father had used a long time ago, part of the large gun collection Eugene had in a couple big cases at in his living room. I was kind of hoping for a hunting lesson of some sort but nobody thought of that. It was hunting, for god's sake. It was just something you did.

We met up with Ray and Forest on the edge of a corn field. They were sitting in Forest's car waiting for us when we got there.

"Where the fuck you been," Forest yelled at Eugene. He was pissed. "We've been sitting in the car for a fucking hour."

Ray got out of the other side with a big smile. "Hey Karl," he said to my father. "How you like the weather?"

It was grey and cloudy and damp.

Then he turned to me. "You ready to go hunting?"

"Sure," I said not at all certain what we were going to do in a corn field. I'd always thought of hunting as something they did in woods, creeping around trees and waiting by trails and streams.

My father came over and handed me the rifle, a little twenty-two, and began showing me how it worked. "We're just going to walk through the fields along the corn rows," he said. "We'll put you on the end over here. If you see a rabbit, just scare him toward the center." It seemed simple enough.

We walked down a ditch and up the other side. The ground had a frozen crust and the soil in the field was uneven so that I stumbled a couple of times before we got started. Everyone looked nervously at me. "Be careful with that gun," Ray called. "Point it the other way." I felt clumsy and foolish already with that feeling of watching every horrible motion from above. My limbs felt unattached, foreign.

Within a few moments, my feet were cold. The only shoes I had were suede, and they had already gotten wet from the snow and had soaked through to my socks. I rubbed them against one another to try to keep them warm.

"Bam! Bam!" We had scared a rabbit and my father and Eugene had fired. Eugene walked over and picked it up. "I got that one, Karl."

"Bullshit," my father said. "He was already down when you shot at him."

It was the first time I'd seen anything get shot. The rabbit was warm and limp in Eugene's hand. "Watch this," he said to my father. He had learned a new way of gutting the rabbit, he said, and then he was squeezing the rabbit in his hands, moving from the neck to the tail. A pile of guts squirted out the rabbits ass.

"Jesus Christ," my father said. "You sure he's cleaned out?"

"That's the way we've been doing it for awhile," Ray said.

Then Eugene handed the gutted rabbit to Ray who slipped it into a compartment in the back of Eugene's jacket.

"OK. Let's go."

We fanned out into the rows again and continued across the field. By now, my toes were frozen, but the cold and the quiet and the grey sameness of everything had put me into a stupor as I walked listening to the slight crunching beneath my feet. Suddenly a rabbit jumped in front of my feet. I'd almost stepped on it before it bolted. It jumped left, then right, cutting across the field toward the others, and with one motion, I brought the rifle up to my eye. I did this because that is what you are supposed to do and the others would see. Surprisingly to me, I guess, all those childhood years of playing with toy rifles had not prepared me for this, all those hours of aiming down the plastic barrels, lining up the front and rear sights, then uttering "kapow" as I pretended to shoot birds and dogs and neighbors. This was all a blur. There was no sighting down the barrel, just a quick pointing and then the squeezing of the trigger, then the metal barrel smacking me quick and hard in the eye. I could barely understand what had happened. The rabbit had run toward the group and I had followed it with my rifle not thinking about them, and I had fired toward the group. But when the rifle went off, the barrel had separated from the stock and had popped up and hit me in the eye. The whole damn thing had fallen apart.

"Jesus Christ, man, where're you shooting? You could kill somebody."

My father came over. "You alright?" he asked. I was standing, stunned. He took the rifle from me and lifted the barrel.

"What happened?" Ray asked.

"The whole thing just came apart. When's the last time you shot this thing."

"Hell, Karl, nobody ever uses it."

I had been lucky, I thought. If the gun hadn't come apart, they would be talking now about how I'd swung the rifle into the crowd, but that seemed to have been forgotten. Now, no danger, I walked the flank for the rest of the day carrying the broken gun, toes frozen, wet, and numb. The sky was grey, the umber field dappled white. I'm sure we headed north.