I don’t know if there’s a sound called death when you hear the firing of a gun yet there it was in my ear, the crack-bang of a shotgun that told me somewhere something was dying. I opened the back door and stepped out hoping perhaps it was my neighbor Will scaring crows out of the pecan trees again except I knew that sound wasn’t the same one that the shotgun blanks made he used to shoo those thieves of the air away, no this was a deeper sound, one that warrants attention. This sound bit the air with a force that spoke of death.
Standing on the porch under the fading red autumn skies I began looking around when I noticed a movement out of the corner of my eye. Out past the field where the rye grass grew all summer down on the other side of a silk-flower tree lined pond there’s a small clearing on the far side and something large was on the ground, it screamed with a horrible bleating sound that said in any language, “I’m dying”. It took a moment to register in my senses it was a doe because this was so foreign to me, like hearing someone use the word, “nigger” (and mean it) it was something that doesn’t belong, something so primitive compared to the world I live in that it’s almost too difficult to comprehend. My thoughts were jumbled all at once, it’s a doe, she’s dying, then guilt - perhaps one of the very ones I’d been feeding daily from the apples I collected off the apple trees that had gone wild, maybe those treats drew her to this place. I saw her thrashing around trying to stand only to fall down, again and again she repeated her vain attempt at getting up until I saw the wind blow slowly across the field and settled next to her, she became quite, her movement slowed, the reaper had arrived.
I quickly went back in and put on my work boots, grabbed a jacket and set off toward the doe wondering the whole time, what I could do for her when I got there, apprehensive about mental TV flash backs of animal planet programs showing deer cutting people up with their hooves I dually began searching my memory on my knowledge of animal husbandry and for some reason wishing I had my multi-tool knife on me (although for the life of me I still can’t figure that one out when a better wish might have been an emergency room in an animal hospital with a fully staffed trauma team of the best surgeons in the world on hand). I could see she was still hanging onto the dearness of life but by the time I got over to where she was her breathing was hard and labored, it was only a matter of time before she passed on and I wanted to touch her. I watched her knowing there was nothing I could do since she’d taken the gunshot to the side of her head and neck. Her eye moved as I looked at her and for a second we each saw the other. At that second our locked eyes and I felt the wildness within her that swam in waters of fear and confusion knowing with no doubt the sinking pull of going down. From the hole in the side of her head blood and gore spewed out around the opening. Repulsed I turned away from the deer with a sickening feeling in my stomach knowing she’d never taste apples I collected again or find the piles of pecans I left by the tree for the deer, or in her world simply breath the air of tomorrow.
I went up to the house where the old man I’d become friends with lived to let him know someone shot the deer. I had almost made it to the house when Will came out and said, “well that will be one less lady eatin’ more than her fair share from my garden and a few more pounds in the freezer”. He continued on with the play by play saying, “almost didn’t get her as the damn thing kept moving on me”, “Will”, I said, “Your shot her?” to which he replied, “sure did, she’s good eating and has been taken more than her share lately so I thought I’d even things out. Say why don’t you give me a hand throwing her in the truck so I can take her over yonder and hang her up”. I said, “OK”, and followed Will in his truck back over to the doe and gently walked up on her once more checking to see if she’d passed once more slowly reaching out to touch her to which Will chuckled and said, “first time you ever seen a doe get shot”, “no”, I answered back, “I was just curious if she was still alive, heard of one once kicking out the back window of a pick-up truck cause the deer wasn’t quite dead when they put her in there”. Then feeling like a traitor for masking my true thoughts on the whole situation I grabbed onto her back legs as Will took the front, we picked her up and placed her in the back of the truck he’d brought over. As the tailgate closed her head flopped back onto her body I knew she was really gone and thought to myself it must be a terrible way to go.
Now I realize being hit by a car might be worse and the total time between the shot and her final moments on earth couldn’t have been more than five or ten minutes at the most but couldn’t get over the queasy feeling that something I enjoyed was no longer around to give me or anyone else pleasure anymore. I thought of my own delight at seeing the deer feed out front and the times I’ve opened the back door to scare them as they chomp down my own garden after they’d already eaten what I had grown for them but that was more of a game of peek a boo with no ending. Here there was an end, game over, no one wins.
I thought back to when I was young when my own father took me deer hunting and how excited I was to be on a hunt with “the boys” and how when one of us finally did shoot a deer how that delight turned to horror as I watched that animal die too. I never hunted again, I never lifted a gun again for it was a lesson that had burned into the soul of my being and I never wanted to be a part of it again. Through the years as I’ve gotten older I still try to understand the whys and the how of hunting but there was something about this death so close to Halloween that brought the dark side of it into light. Under the joy of dressing up, carving pumpkins, and collecting candy in bags lies something moldy, something dank, something that smells sickly.
I got home, entered, and shut the door. As I bent down to take off my work boots I saw the blood that was all over my hands, I saw the blood from the doe had dripped all over my pant legs and work boots, I remember thinking this is crazy I should have noticed this the second it happened, why wasn’t I aware of this or is this where death lies in wait for it’s call; whether from the honk of a car horn, or the click of an electric fence, or perhaps this time from the report of a shotgun.
Autumn when it turns to Halloween is about being scared, it’s about being horrified, it’s about ghosts and goblins and things that go bump in the night. It’s about the end of a cycle. Many times these ends for some reason express not a reason for joy but of remembrance for the frailty of life, funny how these things differ to many of us so perhaps that’s where the joy in it is. To just breath the air, to see, to smell, to taste, to touch, for as it is in fiction so it can be (and often is) in real life the same thing. Death is there just outside the light for us in a little crack of darkness list in hand just waiting for the right time when it can come out and introduce itself and say hello.
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