Call of the Mild

by Lily Raff McCaulou

  Then one afternoon, Scott invites me to have lunch with him and one of his co-workers, Andy Fischer, a former professional bike racer with red hair and a wiry build. Andy grew up hunting and fishing in Montana. He and his younger brother, Kit, observed this household rule: If you shoot it, you eat it. Once, their parents made them choke down a couple of squirrels the boys had shot for fun. The meat didn’t taste too bad, Andy said, and so later, they tricked their parents’ friends into eating teriyaki-grilled squirrel during a dinner party. The more I hear about Andy’s upbringing, the more it sounds wild, adventurous and, dare I say, idyllic.

  At first, Andy doesn’t have any ideas for how I could get started hunting, either. But when I press him for details of his own hunting education, he says something that catches my attention:

  “I was probably in sixth or seventh grade when a lot of my friends started taking Hunter Safety, so I took it, too.”

  Hunter Safety. It turns out that every state in the Union offers a similar course, usually with a long proper name but known informally as Hunter Education or Hunter Safety. Most are geared toward children because, at least in Oregon, all minors must pass a Hunter Safety course before purchasing a hunting license. Adults don’t need any such qualification.

  The next day, I call the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to sign up.

  The woman who answers says that although a class for adults is offered every year, I’ve missed the 2006 class by a few weeks. It’s late summer; I can wait eleven months to take an adults-only class or enroll in an all-ages class starting next week in Culver, a small farming town about forty-five minutes away. Culver has more in common with La Pine than Bend, but it’s a closer-knit community than either of the areas where I spend my days. This class meets two evenings a week.

  Eager to get started, I give the woman my name and phone number and promise to bring five dollars—tuition for the entire four-week course—to the first class. Then I admit that I feel silly enrolling in a class for children.

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “Adults take this class all the time.”

  The following week, I walk into the Culver City Hall, which doubles as a fire station, and am greeted by a gaggle of about twenty kids much younger than I was expecting. A few grown men are scattered around the room, too. Two of them are obviously instructors, so I home in on a third, a man who looks about ten years older than me. I slide into a plastic chair beside him. He smiles at me, and I smile back and relax a little, taking his friendliness as a sign that he’s a student, too.

  One of the instructors sidles between rows of chairs, handing out forms. When he gets to the man next to me, the man shakes his head.

  “I’m just here with my son.” He puts his arm around a small boy—maybe ten or eleven—sitting on his other side. I look around the room and sure enough, I’m the only adult holding a form.

  Our instructors introduce themselves. The first is E.V., Culver’s one-man public works department. He pronounces his initials like the girl’s name Evie. He stands tall, a stern, no-nonsense military veteran with a trim gray beard and glasses. The second instructor is Jack, a redhead whose seemingly endless patience with children is matched only by his seemingly endless girth, and who also happens to be the county sheriff.

  I quickly glean that the primary purpose of Hunter Safety is to instill a healthy dose of fear in these soon-to-be-gun-toting tots. But for me—an adult who arrived already afraid of guns—the fear is paralyzing. We begin by watching a scripted movie called The Last Shot, in which a thirteen-year-old boy accidentally shoots his best friend. At the end, Jack offers one more warning, in case we somehow missed the seriousness of the film.

  “That boy?” he says, pointing to the screen where the final frame shows police officers approaching the shooter in the hospital, just after his friend is declared dead. “He is never going to be allowed to hunt again. Think about that.”

  The room is silent, but I’m pretty sure no one is focused on the kid’s lost hunting career. That boy is never going to be able to sleep again. Or look at himself in the mirror. Or enjoy one ice-cream cone without guilt beating his insides to a pulp. For the next few days, I question my decision to hunt based on the human safety risks alone. It all comes down to the guns. What could possibly be worth the danger of carrying a loaded rifle through the woods?

  E.V. starts the second class with an order: “If you are twelve years of age or older, raise your hand.”

  I raise my hand along with about half of the class. The Under-Twelves are sent with E.V. to practice safe gun handling, while we wizened Twelve-and-Overs sit with the sheriff to talk through a chapter of our textbook.

  The book, which is more like a thick pamphlet, includes sections about animal identification, wilderness survival and basic gun information. Today’s lesson is about guns—different types, gauges and calibers and their various parts. Earlier this year, I happened to learn the difference between a shotgun and a rifle during the non-stop news coverage of Dick Cheney’s hunting accident. The vice president was hunting for quail when he accidentally blasted his friend in the face. (Yet he managed to avoid the horrific consequences we were warned of in the video.)

  A piece of shotgun ammunition is called a shell, and is basically a plastic tube filled with metal pellets. Because a shotgun shoots a spray of metal, it doesn’t need to be aimed as carefully as a rifle or handgun, which usually shoot one bullet at a time. This makes a shotgun useful for fast-moving, airborne targets such as birds. A single pellet, as long as it’s heavy enough and moving fast enough, will kill a bird by intersecting its neck. A gun’s gauge inversely corresponds with the diameter of its barrel, so the larger the number, the smaller the gun. For example, Cheney was carrying a diminutive 28-gauge shotgun during his quail-hunting accident. But if he had instead used a burly 10-gauge (typically reserved for downing geese), his friend probably would not have survived.

  It makes sense, then, that hunters tend to own so many guns. There is no one-size-fits-all. You start with a rifle to shoot deer or antelope. Then you decide to buy a bigger rifle to shoot elk or moose. You have a 12-gauge shotgun for rabbits and turkeys. And you don’t want to pulverize small game like quail, so you probably need a smaller shotgun for those.

  In class, we will be handling rifles only. According to Jack there are many parts to a rifle, but to me, there are only four that you really need to know:

  The trigger: what you yank to shoot. Avoid this.

  The muzzle: the hole through which a bullet exits the gun. Keep away from this at all times.

  The action: a movable piece of metal that holds the bullet in place in the chamber so that the gun will fire properly. When this part is open, the gun should not be able to shoot. People who know guns can see that the action is open and feel reassured that you’re not about to open fire.

  The safety: a switch or lever that should be left on—to prevent the gun from firing—until your target is in sight and you’re ready to shoot. Jack frequently reminds us that, like any mechanical part, a safety can fail at any time.

  Jack never misses an opportunity to wedge a safety warning into the lessons. In the video we watched on the first day, for example, the boys made the repeated mistake of dismissing their .22-caliber rifle as just a .22. Hunters call these small rifles “varmint guns” because they’re not powerful enough to take down an animal much bigger than a squirrel or rabbit. However, Jack reminds us again and again that no gun is too small to be taken seriously.

  “A .22-caliber rifle is never just a .22,” he tells us. “Don’t ever call it that. It can kill you.”

  At one point, Jack mentions that in all his years of teaching the class, only two people have ever failed Hunter Safety. Both failed, he tells us, because they could not demonstrate a level of maturity necessary to hunt safely. Ten years older than my oldest classmate and fourteen years older than the average one, I quietly hope that we’ll be graded on a curve.

  Soon, however, my classmates’ youth
will begin to intimidate me. People like to say that you should never stop learning. The truth is, it’s hard to learn something new—really new—as an adult. As we age, our obligations pile up and free time becomes scarce. But that’s only part of the problem. We also face a relatively short list of acceptable activities to try for the first time. Tell your friends you’re learning to speak French and they’ll likely congratulate your gumption. Mention your beginner gymnastics lessons and they’ll probably laugh. Even activities that are considered lifelong sports, like tennis, are things that people usually learn as kids and then hone as adults. In Hunter Safety, it’s easy to see why. As I’ve aged, I’ve lost my willingness to be bad at something and stick with it anyway. Kids have no choice in the matter—they’re pros at being novices. When the teacher mocks or scolds them, they shrug it off. They’re kids—being publicly humiliated is practically their job. For me, it’s… humiliating.

  Before we move to E.V.’s portion of the class, we take a short break and I head to the ladies’ room, along with one of two other females in the class. I’m in the stall when I hear her voice from the next one.

  “So,” she starts quietly, “how old are you?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  “Oh my God.” She practically gasps, I’m so much older than she’d imagined. Then, after a pause, she adds: “I’m thirteen.”

  We walk out of our respective stalls and introduce ourselves. Her name is Jade. She wears thick black mascara and clear lip gloss. As we leave the bathroom, she asks, “So, what are you doing here?” I search for a concise explanation of my heady ideas about environmentalism, food and my relationship with nature. Leave it to a thirteen-year-old to tongue-tie me.

  “You know,” I say, sighing, “I’m not really sure.”

  We sit down in front of E.V., whom we all know is about to hand out the guns. The room is silent. E.V. wastes no time; he turns and addresses the elephant in the room by name.

  “Who here is afraid of guns? Raise your hand.”

  I fling up my arm before looking around to notice that everyone else is comfortable around weapons or at least has the good sense not to openly admit their fear. My admission bothers E.V., and he will not let up on me until the course is almost over. Each evening, he will ask if I am still afraid of guns. Each evening I will make the mistake of answering truthfully.

  “But you drive a car,” he will plead on the fourth or fifth class, obviously irked. “Do you get scared every time you get into your car?”

  “No.”

  “Yet cars kill way more people every year than guns do.”

  “But I’m used to cars.” My whole life, since before I could walk or speak, I’ve tacitly accepted the risk inherent in cars. Not in guns. Guns are a big, sudden leap.

  Eventually, E.V. accepts that my fear will take more than a few night classes to overcome. He works on my vocabulary, instead.

  “The next time someone asks you if you’re afraid of guns,” he says, “tell them, ‘I respect guns.’ Because there’s nothing wrong with that; you should respect guns.”

  I am 99 percent sure that the next time someone asks me if I’m afraid of guns, it will be E.V.

  “Okay,” I say, “I will.”

  Tonight, E.V. marches over to a wardrobe to hand out the guns: .22-caliber rifles with bulky padlocks attached, so that they can’t actually be loaded. According to E.V., the padlock keys were lost, sentencing these guns to a lifetime of nervous handling by Hunter Safety students. The locks do nothing to allay my fears, however. I’ve been reminded too many times today that guns misfire, that accidents happen no matter what. Perhaps my gun will be the one with an ancient piece of shrapnel wedged inside, waiting to be freed by my careless brush against the trigger.

  When I get to the front of the line, E.V. holds a long metal rifle out to me. My palms are sweating so much that I worry it might slip through my hands.

  “Action open, safety on,” he says, glancing first to a hole where—God forbid—the ammunition would go, then to a small switch. He looks me in the eye. “Got it?”

  I grasp the gun with both hands.

  “Got it.”

  He lets go of the gun. I hold it away from my body, like a stick of lit dynamite, and walk slowly to join the row of already armed students.

  We practice picking the guns up and setting them down to climb over an imaginary fence. We practice handing them to one another across an imaginary stream. We practice carrying them as we walk alongside other hunters. I am nervous the whole time. I only relax when I hand my gun back to E.V.—Got it? Got it.—and he stows it back in the cabinet.

  Other students don’t admit it, but many of them are afraid of guns, too. Much more than age, fear is what divides our class. I recognize my fellow scaredy-cats by the way they nervously chew their lips while their rifles lean against their shoulders. They turn the guns a little too often, searching for a comfortable position but never quite finding one. Some of the kids are younger versions of me, with no significant firsthand experience with guns. Of course, they didn’t grow up near Washington, DC, like I did, during the city’s reign as murder capital of the world. Police officers visited my elementary school and said things like, “If you see a gun lying on the ground, do not touch it. Back away and call the police.” Whenever a gun appeared in the newspaper, it was usually illegal and it was, without exception, bad news. Mostly the news was grisly and tragic. In rare, lucky cases it was a reminder of all that could have gone wrong.

  To us in the fearful half, this is what we know: Gun = death. QED. Even if the gun is shooting innocuous holes in paper, those shots are preparation for death. Even if the gun is shooting a rodent—even a small, pesky rodent that threatens something we value such as crops or songbirds—the finality of its death is sobering and terrifying. Our teachers hammer that into our heads by saying things like, “Once you pull the trigger, you can never take that shot back.”

  They repeat, again and again, how much is on the line when you’re carrying a loaded gun. “You can’t afford to make a mistake,” E.V. tells us. This is what scares me the most about hunting: I can’t think of a single thing I’ve done without making a mistake. In a way, I lied to E.V. when I told him that I’m not afraid of cars. I drive almost every day, but when I stop and think about it, I’m still scared of driving. I’ve had my share of fender-benders. I’ve had close calls. The reason I’ve never hurt anyone behind the wheel, or been hurt myself, is probably as thin and flimsy as I’ve been lucky. I might not be so lucky with guns.

  But then there’s the other half of the class, the fearless half. To them, guns are not confined to our sad, simple equation. Guns are a means to death, of course. But they are also a means to adventure, to food, to family bonding. This half includes kids like Grayson, a skinny fourth grader with dimples, a crew cut and a wide grin, who is barely as tall as my waist. Grayson clearly knows guns and is only here to meet the state requirement for buying a hunting license. When he picks up a rifle, checks to make sure it’s unloaded and hands it to a classmate, for example, he automatically points the muzzle in a safe direction. There is no moment of shock as he realizes, woops, the muzzle is aimed straight at his buddy, then fumbles guiltily to readjust it. Safety isn’t a panicked afterthought but a steady instinct. His face and body remain relaxed. To Grayson, a gun is an object or a tool. When he thinks of a gun, he thinks of hunting with his dad, and all the richness that comes with it. He knows how to take his own gun apart and clean it. He even knows, he tells me modestly, how to skin and gut the animals he has shot—a few birds, some rodents.

  If you think guns are powerful, you should see one in the hands of a competent child. Watching Grayson handle a gun for thirty seconds makes me think that even if I quit my job and moved into the woods and dedicated my life to it, I would never truly be a hunter. Not like Grayson is. Sometimes I look around the room, filled with people big and small, young and old (parents and grandparents of my classmates occasionally show up to observe), and think a
bout whom I would trust as my hunting partner. Together, we would head out into the forest with loaded guns in our arms and feel safe, trusting each other. Most of the time, I’d pick Grayson. Sure, our instructor knows a lot about first aid and wilderness survival. And one of the kids has a dad who’s a cop. But Grayson is quiet and pleasant and curious and looks, at least to me, like he handles a gun as safely as anyone.

  In fact, seeing that rifle in Grayson’s hands is, oddly enough, reassuring. He is proof that children can be raised to handle guns safely and with respect. Of course, plenty of households do contain both guns and children and manage to avert disaster. In 2009, for example, 138 children, ages eighteen and younger, were killed by accidental gunshots in the United States. This figure—any number over zero, really—is undeniably tragic. But consider that more than seven times as many children—1,056—accidentally drowned that year. Or that a whopping 6,683 children died in motor vehicle accidents.

  The rate of gun-related accidents seems startlingly low given the astonishing number of guns that we, as a nation, own—roughly 250 million. Our response to the risk of drowning, for example, is not to discourage children from being around water, but rather to educate them, to teach them to swim and be safe. Our preferred response to the risk of guns is the exact opposite—total avoidance.

  Accidents represent just a fraction of gun-related deaths—about 2 percent in 2007. Nearly three out of five gun-caused deaths are suicides. This is all to say: Chances are slim that you or I will die by gunshot. The lifetime odds that you will be murdered by a firearm are 1 in 306. Your chances of dying by accidental gunshot are 1 in 6,309. Your odds of death by cancer, on the other hand, are 1 in 7. Heart disease, 1 in 6. The odds that you will die of any cause? One in one.