“You can’t really go wrong with this one,” he concludes. “It’s well made; it’ll last a lifetime.”
“May I pick it up?”
“Sure. You’ve never shot a shotgun before, have you?”
“No.”
“It’s real easy,” he says, not missing a beat.
He plants the butt of the gun in my right shoulder and softly presses my head down until my right cheek touches cold metal.
“There you go.”
He points out two small metal bumps, one from the end of the barrel closest to my face, the other rising off the tip of the muzzle. To aim the gun, he tells me, I need to line up those two points and use them to underline my target.
He stands up straight.
“Now point it at me,” he says.
“What?” I lift my head off the gun. “No, I’m not comfortable with that.”
“Well, how else am I gonna check if you’re holding it right?”
This feels like an important moment, one that could someday be reenacted and videotaped to scare future Hunter Safety students. Rule number one in Hunter Safety class: Always treat a gun as if it were loaded. Rule number two: Keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction at all times. That class, those rules, they are my defining experiences as a hunter so far. They are the only principles I have. If I breach them now, simply to avoid looking like the hand-wringing ninny that I am, what do I have left?
“I’m sorry, I can’t.”
He holds his hands up, as if to say, I give up.
The salesman gets out a few other weapons, too. He determines that the “youth” models fit me better than the adult-size guns.
“Lots of ladies buy youth models, because they fit the smaller frame better.” He seems concerned that I’ll be too self-conscious to seriously consider the smaller size. But I’m actually reassured by the idea of buying a gun meant for a child. It feels safer, somehow. Again, I thank the salesman and leave empty-handed.
A few days later, I try a small shop closer to my house that sells shotguns and fly-fishing equipment. There is just one employee, a tall, round man with a trim white beard. His shirt is missing one button. I’m the only customer, and I tell him that I’m looking to buy my first gun, a 20-gauge shotgun. Nothing fancy, just something for a beginning hunter.
“Sure,” he says. He turns around and selects a gun from the rack behind the counter. “I’ve got a Benelli here that might be just the thing.”
In an instant, he shows me that this time will be different: “Here, I’ll open the action,” he says, “so you can see that it’s not loaded. And then we’ll just leave it open the whole time we’re handling the gun.”
The salesman’s name is Russ, and he’s a retired music teacher who is so by-the-book that he might as well be a Hunter Safety instructor in his spare time. This puts me at ease, and I immediately vow to buy my gun from him.
He explains that the reason he likes this gun is because it’s so simple. It’s a pump-action, which means that you push the sheath of the gun forward to move the shell into the chamber. There are no semi-automatic parts to turn finicky after years of use or during poor weather. Next, Russ shows me how to take the gun apart—yes, it actually breaks into pieces—and then reassemble it. Apparently this comes in handy during cleaning.
He also shows me how to hold the gun correctly, and he does so without making me aim the muzzle at his face.
“Are you right-handed?” When I nod, he asks, “Do you know which eye is dominant?”
“My right eye.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m positive.” During Hunter Safety, we learned how to determine this. With both arms outstretched and the backs of your hands facing you, make a triangle with your thumbs and pointer fingers and center the triangle on some fixed object at least fifteen feet away. With your eyes focused on that object through the frame of your hands, slowly draw your hands all the way back to your face. Your hands will end up circling one eye: This is the dominant one.
Russ tells me that women are more likely than men to be right-handed but left-eye-dominant, or vice versa. Men almost always have their dominant eye and hand on the same side.
I notice that I’m relaxed enough to remember all the questions I couldn’t think of when I was nervously trying to keep up with the last two salesmen.
Although he doesn’t have a youth gun in stock, Russ agrees that a smaller gun would probably fit me better. He doesn’t pressure me to buy anything. But he does suggest that whenever I do get a gun, I go to a nearby gun club to practice shooting it. It turns out Russ is a competitive trapshooter. He even offers to lend me some videos on shotgun shooting technique.
While I’m there, I notice the other, fancier shotguns. They have stocks of smooth chestnut, unlike the matte-black metal one I’m considering buying. One has a metal inlay of two dogs—one gold and one black—flushing a bird. Russ opens the action and hands it to me so I can examine it. I rub my fingers over the smooth wood and finely etched metal. It has never occurred to me before that a gun could be a work of art. I flip over the price tag—more than twenty-five hundred dollars—and quickly hand it back.
When I leave the shop, I feel upbeat for the first time in a while. With someone like Russ helping to escort me into the world of hunting, perhaps I will gain admission after all. The next day, I call Russ and place an order for the most basic gun I looked at, a Benelli Nova pump-action shotgun in the youth size. Later, I drop off a deposit, half of the gun’s $419 cost. This is not a small purchase for me. The gun costs about what I bring home in a week of work as a reporter.
A week later, when Russ calls to say the gun has arrived, my first thought is: Shit. Am I really ready to be a gun owner? But Russ sounds genuinely giddy, and a little of his excitement can’t help but rub off on me, even over the phone.
I swing by the shop after work. Russ waves to me as I walk in, then turns and pulls a long white box—like an extra-long board game container—out from behind the counter. I had no idea guns came in boxes.
“You are gonna love this little gu-un,” he sings. I do feel excited to get my hands on it, to see if it really fits and feels as light as I hope.
But first, the paperwork. Name, address, date of birth, driver’s license number, Social Security number. A long list of yes-or-no questions about whether I’ve ever been convicted of various crimes. Easy stuff. Next, Russ dips the fingers of my right hand in ink before rolling each one, sideways, onto the page. He looks over the sheet to make sure I haven’t left any questions blank. He asks to see my driver’s license, which he compares with my answers on the page. Then he picks up the phone and dials.
“This’ll just take a sec…
As Russ reads my answers out loud, my palms sweat. For a moment, I let myself imagine: What if I fail the background check? But before I can muster a believable image of prison, Russ hangs up the phone.
“You’re all set.”
He sends me home with my brand-new gun and three borrowed DVDs about how to shoot a shotgun. In them, champion shooter Todd Bender demonstrates proper shooting technique. The first thing I notice in the videos is that Todd really smashes his face against the gun when he shoots. His face is also highly asymmetrical, and I wonder if these two things are related.
A couple of weeks later, I meet Russ at the Redmond Rod and Gun Club to shoot clays. I park my car in the gravel lot, at the end of a long row of American-made pickup trucks. I recently sold my Ford pickup and bought a used Toyota Echo, and it occurs to me that I might fit in better if I hadn’t placed so much value on fuel economy. As I walk around to the trunk to get my gun, Russ sees me and waves. He saunters over wearing an old, broken-in hunting vest. The pockets nearly burst, they’re stuffed so full of lead shotgun shells.
Seeing Russ’s vest reminds me that I don’t have a good way to tote around the shells I purchased a few days earlier. I grab my down coat from the passenger’s seat and unzip the pockets. I throw it on, pick up my gun and shel
ls, and trot after Russ, who is joining a group of older men lounging around a picnic table. The youngest ones are about Russ’s age, probably late fifties or early sixties. The oldest are in their eighties. Most of them are wearing baseball caps that announce membership in a veterans’ group or other military affiliation. Russ introduces me. I shake their hands and some—the hardest of hearing—ask me to repeat my name.
The club itself is just a flat expanse of sagebrush that has been transformed, shot by shot, into a barren patch of gravel and lead. A trailer makes up the office, where I sign in and pay three dollars per round. Several rickety buildings that look like outhouses are sprinkled around the property. These shacks house the machines that fling clay pigeons into the air to replicate flying birds.
There are several games of clay-pigeon shooting, including trap, sporting clays, five-stand and skeet. In each one, shooters move between stations and shoot “birds”—clay disks—that are flung from various positions. Trap is the simplest: A shooter takes two shots from each of five stations, taking aim at two clays from each. Trapshooting first developed in England in the 1700s, and involved shooting live pigeons as they were released from cages called traps. Today trapshooters take aim at standardized four-and five-sixteenth-inch disks, painted fluorescent colors and hurled at about forty-two miles per hour. Inside the trap house, the throwing mechanism oscillates back and forth, so although the shooter knows the general flight path, he doesn’t know exactly where the pigeon will go.
There’s a particular etiquette to a shooting range. When you aren’t shooting, for example, you rest your gun in a wooden gun stand, unloaded. At first, this bothers me. I’m not comfortable leaving my new, expensive weapon lying in a rack where anyone could take it or tamper with it. But the shooting range is a little bit like a fraternity. Trust is important. And it’s impolite to pace around carrying a gun while everyone else is sitting unarmed. Besides, I quickly learn that my 20-gauge youth model is downright laughable to these über-shooters, many of whom own custom-made shotguns designed specifically for trap. In the rack it goes.
As a group of people shoot, Russ narrates the game of trap: Five people at a time participate—one at each station, arranged in a semicircle. Each person loads two shells at a time. When everyone is ready, the person on the far left shoulders his gun and yells, “Pull!” A sensor detects the noise and releases one pigeon from one trap. The shooter shoots it. The shooter yells, “Pull!” again and shoots a second pigeon. Now he steps back a bit and the person to his right takes a turn. Everyone gets to shoot twice from each station.
Soon my name is called. I run to get my gun. I step up to the station and shoot an entire game of trap without hitting a single disk. Even my voice when I yell “Pull!” sounds inadequate—higher-pitched and more tentative than the others, as if I’m asking a question instead of barking a command. When it’s over, I slink back to the picnic table. Russ pats me on the shoulder.
“Lily, there’s someone I’d like you to meet.” An older, shorter man is standing next to him. He holds out his hand. “This is Del, and he’s one of the best trapshooters in the whole country.”
Del walks me away from the group, asks me to shoulder my gun, and gives me a few pointers. Some of it contradicts what I learned from Russ’s videos. The videos spent a lot of time explaining how to lead a moving target—in other words, how far ahead of the pigeon you must aim to hit the disk where it is instead of hitting thin air where the disk recently was. Del waves off this advice.
“Don’t lead the bird,” he says. “You’re standing close enough to it, just lock on to it—move with it for a second to make sure you’re locked on—and pull the trigger.”
Next time when my name is called, Del walks to the trap station with me. He stands a few feet behind me. When my turn comes, I take a deep breath. “Pull!”
The bird flies out of the house. I lock in on it and pull the trigger. Pow! The clay sprays apart like a firework.
“Good girl,” Del says.
“Pull!” I lock in on the pigeon and pull the trigger. Bang! This time, I miss. The clay sails into the sagebrush, unharmed. Del steps toward me and whispers some advice.
“Keep your weight forward; you want to stand right over the gun, not behind it.”
I shoot a few more rounds of trap and, with Del’s help, hit about half of the pigeons. He congratulates me and I thank him for his patience. Over the next month, as I go back to the range to practice, Del waves and occasionally offers a few words of advice.
Surprisingly, none of the men at the range hunt. Their sport is shooting, not hunting. Every year, a few weeks before hunting season, hunters like me flood the range. The rest of the time, these men—and a handful of women—have the place to themselves. They arrange car pools to shooting competitions. They rib one another. They drool over one another’s guns.
It’s not uncommon to meet hunters and non-hunters who fetishize their guns. They name their weapons and own more than they can possibly use. I write about a burglary in which more than fifty guns are stolen from the La Pine home of one couple. Turns out they had an entire room devoted to firearm storage. Others, like Scott’s family, end up with heirloom guns that they don’t use but can’t bear to sell or give away.
Andy starts calling my shotgun “The Peacemaker,” poking fun at its diminutive size in all-business black. Eventually, I will call it that at times, too, though I never feel emotionally attached to the gun itself. Most people I hunt with will carry more elegant-looking guns and ask when I’m going to upgrade mine. Yet I will remain satisfied with my plain-Jane shotgun. It does its job. I see no need to glorify it.
Soon I agree to take in an heirloom shotgun from Scott’s cousin. It’s a 12-gauge, which will allow me to hunt bigger birds. I try not to think about the fact that I now live in a house with two guns.
CHAPTER 5
GUTS
I awake in a panic. It’s the first day of September and I’m about to go on my first hunt for doves. As I wait for Andy to pick me up, I joke to Scott that it’s symbolically appropriate for my first hunting experience to involve shooting at the international icon for peace. (This image was appropriated back in 1949, when a Pablo Picasso lithograph of a dove was selected as the emblem for that year’s World Peace Council meeting in Paris.)
I won’t be downing any birds, however. I’ve packed a water bottle and lots of neutral-colored clothing but not my gun. Leaving it at home is a strategic excuse to merely observe the other hunters. Despite all of my preparations, the idea of killing something still terrifies me. I don’t want to be pressured by a group of seasoned hunters into doing something I’m not ready to do. Or, perhaps worse, chickening out in front of them.
Andy picks me up this morning and drives us to a farmhouse, where about a dozen people are going to hunt doves on a privately owned farm. Later, I learn that being invited to join this troop is a bit like drawing Willy Wonka’s golden ticket. If you know someone who owns a large piece of land and lets you hunt on it, you automatically gain two advantages. One, you’re not competing with other hunters for space, like you do on public land. And two, the owner of the land can act as a guide, sharing hard-earned secrets, such as where the animals tend to bed down and along which paths they travel and when.
It’s chilly but clear when we pull up, and Marc, the owner, invites us onto his kitchen deck for a cup of hot coffee and a slice of store-bought coffee cake. Andy chats with the other hunters. I take a few bites of cake but I’m too nervous to eat more. I pace across the deck, peering into the sky for a glimpse of dove.
Mourning doves (Zenaida macroura) are considered migratory birds, though some of them stay put year-round. In Oregon, dove hunting is allowed for about one month in early fall, just as the birds are beginning to fly south to spend the colder part of the year in Mexico, Arizona or California.
Across the country, doves are a particularly popular hunting bird. In the 1970s and 1980s, biologists estimated that hunters killed fifty million
doves a year—more than all other game birds combined. Despite the high rate of “harvest”—that’s biospeak for death by hunters—doves remain abundant throughout the country. Car accidents, animal predators, disease, weather and miscellaneous causes account for four to five times as many dove deaths as hunters do. One 1993 study, for example, estimated that domestic cats were responsible for about 70 percent of them.
Last week, in preparation for this day, I purchased my first hunting license. Across the country, wildlife is the property of the state in which it resides. That means each state gets to set its own rules for hunting and fishing. (The one exception is for federally listed threatened or endangered species, which fall under the purview of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.) It also means that even if a dove lands in my yard, it’s not my dove. It belongs to Oregon, and if I kill it without a license or out of season, I’m poaching, or stealing that dove from the state.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began tracking hunting licenses in the 1950s. License sales peaked in 1982, when about 16.7 million Americans paid for the right to hunt. That number has slipped steadily since. By 2006, about 12.5 million people hunted, a 25 percent drop even as the population grew more than 30 percent.
Buying a license was easy. I walked up to the counter at a sporting goods store and gave them my driver’s license. Because I’ve bought fishing licenses each year I’ve lived here, my information was already in the state’s database. The clerk printed out a license, and I signed it, paid for it, and headed home.
As the morning warms up, Marc walks us down to a flat gravel road that divides an irrigation pond from a grove of juniper trees. He explains that he’s been watching the birds for weeks now, memorizing their routine. The doves are currently eating grains off the floor of nearby fields. Doves are adaptable eaters, munching on a wide variety of seeds, grasses and forbs. At about nine thirty each morning, they fly through the junipers, parallel to this gravel lane, he says. The hunters spread out across the road. I stay close to Andy but make sure I keep a few feet behind him. Everyone is fumbling with shells and loading their guns. I’m worried about the guns. There are too many for me to monitor the direction of each muzzle. To calm down, I look instead to the horizon: a small grassy hill to our right. It doesn’t help, though, because I’m also worried about the doves. I hope some of them—how will I know how many are enough?—survive the shootings. Then I worry that this means I’m not a hunter, and never will be. After all, there can’t be too many people who wake up early to go on a hunt and then spend the morning fearing for their prey.
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