There’s an awful sort of sucking noise as you cut the throat of a dying pig. When the blade goes in and you start sawing the skin apart, the lungs get snagged and jolted and it sounds like the animal’s struggling for breath. It’s incredibly disturbing even to watch, even more so to hold the body down, keeping the death kicks from jerking the knife around. The warm corpse will jerk a little as you struggle through the hide, opening the body up to let all the blood out; afterwards, it can be gutted, strung up, skinned and butchered. Then, pork chops!
    But that’s not what they teach you in the Maryland Hunter Safety Training course. My brother (Carver Center ’05 graduate Orpheus Collar) and I had a trip planned with our father and grandfather to go kill animals in Texas; unfortunately, neither Orpheus nor myself had ever been hunting, and neither of us had killed anything bigger than a bug (actually, I killed a squirrel once, but it was entirely an accident). A few minutes of online research later and we found a course being taught in Odenton, Maryland, one that would allow us time to get the full license and still make the plane to Fort Worth.
The majority of the course was taught in an oversized garage, filled with a dozen rows of little metal folding chairs. We learned where to point our guns while we walked (away from our friends), and how to avoid killing friends while we hunted (by not pointing our guns at them). Another big focus of the course is improving the image of hunting; they told us not to wear any bloody hunting clothes into town, and never to tie the dead bodies to the hood of our cars.
    The lectures lasted for about six hours, split up over two days. It’s easy to fall asleep because the actual content is boring and repetitive, but the lecturers themselves spliced the course material with their own interesting personal stories and advice. Also more interesting were the skills tests; eventually, we got out of the chairs and into the woods, in order to prove we could really handle firearms. We blew away paper bull’s-eyes on a shooting range, and traversed a hunting-walk (where we carried around unloaded guns in groups of four, acting like we wanted to kill the plastic animals placed around the nature trail).
    “Would this be an ethical kill?” our guide asked at every fake clunky deer or woodchuck. I wanted to state that the whole idea of ethics was exclusive to a personal sense of morality, but the state of Maryland uses the word “legal” and “ethical” interchangeably, and plus, I’m not really that fickle.
    After guessing most of the ethical questions wrong (which was okay because we were only being evaluated on how much we didn’t kill the other people walking), we went inside for a free venison chili lunch, followed by a fifty question multiple choice test. I passed with a perfect score (and got a complimentary pocket knife for being so smart!). Orpheus also passed the test, although it should be noted that he did not get a perfect score. We got our actual licenses separately; I took my graduation certificate to a sporting shop, where they tried to sell me all sorts of stamps that would allow me to legally kill even more animals than the regular limit allows. I felt that killing more than six deer in a day was probably excessive, and I opted to go for the regular license. The woman handling my order actually gave me a weird look, as if I was an idiot to pass up the additional kills.
    Within a week, Orpheus and I were boarding a plane for Texas, preparing for our first hunting trip. I had to declare my shotgun at the check-in counter; they told me to prove that it was unloaded and sign a little card. I pulled the gun out of its case, looking around to check for the reactions of people around me. No one seemed to notice much. I went ahead and tried to open the action (that’s where the bullet goes), but after playing with it the night before, I’d left it cocked and ready to fire, sans bullet. I got a little nervous, because I didn’t know how to unload the gun while it was cocked. At the time, I was pretty sure that I hadn’t put any shells in (considering that we didn’t have any in the house), so I fired at the ground. Again, no one paid any attention, and I snapped the chamber open and showed the woman behind the desk.
    The state of Texas is sort of like another country; they have different fast food chains (Whattaburger and Taco Cabana both come to mind), they have drive-thru beer barns and everything is bilingual. When Dad and Grampa came to get us, we were quickly shuttled out of the bright lights and barrage of liquor billboards (Bebes Tequila!) and headed for Rochelle, where we had a whole ranch of animals waiting for us. After a four hour drive, we finally came to the complex web of dirt roads that eventually got us to the house.  
    The next morning was not cold. That was exciting to me, because the gradually cooling November weather was really starting to be a downer back in Baltimore. I got up, put on a t-shirt and strolled outside. Everyone else was sitting around in chairs, waiting to start cooking breakfast. One of the other occupants of the ranch was out with his eleven-year-old son already; they’d been up and looking for something to kill since before the sun rose.
    But they didn’t fire a shot; we had breakfast prepared by the time they returned. Breakfast, in fact all meals on the ranch, were mostly fat and grease (there were eight men staying for the weekend, but no women). I also noticed almost everyone had a potbelly, and I was wondering why, since wild game tended to be a whole lot leaner than store-bought meat. Then, taking into account the copious amounts of beer and grease that they imbibed by the hour, I realized that the meat probably wasn’t the main source of their bulbous torsos.
    After breakfast, one of the guys took us around the property. He explained that the land was hunted by many, many different people, and everyone who stayed and hunted there did their part to keep the place running: fixing blinds, repairing damaged equipment, anything that needed work. And, in turn, the hunters had a place to stay for free and kill at their leisure. By this time in the day, the warm weather was starting to become a burden, and my black shirt was soaking in all the sunlight that the cloudless sky could afford to deliver.
    The Texan brush land was filled with organisms that wanted to kill me. There were plenty of cacti, but every other plant had spines as well. Every tree, flower and vine was decked with a thousand needles or knives. Of the few bugs that inhabited the area, all of them were fanged beasts filled with poison and fury. As we drove through the fields and dry hills, the area just felt sinister; the perfect place to spill some blood. Ironic, though, that the game facing the dangerous end of our guns would be the only creatures on the ranch that wouldn’t, under any circumstances, try to hurt us or kill us.
Not that we would be the first mammal slayers to stay at the ranch. Before Texas was settled (which is a nice word for stolen), nomadic Indians would come through the land, killing buffalo and mammoths or whatever used to live in Texas. Then the real Americans came in, put up fences and shot everybody. Actually, to their credit, the Indians were (according to one of the hunters lodging with us) quite fierce, and the settlers didn’t win every skirmish on the ranch.
In honor of the battles fought and lives lost, our tour vehicle was an old military machine, the Jeep Willis, a World War II era truck, one of the few still in existence. Most of the Willis model cars were used overseas by American troops, and when the war ended, they decided it would be more cost-effective to dump them all in the ocean rather than spend their already depleted funds shipping all the cars back to the states. There were two seats and a small truck bed in the back, and somehow, we managed to fit six people, a bucket of corn and molasses to bait pigs, and a couple of guns (not that there was anything to hunt in the daytime, but no one ever left camp without a gun) .
Anyway, while on our tour, we stopped by a small grove of trees and quickly set up a pig trap; within a half hour, we had rigged a fence-and-post contraption that would tempt hogs with the bait; the pen had a triggered door that would shut when the hog tried to get some of the delicious food. During our stay on the ranch, the door snapped shut many times, but we never got any animals.
    At least, not in the trap. That evening, after a brief run to Wal-Mart to get Texan hunting licenses, we grabbed our firearms and took a walk. Orpheus, Dad and I made our way around the ranch, trying to stay quiet. We saw several armadillos, but nothing worth murdering. As the night got darker, it became increasingly obvious that we wouldn’t be catching anything, and we’d need to head in soon. Right as we were about to turn around, we heard a shot from up ahead; the three of us jumped, ducked, then snuck towards the source of the shot and hoped we wouldn’t be mistaken for animals.
    We found the blind where the shot had been fired; my grandfather was stepping out, followed by my cousin, Russ Collar, who was still holding his gun. A few meters away, something was flailing in the dirt. As we all drew closer, we found two bodies on the ground, two pigs, both shot in the head, both still writhing in their final agony, expelling the last bit of energy they had left in their bodies. I was a little confused, staring at the pigs. There were certainly two of them there, flapping around in the blood-and-dust mud, but only one shot had been fired.
    “That’s a first,” Russ said, grinning broadly. He told us there’d been a whole gaggle of hogs, bobbing their heads around, eating from the ground. He’d lined up the shot, fired, and ended up hitting two of them, both through the brain (and failing to kill either of them with the initial bullet).
 Orpheus and I watched as Dad and Russ slit their throats (to drain as much blood as possible before gutting); then their bodies were dragged away from the wet stain, rolled over, and from the anus to the rib cage, their bellies were split open with a knife, insides extracted and left in a wet puddle on the ground (to be eaten by coyotes when they caught the smell of blood in the air).
    I helped hold one of the pigs as it was being opened and gutted; I gripped the back legs and forced them apart as my cousin sliced through the hide and took out intestines, liver, lungs, heart… he even named the parts as they came out. He squeezed feces out of the animal’s body, and made sure not to cut through the bladder (the idea being that you don’t get pee in the meat).
    I write about this nonchalantly, but at the time, it was fairly horrifying. I’d dissected animal parts in Aaron Joseph’s human physiology class, and I’ve watched a lot of really violent movies, but when you watch a live animal being killed and gutted right in front of you, the whole process from life to death in a matter of minutes, it’s frightening. I didn’t want to hold the legs and I didn’t want the pig to be reduced to skin and meat and blood and bits. But, if nothing else, I was curious, and I did want to watch it happen.
    My father, working the other pig, seemed to be doing a lot of work with his hands rather than his knife, and by tugging on the insides of the animal, its guts fell out in chunks. He’ll be the first to admit he’s not a hunter, but he bought an expensive hunting knife quite some time ago, and I think that might have been his first chance to use it for its intended purpose. Even though his cuts weren’t all quite on mark, it still dug through the skin and meat with ease.
    Still a little dazed from the smell of blood in the air, I helped load the two hollow corpses onto the Willis and we made our way back to the house. The headlights were no longer functioning, so we found our direction through the use of a couple of flashlights. I wished there was a shower out in the brush; just the flecks of blood on my pants were enough to make me feel obscenely dirty (and maybe a little guilty to boot).
    When we got back, I scrubbed my fingers and palms with an excessive amount of soap, rinsed, then wiped them dry on my pants. Remembering that I had blood on my pants, I swore quietly and washed my hands again.
    The first pig was already hung up on the skinning tree when I came back outside. The night was pretty warm compared to Baltimore’s average November temperature, so I opened an ice cold can of delicious Coca-Cola and sat back in a chair to watch the butchering. The skinning process is very simple: a cut is made along each of the ankles, then the skin is peeled down with the knife, cutting away the fat underneath it. It was a very manly night, with the men drinking their beer and talking about sex, cutting up pigs and handling their guns.
    Just as I was enjoying not cutting up a pig, my grandfather volunteered Orpheus and me to do the next one. My first instinct was to get out of it by citing that I’d never skinned anything and I was too tired or something, but I agreed, hiding my reluctance. I was more interested in the full hunting process than I was repulsed by the idea of touching cold bloody pig bodies.
    After the first corpse was finally reduced to just bones and meat, it was taken off the lift and the other one was ready to be hanged. I took a knife and slit through a tendon in the lower back legs of the next one; a metal rod was inserted through both holes and the whole animal was lifted, still juicing out of the big hole in its torso, lifted off the ground and tied so that my work was level with my hands. My grandfather helped with the first cuts, then left Orpheus and me to bring the skin from the leg and butt all the way to the head. It sounds fairly simple, and it looked pretty easy, but I have to say, I did a pretty lousy job. It looked like it had been skinned with a cheese grater.
    I guess I can chalk it up to the aforementioned inexperience, though. I kept making the blade go deeper than the fat and tearing into the meat; the skin was peeling down with hunks of flesh stuck to it. Orpheus had similar problems, but I think I probably lost about a half pound of meat on the skin. I had begun the skinning wearing latex gloves, but I couldn’t exactly feel what I was doing; the skin, as it peeled down, acted like a hood for the un-skinned part of the animal. I lost the gloves, to better feel where to pull and what to grab. We had to grab the skin and tug it down, cutting holes in the middle of the hide to use as handholds; that way, we didn’t have to keep pulling the fleshy, chopped edge of the skin with the little bits of bloody, dirty meat hanging off.
    The full process of the skinning was long, cold, and eventually, boring. There were certain places I didn’t want to touch, like the bloody face and or the brain-oozing head. Before the job was finished, we had to hacksaw off the head and feet, which was especially revolting. The noise of the hacksaw running back and forth inside the neck was simply grotesque, and the feeling of the whole piece coming off left me feeling like I’d just committed a horrible crime. It passed quickly, though, as I looked into the gut bucket (every skinning needs a bucket underneath to catch all the nasties), the head sat there looking up, on top of the remains of two hogs.
    The next day was very quiet. Not much to do in the day time; I missed another way-too-early morning hunt (again, no shots fired), we had breakfast, and then settled into the downtime. I spent a few very quiet hours writing and watching my brother draw. Finally, breaking the calm of almost normality, someone mentioned the guts needed to be thrown in the boneyard. I immediately conjured up an image of fields filled with sun-bleached skeletons and rotten, heat-mummified corpses; Orpheus must have had the same idea, because we both volunteered immediately.
    The boneyard was only some old ratty bones, a lot of lower jaws for some reason, and some old dried skin. We left a pile of ready-to-rot stripped pig to help decorate the area. By that time, dusk was getting ready to snatch away the light, so we got back to the ranch (the bone yard was about a half mile down the road, to avoid attracting whatever scavengers would actually want to eat old intestines) and split off into little groups, two to a blind.
    The previous night of walking around, hoping something would jump in front of my gun, had been a pretty exciting night; I was fully prepared with an instrument to kill should anything happen to accidentally bump into me (or vice versa). The blind, however, was just a little room, cheaply built on stilts. There were two metal folding chairs and the windows had little curtains you could push away and stick your gun through. And unlike the other night, the blind held a lot of tension and still, meditative anticipation. It was silent and cold; no birds singing, no movement in the woods. There was enough of a breeze to give the trees a little volume, but otherwise, nothing but stagnancy and desolation in-between the trees, brush and cacti that filled the land.
    Now, in Texas, it’s legal to hunt bated game (that is, you can put out food and wait for the animals to come and grab a bite to eat, then shoot them in the face). It’s a little unfair. Okay, well, really unfair. I’m pretty sure it’s ethical, though. Regardless, I was stationed about seventy five feet away from a feeder, a machine that was supposed to go off and shoot corn when the sun begins to set. It sounds really professional and high tech, but they were just big buckets with a cheap motor and a solar-sensitive-something on top. Ours never went off, though.
    Still, the animals knew it was a happening place to be. After forty minutes of waiting, a doe wandered into my sight. Oh, and while I’m on the subject of unsporting (or at least, still close to it), let me mention that the sights on rifles, good ones, make the shots really, really easy. At seventy five feet, I was clearly seeing that doe’s head. The only trouble is keeping the gun steady, and accounting for any wind resistance.
    Anyway, I didn’t shoot the doe. It was little, and I was waiting for a massive leviathan of a stag, some forest monstrosity with the bones of hunters-past caught in its antlers, or maybe a Seuss-like beast with fifty horns, speaking in rhyme and sitting on an egg (in which case, I could kill it, eat it, boil the egg, then eat that too).  Instead, I just sat, waiting, watching the doe and thinking about how easy it would be to kill it. Staying in the right mindset is essential in any task.
    As the doe pecked around at the grass, I saw another two deer coming into the area, and a buck hanging back in the trees. He still didn’t look very big, and I checked everyone out closely through the rifle. I kept muttering things to Dad as quietly as I could, but deer have amazing hearing. Even over the breeze, they kept poking their heads up and looking around if I got louder than a light whisper.
    After the does kept nibbling around for some time, the buck finally stepped out into the open, and I realized it was getting late. Dad told me it was now or never if I was going to shoot; he got tense, and started mumbling about the trouble of tracking a deer when you mess up the shot.
    I was already lined up on the buck, but suddenly I was actually pressured by time. No longer lingering on fantasy deer, I put my finger against the trigger and tried to get the gun to stop shaking. I recalled the shooting range at Meyerstation; out of five bullets, only one of them actually hit the paper target (and it didn’t make it anywhere near the bulls-eye). I took a breath, held it in to steady myself, then stopped the sight right on the deer’s heart.
    I pulled the trigger; nothing happened. I paused, exhaled, and snapped the safety the other way. I tensed up again, took my breath and steadied; again, I pulled the trigger, nothing happened.
    “Dad, nothing is happening,” I whispered, insisting urgency as quietly as possible; I kept the scope focused steady right on the heart.
    “Safety,” he whispered back.
    “I don’t…” I decided to just try it again, and flipped the safety back to the first position. Once again steadied, poised to shoot and mentally prepared to exterminate that buck, I squeezed the trigger for the third time.
    Still, though, nothing. I pulled the gun into the blind quietly and communicated to Dad that it was definitely not the safety; after a quick study of the weapon, he unloaded the bullet and put another one in the magazine. I cocked it and slipped it back out the window.
    After three failures, the final boom of the rifle came as a tremendous, deafening shock. I wasn’t expecting the gun to fire and I wasn’t expecting to hit the deer. I watched through the scope as the buck buckled and fell on its side; the does scattered.
    “That’s it,” said my Dad, hugely enthusiastic that we wouldn’t be spending our night tracking blood from a belly wound. We walked over to the animal for the examination; he was a lot bigger than he looked in the scope. I examined the body with a mixed sense of pride and compassion; it felt like a huge accomplishment to actually complete the task so quickly and easily. Morally, I don’t have a problem with hunting; still, though, even without the pathetic flopping and sprayed brains, there was an enormous sense of indecency; I didn’t really want to take pictures with it, but, hunters always have to take the same photos. Just like sixteen-year-old girls always take pictures of themselves standing in a group smiling (with at least one person making kissy lips at the camera), hunters always have to hold up whatever they killed, smile and try to fit a weapon in the shot.
    After the pictures, I was all ready for the Willis to show up and take my deer away to the place where someone would gut it and skin it and butcher it and do all the things necessary to turn a buck into venison. Instead, my father handed me a knife and told me it was time to cut the throat.
    It’s not that difficult to pull a trigger and have a bullet puncture the heart for you, but the throat was personal. As I held the blade up to the neck, wondering if I should saw or stab or hack my way in, a vein throbbed from under the deer’s coat, and I shuddered, thinking it might still be alive. I would later be assured that it definitely wasn’t.
    Regardless, I forced the blade into the middle of the neck and worked my way around; nothing much came out, except some thick globules of blood and something disgusting. The wound, also, hadn’t produced any blood; we’d actually had difficulty figuring out where the hole was. Confused, I opened the neck up even more, but still, the animal didn’t seem to have hardly any blood at all.
    And, from there, I went to the belly, where I cut up to the chest and had to pull everything out. It was difficult actually bringing myself to touch the insides, but the warmth was bizarrely comforting in the now-frigid night time temperatures. It was a hack job, chopping around in the belly, but most everything came out. Eventually, I discovered that the ribcage was weak in the middle, and I cut through, exposing the juicy chamber. I discovered that my shot had obliterated the heart and ricocheted into the spine, blowing out the buck’s flow of blood to the brain. When I opened the cavity, the blood that had collected inside gushed out onto the ground, and I had to cut out really slippery lungs and what was left of the heart.
    Russ eventually showed up (a while before the Willis did), and he gave me some pointers on the rest of the job; I had intentionally avoided the whole genital region and had begun my cuts upwards of the penis, but he pointed out that I was missing all the gross stuff in the area unless I made the cut all the way to the anus. Cutting out another animal’s penis was definitely the most scaring part of the whole experience. I was shell shocked after tossing the sliced up organ into the pile of deer insides; the animal I’d killed was no longer of any sex and no longer part of life; it was just two piles of dead: bones and meat, guts and blood.
    When the Jeep finally came, there were more pictures; I did my best to look as entertained and enthusiastic as possible, but the blood on my hands was just liquid guilt. I kept trying to wipe it off onto my pants, and remembering that I didn’t have any other clothes left. I remembered one of the ethical parts of hunting was to never walk into town covered in blood (animal or otherwise). I wondered what they’d say at the airport.
    We came back to the camp and ate dinner before stringing up the buck; I had to cut holes in its legs for the re-bar lift to stick in. Once it was firmly strung up, Orpheus and I both skinned it; the hide came off much easier than the pigs’. Pigs are tough; deer are soft and feel good to touch. As we gripped the skin and tugged it down, instead of feeling dirty bristly hide, it was a smooth, inviting fur we were yanking on. I hack-sawed through the neck again, and the body was clean of all the excess; just meat fat and bones, waiting to be butchered.
    I was informed by our youngest hunter that I was supposed to keep the skull; he also explained to me the point system used to compare bucks. Every branch of the antler, every literal point, counts as one point. My buck was worth six points. Apparently, that’s moderately impressive, but if I were ever to be gunned down, if someone ever decided to slay my face off for sport or leisure, I hope that I would be worth more to them than six points. Some people would say that human life is priceless, and a lot of people would agree that it’s equally pointless, but until we apply similar standards to animals, I think serial killers and soldiers should have a universal point-system for the people they kill.
    Not really, though; I don’t eat people, so I don’t think people should be killing other people. It’s very much a waste of life. Because I do eat meat, I would be a hypocrite to suggest hunting lower animals is unethical. Even though I feel guilty doing it, shooting a deer in the heart and cutting it to bits is still more humane than eating a chicken nugget (and I eat chicken nuggets all the time, without feeling a single pang of empathy for the unlucky cluckster that gave his life for my snack). I don’t blame the people who are revolted by the idea of hunting, but then, I have no patience for anyone who tries to argue the immorality of hunting. Granted, the ethics are sketchy, but the food chain is a universal cycle. I’m on top, and I like it there.