Hawkinson: Once more to the woods, eh?
Reporter: Don't try to be funny. It doesn't suit you.
Hawkinson: Not everyone would agree with you on that point.
Reporter: Enough would.
Hawkinson: You used to be nice. Must be the beers--
Reporter: Tape's running in 3-2-1 . . .
Hawkinson: Well, let me finish by telling you a hunting story . . .
. . . When the alpha males weren't telling the rest of us neighborhood kids what to do, sometimes I found myself following along on "hunting" trips in our little woods. Though there were often four or five of us on these trips along the sheep paths, there was only one BB gun, so whenever anyone saw a critter--a bird, any kind of bird, a squirrel, a chipmunk--he'd try to pull the gun out of the arms of whoever had it at the time, whether the safety was on hardly mattering, leading generally to a skirmish and some hotly traded epithets, some so uniquely worded that they often led to long strings of every nasty word imaginable placed alongside other long strings of every nasty word imaginable, to the point that the words made no sense other than to express a certain level of disdain over losing rights over the BB gun and its limited supply of BBs.
Reporter: Please shorten your sentences, for god's sakes!
Hawkinson: Right. And if they ever thought a clean shot was possible, they'd race toward their intended victim like little air bubbles flowing along a vein of a freshly slaughtered sheep.
Reporter: And let's skip the fancy literary-type language. This is not the place for it . . .
Hawkinson: Right. Well, as they'd race toward a critter, I'd half-race to keep a safe distance behind the rest, partly because I was not a strong runner and partly because I'd expect them to trip over each other and land in a patch of brambles. It happened more often than you'd think. That usually led to a whole lot of swearing and finger pointing and accusations about incompetence in the shoe-tying department (some of us always ran around with shoes untied with laces like string licorice).
One day, one of the hunters spotted a chipmunk high up in an oak tree, chattering at us from a safe distance. The hunter took a shot at it, the BB ricocheting off the trunk of the tree, and his brother yelling at him for wasting bullets. He called everything bullets. So we kept moving
These kids would later be the makings of slaughterhouse workers, stunning the livestock with a reliable captive bolt pistol, raising inverted yet still alive carcasses with chains, slashing their throats with muscular authority, and draining the blood into drainage pools--while the hearts were still alive and acting as exsanguination pumps.
Reporter: Uh, uh, what did I say about getting all literary up in my face?
Hawkinson: Finally, and by pure luck--bad luck for the critter--someone knocked the chipmunk out of the tree with the BB gun. Hysterically, everyone screamed and raced and out-shouldered each other to where it had fallen to the ground. It was already dead, but that didn't stop them from passing around the BB gun and each plugging it again and again until it was virtually shredded--its little mouth fixed open in stunned surprise, its eyes still open but making no eye contact with any of its attackers, its fur soaked in its own blood. Then one of the older boys grabbed the chipmunk by its bloodied belly and, ripping apart the skin, dumped its entrails on the ground. Just for good measure, he flicked the intestines up into the face of the smallest "hunter," who immediately began to wail. Then it was over. I was struck by how quickly the hunting party lost interest in the bloodied, eviscerated body of the lifeless little chipmunk. After kicking it off the path under a patch of ferns, they set their sights on the next would-be victim. I turned and went home for lunch.
Along the way I felt something tugging at me; I felt bad that I hadn't participated in the hunt, that I hadn't gotten more worked up about chasing the chipmunk, that I didn't even bother to muster up a "Whoop!" during the chase. (The others seemed to sense my lack of enthusiasm; no one shared the BB gun with me share during the community plugging.) I felt like a misfit. The reason: I was falling behind in my progress as a rotten little kid. That eventually would mean the other rotten little kids would start to notice, which would mean they'd start to single me out for taunts, possibly abuse (depending upon whether my older brother was around). They might even shun me from playing a pick-up game of basketball or baseball. And that would mean I'd find myself spending too much time alone--possibly helping my mother or reading books or playing with my G.I. Joe in the bathtub or staring out the window and wondering what everyone else was doing. Already, a classic anxiety presented itself: FOMO. Clearly, something had to be done. The course of my life stood in the balance.
My best hope was to prove myself a worthy hunter.
Reporter: My best hope to get this interview published is to wrap it up ASAP!
Hawkinson: Coming to that . . . So I begged for weeks. (I was a pretty good beggar--what I lacked in strategy I made up for in relentlessness and whining. I would have driven myself crazy if I were my own parent.) Finally, my dad, worn to a frazzle, took me up to the Coast to Coast store and picked out a BB gun. He gave me the usual warnings about safety, or at least I think he did; I wasn't paying attention to a single word he was saying. I was already daydreaming about myself as the greatest rotten little kid hunter on this side of town, possibly even in the entire town. Now, I thought, I was on my way to redemption with the other neighborhood kids.
After practicing loading my "bullets" and taking aim at old pop cans, I was ready to strike out on my own to the neighborhood woods. I had already decided that I'd go solo during my first hunting trip. If something went wrong or I wasn't the eagle eye I thought I had become with ten minutes' practice, I didn't want any witnesses. I'd never hear the end of it. My childhood friends, the rotten little kids in the neighborhood, could be real bastards.
I headed down the central sheep path looking for chipmunks or squirrels. Nothing was around. All was quiet. I kept going until I reached the end of the trail, which led out to the town dump and low lying swamp land across the road--still nothing.
I pivoted the barrel of my new BB gun, listening to the BB's rolling back and forth. Plenty of ammo.
I turned to retrace my steps and trudged homeward, defeated, without the thrill of a kill. I was perhaps ten yards from stepping out into a vacant lot when I heard it, a songbird, an American Robin to be more precise, about ten feet off the ground in a nearby tree just off the path. It alone was filling the woods with its cheery song. I froze. Lifting the barrel of the BB gun ever so slowly, I aimed at the bird. Its back faced me. It continued to sing. I put the gun down. I thought of the neighborhood kids. I re-aimed and fired, and in a second I knew that I had hit it. Its song stopped. It toppled to the ground and flailed about in the underbrush. It seemed to writhe in agony. I shot again and again and again, until it lay still. Immediately, I kicked leaf debris over it until it was completely buried. I dropped to my knees; nausea had overcome me; my head was swimming. I got up again and ran from the woods.
At home, I threw the BB gun into the corner of my closet--next to the old box of seeds that would be the false start of my new business. I never shot it again. Never touched it again. In the years that followed, I'd think about the first time I'd heard of the Red Ryder BB gun from the movie Christmas Story. Everyone warned Ralphie that the worst thing about having a BB gun was that he'd shoot his eye out. It wasn't the worst thing.
The worst thing about having a BB gun was shooting a songbird up the backside in the middle of its song.
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