 |
PatchWork
by
Joyce Whitis |
Last Updated 09/06/05
Email: joy@our-town.com
Animal
Tales
When we went to see him that last time,
laid out against ivory satin in a steel-blue coffin, he looked just like always, skin the
color of old saddle leather and a body as lean as latigo.
From the beginning of our long friendship, his conversations had been spotted with
stories about coon hunts and dove shoots and that buck that he brought down the first day
of legal season. He stressed that part about
being “legal” but I understood that he remembered a time when there were no
seasons. When everyday was “open”
season. He lived close to nature, was an
outdoors man who hunted freely. Since he was
a boy hardly ready for his first reader, he’d known how to shoot and skin a rabbit,
bring a squirrel down from a saplin’ or set a trap for a raccoon. He had killed lots of deer, in season and out, by
spotlight and from a blind.
As an individual who shoots wildlife
with a Nikon and not a Remington, I didn’t share his love of hunting. The fact that he had corn-fed deer for months
before killing them was strategy in his eyes
but treachery in mine. Out of respect for his
advanced years and because of his basic goodness, I listened to his stories without
telling him how I felt about killing animals.
One night we were jerked awake by pickup lights reflecting off the bedroom wall,
horn honking and shouts of “Hello in the house!” He was a little afraid of the
Danes so when he saw the lights come on inside the house, he started talking from inside
the truck. “Hey, come on out here and see what
I found in the middle of the road.” We
dressed and went outside, leaning over the back of his pickup to see what he had indeed
“found”. “Ain’t that the
biggest jackrabbit you ever did see?” His
face was all smiles over the antler-less deer whose once red blood was now a dark stain
over the truck bed. “Since I found it on
your road, I thought you’d like to have a leg. Be
good eatin’…tender!”We told him thanks, but to just keep the carcass for
himself, we’d have to pass it up this time.
Back in bed, I closed my eyes and saw the doe that had been running across our
coastal field a few days ago. The Danes had
spotted her too and chased after her but she laughed at them as she cleared the four-foot
fence and was lost in the woods on the other side. On
this night, blinded by the glare of a spotlight, she had no defense against the blast of a
30-30. As the years collected, he brought trophies to show us with stories of those kills. Once I took a picture of him with a six-foot
rattler he’d shot and after that he brought other dead animals for me to picture. One morning he came up the lane, horn honking. I walked out to see what he had this time.
A morning breeze fresh and cool brushed my face as I
walked to the back of the pickup. That same fresh breeze touched the orange fur
along the big cat’s back and it seemed to move as if waking from a nap. But I knew that it would never wake up and touched
with a long time love of cats, I started to cry. Only
a few minutes ago she was running on strong legs through heavy brush, over sifted oak
leaves and through soft shadows. Did she have
a family out there, this bobcat? Was she on
her way home when the bullet brought her down? Were
there hungry kittens somewhere……waiting? I reached out and touched the softness
of the cat’s back and then I was running with her, running through patches of
moonlight and into shadows of ancient oaks, woods that had been there since the beginning
of time. The bobcat and I were together, side
by side. I could feel her breath. There was a
blazing light; a frightening noise and the cat fell to run no more. Sam’s words broke
the spell. “It’s just an old
bobcat,” he said. “I’ve shot
a bunch of ‘em. They used to be
plentiful around here but now you hardly ever see one.
This is the first I’ve seen in
years.” I couldn’t talk at all. There was
nothing to say anyway. I knew that I could
never explain to him how I felt about the animals that he killed and he felt no need to
try to justify his world to me. We remained
friends until he died and sometimes we remember Sam and his old pickup and the night he
brought us a big “jackrabbit”.