doe and buck
Black Friday is all over facebook and radio news. I'm sure tv is drowning everybody in it. Marketing. Sales all over America. Cheap. I saw a video of two guys fighting in a mall. They were hard at it. I had a feeling it was something like they had vowed to kick each other's ass on sight, or at least one had a bead on the other. I'm recalling one guy I know was in Walmart with his wife when he spotted the guy who had knocked up his sister, though he aimed to kick his ass over something else this time. He took off walking fast up behind the other guy, wife heaving a sigh, knowing better than to try to stop him. He walked up close behind the guy, cussing him. The guy kept on walking. Friend said, "If he'd a turned around, I'd a drilled him right there in the store." This wasn't even Black Friday.
I'm recalling another guy I know who was set on kicking a certain guy's ass first time he saw him, no matter where it was. A day came he had to get up in a suit and go to his little girl's kindergarten graduation. He spotted among the parents in folding chairs this guy whose ass he'd vowed to kick on sight. He had to sit there in his suit, in as uncomfortable a place as he could ever be, sit like in a straight-jacket unable to move, smoldering, watching himself in his mind's eye doing like he said he would when he got ahold of him. He'd hold him down with left hand on his throat and warp the hell out of his head with his fist. I was hearing it kind of wide-eyed, thinking about the physical damage it would do to the guy he was hitting, something like compassion. And I realized it was what my friend intended. He would mean to put the guy in the hospital for a long time, leave him just short of dead.
He's a tough guy, too. He has a brother bigger than him. I imagine he grew up learning to beat his bigger brother in a fight. They're both tough. I heard from a source who was there, of a time his brother walked up to a guy that had raised a shotgun and threatened him with it. He pressed his chest to the barrels and said, eyeball to eyeball, "You better pull the trigger before I take that thing away from you and beat you to death with it." The guy put the gun down. These are my buds I spend time with watching them practice before a bow tournament, watching a race, hanging out on Fourthajuly watching the kids play, daddies batting a softball for the kids to catch, mamas keeping the babies out of the range of a flying ball. They fish as much as they can and hunt with intent to fill a freezer with meat for the year, new antlers for the collection, and the head of a monster buck with a pretty rack, a twelve-pointer, to have mounted for the living room, robin-hooded arrows resting among the antlers like medals.
Yesterday, talking with friend who intimidated the guy in Walmart, he had his rifle and was on the way to his blind to see what he could find. He showed me the rifle, the kind you see in movies assassins use with wooden stock and a big powerful scope, single shot. The whole thing was such a precision instrument I dared not touch it. He showed me one of the bullets he uses. Just the bullet, itself, inert, harmless as a marshmallow outside the rifle, looked deadly. I didn't even want to touch it. I was interested to look at it, not handle it. I asked him how far it shoots with accuracy. He said he'd killed a coyote at 350 yards with one. I enjoy hearing his accounts of his kills. He takes hunting seriously. He takes only bucks over three years old. He won't take a shot unless he can be certain the buck will drop straight down and feel nothing, fall asleep standing. He doesn't like them to suffer and he doesn't like following a blood trail through the woods with a flashlight, nor does he like dragging one uphill to the nearest place he can get to with his truck. Hunting is a skill unto art form I appreciate in others, but cannot presume for myself the right to snatch the life away from an other.
buck
I'm recalling another guy I know who was set on kicking a certain guy's ass first time he saw him, no matter where it was. A day came he had to get up in a suit and go to his little girl's kindergarten graduation. He spotted among the parents in folding chairs this guy whose ass he'd vowed to kick on sight. He had to sit there in his suit, in as uncomfortable a place as he could ever be, sit like in a straight-jacket unable to move, smoldering, watching himself in his mind's eye doing like he said he would when he got ahold of him. He'd hold him down with left hand on his throat and warp the hell out of his head with his fist. I was hearing it kind of wide-eyed, thinking about the physical damage it would do to the guy he was hitting, something like compassion. And I realized it was what my friend intended. He would mean to put the guy in the hospital for a long time, leave him just short of dead.
spike
black bear
does
photos from trail camera the other side of the road
*
No comments:
Post a Comment