But in my working-class tastes and wiseass demeanor, I had fallen afoul of the chairman of the English Department, who cameto have it in for me. I felt a little like Billy Budd under the regimental eye of Master-at-Arms Claggart. No matter how well I thought I performed—on quizzes, papers, exams, class discussions—I couldn’t seem to garner his support, much less his approval. I admit I was mired in the first of several reckless phases during which I felt perversely untouched by nearly everyone and everything except my own shaky ego. With my jaunty attitude, suspect intellectual skills, and permanent C average, I was an easy target for Professor X’s withering criticism. And because he taught most of the required departmental courses I’d be taking that year, my prospects for success shrank by the day.
On Friday, November 22, on my 20th birthday, I was privately bemoaning my pitiful lot in life when the unthinkable happened. President John F. Kennedy, whose family had a long connection with my college, was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas. From the moment the news pole-axed us (I was sitting in a History class), everyone I knew was in shock; everyone I knew was looking for answers, tough enough to find because such senseless evil can hardly be explained at all and fits none of our rational categories of behavior. I was caught up in the turmoil but wasn’t certain how to navigate it.
Even the long view afforded by history seemed inadequate. Some of my professors remembered the spring day in 1955 when then-Senator Kennedy gave Assumption College’s commencement address. He wasn’t just an icon (as he was to my generation) but a living presence to many of the college’s elders, as well, who felt his loss more deeply than I could have imagined. Language faltered. Words of understanding and consolation seemed useless. Even the proper questions were difficult to frame, and suddenly, catastrophically, it seemed that everything we held dear about the future’s promise had disappeared. We hadn’t had a chance to decide what we could do for our country.
Three days later, Monday, November 25, a bunch of us skipped our classes. Unable to watch another second of the televised funeral procession, tired of our inertia and teeth gnashing, and partly hungover from too much bootlegged booze in our nights of collective bereavement, we were playing football on the athletic field behind the college: blowing off steam, sweating out poison, hurling our bodies in a frenzied pitch at the ball, at each other, so we might purge our frustration, our powerlessness. If there was a magical quick fix for our anger, we had not yet found it.
Just before quitting, as the sun began to lower behind the western tree line, I heard a cock pheasant cackle in the swamp on the nether side of our playing field. There is no avian call quite like it, and once you’ve heard it you never forget it. A “harsh, hacking uurkiik,” the bird books say. Nothing else sounds like a crowing male pheasant—not a drumming grouse, not a fidgety wood duck, not a braying sandhill crane, not a love-lorn yellow-billed cuckoo. I snapped to; something inside me saluted. I’d never heard one there before, and every atavistic filament in my body took notice. I’d like to say I had no choice but to follow its clarion call, but of course that’s not true. I did have a choice, as all of us do on most occasions, but whatever reservation I might have had disappeared in the repeated cackling of first one then a second rooster. Their siren calls, haunting and yet familiar, issued from a world of possibility I thought had otherwise been eclipsed.
But I lacked two things: Suzie, who was back home with my parents and whom I missed more sharply than anything at that moment; and a Massachusetts hunting license. As fate would have it, the weekend before I had gone home to Connecticut and brought back my hunting gear. After spending Thanksgiving Day with a girlfriend and her family, I was planning to drive to southern Vermont and join my uncle for a few days of hunting snowshoe rabbits with his beagles. Gear-wise, anyway, I was equipped.
The college was situated on nearly 200 unbroken acres in residential northwest Worcester, and its back regions were not only a longish way from central campus’s buildings and populations, but there were also few near houses on the woodsy end. Undoubtedly, there were rules against discharging a firearm inside city limits, but I didn’t know what they were, and in my indulgent reckless phase wouldn’t have paid them any heed even if I did. Anyway, I was already a confirmed lawbreaker.
All I know is that I took a solid feeling from it there, close to my skin. The weight of it, the slightly dusty odor of it, the heft of it was comforting, and made me feel tethered to the earth.
Back then, possessing a gun on campus didn’t raise red flags. A year earlier I’d brought my lever-action .22 to school and kept it under my bed with my hockey sticks. Inspired by an old magazine account about legendary taxidermist Carl Akeley, who collected specimens for New York’s American Museum of Natural History, my roommate and I snuck out to the back-campus woods on weekends and took turns popping gray squirrels in the tall hardwoods. We processed the skinned carcasses in a boiling beaker on a hot plate in our dorm room, then glued the dried skeletons together and presented them to our mammalian anatomy instructor as study aids. Our small-game collecting expeditions didn’t earn me an A in the course, but our professor, who never asked where or how we got the squirrels, seemed pleased with the offerings, and we felt sufficiently rewarded, having justified our hunting in the service of science.
I couldn’t justify what followed in the same way. As everyone else left the playing field and peeled off toward the dining hall, I bolted to my car, swapped sneakers for boots, slipped my hunting pants over my athletic garb, got into a hunting shirt, assembled my 16-gauge side-by-side, put half a dozen #4 shotshells in my pockets, and as the sky edged toward dusk I took off on a determined trot back to the swale. I dropped down off the raised field and started a rapid zigzag stalk through mixed lowland cover.
I didn’t go far before a rooster startled me, and I swung on it crossing right to left. It looked as big as a peacock. I blew the first shot but sped my swing and followed through. On the second shot the bird dropped and hit the ground, crippled, and began to run. I caught up to it near a downed maple trunk, dropped my gun, jumped it, and unceremoniously wrung its neck. A spasmodic shudder ran up my arm as the last breath left its body. The die was cast: I tucked the gorgeous corpse inside my canvas shirt. Its long tail tickled my throat. In the fast-cooling evening, its warmth was somehow reassuring. Don’t ask me how; it was what it was. Period. All I know is that I took a solid feeling from it there, close to my skin. The weight of it, the slightly dusty odor of it, the heft of it was comforting, and made me feel tethered to the earth.
I made a loop deeper into the swale looking for the other rooster. The next flush made me a multiple lawbreaker. Even in the thinning light I knew it was a hen; even in lengthening shadows I knew it couldn’t be mistaken for a ruffed grouse, a common enough alibi used by people dragged before a wildlife magistrate. I was lucky again. This one didn’t run and flush out of range as I half expected it to do. I fired anyway—the report seemed 10 times louder this time—and got her going straightaway with a single shot. On the ground, from a distance, the dead hen looked like a pile of straw. Around her beak were beads of blood, like a little string of rubies. I stuffed her, too, inside my shirt, now bulging so that at a distance I might have appeared pregnant. With every step I took it grew darker and colder, so I gave up on the other rooster. The tree line was barely visible when I turned back toward central campus. Overhead, in the upper darkness, a Boston-bound airplane’s lights blinked in the night sky.
In one of his novels, John Steinbeck says that when you shoot a pheasant you shoot something better than yourself. According to the dictates of Right Reason and the Golden Mean, about which our philosophy and religion professors lectured us incessantly, I should have felt ashamed of my predatory action. I don’t mean ashamed of hunting, but ashamed of not observing the proper time and place for it. To seek an answer to my own turmoil in killing when Death was the topic of the day on the world’s stage would have struck most of my preceptors and peers as being not just selfish and trivial but callous and brutal as well. Yet despite the fact that I had broken with normalcy and decency by resorting to poaching, I wasn’t feeling at all craven or larcenous, though I admit to a small portion of giddiness about my unexpected success.
