Plus Thoughts on Hunting

Hunting was challenging today.

I went out at 4:15, carrying the shotgun. I have received the scope for my air rifle, but I found that the gun is so heavy, the crosshairs jump around a lot at 25 yards. I can’t be sure of getting a clean shot. I am researching ways to fix this. Slings, better ways of holding the gun, and so on. In the meantime, I am using the shotgun. It’s the best combination of humanity and lethality.

Unfortunately, the humanity angle did not play out very well.

I walked around the property. I saw two squirrels on a tree a hundred yards from the house, but by the time I got to them, they were up the tree and out of sight. I could not shoot at them before they went up, because the tree was between me and a neighboring property. Too bad.

I walked down past the way-too-close neighbor’s house I’ve written about before, and of course, two squirrels were jumping around within easy reach. In the direction of the house. Nothing to do but keep walking.

I saw a couple more squirrels and chased them. I chased the first one from tree to tree. He would not stop moving, so I tried shooting when he slowed down. No luck. He eventually went into hiding, so I kept going. The next squirrel I saw was far away when I spotted him, and he had plenty of time to hide while I walked to his area.

On the way back to the house, I saw what may have been the first two squirrels, in the area where I saw squirrels on the way out. I walked to their tree, and of course, they went up and hid. I decided to try some of the tricks I had read about.

I threw a branch to the other side of the tree to scare them around to my side. It worked, but they went back to the other side before I could shoot. I scratched the side of the tree with a branch to make them think a predator was climbing after them, but they didn’t buy it.

Some guy on the web said it was smarter to sit under a tree and wait for squirrels to come out than to give up on them and hope to see new ones. I decided to do it his way. I sat under a tree 20 feet from the one with the squirrels, and I waited.

Eventually, they started climbing down, and I shot one. Hooray. It came down by the base, and I tried to shoot the other one, but it would not present itself. I saw the first one flop around a little, and I thought it was kicking its last. Then I realized it was just wounded. It was trying to climb to safety, but it couldn’t do it. I had to walk after it and shoot it in the head.

I should have finished the squirrel off sooner. I don’t feel good about what happened to it. Lesson learned. Unfortunately, the squirrel, not I, had to suffer in order for the knowledge to pass.

I am taking pains to be humane, but I suppose events like this are inevitable. I don’t like it, but you can’t hunt and expect everything to work perfectly. This is something hunters have to deal with. If you’re going to hunt, you have to accept the possibility that you will occasionally cause suffering.

When I cleaned the squirrel, I noticed it only had three feet. I thought I had shot its foot off, which was even more disturbing than leaving it wounded. I was wrong, though. The stump had healed. This squirrel had been shot before, or something had bitten its foot off. This was one hard luck squirrel. It climbed perfectly well, though.

I think a lot about the ethics of hunting, and I am developing some beliefs. I have realized hunting is important, and that a man should know how to hunt. It’s easy to rely on the grocery store and preach when life is good, but there are such things as hard times and catastrophes. You should be able to provide protein when the stores have been looted and burned. Also, hunting teaches you valuable skills which are useful in self-defense situations. A man should have some ability to defend himself and others. He should be able to defend his land. There may come times when it will be necessary to stop criminals yards away from our houses instead of waiting for them to enter.

During the LA riots, people had to stand on the roofs of their businesses holding guns. Here’s something disturbing a black friend told me: on Martin Luther King’s birthday, his dad guarded his house with a gun. People roam around on MLK Day in gangs, doing whatever they want, and the cops sit by and watch because they’re outnumbered. The newspapers ignore it, so white people don’t hear about it. Sometimes defending your property with firearms is necessary.

They say Southerners had one big advantage in the Civil War: they were hunters. Shooting Union soldiers was not that different from shooting deer and rabbits, so they moved smoothly and quickly into their roles as killers of men. They knew how to hide, stalk, shoot, and care for weapons. Yankees had to be told which end of the gun the bullets came out of. If things get weird in the future, people like me will be a step ahead of vegans and fruitarians from California and Boston.

People who live around me have great weapons. They even have camo, blinds, infrared cameras, and a lot of other stuff that can be used against human beings as easily as turkeys. They have gotten over their squeamishness about shooting living things. This is not an area where gangs of disgruntled Hillary voters can get out of cars, walk into houses, and rape, kill, and steal.

Some of the tasks associated with hunting are unpleasant and gruesome. Pulling the warm, smelly organs out of an innocent squirrel is a very nasty experience. But aren’t such things part of life as a human being? If I’m willing to pay Perdue and KFC to slice chickens open, tear out the guts, and give me the meat, shouldn’t I be honest enough to do these things for myself?

I don’t like killing other creatures, per se, and I don’t want to make them suffer, but this is what I am. I have to man up and accept my role in the world. I am a predator, from a race of predators. I live in a cursed world, and predation is part of it. I am not exempt, any more than God is. God kills and punishes all the time, and I believe he put us in a position where we sometimes have to kill or punish, so we would understand what he goes through. A person who is nice all the time can’t be a good Christian. If you never ruffle any feathers or cause any suffering, you’re shirking. Even Jesus beat people with a whip.

I have no patience with mushy, touchy-feely Christians who reject their obligation to be hard, and who criticize gun owners, the military, hunters, parents who spank, meat eaters, and so on. Their posture is not love. It’s self-righteousness. When you refuse to offend or harm, even when doing so is required, you make yourself out to be better than God, who burned people he loved with hot pitch and drowned the entire human race.

Repeatedly, the Bible says God is a god of love AND JUSTICE. It mentions mercy and justice together, to make a point. God has killed more people than Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, combined, and he will kill more in the future. He’s not going to let us sit back sucking our thumbs, saying we’re glad we’re not like him. Sometimes we have to do hard things to other creatures. We are not better than God.

God is love, according to the Bible. At the same time, the flames of hell are his anger at work. He created hell, and he puts people in it all day, every day.

Absalom was cursed, and he died in disgrace. He undermined his father, David, who had a hard job ruling Israel. He stood in the gate where business was transacted, and he sucked up to the people. He was nicer than David. He took up their causes to spare them dealing with David. Then he declared himself king, and then he had to be hunted like a pig and killed with darts.

He wasn’t better than David. He was morally inferior. He was conceited and manipulative.

When I think of the self-aggrandizing, praise-sucking, warm, fuzzy Christians out there criticizing the rest of us, I think of Absalom. They’re like divorced dads who curry favor with their kids by spoiling them with presents. You know the type. They steal their children’s hearts and make Mom out to be a witch, and then they dump the kids on Sunday and leave Mom to deal with rules and spankings.

Hunting has its ugly side, but on the whole, it’s very pleasant. You get to go outdoors. You turn off your phone. You forget the insane, doomed mess the world has become. When I hunt, I think about two things: hunting, and God. No business. No worries. Every time a squirrel falls, I feel great satisfaction. I’m doing something my grandfather tried to teach me to do, forty years ago, with his shotgun. I love succeeding at it.

There are certain things every American man wishes he could do. Welding, machining, and hunting and/or shooting well are probably the top three or four items. A big percentage of us never learn how to do these things. I already weld and machine, I am shooting rifles well for the first time in my life, and it looks like I’m a reasonably good squirrel hunter. Coyotes, turkeys, and deer are on the way. Nice.

It’s funny, but since I’ve been hunting, I’ve had strange experiences. You know the funny little patterns you see on the insides of your eyelids when you close your eyes at night? For most of my life, I’ve generally seen golden geometrical shapes, like mazes. Now I see trees against the sky. It’s like I’m looking for squirrels.

I really see trees. I don’t mean I see shapes that remind me of trees. I see actual trees, through a glowing golden fog. And if I fall asleep while I’m looking at the trees, they turn into full-blown dream trees against a blue sky.

That has to be supernatural.

God wants me to hunt. I don’t know why, but he does.

I don’t know if I can get the air rifle to work for squirrels, but I’m going to improve my standing rifle shooting. I will continue working on killing squirrels humanely, with precision. I’m going to look into turkey hunting and see what I can do here on the farm. After that, I’ll try to get pigs and coyotes until the fall game seasons start up.

I’ll have to get camo. Unlike squirrels, turkeys see in full color. Squirrels couldn’t give a crap.

No squirrel photo this time. This one was too gross to post. when I fry it, I may post a shot. Thanks, everyone who has given me hunting or shooting tips.