Game Over

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

I got a call this morning from a fellow who hoped I could get his hunting license back. Most people who hunt like to take a gun along, rather than a bow or maybe their bare hands. He lost his gun rights more than a decade ago, after a domestic violence conviction.

He said he’d always wanted a chance to go big game hunting. To get a trophy he could hang on his wall. Colorado, where I live, had just posted its Big Game Hunting Planner, and if I could help him, maybe he’d be able to join in the fun, in the fall. Could I get him started?

I told him I couldn’t help him. Short of a governor’s pardon, I didn’t think he could get his gun rights back, because of the domestic violence.

I didn’t tell him I was sort of glad I couldn’t help him. Some years ago CBS television aired a documentary about America’s big game hunters, and their hunted. It was timed with the opening of hunting seasons across the country.

It brought hunters who kill, not for food, but for sport, into a perspective few of us have ever seen, even those of us who hunt. For those of us who have never been on hunt, we saw for perhaps the first time how wild things are slaughtered. We saw them shot, saw them twitch, heard them moan, saw them die. For us who have hunted, we saw ourselves in a new way: it’s not the same squeezing a trigger as watching yourself squeeze the trigger.

We saw some friendly black bears browsing a county dump, taking food from the hands of tourists. The CBS cameras showed us the same black bears, used to the human presence and unused to fear, on the first day of hunting season, one day later. We saw America’s sportsmen come within feet of the bears and gun them down, the bears standing still, still looking for a handout. They finish the bears off like they finish off a man shot by an inept firing squad, with a bullet behind the ear. An execution.

We saw a quite beautiful woman on her first hunt. She got herself a buffalo on a preserve. A game official drove her out to the herd and picked one out she liked and had her wait for a clear shot and she dropped it and waited until it stopped kicking in the dust. “It’s one of the Big Ten,” this quite beautiful woman said when asked why she wanted to shoot a buffalo. Bagging ten selected animals gets you into a famous sportsman’s club. It was all very wonderful and I hope to God I am never left alone in the company of a woman as beautiful as that one.

The game official was a marvelous fellow, too: he took the woman’s money and called it wildlife management.

We saw two more sportsmen go after some more exotic game imported and raised for the kill on a hunting preserve, two strong sportsmen who huffed through wide brush spaces and shot their animals in a little more than ten minutes. They were really fine sportsmen and would have bagged their game sooner but for the pot bellies they grew in the city and that slowed them some.

One of them took a while to kill his animal, some kind of beautiful elk, and he put five rounds into it and said it was stubborn and put another shot in its head, in the back beneath the skull so it wouldn’t spoil the trophy, and he tried to pose with the animal so his guide could take the picture he wanted, but his pot belly kept getting in the way and he couldn’t force the animal’s head into quite the right position because the animal was still alive and it all frightened the great hunter a bit. He didn’t get a very good picture.

I remember I used to hunt the Northern California woods with my uncle and we’d track the bears and the rabbits and the raccoons but we wouldn’t kill them. The joy then was in the tracking. Once my uncle convinced me I would never know what hunting was really about until I killed something. We tracked all day and the dogs treed a raccoon. I shot it through the eye. I picked it up by the tail and looked at its spoiled bandit face and the ‘coon’s life ran down my arm and dripped off my elbow. I looked at my uncle and he saw my face and my uncle who told me I wouldn’t know hunting until I’d killed something was crying. I never hunted again.

Not until CBS took me hunting those years ago and I saw what my uncle saw. Until that I didn’t know anything about it. You don’t know what big game hunting is like until you see a bear tame as a pet executed and slung up against a tree, the blood caking its coat, its tongue lolling from its dead mouth.