By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 14, 1999; Page F01
George Orwell and I have this in common: the .44 Winchester. There we part company. He used his to shoot an elephant. I used mine to shoot a boar: He didn't want to shoot, but had to. I wanted to but didn't have to. He did it out of duty (he was an English Imperial Policeman, in Moumein, Lower Burma), I did it out of quite possibly blasphemous curiosity. He shot his elephant to save face; I shot my pig because I am beyond face.
He produced one of the great essays in the English language: "Shooting an Elephant," in which the bullet-riddled beast, leaking blood from dozens of wounds, died in slow, pathetic squalor in a village square, a symbol of the doomed British empire. It was then hacked to pieces by hungry peasants. Orwell felt melancholy, ambiguity, guilt.
I produced -- well, what follows, good or bad. My ambition is as large as his, but it runs in the opposite direction. I will use the animal's death as a symbol of a vanishing empire all right, but not the British one, or even the American one.
I went on this adventure with my eyes open and in full awareness of what I wanted to do. It helped that the animal was particularly ugly, and that it was old and that its life was far better and far longer than any like-size animal raised in a pen and sent to the slaughterhouse, I suppose. But that's mere rationalization. Here's why I did it: I really wanted to enter the House of Death, having written about it fancifully in novels for nearly 25 years and seen it on movie screens for nearly as long. I wanted to know what it felt like and most important, I wanted to make a great shot.
The hunt took place on a Pennsylvania game preserve. I'm not sure if it was an honest hunt, or that the animal ever had a chance of escaping. It seemed to lack that truly wild beast's hair-trigger reflexes and sense of being stalked. (I have hunted elk, too, and by contrast those clever boys weren't about to give it up for the fat guy who sits in movie theaters all day; they stayed far away, in the black timber, laughing.) But possibly the wild male swine called Sus scrofa is naturally lethargic. I can only say that the shooting part was clean, a sportsman's shot.
What got me to that moment was a progress of pure gracelessness under no pressure at all. The hike was nearly an ordeal for a rather large man long separated from his days of high school sports glory. It had snowed, a good five inches. The preserve was on a wooded mountaintop, and the sun blazed fiercely down. In a mind formed by too much reading and not enoug reality, I began with fancy thoughts of Faulkner's Boon Hogganbeck tracking the Bear, and El Sordo's fight on the snowy hilltop in Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls." That reverie may have lasted for at least three or possibly as long as six whole seconds.
It mostly vanished the first time I fell. Only vapors remained by the second time. I fell four more times, and Hemingway was not on my mind nor Faulkner nor Orwell, not even a little. Instead I thought of three other men: Curly, Moe and Larry. Under the snow lurked black ice, and each time I put a foot down, that foot went up. Then I went down. Think of a large burlap sack full of potatoes hitting the cement floor of a warehouse. Stevie fall-down-go-boom! That's what I thought of as I fell the sixth time. Some hunter! Some hero! Fat Hemingway wannabe, stumbling in the snow, the little Winchester (loaded, but not cocked) flung aside.
Carl, my guide, a large young man in a hat the color of a nuclear airburst (blaze orange, to keep the hunters from hunting him), tried hard to keep from laughing. Heroically, he stifled the painful guffaws that welled up from deep inside. Well-fought, old man! I thought. But if you've ever been laughed at by a man in a big orange hat, then you know what you've done is pretty hilarious. Anyway: Carl wasn't falling at all. Carl was used to this. Carl kept pulling me to my feet and urging me onward, choking his giggles all the way.
During those moments when I was, however temporarily, ambulatory, we seemed to cover a couple of miles: We climbed a hill, we went down a hill. We went across the river and into the trees. We climbed another hill. The woods were lovely, light and deep. And quiet. They were whitely pure, too, except for the remains of a gut pile, where the morning's hunter had blasted his boar. You could see the blood spattering the snow as if someone had detonated a cherry bomb in a plasma bag.
There wasn't an animal in sight, not even a bird. Snow, trees, bright sun, that's all. Carl said he might just set me down on a log, go off on his own, and try and drive the pigs toward me. I said: "Let me get this straight. If it's big and orange, don't shoot it?"
He laughed at my little joke, and said, "Yeah, you'd find out that by the pound I'm pretty expensive."
But eventually, Carl found the boars. They were nestled in a little draw halfway down a hill. They stood out against the snow, several Black Russians -- pigs, not drinks -- one blond European and a crew of oinky little piglets. Today I resolved: The blond won't have more fun.
The animals meandered through the pines, snarfing at vegetation, making pig noises, shuddering, eliminating, generally acting like fraternity boys in the late '50s. Carl instructed me not to shoot until one separated himself from the herd, in case my bullet went through; that way I wouldn't injure another animal. We counter-circled, trying to get a good angle, trying not to make much noise. At last, helpfully, the blond pig wandered away from the crowd. I thought: he's so obedient, possibly he's animatronic, and this whole place is some part of the Disney plot to take over the world?
My pig just stood there, snorting and farting, contemplating whatever it is that pigs contemplate, which is probably pigs of the opposite sex. He was a fellow dreamer, I suppose, not particularly crafty. He actually reminded me of myself on a Sunday afternoon, absent merely the underwear, the beer can, the couch and the TV tuned to the football game. He also probably smelled a little better.
Carl said, "Best place to shoot 'em is right behind the ear."
Yeah, right. I couldn't even make out the head. At my age I can see clearly for about three inches. Anything beyond is a general mystery. So I didn't really want to go for that head shot, not without a telescopic sight. I opted, instead, for the shoulder.
At this point, Orwell -- then Sublieutenant Eric Blair -- seemed on the verge of a nervous breakdown, or a severe attack of delirium tremens. I am entirely too oafish for such high-strung fibrillations. Was I excited? Honestly, not much. No irregular heartbeat, no deer fever, no doubts, no hesitations. At this point, it was not about the pig and me but about the gun and me, for it was the gun that I was focusing on.
It was a Winchester '94, Trapper model (16-inch barrel), with iron sights, in .44 Magnum. Light, handy, a classic design 105 years old, as descended from an even more classic design embodied in the Volcanic Pistol of 1857, designed by two New Englanders named Smith and Wesson. In fact, the rifle's pedigree is much better than mine; it would get invited to the better parties in this town, whereas I never will. Smith, Wesson, Oliver F. Winchester, John M. Browning (who refined the S&W design), Eliphalet Remington (the ammunition), all high-bred Yankees (except the maverick Browning, a genius who made his own way in the world). No high-tech plastic here: Your granddaddy could have hunted with the rifle, or his granddaddy.
As I am about to shoot, here is probably the place for a great argument to be made about the dignity, the great ceremonial ritual, the sense of connectedness to nature, that is the true spirit of hunting. I will not make it. I didn't come to commune with nature or to experience epiphany: I came to shoot.
I cocked the rifle. There's some mechanical trickiness here. You don't want to be walking on ice in snow with a volatile rifle in your hands. I threw the lever, which by the cleverness of Smith, Wesson and Browning lifted and locked a cartridge into the chamber and pressed back the hammer. I love the ingenuity of guns. Then I gently eased the hammer down and pushed the safety on.
I squirmed forward, duckwalking through the snow, until at last I was about 60 yards from the thing, which had not detected my presence. I kind of wedged myself against a tree for support, astounded that I remembered next to cock the hammer and take off the safety. I raised the rifle to my shoulder and tried to squeeze into it, absorb it, steady it. It's a light rifle, and I'd worked on my marksmanship for this moment. I concentrated on the front sight, trying to resolve it hard and clear against the blurry center of the animal far off and a little below. I felt my finger on the trigger, noted how hard and unyielding it felt, and evidently somewhere around this time began to press it.
I never decided to fire. If you do, you miss. Instead, I merely recall thinking that I'd found the sight picture and it would be an excellent time to do what I had come to do and in the next nanosecond I had in fact done what I had come to do. Orwell comments that he didn't hear the rifle; I certainly did, for rifles are very, very loud. It was so loud it interfered with the ringing in my ears from other rifles. I also felt the recoil, which was considerable, and quickly levered another cartridge into the chamber.
"He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down."
That's Orwell.
My pig, by contrast, stirred and fell in one split second. The considerable impact of the bullet, passing through his shoulder, his lungs, and his far shoulder, coming to rest just under his skin, flipped him on his back. His brain and heart died in a split second, but his legs didn't get the message for several more; they twitched and fluttered.
"Should I shoot again?"
"He's dead. Those are just reflexes."
We approached. They will charge if annoyed. He was far beyond annoyed, however. I put the safety on, eased the hammer down and leaned the rifle against a tree.
He lay in a bed of reddened slush, eyes open, warmth leaking out of him. I concentrated very hard on my feelings: What were they? In the rapture of my narcissism, even his death was about me. Evidently I was supposed to feel exultation, for at one moment my hand was pumped by the gleeful Carl and nice things were said about the shot I had made.
But here's what I felt: utter nothingness. The void. Knock-knock, nobody home. A slight exhaustion, perhaps, from all the concentration. Sore, from the falls. Cold, wet, from the snow. Those aren't feelings, though, but only sensations -- the feelings were gone.
Carl knelt and deftly dressed the animal. That's what they call it; undressing is a more accurate term, and unpeeling more accurate still. With a flick of a sharp knife he opened it, and God's plenty spilled out, in that odd, insubstantial state somewhere between the liquid and the solid, steamy and glisteny. What I felt, I realized, was something akin to what a lover feels in intimate biological contact with his loved one or what a parent feels changing his baby's diapers -- the suppression of disgust. It was useful, certainly, for a species that depended upon hunting for sustenance for a million or so years. I could look on the viscera without repulsion because of some ancient hard wiring left over from the age before language; if you hunt to live, you cannot be upset by interior landscapes of tonight's dinner.
Gutting accomplished, the animal was quickly rendered into meat. It lost its animalness after a few deft slices of the blade, and once a bone saw was applied became a spectacle recognizable in every butcher shop: chops and ribs and tenderloin, long, marbled loaves of pure, blood-rich protein. The head and skull were set aside; I thought -- too much education again -- of Jason and the Golden Fleece, for the beast had a snaggle of teeth, curly yellowed sabers, that could have been a ram's horns, and the blond hide was floppy. That Golden Fleece would earn me the hand of a princess. But my girlfriend is a princess, and I am the father of a princess. What the hell did I need another princess for? I had gone hunting to get away from the freakin' princesses!
You're supposed to dress your own kill. Sorry, not interested. You're supposed to eat what you kill. Sorry, not interested (for the record, I donated the meat to a homeless shelter in Williamsport, but before you nominate me for humanitarian of the year, be advised I did it out of only the most selfish of motivations, to spare myself labor, money and guilt). You're not supposed to think of Hemingway, Orwell, Faulkner or Jason when you do this sort of work, but that's really all I thought of. I also thought of Golding.
Kill the beast. That's the primordial chant at the end of "Lord of the Flies," that work of profound misanthropy, and at last I had obeyed it. But Golding's beast is metaphorical; the chant is really the evocation of the endless human capacity to destroy life and exult in it, again a handy thing to have if civilization hasn't yet been developed and you're worried that the Oglocks from the Valley of the Vapors may come over into your forest. I felt that, too, a little of it: the killer's pride, the sense of accomplishment. Indeed, that's what I'd sought and I understand the consequences: I fully anticipate the anger, even the anguish, of many people in receipt of this news.
But only in the past 25 years could such an act seem shocking, and I seem to date from before then. Until then, at least here in what is known as Western culture, man's dominion over beasts was largely unquestioned, as was his right to eliminate them for whatever reason. Now, of course, all that has changed, and at the root of the change is our image, our idea, of nature. That, really, was the metaphorical substructure of my trip to Pennsylvania.
For generations beyond memory, nature was the enemy. Nature was to be destroyed, her animals killed, her woods plowed, roads cut through her heart, her minerals looted, factories erected to besmirch her purity. She was the other. It was us against her, and the war was without quarter. When she won, she won big, racking up a score that would make even a genocidalist, like Hitler, envious. In a sense, she was evil, or at least Melville's Ahab believed it: And he wanted to slay it, have revenge upon it.
That view of nature was useful: For if nature is savage, then men are necessary. To fight against a force so immense, we need warriors of sinew and strength and courage: We need men. As long as nature is the enemy, man is king.
Of course it's all different now. Now, nature is an abused woman, to be nurtured and soothed, petted and cooed. Whole bureaucracies exist to protect nature from -- well, from people like me. Man, or more particularly men, are the enemy. Hunting will certainly die shortly, and the game preserves, with their wanton cruelty for sale to the highest bidder, far earlier. What I did was to have a last experience as the frontier closes down. It's not really woman that's triumphant, but a larger, lovelier, softer, more benevolent view of the universe. It's the triumph of the mommy. The universe is now a family, and we can talk things out. Therapy is the answer to everything.
Of course in such an environment, the man, with his rifle, the blood on his boots, his willed insensitivity, his disconnect from the pain he's caused, is a hideous anachronism. The bald act of killing is no holy sacrament but a pathological weakness. No hunter can be a hero. Meat doesn't come from animals any more, but from stores. So, the empire whose passing I mourn (where Orwell welcomed the fall of his) is the empire of masculinity, of man the protector.
What I can't get over feeling, however, is that the very New Nature conceit wasn't purchased by the people who adhere to it. It is only conceivable in a time of peace and prosperity and insulation, where meat comes on little styrofoam trays and veggies are neatly bundled with red plastic strips. You can eat like a Neanderthal and not get your fingers greasy, to say nothing of bloody.
You say this is ethical progress? I may not disagree with you, but I also say it was bought and paid for by the men you now exile -- the tough guys, the insensitive ones, the ones who stopped the Oglocks from the Valley of the Vapors. They brought home the bacon, the old fashioned way, and we are all the richer for it.
The Internet address for a full-text version of George Orwell's
"Shooting an Elephant" is: http://www4.torget.se/users /n/n94frel/sae.html
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