The Art of Rabbit Hunting

When I was younger, I used to go rabbit hunting with my dad. It was one of my favorite of all the hunting genres because it didn't require you to be quiet, and you got to walk around and do what you want for the most part. We would also bring along all of our hunting beagles (Andy, Alison, Gunner, Jimmy, Ed, and Coleen... the WIVK on-air staff) and they'd run around and bark and sniff things and when dad wasn't looking I would pet them or try to feed them leaves... you know... because it's funny to watch dogs eat leaves, especially when you're bored. But it wasn't until I got older that I realized how much I learned from going on these trips with my dad. Though I never got the itch for going out and shooting things, my love for stretching metaphors and meaningful life experiences ended up making the hunting trips way more applicable than I thought they would be.

The lessons would always come up in the most unpredictable of ways, and it was senior year of college that I realized exactly what it meant to be a good rabbit hunter. When it come to running around with a gun in the woods, I was always a little overly cautious--I always had a fear of shooting my dad in the face, or more likely, shooting one of the dogs. Once I actually shot a rabbit, I told my dad I was done; I kind of considered it more of a feat that I shot a rabbit and nothing else, and that's kind of the way that I went about the rest of my life. Get in, get out, call it a day.

And that's the exact approach that I took to my last Cinco de Mayo. My senior year was winding down quickly and after thesis and comprehensive exams were over, there wasn't really anything to do but show up to class and then celebrate with people in our spare time. The drink of choice at Maryville College is arguably a toss-up between boxed wine or margaritas at a local Mexican restaurant and considering that it was Cinco de Mayo (and a Saturday, mind you), margaritas were the obvious choice. I had decided that because it was too predictable for seniors to get drunk and make bad decisions, I would tread lightly in Margaritaville, but it didn't take too many margaritas for all of us to start reminiscing about the three years that had gone by. Then, someone inevitably said that we were all probably never going to be in the same place again at the same time, and that's when we all ordered more margaritas and ended up posing "Last Supper" style.

But after the initial margaritas, I had decided that tonight was the night: the night to go rabbit hunting. I was fresh out of a relationship and had been eyeing someone in particular for some time. I knew the follow up party that I needed to go to, and I knew that this would probably be my last chance to even solidify a decent conversation, let alone anything further than that, so I set off for the chase. Once the party had started, I wasn't sure how I would accomplish my goal, and like most of the hunts that I went on with my dad, I was pretty much ready to give up and go home after thirty unsuccessful minutes. Even as a senior, chasing after a freshman rabbit, I didn't have much confidence, and I didn't believe in my hunting skills. After all, this wasn't just a rabbit. This was a pretty rabbit who was transferring to a college in New York; everyone wanted to shoot this rabbit, metaphorically of course. (Disclaimer: I neither condone, nor encourage, anyone to shoot another person. Maybe I should lay off the metaphor for a bit.)

So as the night continued and the bottle of tequila grew less and less full, I committed to my cause. The funny part about guys is that we're stupid when we're interested in someone. We do things and say things that we would never have otherwise, so of course, I made sure that we were interested in all the same things. And I guess, in a way, the same logic applies to hunting. There's a specific way that you walk when you're in the woods, even if you're rabbit hunting. You tread lightly, and you try not to make yourself too obvious because you don't want the rabbits to run before you get within eyesight of them. And there's two types of hunting: the kind where you sit and wait, and the kind where you're constantly moving, and of course, last Cinco de Mayo, I was constantly moving.

After the conversation had run out, I was running around the party trying to entertain in any way possible to keep my rabbit's attention, but nothing seemed to be sealing the deal. When the rabbit suggested that we should jump into a pool with all of our clothes on, I went for it. And when the pool was only three feet deep and I scraped my knees on the concrete pool bottom, I just kept going because it seemed like that's what you're supposed to do. But then, toward the end of the night, I had noticed that the rabbit had disappeared, and there were only two explanations as to what could have happened: the rabbit had left the party or someone else had shot the rabbit.

Disappointed, I went from room to room looking/sulking for the rabbit when I knocked on one of my friend's doors. He barely opened the door and put his face in the crack and asked what I wanted. Don't get me wrong, everyone deserves to get with whomever they want, but there's an ethical code to every hunt, and my dad's words suddenly shot back into my head: Justin, you should never shoot a sitting rabbit: no matter what. There could be something wrong with it, like wobbles. (Just in case you don't know, "huntchat.com" explains that wobbles are actually warbles, and warbles are parasites that cause white lumps in squirrels and rabbits. If they have warbles, you can apparently die. Congrats, you learned something today.) So when he barely had the door open, I had this gut feeling, almost like a mother's intuition, to push the door open farther.

When I pushed the door, I saw a pair of feet laying on his bed; they didn't look like normal feet though--it was more like, Hey, I don't know the floor from the ceiling, I think I'm just going to pass out now feet. And when he gave me the "get out of here, I have a job to do eyes," I channeled my dad the best I knew how and said, You know, my dad told me you should never shoot a sitting rabbit. There could be something wrong with it. I decided not to include the part about the wobbles because it didn't seem applicable. My friend just kind of stared at me confused, and as he did, I forced myself a little farther into the room to see the girl passed out on the bed, and I repeated myself, It's not ethical for a hunter to shoot a sitting rabbit. It's unfair because something might be wrong with it. I looked back over at the girl, You just can't shoot a sitting rabbit. And just like that, it was like saying "rabbit" three times awoke her from the dead, and she awoke from her slumber and excused herself from the room. I could tell that my friend was about to kill me, so I decided to excuse myself as well, but in the midst of my own hunt, it meant more for me to stop and make sure that we weren't going around shooting rabbits with wobbles... sure, we were in college and we all know what's on everyone's minds, but there's always a moment when you have to pull back and ask yourself, At what cost am I doing this?

So, I had given up on my own plans for the night, and I was getting my stuff ready to leave when I looked up and saw the rabbit again... my rabbit, that is. I had spent the evening doing shots and taking pictures so that the rabbit could put them on Instagram and talking about things I didn't care about just so that I could impress someone who ultimately, was just another person. I had set myself up to believe that this was the moment, and after all of that, I didn't even get to have a truly meaningful conversation, so as I saw the rabbit go into a room alone, I walked in, and announced I've been following you around all night doing shots and talking about stupid shit, when all I wanted to do was kiss you. I had caught the rabbit off guard. Look at my knees. This is stupid. I'm going to have scabs on my knees. Why? Because I'm not the person that's just going to come up and kiss somebody. I jump in pools after people--shallow pools. And then the rabbit asked, So, why didn't you kiss me? All of a sudden, I began to feel like the rabbit instead, gun pointed at me and everything. 

My dad always used to ask me why I never shot at more rabbits, and in the end, it was because I was scared... scared of shooting him or the dogs or just missing all the way around. I thought that maybe if I didn't shoot at all then it wouldn't be a failure. If you don't shoot at anything, you can't miss. But in the same respect, you can't take anything home. So in one of the bravest moments of my life, I closed the door, and I went in for the kiss. I. Shot. The. Rabbit. And it was the best fifteen second ending to a hunt in the history of all the hunts I've made.

So, in the end, the rabbit ended up deleting me off of Facebook, I went to DC, and the rabbit went to New York. I don't think my dad's intended lesson was to draw metaphorical comparisons between shooting a 4x10 and trying to kiss people, but that's just kind of how life works out I guess. I doubt I'll ever see that rabbit again, and I'm kind of cool with that because that night of hunting can teach a person a lot. There's always a code to go by. You can't just go around chasing anyone you want, especially if they're unconscious, but on the other hand, for hunters like me... you have to be willing to take the shot. You may not hit the target every time, and even if you do, the target may delete you off of Facebook, but you can't be afraid of pulling the trigger. After all, you don't know exactly how many hunts you're going to have in your life.

Wendell Shot My Friends

I am surprised that PETA didn't storm my house as a child, and if some of the photos from my childhood ever leak into the public eye (which considering my eventual run for presidency, they might), then I'm sure they will appear sooner than you can say that's not faux fur. Last night, Andrew and I were sitting on the couch watching Call of the Wildman, which is about a man who goes and grabs a lot of wild animals with his bare hands. He usually gets compensated for his services in small amounts of money, pieces of food, or the occasional first born. Anyway, as we were watching him eliminate a covey (just go with it) of raccoons from a family's house, I started telling Andrew the story of living in a single wide trailer with my family as a young boy.
Essentially, we would have the occasional mouse or perhaps on the right day, a small litter of opossums scurry through the living room or the kitchen. My dad kept a blowgun around the house and eventually mastered the art of shooting the little buggars with darts which would pin them to the floor. From there, they were available for removal. Andrew kind of looked at me with a fascinated, yet terrified, stare. Apparently his dad had never pinned any small rodents to the floor by use of a dart and a stiff gust of wind. I forget that other people didn't grow up the same way I did, and the concept to me is foreign. Of course, the dynamic changed when we moved from the single wide to the double wide. That didn't eliminate the presence of dead animals in our house... we just brought them in dead, as opposed to killing them on location.
Some of my favorite childhood portraits that are only seen by people legally bound to the Kirkland name are pictures of me hanging out with a flock of dead geese. The composition is almost ironic in that "postmodernist art that nobody gets but everyone wants to understand kind of way." There's me, kneeling next to these dead geese with a smile on my face petting their little head feathers with blood stains trailing from them. And I mean, I guess it was never a big deal for me, but even as I write this, I wonder how people will respond to phrases like petting their little head feathers with blood stains trailing from them. I get it. I see you. Something is wrong about the whole situation.
But there's also some merit in growing up around things that are kind of morbid. Instead of being afraid of everything under the sun like horror movies or snakes, I was just kind of emotionally vulnerable... but not when it came to animals. Nine year old Justin was an absolute wreck when Rose died on Titanic, but when Bambi's mom got shot, I was like Neat! Dinner! The thing is that while I may or may not have utilized the deer's body itself as a personal swing set, I knew that the deer died for a reason... and not just for a play place for my friends and me. The ultimate reason that my dad went around killing everything is because we needed to eat. Yes, holding a beating turtle heart in my hand was kind of awesome, but it's not like Wendell went all Hannibal Lectar and just killed things for the joy of killing. He's a lot of things, but he's no Dexter.

Wendell, why you killin all the animals?

But it did take me a long time to understand exactly why all these things were ending up dead on our porch. To be the academic that I've always claimed to be, I'm really not the brightest person when it came to common sense. There was something that didn't quite click with me from the time that these animals showed up at the house to the time they ended up on the table. But I will go through the step by step process of what was going through my child mind as this timeline of animal death happened around me.
First and foremost, there was the initial victim in question: the kill. Most of the time, it would just be laying there and because most of the kids in my neighborhood lived in houses that also concocted drugs and/or were dangerous to play with themselves, these animals were my friends. I think I consciously decided to ignore that they were dead entirely because if I did that, then I could just have pets for awhile. I can't count how many pictures of me there are carrying around dead rabbits and quail, and if I remember correctly, I had conversations with them... probably because no one else wanted to talk to me anymore.
Then, in true parental wisdom, I was ushered away so that I wouldn't see the animal skinned and cut up. Actually, I don't think I saw the actual animal be taken apart until I was at least ten, which is obviously a suitable age for an introduction to animal dismemberment. Anyways, the next time that I would see the animal was all cut up in the bath tub. Yes, looking back on the whole mess, it was kind of weird to imagine that I took baths in the same place that we would leave our fresh meat to soak, but whatever. I would spend hours leaned up against the side of the bathtub just poking at the meat. I'm not sure if I didn't understand what raw meat looked like or if I thought it was going to come back to life, but there was something about it that was fascinating.
And then, for the finish I guess what it boils down to is that... I ate my friends. I suppose I should maybe go back and apologize to all of my fallen comrades, but at the end of the day, I wasn't so emotionally attached that I couldn't enjoy a Southern-fried version of venison filet mignon or stuffed wild turkey breast. And even with the mice, it's not like I had a Michael Jackson thing going on. I wasn't so much interested in naming the little guy "Ben," but more concerned about where exactly I was going to stumble upon a mouse bound to the ground by a small metal dart with a bright green cap. Call it what you want, but my childhood was kind of awesome. While everyone else was going over to friends' houses for dinner, I was having my friends over... then eating them.

Wendell.

I tried my hardest to think of a title that would be suitable for a father's day edition, but I really couldn't find anything that seemed to encapsulate everything I wanted to say as much as "Wendell." Wendell is a tall man, with a heavy winter coat, and a winning personality. He has a man's man exterior, with a ladies' man's heart; once upon a time, I saw him skin a deer with a Marlboro Red in his mouth, and he enjoys nothing more than a ribeye steak. He prefers Remington over Browning, was once in the newspaper for pitching a no hitter, and is the only male member of our family in his generation to never have a mugshot. The only thing that I've ever seen break him is the death of my grandmother, shellfish, and Rachel McAdam's performance in The Notebook. He's kind of a legend.
Upon meeting him, you would probably guess that Wendell and I aren't the most compatible in the world. In response, I would say that you are wrong. I'm not really sure how to explain it, but in the most generic of ways, there's really no better hero in the world for a young boy than his father. Regardless, of all the embarrassing things that have happened to me throughout the course of my life, he's apart of at least seventy-five percent of them. When I tried to think about what story I would want to tell about him (that he wouldn't kick my ass for), I couldn't settle on one. I thought about doing a comprehensive evaluation of him, but that doesn't quite capture the particulars in a way that I would like. I've categorized him into three major personas: the huntsman, the warrior, and the Chik-Fil-A fanatic.

I didn't kill this deer, but Pop made me get dressed for the picture
so that I would feel better about myself.

Ever since I was just a wee little Justin, it's been pretty commonplace for there to be some kind of bloody animal laying around our house somewhere. It was my duty, as the second man in command, to eventually be the deer-winner. There would be a day in the future that I would be responsible for blasting an animal away and bringing it home. My training started early. Pop and I would take yearly ventures into the woods, most of them I would try to talk my way out of with a suspiciously convenient stomach ache, to bag my first deer. It was never anything to do with the killing of an animal; I liked eating them way too much to complain about that. It was more about that I had to get up at the crack of dawn and spend the morning in the freezing cold. Oftentimes, I would fall asleep, and sometimes I wondered if I would freeze to death out there. I would be the Leonardo DiCaprio and Pop would be Rose. My frozen pubescent body would be found somewhere around Douglas Lake, where he would put me once I became a camouflage popsicle.
But my favorite Wendell is not one that I found in the woods; it's always been badass Wendell that gets cut off on the highway and throws an open Diet Dr. Pepper into a car full of disrespectful college kids. Warrior Wendell kicks butt and takes names. This past Thanksgiving, Pop called me gay in front of our family and friends. I announced, "So what if I am?!" He then announced, "I wouldn't be surprised!" Some would say that it's our thing, in addition to quoting terrible movies, discussing music, and evaluating poetry. (I'm not kidding.) The thing is... it's always been okay for my dad to call me gay or weird or chunky. It's a whole other story if someone else does. That's why when a boy was bullying me online, Pop made me get in the car with him and show him where the boy lived. Me, being the social disaster I was in seventh grade, couldn't imagine a more devastating blow to my already floundering reputation. Warrior Wendell would not back off. About three Thor punches on the door later, the boy's father answered. Dad would go on to tell him what a "little prick" his son was and how he shouldn't even be allowed to have a computer. I would stand behind him having a party in my head, throwing all kinds of gang symbols and whatnot, while on the outside, I'm sure I looked like I was about to shit my britches. The ride home was almost completely silent, until Dad offered to take me to Sonic for a milkshake. "Don't you ever let anyone make you feel less than you are, Justin. You hear me? What kind of milkshake you want?"

Wendell at the beach.

The relationship between a father and a son is a bit of a double-edged sword. I never really recognized all the amazing things he's done for me until I was much older. We never appreciate those around us at the moment we should; all that we can do is try our damnedest to love them enough to compensate for the times we took advantage of them. The moment that Pop and I really started becoming as close as we are now was when I auditioned for American Idol. We decided to travel down to Charleston, South Carolina for the auditions... or rather, for Chik-Fil-A.
We got there late at night and we were starving, so we stopped by a Chik-Fil-A. Wendell had never had it, and he wasn't too fond on the idea of fast food chicken for dinner. It only took a couple of bites, and I saw a changed man. We stayed in a sketchy motel, filled with avid AI hopefuls practicing throughout the night. Pop and I agreed that I should "save my voice." We went back to Chik-Fil-A that night, then went to the beach. I didn't make it very far in the auditions, and naturally, I was kind of pissed about it. We took off from Charleston in silence. Even when Pop stopped at Chik-Fil-A on the way home and bought ten more chicken sandwiches for the road, we still didn't speak. It was until about an hour into our trip home that he looked around and said, "Justin, don't worry about it. That shit's a set up; you could see that from the stands... want a chicken sandwich?" I burst out laughing. "Dad, why did you get ten chicken sandwiches? You know there's a Chik-Fil-A at home, right?" He looked around puzzled, "No there's not." I looked back and smiled, "Yeah, there is." He looked forward as if he couldn't believe that this magical chicken kingdom existed in Knoxville. "Oh." He took a giant bite out of his sandwich and kept driving home.
Honestly, I really don't know how we ended up together. We're kind of like The Gilmore Girls, with a lot more profanity and dead animals. Actually, maybe we're more like Duck Dynasty. I can't be too sure. But if there's one man I could have on my side for The Hunger Games, it would be Wendell. I mean, the man throws hatchets for God's sake. Past all the Chik-Fil-A sandwiches and deer hunts, I've never had a bigger advocate in my corner. There's really no person in the world that I would rather be like, and without him, I would legitimately have no excuse for acting the way that I do. We never got out and played ball, but he did teach me how to skin a squirrel in five minutes (and for the record, that's slow). And when you have a dad that knows how to change the oil in a car AND knows all the words to every song in Burlesque, what more can a boy like me ask for?