Enjoy The Silence

Last updated: Thu, 08 Jun 2006 12:01:00 GMT

Despite the rough ground, he puts his feet down silently, without looking. One in front of the other, cutting a track into the dew. It's early morning and the wet fatigues on his shins feel like home. He knows this country so well that, decades from now, he will be able to close his eyes and walk the same trail, just as he could probably walk it now, blindfolded. He will weep, then, for missing it, but he will never return.

His eyes are flicking from cover to cover, he evaluates each avenue as line of sight is opened by his progress. His eyes don't stay still long enough to look, but looking is not necessary. He is relaxed.

Movement.

Before his brain has even registered quarry, the rifle is at his shoulder. He is a natural shot, both in the general sense that he is at home with a long gun, and in the specific sense that his hand matches his eye; his strong eye and hand are both right, he doesn't need to close the left eye to take aim.

The familiar waxy feel of the tiny Marlin's stock is tight, just so, against his cheek. Movement again, and a rabbit clears the crease in the ground it had been hiding in. It's square in his sight. It begins to turn and he depresses the trigger.

There is a pop, barely audible, so quiet in fact that the click of the hammer can be heard above it. The familiar thwop of a round hitting home, his rabbit flops backwards and begins to kick. Not a clean shot. A shame.

He runs as the rabbit's cry starts up, slings the gun over his shoulder, moves to a crouch immediately next to the spot. A gut shot. He should have taken his time. There's no pleasure in this. The fun is gone.

He does not panic. The rabbit struggles. He pins it with his left hand, reaches his right in around the throat -- index and middle fingers under the jaw, thumb, third and little finger behind the neck. He lifts the rabbit to between his knees, muttering soothingly under his breath. He positions his left hand across the shoulders, with his right he squeezes and twists. It is a movement he will never be able to describe sufficiently, just as it was insufficiently described to him.

Another small pop, this time too quiet to be heard, only felt. The rabbit is still. While this has been happening, he has not been thinking, only doing. An unpleasant task that needs to be done, and he is happy to cede control to the part of his mind that can do these things.

It has gone badly before. He has panicked before. Killing with his hands, even getting blood on his hands, was not something he enjoyed. He remembers, as a boy, being taught to break a neck. That went badly. He broke the animal's jaw, it screamed and screamed. He dropped it to the ground and shot it again.

But, since then, he has learned. And while he tries to keep one shot per kill and one kill per shot, he knows that he can dispatch anything he's big enough to hold down, with a hand or a knife.

He lays the rabbit on its back, pulls the soft fur below the ribcage taut between his left thumb and forefinger and slips a knife in, just half an inch. He draws the knife quickly to the crotch and rolls the rabbit over to the left. There's no need to pull the alimentary organs out, they fall out in one lump. They don't fall out this way if he rolls it to the other side. He doesn't know why. He knows that this trick can be repeated with something as big as a deer, which will save a lot of messy effort later that day.

The kidneys, heart and lungs would need pulling, but he'll leave them in there for later. The dogs can have them. They'll not eat lungs, but they're fond of hearts and kidneys.

He bends the rabbit's left foot forward, bringing the joint to a right angle and pulling the tendon taught. He slips the knife in between the tendon and the bone and pulls a two inch incision. He slips the right leg up the inside of his belt and slides the incision in the left leg over the protruding right foot, until the legs lock at the ankle.

The rabbit swings from his belt, blood bubble at its nostrils.

Three hours later, there are another two. A pair of partridges grace his poacher's pocket. A roe deer hangs from a tree.

It has been a good morning.

He enjoys the exercise, and the adrenalin. If he is honest, he enjoys the killing. He enjoys the eating afterwards, and the feeling that he can provide. He likes to feel that he can, and sometimes does, exist without other people.

The blood he doesn't mind. He prefers it when it's warm.

The shit and the guts he has learned to tolerate.

Or, rather, he has learned to delegate.

When the job needs doing, he becomes a different person. Perhaps less of a person. It is not like the single-minded focus that he will use in later life to achieve short term goals -- shutting out thought so that he can concentrate all the harder. It is more like a complete absence of thought.

It is peace in motion.

When he reads, in later life, of drugs like rohypnol, he will wonder if they are the same thing. He will not be tempted to find out. Before then, he will have squandered much of his youth trying to numb himself in other ways.

He will grow out of that, and he will become old and fat.

It never used to worry him, this numbness, this part of him. But lately he's been feeling it again. In the dead of night, with a puking, squalling child on his arm, covered in shit, he has had to call on an old skill to get the job done. At first he thought that this was rather handy. But now he's not so sure.

She is screaming. The adrenalin rises. Through the detachment, he watches his hands move in that old familiar way, getting the job done. She is irate. He does not panic. He crouches, leans forward, cradling her warm, smooth neck in his right hand. He lies her down on her back, cooing and soothing. She is struggling. He is drawing comparisons. He pins her with his left hand -

The rush of an old memory is like a slap in face.

It would be easy. He knows that part of him could do it. He had forgotten he could be like this.

He is tired and out of sorts. In the morning, she'll smile her toothless smile, he'll return that blue-eyed stare. He'll forget all about this single, painful, second.

He finishes the job in hand.