My dad got really into hunting when I was little. Some of my closest memories of him were me sitting on his lap after work while he watched hour after hour of hunting videos. Guns firing bullets made invisible with speed, the only evidence of their dispatch a grey puff of smoke and an aching recoil. Video after video moved by in a blur, my father watching on with reverence, illuminated only by the white glow of the screen. Thousands of nights concluded with various videos all blurred into the milky haze of memory. The puff of smoke, the percussion of gunshots, the hollow carcasses of animals. Camo green and hunter orange, the deep purple-red of blood clotting against fur and metal alike. Watching through the reflection in my fathers glasses.
Only one video really stuck with me.
A man stood in front of rows and rows of trees, in his hands he held a dead squirrel. The animal flopped loosely as the man gesticulated. His words are lost to time, but I remember the camera zooming into the incisions he made over each foot of the creature. Delicate cuts made to separate the flesh of the foot without fully disconnecting the hide before situating the animal's feet under the toe of his boot.
“And then you just pull,” the man said, and then he did.
In a matter of less than a second the squirrel had been separated into 2 new creatures, one consisting of the bone and tissue of the squirrel, pale and bloodless from the field dressing; the other a hollow, inside-out display of connective tissue with tufts of fur peaking out from the incisions. The 2 creatures connected only by the hands, almost reaching out to one another. Fat round black eyes like 2 oversized marbles stared up at itself, meeting the hollow holes of its newly born twin.
My father rewound the video, eyes staring with reverence, hands miming the man's technique.
“Just like taking off their pajamas,” the man said.
“Just like taking off their pajamas,” my father repeated.
My dad bought a lot of guns, a hunters license, and spent 4 years of falls, summers, and springs trudging through overgrown forests trying to kill something. I usually went with him on these trips, 6 year old me, toting along a rifle as tall as I was strapped to my back. I got a lot of poison ivy, twisted ankles, and bug bites, but not much else out of the experience. I look back on it in a kind of haze, each trip blurring into one another. Years where every Sunday was the same process of packing, hiking, waiting, before returning to unpack. Hours spent in silence, ears perked for any sound of life, waiting with bated breath to end it. It was the only time I got to spend with my dad, and it was spent quietly following his footsteps, sitting on fallen logs, and looking up into trees.
Since we always hunted at the same spot, I was allowed 30 minutes to play on the nearby playground after my father had given up on killing anything that day. It was cathartic for me, but I felt it was my fathers least favourite part. Getting to watch his son enjoy a break from sitting, staring and listening to run and play with half a dozen other kids. I always felt his disappointment as I shrugged off my gun and ran to play on the monkey bars.
My dad wasn’t picky on what he wanted to hunt. Each season money was dropped on new tags for deer, ducks, and small game. He even took time to read codes for killing various pests and carnivores just in case he happened to spot them during one of his trips. A man to him was someone who killed for their family and he could not consider himself a man until he had done so. But despite 4 years worth of hunting trips, he was unable to become a man nor raise his son to be a man either.
The hunting trips stopped when I was 10. I tripped over a branch on the path, tumbling over myself until the barrel of the gun placed on the back was aimed directly at my stomach. My dad had laughed at that moment. A sharp piercing laugh before pulling the barrel away from me. The safety’s on, he had said. It wasn’t.
I had nightmares for weeks of myself bleeding out in those woods while my father laughed over me, unsheathing his knife and reaching to gut me like he would have any other animal. My mom forbade me from ever going on another trip, and despite my dad’s ambition, he never went on one again.
When I was 11, my father resigned himself to watching video after video of other men hunting each night. It reminded me of an old football player, retired, watching from the sidelines, watching a game he loved but would never play again.
Months later, from the corner of my eye I spotted a rabbit in the back yard.
Oh, a rabbit, I remarked to no one in particular. My dad got his gun.
The rabbit didn’t move as the door opened, nor as my father trod over. It didn’t even try to run as my father stood directly over it, the gun barrel almost pressed against the rabbits skull. It was almost winter, the creature was skeletal. Eyes bulging from sockets barely covered with a thin layer of fatless skin. Eyes like black marbles that gazed up to see the tunnel of steel holding its death at the other end.
He made me clean it, said it was something I would need to learn for when he got other ones. Bigger ones he said, ones that he could barely carry home. He was gleeful that night. Carrying around the limp corpse, showing it to every neighbor that would answer their door.
I had sealed that rabbit's death and now my father was determined that I had to butcher it. I was crying as he garroted the rabbit up by its neck in our garage, situated a bucket underneath it and nestled a knife into my hands. I remember the knife I used, it was almost the same size as the rabbit. I had to hold the rabbit still while I tried to delicately pry open the rabbit's stomach. The incisions were sloppy. I was a child with vision blurred from tears and my body trembling with sobs. My father wasn’t pleased, citing that the pelt would be ruined if I kept being so careless. He wrenched the knife from my hands, cutting my palm in the process.
Still, he did not let me leave. I sat alongside him, clutching my bleeding palm to my chest as he swiftly gutted the creature before beginning the pelt removal process. 2 slits made onto the feet before situating them beneath the toe of his boot, and with a wrench, the creature became 2. Skinless, its eyes looked up at me accusatory.
My dad wanted me to treat the pelt afterwards, he talked about displaying it over the mantle, his first kill, something to pass down through the generations, something to outlive him, something to show that he was worth something, that he was finally a man. He continued on like this while handing me the materials, only stopping to provide brief instructions before setting me up at the sink to scrub away at the limp skin.
I spent hours at that sink, never performing well enough for my father to allow me to leave, each time being told to tidy another spot, reapply another area. My hands became raw and red. The open cut on my hand continuing to leech blood into the sink at each motion of it over the pelt. The nightmare only ended after my mom came home.
Swiftly, the rabbit, pelt and all, was thrown into the garbage and my father was sent away until she could cool down. She didn’t end up cooling down. The divorce was finalized quickly after.
He died 4 months ago. Heart attack, no else but me could put him into the ground. I didn’t have money for a funeral, or a casket, or hell a plot, so the old man was cremated and stuck into the cheapest jar they had. His property had been foreclosed a year ago and luckily he had died outside of the house or else no one would have found him since he lived alone in a double wide a few acres deep into the woods. By the time I made the 6 hour trip out to the house to sell his belongings it had been sitting out there unattended too for months, the door swinging open in the wind.
The front yard was a graveyard of junk, trash, and clots of rusted machinery all overgrown with hip high grass. As I treaded through the gravel path that made up the way to the door my feet kicked away countless casings. Only a few feet from the door, a stray breeze caught against it and knocked it backwards into the siding of the trailer, thudding loudly and rattling the screen inside. I almost jumped from the sound, but my body was frozen stiff from my first real glimpse into my father’s home.
I’ve heard that ferrets line their dens with the pelts of their prey, much in the same way that hunters line their walls with taxidermy creatures. Taxidermy wouldn’t have been a surprise for my father, after 8 years I imagined he would have at least gotten another rabbit or too, hell, maybe even a deer if he tried hard enough. Mementos of kills, I was expecting that.
Sitting on my fathers couch, dressed in pink pajamas, twin bows in its threadbare hair, arms crossed around a pristine teddy bear, was the crude, stitched together, approximation of a child.
I didn’t go into that house, I didn’t get closer to that thing than maybe 10 feet, but stained into the back of my eyes with crystal clarity, she sits. Her skin is coarse and leathery but with a wet sheen to it like someone took the care to try and soften her months ago. Every opening of her face is tattered, frayed, some parts too far sunken and others protruding with stray tumors. Her face is lopsided, her nose crooked and her ears slanted backwards as if pulled too tight. Her hands are overstuffed, each joint swollen and each nail painted a chipped soft pink. Sitting on her teddy bear's lap are 2 plastic blue eyes, which have tumbled from their sockets and sit delicately before her as she stares down at them with her own empty sockets.
I didn’t go into that house, but the police did. Her name was Emily Adkins, she was 11 when she died, disappearing from a nearby park 6 years ago after running into the woods out of sight. There wasn’t a reported gun shot. The police weren’t too sharing with me when it came to the other details of what they found in the home. A lot of guns and knives, some taxidermy stuff, but luckily no other dead kids.
I finished my report and went home, there was nothing else to do.
I had a lot of nightmares, a lot featuring my dad, a lot more featuring Emily. I dreamed of me, sitting on that couch, hollowed out, while she stood outside in my place. I dreamed about struggling against a noose around my neck and my father butchered me, all while he talked about what a great prize I would make to pass down for generations. I dreamed of Emily with the black marble eyes of the skinned rabbit.
One night, as I lay awake dreading seeing her face again, I scanned the internet for more information about her. I thought maybe seeing her alive, whole, would help me feel just a little bit better. Maybe get her out of my head.
I found the initial police filing for her disappearance. A young girl named Emily, reported missing 8 years ago, all information I had already heard. Blond hair, brown eyes, age 6. I scanned over it again, hoping my tired eyes had jumbled something, missed a word here, somehow made a mistake, but there was none.
Emily Adkins disappeared at age 6, died at age 11. 5 years unaccounted for. I called the police office the next day, asking about these dates, still hoping there had been some great mistake. There was a lot of pity in the officer's voice as he explained, a lot of sadness he didn’t quite have a place to put.
Emily Adkins had lived with my father for 5 years, he explained. From the remnants of the house it appeared to the police that she had been raised like any other child would have. Calendars marked for weekly hunting trips, homeschool textbooks halfway completed, various crayon artworks of dead animals sitting beneath a larger and a smaller stick figure, the smaller one clutching a teddy bear.
"Of course you couldn’t really know what those 5 years were like", he continued, "but there wasn’t any sign that they were all that bad considering what he did to her".
"How did she die," I asked. The melancholy in the officer’s voice turned palpable.
"The cause of death was a gunshot wound through the stomach, point blank range," he replied.
I slept worse that night, and the night after, and for the next week I spent churning through the haze of those hunting trips. Trying to recall if it had been a branch or my fathers foot out in front of me when I had fallen that day. Trying to recall how close that playground was to our hunting spot. Trying not to imagine an 11 year old girl holding her stomach together as my father finally got the trophy he was after, no matter what it cost him.