The Death of Jim Loney. High Horse (see star). I Get off My High Horse. Blood in the Snow.

--Teaching The Death of Jim Loney.
It makes my eyes wet.

And it shames me.
I’ll never write something as beautiful as that.
I wonder who it was that shamed James Welch.

But it’s not for the death of Loney that I cry, if I cry at all.
It’s not for any character that somebody dreamed up.
It’s for the mind that come up with thoughts as sad and as beautiful as those. That’s what I cry for. If I cry.

And I knew James Welch.
And his mind day to day was not that lovely. And he died of sickness, not of loneliness and loss the way his character died.
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--I'm getting on my high horse.

*(Don’t tell the French, they’ll eat It, and if that bothers you, remember that some people think about cows the way you do about horses, and that the average pig is smarter than your dog and that a worm's central nervous system is as complex as your own).

--A hunter got into a dispute with other hunters in WI. He ended up killing six and wounding others. Authority Zeigle reports the suspect was “chasing after them and killing them,” with a SKS 7.62 mm semiautomatic rifle, a common hunting weapon. He then became lost in the woods and was lead out by other hunters whereupon he was recognized and arrested.

He’d run out of bullets.

I will make no light of this tragedy.

--Driving two days ago on the freeway I passed a SUV pulling a trailer with a four wheeler in it. Strapped to the four wheeler were the corpses of two deer.

You forget how it looks, something so large and so dead, if you haven’t seen it in a while. I grew up like that, with the dead all around me.

You can get used to anything.

I will make no light of this tragedy.

--I’m not as anti hunting as you would guess.
Oh, I’m anti hunting.
But many of the people who eat meat that has been slaughtered and packaged complain about the barberry of hunting and I find that a bit silly.

What happens to the cow or the pig or the chicken on the typical factory farm (where 99 percent of this country’s meat and dairy products come from) can only be defined as torture; what happens to them in the slaughterhouse is something beyond. The bulk of our meat animals are not even dead before they are being skinned.

Give me a bullet through the heart on a snowy day in November any time over the life and death of an animal whose meat you will be buying cellophane wrapped.

Give me even a not so sudden death, but a stumbling one. An hour in the cold in which I can see my breath go thin. But not a factory farm life or a slaughterhouse death.

--And at liveshot.com you can target practice in a virtual way but with real world outcomes. You control the firearm with your mouse, but there is a real firearm and it really fires a real bullet and it hits a real target. They’ll burn a dvd for you to show you your gun going off as a result of your will for it to do so.

And that must make you feel oh so powerful.

God knows, growing up with guns, that’s how I felt.

--They mean to offer virtual hunting with the same results.

“We are currently working on a very comfortable, ADA compliant blind which will house the LIVE-SHOT shooting system. Once this and the perimeter fencing are completed, will we be able to offer a unique computer assisted hunting opportunity.”

In short, you can kill an animal from the comfort of your own home. With the click of a mouse.

They way they promised us wars would eventually be fought.

--People tell me: what are you vegetarian for? That’s against nature.
And I tell them: if this was nature, I’d beat you over the head and drag your wife off and have my way with her.

But all are laws, those things that make us human, that nod to the development of our conscience as a species, those are the very opposite of the laws of nature.

For what is for an elk mating is for us rape.
What is for a sparrow forging is for us stealing.
We call assault (ask Artest) what any other species in the world considers a shot at survival of the fittest.

In short, the laws of nature are exactly opposite of our laws.
Except those that say: if it tastes good, kill and eat it.

--As a boy, I hunted with my father. Ironically, these are some of the memories that cause me the deepest sense of nostalgia.

Not for the kill. Not for the blood in the snow or the flavor of heart and liver mixed with scrambled eggs. It's because it was me when I was young and my father when I knew him less well than I know him now and therefore knew him as better.

But we were together. As I remember it, it was always dusk. I can hear his footsteps breaking through the curst. I can see the mountains blue around us. And I can feel the cold and the promise of the warmth to which we would return.

And I can remember the feeling that everything was in order, the world in its universe, me and my father on it.

Even though I was a killer I think of this time as my innocence.

--My mother keeps a photo. I find it hidden in her home in the room of her most prized possessions, in a wooden box my father bought for her in Chinatown, a place where I can only assume she keeps the most precious of mementos.

It is of me, smiling, eight or nine, holding the antlers of deer which dangles from the ceiling of the barn, its eyes blackly vacant, blood dripping from its tongue, me hefting the head upward as if I mean for it to pose there with me.

She keeps it I suppose lest she ever have to remind me that I am not what I think I am.