Prey

The Trophy Hunt

His feeble plan to allay my urges included hunting, fishing, dressing animals, taxidermy, and suggesting a future career in pathology. He said that as a medical examiner, I would conduct autopsies and the dissection of human beings. He didn't understand. It wasn't the cutting or the opening of a carcass that excited me; it was the taking of a life, it was snuffing something out of existence. Opening a corpse up from groin to sternum was like sex without the orgasm to me. There was no payoff. There was no excitement. It was pointless. I did what I had learned to do. I feigned interest and thanked him for his brilliant ideas and told him I don't know what I would do without him (I'd heard that line in a movie before and thought it sounded authentic to me).

After the bird, I could never go back to insects and reptiles (or even birds for that matter). I yearned for mammals. Insects and reptiles and birds didn't feel the way a mammal feels; the love, the anguish, the pain. I had found new prey, one that filled me with heavenly euphoria.

That November, in the midst of puberty and the development of a libido, my dad decided to take me deer hunting with him for the first time. He had a cabin near a sleepy little town called Crystal Falls in the Upper Peninsula; a cold and drafty, decrepit box that lacked running water and electricity. I had to take a shit in a frigid outhouse that seemed more a freezer than a privy. I cared little for first-world comforts however, so the conditions did little to perturb me. I was electrified with the excitement of watching a large animal die, butchering the skin and plucking out the innards with blood-soaked hands, seeing the fleeting light escape from its insentient, black eyes.

The morning after our arrival, amongst the pines, bathed in the dull glow of the sunrise, I killed my first mammal. As the buck stood still, drinking from a winding brook, its antlers a magnificent crown of bone; I blew one of its front legs off with an errant shot. The deer was so bewildered that it began hobbling right toward me, unaware of where the shot had come from, unaware of its own gruesome injury. I took it down with a shot to the heart and a splash of crimson which painted the snow in vile fashion. The sound of the gun reverberated through the hills and valleys; the sound was deafening against the silence of the forest.

My dad stood so close behind me that I could feel his breath on my neck, shooting out of his open mouth in thick gusts of heat. He had put a deadly weapon in my hands and he wanted to make sure I couldn't turn it on him. He never said it aloud, but he was thinking it-I always knew what he was thinking.

My dad dragged the deer back to camp in a game carcass bag attached to a shoulder harness. The deer dragged easily through the fresh, powdery snow. Luckily the kill site was only a half a mile from camp; he told me I had bagged a heavy sucker. He said it had to have weighed north of 200 pounds and kept referring to it as a trophy buck, which planted a seed in my mind that sprouted later on in life. .

When we arrived he dropped the deer near the winch and bent over and placed his hands on his knees and panted voraciously. His face was red with strain and the cold air; his large head looked like a giant tomato. After he caught his breath he gave me a wink and a smile. I didn't really understand what it meant, but I think he was proud of me. Maybe he thought everything was going to be all right? Maybe he thought hunting large game would sate my ravenous hunger? Maybe he thought he had solved me? What he didn't know is that he only made my hunger worse. This wouldn't satisfy me for long. To me, a deer was merely a gateway to larger and more dangerous game.

My dad tied a strap around the buck's neck, right underneath the head, while explaining the importance of placing it as high up the neck as possible, and to always raise the carcass by the head-he said it was easier to remove the organs and was less likely to contaminate the meat. Next he opened the deer's stomach membrane from the pelvis to the base of the sternum; he said it was vital to allow only the point of the knife to penetrate the membrane to avoid rupturing the stomach and intestines. After that he slowly removed a few major organs and dropped them into a large blood-speckled bucket: the kidneys, the liver, and the spleen. Next he pointed to what looked like a translucent water balloon filled with yellow liquid in the lower abdomen near the spine. He explained that this was the bladder and that it needed to be removed without spilling the urine inside the cavity. He grasped it firmly, closing off the urethra and cut it out, dropped it into a Ziploc, pierced it to allow the urine to drain and then sealed it with a zip-tie. After that he cut a circle around the anus and gently removed the rectum and then tied it shut with a zip-tie; he said this kept the feces from contaminating the meat. After that he cut through the membrane connecting the intestines to the cavity and removed them as well. Then he used a bone saw to cut through the sternum and open up the chest cavity. He removed the heart and dropped it in the bucket, then he severed the windpipe and removed the lungs and esophagus and then he used a garden hose to rinse the cavity out thoroughly.

"Good for now," he said, his hands painted dark red with gore. "We'll let the meat cool. I'll show you how to skin it when we get home."

"Ok Dad."

Watching my dad butcher that buck changed something in me forever. My blood was pumping in my ears. My heart was threatening to beat through my chest. My raging erection was thick against my thigh, restrained by the confines of my tight-fitting jeans. That was the first time violence had ever become sexualized for me. The dead eyes, the tongue hanging out of its mouth, all the squishy innards being cut and ripped from the cavity with savage intensity, the blood dripping from its tail, caking the snow and coagulating-that was the exact moment I developed a fetish for disembowelment.

That's why I blame my dad. If it weren't for him I never would have developed this unfathomable hunger that whispers to me from deep within my belly, telling me it was time- time for another one.

Later that night as we huddled around the stone fireplace in the cabin to keep warm, the fire painting our faces with bright orange flickers and shadows, the cold inching further and further into my bones, and the wolves howling forlornly in the wild beyond. I sat there and stared at the fire, almost without blinking, seeing images in the flames: dead bodies, dead faces.

"Cameron, are you ok?" I didn't answer right away, so he gave me a little nudge. I looked at him blankly, my mind bright with the visions dancing in the blaze. He repeated himself and rubbed my head affectionately.

"Yes Dad."

"I never know what you're thinking," he said, more to himself than anything. "I never know what's going on in that brain of yours. You don't talk. You don't communicate with me. I feel like I'm cut off from you, like there's some kind of invisible barrier between us that I can never cross."

"I was just thinking about the buck Dad," I said with a shrug. "That's all. Nothing special."

"How are you feeling?"

"Nothing Dad," I replied while looking back to the fire. I could see the devil in the flames. "I feel absolutely nothing ... I'm empty inside." I could see that he was crying again, the tears were glistening in the glow of the fire. He cried a lot around me.