Martin Marten (9781466843691) Read Online Free PDF Page A

killing other creatures, and you get a little sad.
    An excellent point, said his dad. But at least you are sensitive to it. That’s a step in the right direction. At the moment, we do not have much of a choice about what to eat, our bodies having evolved in this way over millions of years, but at least you have a certain respect and honesty about the system. That’s good. That’s a step toward reverence. Better that than the arrogant assumption that you can kill anything you like any time you like. That’s the wrong direction. That direction leads to more killing. Trust me on this one.
    These kinds of conversations by the fire were probably Dave’s favorite times with his dad. His dad was not much for sports and not much for hunting and fishing and not much for playing video games or watching television—although he did like watching movies with the family once in a while, the four of them curled up on the couch. Dave’s mom and dad usually then fell asleep within minutes, and Dave and Maria would finish watching the movie and then gently wake up their parents, who would deny having fallen asleep and talk knowledgeably about the movie as if they had seen it, which they certainly inarguably had not.
    *   *   *
    The first animal who died at Dave’s hands was a rabbit, for which he had meticulously set a wire snare. The rabbit, only slightly bigger than Dave’s hand, had sprinted into it and strangled and was hanging limp and horrifying in the air like a small brown accusation when Dave checked his snares. It had only been dead for thirty minutes, perhaps—long enough to go cold, but not long enough to be wholly stiff, and after opening the snare that had choked it to death, Dave held it in his hands for a moment, wondering at how something so small could be so deft and vibrant in life and so infinitesimally small and weightless in death, almost as if its life had the weight and the loss of life shrank the creature to an empty skin.
    He also found that he felt bad. He had not expected that; he had expected and rather looked forward to feeling triumph, that he had laid plans that worked, that he had procured food for the family in the ancient tradition of the hunter and provider. But instead, he felt small and mean, holding the shell of the rabbit in his gloves. He had planned to reset the snare along this path, clearly a rabbit run, but instead, he packed up his stuff and went home.
    Skinning and cleaning the rabbit presented another whole set of logistical and emotional challenges, not to mention a rigorous examination in anatomy—is that a liver or a kidney? How could there be so little obvious meat? Should the internal organs, including a truly disgusting length of what seemed to be the colon, be buried or tossed in the river or securely bagged in plastic and placed in a garbage bin in town? Could it really be the case that he, Dave, the successful hunter, a man who had brought home meat from the wilderness for rabbit stew for his family, would have to ride his bike into town with a reeking bag of rabbit guts on his handlebars and then sneak it into the garbage bin behind Miss Moss’s store?
    He stared at the charts of rabbit anatomy he had downloaded from the Web and printed out for exactly this moment, when he had to separate the good parts from the foul parts, and after a moment, all the words swam together—the sacculus rotundus, the vermiform appendix, the squamous epithelium, the proximal duodenum, the convoluted jejunum, the ampulla coli.… Dave gave up. He carefully put all the disjunct parts of the former rabbit into a black plastic bag, tied it off with three tight knots, washed his hands four times in water slightly hotter than he could stand, and rode down to Miss Moss’s store with the bag. Luckily no one was out behind the store, and he slipped the bag into the garbage bin and then went into the store to buy milk and coffee, feeling that he ought to pay for the loan of Miss Moss’s