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let on to his father that he wasn’t interested in hunting, but that maybe they could still go down to the shooting range and still shoot together, that his dad would still be a bit disappointed that his son had chosen to omit the ancient rite of passage from his life. Little did Tyler know: his father wouldn’t have cared in the least; he would simply find another activity they both could share together. Communication could solve so much unnecessary unpleasantness.
    “I mean shoot it with the bb gun, silly,” Lilith explained. 
    Immediately, Tyler thought of his father’s dark story about the rabbit when Ray was his son’s age. He told his son about how he saw a rabbit in his mother’s garden gnawing on one of his mother’s plants and how he had taken aim with his own pellet gun and fired at it. Ray wasn’t nearly as good of a shot as Tyler was but he had hit it nonetheless. The pellet tore into the rabbit’s hind quarters and it toppled over on its side with a sustained piercing screech that summoned Ray’s father (Tyler’s grandpa) on the quick. Ray had told his son that he immediately dropped his rifle and pressed his palms to his ears, not only because of how surprisingly loud the penetrating shrieks were, shrieks that could conceivably drive a boy crazy, but he actually felt, in his youth, that if he plugged his ears tight enough, the recollection of doing such a thing to this rabbit would simply bounce off of his hands rather than enter his head, where it would reside with him for decades.
    Ray’s father had come rushing out of the house, thinking that his son had had an accident with the air rifle that his mother was so against from the beginning, just like her future daughter in-law, Cindy. Once Ray’s father was relieved to see that both of his son’s eyes were still safe and secure in their respective sockets, he allowed himself to become a little annoyed with little Ray. 
    “What the hell are you doing, Ray!?” Ray’s father bellowed. 
    “I-I-I didn’t think that I would h-hit h-him!” Ray answered his father through both of his hands, which were covering his mouth as if he was blowing his nose with an invisible tissue.
    What happened next is the other half of the baggage the rabbit incident had supplied Ray Swanson, the rabbit’s screaming being the first half of the hefty load.
    “Well, Swansons don’t start anything that we can’t finish. Put him out of his misery, Ray,” his father ordered.    
    “I don’t want to do that!” Ray argued.
    “It’s the least you can do after shooting him. It’s either that or he’ll continue to holler himself to death. Do him a favor, Ray,” Ray’s father reasoned, starting off stern and ending with an underlying sympathy in his tone.
    Ray saw his father’s point and did what had to be done. He ran up to his room to quietly sob into a pillow while his father disposed of the rabbit. For the next few days, Ray  hated  his father for making him kill the rabbit; but hadn’t Ray done that already? Did Ray really believe that if he left the rabbit alone that eventually it would stop screaming and say, “Well, now that I got  that  out of my system I’ll be on my way!” and hop off to another yard? No, Ray didn’t think so; not even in his sugar coated juvenile dreams. His father had been right: finishing the job he had started was the most merciful way to go about it. 
    Later, in his more mature years, when Ray thought about the rabbit incident, he would liken his father’s actions to that of a parent who caught their teenage son smoking and as a punishment had forced them to smoke the entire pack in front of them. A hard lesson to learn, but one you’d never forget.
    Tyler  didn’t forget either. After hearing his father tell the story, he couldn’t, for the life of him, figure out how someone who tells a story like that could  possibly grow up to enjoy hunting.
    So, when Lilith had dared Tyler to shoot the squirrel off of the