One time I shot a bird.
I had just gotten my first shotgun, I knew fuck all about guns, and me and my teenage friends were assholes. So we see this bird and someone says I should shoot it. I figure what the hell—I’ll pull the trigger, the bird will go down, and we’ll keep moving. Clean and easy. I’ve got two rounds of target load in the mag, so I rack one in and take the shot.
Now, little do I know at the time, target load doesn’t really kill things properly. Instead of lead, like you get with buck- or bird-shot, it’s filled with plastic BBs. Good enough for paper targets, not really suited to “hunting” of the sort I had just gotten myself into. This bird tumbles wildly out of the tree and spasms frantically in the dirt. Flapping and spinning and kicking up debris like nothing I’d ever seen. Raw pain and desperation. Shit.
So I’ve got one more round, the bird is fucking apeshit with fragments of plastic embedded in it and useless wings, and my friends are going out of their minds, screaming at me to put this thing out of its misery. But it’s moving so goddamn quick and in unpredictable directions that I’m having trouble keeping my sights on it—and I’ve only got one chance, so I’ve got to be sure. For maybe five seconds, eternally long seconds, there’s just shouting and flapping and chaos, and I’m trying to calmly line up the shot.
Breathe. Eyes on. Bang. Dead.
It was just a bird, but I feel like that experience changed me. Suddenly, guns weren’t toys. Birds weren’t just generic, annoying, noisy fucks. Life was more serious than video games. I had the power to make terrible things happen. It was up to me to think and use sound judgement. What I did mattered. Things mattered.
