IN MY SHOES: Granny Get Your Gun
In this New York Times op-ed, Betty Fussell an 82-year-old, “city girl from New York” who is “half-blind” describes a deer-hunting outing in MT with her son Sam last October:
Sam calls hunting “earning your food.” Although I’ve spent a lifetime buying, cooking and eating food, this would be the first time I’d ever hunted and sought to kill. Others had always done that for me.
By noontime on this fifth deerless day, I have seen nothing but snowflakes and ravens. … I’ve liked the challenge, but I’ve also yearned to go home - not to Sam’s cabin but to my overheated New York apartment. …
[A]s we trudge across one more clear-cut hell, I say to myself, I will not cry. I’m like a Marine recruit on Parris Island, collapsing from heatstroke while his sergeant says, “Suck it up, Fatso.”
By miracle the sun breaks out, lighting up the landscape like Christmas in Manhattan. Sam points. …
When I lift the gun and look through the scope, by chance she’s right there presenting herself broadside. …
“Great shot!” Sam hollers. I jump into his arms. My head is exploding as we embrace. “A double-lung shot,” he says. “She didn’t know what hit her.”
I’m both elated and appalled. Extreme joy and extreme grief are locked like the crosshairs. “Now’s the time to pray,” Sam says. Even though I long ago abandoned my forefathers’ Calvinist God, it’s him I thank for the fellow creature I’ve killed.
After her kill, Fussell could look forward to eating venison steaks, sausages, and jerky, as well as to snuggling beneath the tanned deer hide in her Manhattan bed. You go, granny!
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