This was started by a comment Sarah Prince made about stressing out birds (geese in this case) by bothering them (I had threatened to paddle about nightly chasing them once or twice around the lake).  I realized when pondering Sarah's response to my proclamation that I've always had a very different view of animals than most other modern people.  I had the benefit (at least that's my view) of growing up on a farm and seeing the reality of life and death from a very early age.  I don't know if I was maybe 7 or 8 when Czela was old enough to start successfully hunting woodchucks or perhaps slightly older.  I have a clear view of how it started.  Dad had obviously seen her natural hunting skills (she wasn't trained to point, had an instinct to hunt and so could stalk woodchucks pretty well).  And I think she was probably quite smart (maybe having been burned the first few times by woodchucks that disappeared down their holes) so would bark at them, positioning herself between the woodchuck trying to escape and the getaway tunnels. 

Let me backup.  The other thing about farms is that when you're farming, there are some living creatures that become the enemy (locusts, corn earworm, crows, foxes, etc...) and woodchucks definitely fall into that category.  The standard "best reason" is that "horses break their legs in woodchuck holes".  I have a memory of questioning that (or hearing someone else question that?) and being told that cows don't really ever break their legs in woodchuck holes.  (There were a bunch of beef cattle on the farm, but few horses (1 or 2?)).  But another "good reason" was presented which still makes sense to me today (having worked as a farmer myself for a while 15-20 or so years after Donald's Mountain here on the Salmon Kill), namely that woodchuck holes (actually the accompanying mounds of excavated material) are hell on equipment (especially mowers of most kinds).  And woodchucks will clip seedlings down in your garden if they get in too (loving young tender greenery above all else).

So back to me as a small child though.  What I remember about the first time was that someone (Dad? one of the other guys who was around? (my memory is that there were always lots of men around there working)) handed me a baseball bat when we were there by the house and heard Czela barking frantically out in one of the fields.   It's hard to remember the rest of the details of the first time.   Whether anyone came out into the field with me to coach, or whether I just figured it out by myself.  I do remember pausing a bit when I was handed the bat and querying "really? i get to really go help her kill the woodchuck?" and being assured that "Yeah, that's fine, she'll probably get it without you anyway, but you can help keep her from having to work so hard."  Or maybe it didn't happen that way at all and I'm making this all up.  It was definitely a baseball bat the first time though.

It suddenly occurs to me why _Lord of the Flies_ always struck such a chord with me.

In point of fact, I was pretty timid (and actually scared of the woodchuck with it's bared teeth trying to fight off the dog barking in its face), so my first few swings were pretty feeble (and done trying to hold the bat as far away from my body as possible just to make sure the woodchuck couldn't possibly get me).  But the cool thing was that it didn't matter.  All Czela needed was a distraction.  So if I could even touch the woodchuck with the bat gently and cause it to switch focus for a microsecond, that was enough time for Czela to close.  All she needed was a grip on a bit of skin and it was all over.  As soon as she had a hold (she was pretty good at actually being able to bite right at the back of the neck, but the side of the neck (or farther down the back) would also work fine), she would shake her head violently from side to side.  For a really long time.  It was hard to tell exactly when the woodchuck died (every now and then one would escape on the 2nd or 3rd shake and need to be corralled again) but Czela always made sure.  Long after it was obviously limp and dead, she would pause and pant in some oxygen and then give more shakes for good measure.  Eventually the shaking reduced in intensity (as she probably just got tired) and then she'd proudly carry the woodchuck around and show everyone (we always made a point to praise her).  It then became a game to try to remember to get the woodchuck carcass away from her before she could go hide it somewhere (and then go roll in it a week later, her hunting instincts were pretty complete and the smell of carrion (to hide her own distinctive dog smell from her attempted prey was a tool she always wanted to avail herself of, but none of us who wanted her to be able to come in the house were very fond of).

My role was never to actually bash a woodchuck to death.  Not that I didn't want to (the object was to kill it after all), but after a few times (and the other thing about this was that it would be quite a random event, looking back, I was a bit like a fireman, ready at any time to go put out a blaze) there were certain realities that became apparent.  I cared way more about Czela than anything else, and I think maybe once early on I took a swing a bit too vigorously and came close to hitting (or maybe even did hit?) her with the bat.  What I'm sure of is that it took care to try to swing in such a way that meant she couldn't be in the path of the bat (later it was a stick, I'll get to that).  Eventually we became quite a team (and the mutuality of that relationship isn't something I'd fully appreciated until now writing about it).  My recollection (I was quite proud of this "hunting" (I still am actually, it was good fun)) and what I would tell anyone who would listen is that there was almost no time difference at all from the bat striking the woodchuck and Czela latching on to it.   In hindsight, (and this is the part that just occurred to me now), Czela probably learned as much over time about me and how I was swinging the bat as I did about her strategy to keep the woodchuck away from its hole (there were a few that escaped us, but usually we'd end up back there a few weeks later with a victory).  And so my recollection (especially in later years) of her hitting just about simultaneously with my carefully controlled (but still packing enough of a punch to insure that I got the woodchuck's attention) swing was probably pretty accurate.  At a certain point I remember doing what hunters have probably been doing forever: personalizing my weapon.  Rather than the same old baseball bat, I went out with a bowsaw and cut myself a woochuck killing stick (from a sapling an inch or two in diameter).  I remember peeling the bark off of it.  And at some point I was given a gift (X-mas? birthday?  sorry, can't remember) of a hand-held woodburning tool (which I still own (or did a few years ago when I last saw it)).  I don't know what gave me the idea.  Perhaps the little plastic airplanes I was assembling as models (some of them fighters with decals).  Was one of the decals on one of them a representation of a "kill tally"?  That seems unlikely, but who knows?  My memory of building models is only that I could do it, but didn't really have the patience to do it right.  Any instruction that said "wait for glue to dry before proceeding to next step" was likely to be challenged by me.  My rationale being "why? I bet I can just proceed."  Which I usually did.  So my models were always a little "off" though they still mostly looked like airplanes from a distance. 

Back to the subject at hand, I at some point did get the idea to start keeping track of how many woodchucks Czela and I (and my custom crafted stick) had killed.  So I started woodburning another X into the handle after each success.  How many were there?  I really have not that much of a clue.  Probably more than 3 or 4, but not too many more than a dozen (maybe not even that many)?  I'm not sure why it matters, but as I write this I'm finding even my attempts to "look back through time and remember" to be instructional.  I can't be sure of nailing down some details.  Whether it was Dad or someone else who handed me the bat the first time and whether I was accompanied out into the field to find Czela both seem important to me now, but there's no way I can be sure what's fact in this particular part of the story.  But in the process of trying hard to probe my memory, what happens is that other (more deeply buried) memories of related events or circumstances come up (like the model planes).

Maybe it was the _Horse_the_Band_ video/song from Ben the other day that brought this back to me.  Hmm, probably not.

In the end, I'm really glad I grew up the way I did.  I have a very strong memory of being very young (probably before I had ever helped Czela kill a woodchuck) and seeing a beautiful dog laid out dead in our back yard.  I went screaming into the house and was told "That's a coydog; Donald shot it."  I said dog because that's what it looked like to me.  I got a lecture on how coydogs were awful (in this case, the explanations didn't work, I don't remember what any of them actually were, only that I didn't buy any of them for a second).  I think I sat and looked at that carcass and gently touched the beautiful fur and looked closely at the open (but obviously lifeless) eyes for quite a while.   Maybe it wasn't that long (as I write I realize that I think someone noticed me doing this and maybe even crying over it and took the body/carcass off out of site farther away from our house).   I realize now that there was no "dog" involved ever.  It was a coyote.   Maybe my parents (and the other adults around?) worked harder at convincing me the "rightness" of killing woodchucks vs. coyotes.  In fact the more that I think about it, the more I realize that I must have had a conversation with Mom and/or Dad where I could sense that neither one of them was particularly proud of the fact that Donald had shot the "coydog".  Donald after all was a spoiled rich teenager (who told everyone that the mountain was named after him (when in point of fact I believe that both he and the mountain/farm had been named for his dead uncle)) whose father had bought him a high-powered rifle.  But Dad was working for Donald's father, and so it wasn't probably practical for Dad to try to tell Donald that it was wrong to shoot a coydog or coyote (we only had Polled Hereford cows (beef cattle) on the farm, and there's no way that coyotes could really prove much of a threat (mother cows are amazingly protective of their young at birth and it only takes a few days before a newborn calf is big, strong and fast enough for a coyote to really be no threat at all (even at birth most calves probably weighed almost as much as a coyote)).  So I'm incredibly thankful for the "unspoken message" that I received from my parents.  Since Donald was part of the power stucture in our lives at the time they couldn't come out and flatly say that it was wrong for him to do it (because I was never any good at keeping my mouth shut and if they'd told me that I would have told him (or his Dad)), but nevertheless I somehow came to know that's how they felt.   Whereas woodchucks were somehow different. 

Obviously the point was pretty well made with Czela being the link in between.  She was the partner for the worthy task of attempting to rid the farm of as many woodchucks as we could.  And despite the fact that Czela had very short hair (dark red, similar in color to an Irish setter if you've never seen a viszla), I couldn't help be struck by how much the dead coydog resembled her (except for the dead eyes).  The coydog was just beautiful: grey, red,  almost orange and all kinds of colors in between painting an amazing palette.

Do I have a tendency toward violence because I learned from an early age to go and kill sentient mammals with only a stick and a dog?  I don't believe so.  I believe it gives me an understanding though of the instincts surrounding violence (or the urge to kill).   As I grew up, I was surrounded by hunters and hunting for most of my childhood.  Even on Donald's Mountain I often would go out in the woods with the adults who were hunting (there's another story about a wagon coming unhitched before dawn that I'll try to write here at some point in the future) and help to "drive" the deer to the "setters" (the deerhunting strategy always seemed to be to have a bunch of folks sit first in good locations while a larger group of hunters would attempt to establish a line as we walked through the woods, the idea being that the deer would hear those walking and keep far enough in front of them (but be distracted by the pursuit and the setters would be able to shoot them as they moved into a field of fire)).  Donald's younger brother Jimmy (who was only a year older than me) was permitted to carry a gun (and hunt) at a very young age.  I wasn't (but I don't recall ever actually wanting to).  I always enjoyed hunting (even though I never carried a gun through all those years) and spent quite a bit of time in the woods.  Later (as in several years later) I went out quite often with Dad, Larry, Bruce, Mark and Karl.  I always loved getting up way before dawn (it was necessary to eat a hearty breakfast before hunting and ideally one wanted to get the setters to their position before the first light of dawn).  In fact i can remember clearly that it was during a hunting trip that we'd gotten the call (it took Mom quite a while to track us down in the woods (actually she made a phone call to someone who came up to wherever we were and gave us the news)) that our new house (on South Hill) had burned down.  That was 4 days after Mom and Dad had closed on the property and it certainly changed our lives.  But that's also another story.

One of my best friends today (in fact I would have to say he's been my best friend for the past couple decades) is an avid hunter.  But I decided after a while that hunting was too much like fishing for me (in that I didn't have the patience).  So my participation in recent years has been limited to waiting for a call to help Tom drag a deer home.    Or several weeks later to go over to his house and help him slice the meat into strips for jerky while we watch Monday night football.  But I'm thinking that one of these years that I'll probably want to go take a hunter-safety course and buy a license.  Maybe I'm patient enough now to be able to handle it.  I know I'll enjoy being outside in the woods.   It's just that the gun seems unfair.  But I'd probably not be so successful at bringing home venison with just a stick.