My father taught me to shoot a gun in the city park across from my grandmother’s house during the few months we lived there. I was ten that spring, the only time I lived in town before college. We’d take the bb gun from his pickup, cross the street to the park, and take aim at the aluminum garbage cans chained to the picnic tables. The gratifying shuck of the lever-action that chambered the next shot only rivaled the plunk of copper bb on aluminum lid. When I tired, my father would take the gun and swing-cock it, hold it out one-handed, and tag the cans. Once, a police cruiser drove past and slowed. My father shadowed the gun along his leg and waved. The cop returned the salutation and kept driving. Pops slapped me on the back, somehow telling me that was how things were supposed to be done.

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Irrigation canals criss-crossed the land around our house like intricate stitching. The cover brought Canadian geese and sand-hill cranes but, more than anything, ducks. We shot the quackers like we swatted flies; daily and without remorse.

We cleaned them near the well pit. One of my father’s favorite gags was to cut off a leg and pull back the orange skin and find the tendons. He’d coax one of us youngsters near to examine the foot—otherworldly with its scaly webs and bumpy nails—and pull the tendons, flexing and constricting the toes. The first few times we shrieked and shied away, but once the shock wore off we took turns pulling on the flossy string that ran parallel to the bone.

Once, I took a duck foot to show and tell. I can’t recall the class’s reaction but remember it made my backpack smell like wet and living leather.

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My father is a hunter. For many years I could not figure out why. He hunts all his game on his own property. If he itches for ducks and geese, he walks to the canals behind his house. If he’s antsy deer and elk, he drives twenty miles to his ranch and stakes out runs and paths. I cannot remember a year he hasn’t shot a big game animal.

Before I could carry a rifle, I’d push brush for my father on the annual elk hunt. The hunt ushered in transition, marking the end of the farming season. We met at the farm shop, sometimes in snow, sometimes rain, usually a stout wind. In the black anticipation of the eerie sunless morning all of us milled about as serious as wolves. My father divvied out assignments to the group: one pickup here, another there, fan out along the hills, plant near the cliffs. Then we left, a cavalcade of headlights humming toward the crags.

I carried a pellet gun. My father dropped me in the thick draws and then took station farther up the mountain. I crept through the forest barrel-first, my hands sweating through my gloves. Morning came, and the sun shot down in kaleidoscope spirals through the tall conifers. At that point of complete vanishment and panic—me not knowing north from south, or where the big guns were, or if the hunters would mistake me for game—that echoes of gunshots sounded. Fool hens boomed out from the grass and scared me so bad I thought I’d been shot.

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Here’s a story for you, Pops. I shot a cat near the granary at the old house. I heard you complaining about how many strays were around so I took my pump twenty-two—the one you gave me for my twelfth birthday, the only gun I’ll ever love—and waited in the driveway until a cat came wandering. It hunched down in the gravel about twenty feet out. I put a bead right on the thick of its chest and paused. I watched that mangy orange tom breathing on the other side of the barrel and something stirred in me. I couldn’t do it. I put down the rifle. But then I didn’t want you to be bothered by this cat, so I brought the gun up and shot behind it in warning.

The lead ricocheted, drilled the cat in the hip. The red painted its hind legs. Mewling and caterwauling like I’d never heard, the cat came to me wanting help, crying as it dragged itself through the gravel. I rose up to put it out of its misery, now it was on the driveway pavement, but again I balked. I ran for the garage. The cat followed and crawled under the suburban and pulled itself into the undercarriage and knelled. I shut and locked the back door. The cat must have died up there, fallen out somewhere on the road. I never found its body.

You probably didn’t see the blood on the driveway. I washed it off with the hose.

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One epic year elk hunting at the ranch we harvested four bulls and four cows in one morning. My cousins and I added three fool hens. We dragged the animals back to the house and laid them out for a photo, their chest cavities propped open with branches of pine, their blood running rivulets down the hill toward the dirt road. I stood in the photo with my bird and pellet gun, my orange safety hat, my bloody jeans; one among a dozen other identical men.