I Owed It to That Bird

I was around ten. My father had a hunting rifle that afternoon, which was not unusual — he was a hunter in the way he was everything else, occasionally and with the specific pleasure of someone who enjoyed having a reason to use what he carried.

He always carried two guns: a handgun on his belt, a smaller one at his ankle. The hunting rifle was a third option, brought out when the occasion called for something with more range.

He placed the rifle in my hands. Told me to look up. To shoot a bird.

I did as I was told. I was ten, and doing as I was told was the operational reality of being ten in that household, and I didn’t have enough formed self yet to place between the order and the action. I looked up, I saw the bird, I fired.

The bird fell.

Somewhere — far enough that I couldn’t find it, small enough in the sky that I’d barely registered it as anything other than a target. I don’t know the species. I don’t know if it was alone or if there were others. I know it was there, and then it wasn’t, and I was the reason.

That bird has stayed with me for my entire life.

What We Did About It

From that afternoon onward, whenever my siblings and I learned my father was going hunting, we went with him. Not because we wanted to. Because we’d worked out the only form of resistance available to children who couldn’t refuse directly and couldn’t take the rifle away from him: we made noise. Enough noise, consistently enough, that the animals heard us coming and had time to be somewhere else before he could shoot.

He wasn’t happy about it. He didn’t shoot us either. It was what it was — a small, sustained, entirely undeclared war between a man with a rifle and his children with their voices and their feet, conducted in the specific silence of a conflict where both sides knew what was happening and neither side said so.

We thought we were enough. Sometimes we probably were.

I never forgot the bird. I owed it something, though at ten I didn’t have language for what that was, or any way to pay it back that was available to me yet.

What It Built

Many years later, as an animal advocate in Portugal, I organized campaigns against hunting. I learned how the judicial system handled these things. I used what I’d learned. I stopped hunting tournaments — not through protest, through process, through the specific, patient, unglamorous work of understanding which lever moved which thing, and moving it.

In rural Portugal, this made me enemies. The kind of enemies that make themselves known in the ways that kind of person makes themselves known — not directly, not usually, but present, in the background, in the specific texture of a community that has decided someone is a problem. I didn’t care. I’d grown up with the most dangerous person in my immediate environment, and “rural Portugal is not happy with you” did not register as a significant threat by comparison.

I owed it to the animals. I owed it to the bird. That was the whole calculation, and the calculation didn’t change regardless of who was unhappy about it.

What This Isn’t

I want to say something about guilt, because I think it’s the obvious interpretation of this piece and I think it’s wrong.

I don’t carry guilt about the bird. I want to be honest about that, because I think guilt would be, in its own way, a form of self-indulgence — a way of making the bird primarily about me, about what I feel, rather than about what happened to it and what followed from it.

My mother always told me that she was able to keep her figure after my brother and after my sister, but not after me. I was too much from the beginning — too big, ate too much, always hungry. My impact, in one form or another, probably started there. I’ve learned, across everything that’s come since, to accept what I can’t change. Not passively — I’ll fight back, I’ll try to move what can be moved — but from a position of accepting how small I am and how limited my powers actually are, rather than from a position of frustration at those limits. Frustration at something you can’t change is just energy spent twice: once on the thing, once on being angry about the thing.

I can’t bring the bird back. I can’t undo the wrong things I’ve done in my life, and there are enough of them that a full accounting would be its own book. I can’t be unborn. I can’t not be the son of a psychopathic schizophrenic, from a lineage of people who were, in various ways, dangerous and extreme. I can’t not be the person who was handed a rifle at ten and did what he was told.

What I can do — what I’ve been doing, in every form available to me, for as long as I can remember doing anything that counted — is try to do right by the animals. Not to save myself in the process. Not to balance a ledger that I know doesn’t come out clean regardless of what I do. Just because it’s the right thing to do, and because I’ve had a particular education in what the wrong thing looks like, and because a bird fell from the sky one afternoon and I was the reason, and I owed it something, and paying it back is the work.

I’m going to hell anyway. The ledger is what it is.

But the animals are here now, alive, fed, in the mountains, with names.

And somewhere, in whatever way these things work — and I believe they work somehow, even if I can’t prove the mechanism — I think that bird knows.

The commitment this piece describes is behind every book in the Good Bad Person series — and the specific quality of action taken without self-redemption as the goal runs through Confessions of a Good Bad Person and When You See Evil, Do Your Worst.