Gun Guys

by Dan Baum

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You’re not married.”

  “No,” he laughed. “If I was married, I’d probably have a fancy bathroom instead!”

  * * *

  * The .50-caliber machine gun that Browning designed in 1918 was still the standard heavy machine gun of the U.S. military in 2012.

  5. FUDD LIKE ME

  A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct. Whatever his acts, they are dictated by his own conscience, rather than by a mob of onlookers. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this fact.

  —Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

  All the anger about guns mysteriously evaporated when the subject turned to hunting. Even the most ardent gun-control advocates knew that too much tradition lay aback of hunting to think of meddling with it.* Hunting could even be useful to them; it afforded the opportunity for some political jujitsu. By acknowledging hunting as a legitimate use of guns, gun-control advocates could offer an olive branch while condemning other guns and gun use. Politicians hoping to reimpose a ban on assault rifles could establish that they wouldn’t dream of interfering with the good guns with which Americans hunted, only with the bad guns with which they killed each other. Howard Dean: “I never met a hunter who needed an AK-47 to shoot a deer.” John Kerry: “When I go out there and hunt, I’m going out there with a twelve-gauge shotgun, not an assault weapon.” Bill Clinton: “You don’t need an Uzi to go deer hunting, and everybody knows it.” If the only gun use you countenanced was hunting, the comments made perfect sense. If, though, you were into self-defense, competitive shooting, Walter Mitty fantasy, historical collecting, end-of-the-world preparation, tyranny prevention, machine-gun meet-ups, or you just thought guns were cool and fun, holding up hunting as the sole legitimate use of guns sounded either ignorant or offensive or both.

  Still, the firearms industry recognized that the path to firearm legitimacy ran through hunting, and it was making a feverish attempt as I drove around Arizona to rebrand the AR-15 from “assault rifle” to “modern sporting rifle”—the firearm with which everybody was likely to be hunting in a few years. Most states didn’t allow people to hunt deer with the .223-caliber bullet that the basic AR-15 fired, but the cartridge was great for small game, and because of the gun’s unique modularity, it was easy to make it fire hunting-caliber cartridges. The website of the National Shooting Sports Foundation offered a video of a kindly old gent in flannel shirt and Elmer Fudd hat hefting a camo-painted AR. “Anti-gun folks insist on calling these rifles ‘assault weapons,’ to label these ‘bad guns,’ as opposed to more traditional-looking ‘good guns,’ ” he said, as soothingly as Wilford Brimley in a Quaker Oats commercial. “Truth is, it won’t be too long before lots of hunters call one of these rifles ‘Old Betsy.’ ”

  As I traveled around talking to gun guys, “modern sporting rifle”—or MSR—was becoming the new term of art for the AR-15. Though I never once heard anybody use the term while speaking, the gun press used it universally. It was easy to get the sense that a kind of race was under way: Could the AR-15 lose its assault-rifle stigma and become thoroughly legitimized as a modern sporting rifle before the forces of gun control could mount another assault-rifle ban?

  The truth was, a lot of gun-rights activists didn’t even consider hunters allies in the cause. They called them “Fudds” and dismissed them as dilettantes who lolled comfortably in their privileged status as the only legitimate gun users. Fudds couldn’t be bothered to raise a ruckus over handguns, concealed-carry rights, or the Second Amendment. As one gun-rights activist put it to me in an e-mail, “I don’t need phony gun owners, like the American Hunters and Shooters Association, muddying the waters.” What’s more, Fudds had dropped the ball on inducting a new generation into the gun life; the number of hunters was dropping, and their average age was increasing.

  Hunters were a diverse group, attracted to the sport for myriad reasons, and hunting was a lot more complicated—physically, socially, ethically, and spiritually—than I could have imagined before trying it. I came to it as a way back to guns, many years after leaving my high school air guns. It was, as they said, a legitimate way to keep guns in my life. I could feel their weight and shape in my hands as I walked the woods.

  My first hunt was in Georgia, in 1985. I’d crossed the Mason-Dixon line to take a job as a police reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, whose newsroom was a vast cavern of cigarette smoke, with green-screen computer terminals the size of small refrigerators. The Internet lurked just over the horizon, and newspapers like the Journal-Constitution were snoozing through the lazy, corrupt twilight of their media dominance. The city desk may have been anchored by good ol’ boys who packed their cheeks with tobacco and put salted peanuts in their Co’Cola, but the reporters with whom I spent my days were largely cynical, urban Yankee transplants like me.

  With nobody in my life who could teach me to hunt, I bought an ancient copy of How to Hunt Deer and Small Game, a 1959 hardcover full of terrific black-and-white photos of men in checkered duffel coats and Elmer Fudd hats trudging through the Maine snow. I pored over utterly unfamiliar concepts (“Slice through the anus-end of the lower intestine and carefully lift it free of the body cavity …”). I wasn’t sure if, when the moment came, I’d be able to kill a big mammal with a gun.

  The spindly Remington .22 I’d bought in college wouldn’t reliably knock a deer over and wasn’t legal for hunting, so I paid a pawnshop sixty-five dollars for one of the rifles I loved from old war movies: a British .303 Lee-Enfield, a blunt-nosed monster of wood, iron, and brass that was made in 1916 and weighed slightly less than a grand piano.

  Thus equipped, I drove south one autumn evening to the Oconee National Forest, expecting to pitch my little tent in the silent woods and wake in solitude before dawn of opening day. As my headlights swept the forest’s campground, though, I beheld the pandemonium of a miniature redneck Woodstock: dozens of tents pitched side by side, roaring camp-fires, gigantic jacked-up pickup trucks rumbling through, and hundreds of skinny white men whooping and hollering and passing around bottles of Evan Williams bourbon while boom boxes balanced on truck hoods blasted George Strait and Ronnie Milsap. This was obviously an annual ritual. I wedged my tent between two others and joined a nearby camp-fire. “Hey, man,” a ropy Confederate said, offering the bottle. “You from Atlanta, ain’t you.” To these guys, Atlanta—forty minutes away—was another planet; not quite Yankeeland, but close.

  “Worse, actually. I’m from New Jersey, and I live in Atlanta.”

  “Yankee boy!” one of the men laughed, spinning the cylinder on a long-barreled .357 revolver. “Well, you’re welcome here if what you come for is to hunt deer. That’s what we’re about tonight: hunting deer.”

  “I’m here to hunt deer,” I said. “But it’s my first time. What do I need to know?”

  Everybody started talking at once: You want to take and hold just back of the point of the shoulder. Spray your legs with this here deer estrus to mask your scent. Get you a place to sit while it’s still dark so you’re there when the sun first comes up. Deer can only see motion; sit still enough and they’ll walk right up on you. Get in a tree if you can; deer don’t look up. Cut the scent glands out the hind legs first thing so they can’t taint the meat, and then be sure to wash your knife. Keep the wind in your face. Watch you don’t cut the gut getting it out the deer or your meat will taste like shit.

  It was too much to absorb, especially with that bottle of Evan Williams going around, but what came through was how sincerely the guys wanted to initiate me into their world. A man who hadn’t grown up hunting must have been an oddity for them—and a Yankee certainly was—but they didn’t pay that any mind. What mattered was that someone wanted to know how to hunt, had bought himself a rifle and a fistful of deer tags, and had come to try it. They took me in like a kid brother, not in a condescending way but with tenderness and concern. What th
ey were doing, I’d come to understand years later, was recruiting. Like the baby-faced kid who would insist I shoot his AR-15, the guys in hunting camp were doing what they could to widen and strengthen the circle of gun guys—or at least of Fudds. When people talk about a “brotherhood of arms,” it isn’t just soldiers they mean.

  I finally staggered off to bed and woke in darkness to the tweedle-deet of my pocket alarm clock. The camp was stirring, bacon and coffee heavy in the air. I felt my way down a dirt road in blackness, walking for twenty minutes or so before turning into the woods. I crunched through the dry leaves until I guessed I’d put plenty of distance between me and everybody else. It felt like the heart of the forest primeval. By starlight I could make out a broad swale ahead of me. I sat with my back against a tree, with a good view of any animal that might pass.

  It took a long time for the sun to rise. An eerie mist rose from the rotting leaves. The squirrels began to stir and the birds to chirp. Voles scurried beneath fallen leaves. Gradually I discovered that I could see color—the yellow of the leaves on the forest floor, the bright orange of my vest, everything slowly morphing from shades of gray. I looked at my watch: 5:59. One minute to the start of my first-ever deer season.

  Out of nowhere, the woods exploded with gunfire—a great ripping wave roaring from every direction. It seemed that every man from the campsite had opened fire the second it was legal to do so, whether he had a target or not. I slid lower on the tree, lest a stray bullet find me. I heard a thump-rustle in the swale below, and trotting through, about seventy yards away, was a panicked yearling, no bigger than a German shepherd, looking to get out of the bullet storm. Like a cat on a mouse, I fixated. Whatever doubt I’d had about my ability to kill vaporized in a flash of predator energy. I’d come out to kill something, and here something was. I hoisted the Enfield to my shoulder and sighted on the deer’s rib cage. When I pulled the trigger, the gun thudded hard against me; the shot must have sounded, but it hardly registered. I looked over my gun barrel and the yearling was gone. Had I disintegrated the tiny animal with my enormous rifle? A second passed, and another thump-rustle in the brush told me he had fallen.

  I walked down the hill with my hand wrapped around my mouth in horror. The little deer lay with its front leg twisted under it, eyes open, stone still. A big red hole glowered from its rib cage like an angry third eye, and vivid red blood splashed the yellow leaves. My face was hot, as though I’d smashed a priceless vase; my first impulse was to run away in shame and tell nobody what I’d done. But I took a breath, removed the magazine from the rifle, and jacked the cartridge out of the chamber. Then I knelt beside the deer and did exactly what How to Hunt Deer and Small Game—and my drunken brothers from hunting camp—had taught me to do. It was remarkably easy, and very quickly the remorse and disgust I’d felt gave way to a sense of wonder at the complexity of a mammal’s anatomy and—as corny as it would have sounded to my colleagues in the newsroom—gratitude to the deer for letting me take him. The whole job took less than twenty minutes. I dragged him from the woods, laid him in the trunk of the car, drove him home, and, after a day of taking him apart, cooked him three different ways and held a dinner party at which my friends ate every bit of him.

  It’s one thing to handle guns and shoot them at paper targets. It’s another to blow a ragged, bloody hole through a large warm-blooded animal. A week later, in my capacity as a police reporter, I sat in on an autopsy and was dumbstruck at how similar we are, internally, to a white-tailed deer: same pink-and-purple organs, same striated meat. Shooting that deer changed my relationship to guns. I’d killed something with a firearm, which both connected me to guns’ history as tools and made me forever a dealer in gun death. I felt oddly freed to start buying them and discovered that I liked the ones from the early twentieth century. I found a 1918 British Webley revolver as a companion piece to my big Enfield, a 1942 Victory Model Smith & Wesson .38, and a Marlin pump-action shotgun from the Pinkerton strikebreaker era. Like a dope, I hung them on the wall of my Atlanta cottage, envisioning myself as the great outdoorsman, and was promptly burgled. For months, I imagined arriving at a homicide, reporter’s notebook in hand, to peer over a detective’s shoulder and find my Webley lying in a pool of blood.

  It was around this time that I fell in love with Margaret, who was also a reporter at the paper. She’d spent her childhood summers hiking the Sierras from a phoneless, unelectrified family cabin three miles from the nearest road, so her appetite for the woods was a given. I worried that my gun thing might be a problem for someone reared by Berkeley-educated Unitarian academics who worshiped at the altar of logic and reason. But I was encouraged when, on a hike, I pointed out a deer about the size of the one I’d shot, and she said, “Yum!”

  Margaret was not a girly girl. The second of four children, she’d spent her childhood trying to keep up with a big brother. It was encoded in her DNA: If the boys were doing it, she had to do it. On a reporting trip to southern Georgia, I wandered into a pawnshop looking for old, cheap guns, as usual, and found on the rack a beat-up .30-30 Winchester, the basic cowboy saddle rifle, for $140. Margaret had been a horse-crazy kid and had learned lots of cowboy songs on the guitar during her off-the-grid summers. I wondered if a gift of weaponry too early in the relationship might queer it, but the Winchester’s size and history seemed perfect.

  “I have something for you,” I told her that evening, and gingerly placed the rifle in her hands. “Cool!” she said, working the lever—click-clack—and sighting down the barrel. When I told her that she could learn to use it and come along hunting with me and the rednecks, whatever anti-gun instincts had been imprinted on her yielded to the need to keep up with the boys. We went to a range, and although the rifle’s concussion made her burst into tears after the third shot (“I’m okay, I’m okay”), she put ten bullets through a five-inch paper plate at a hundred yards.

  She wondered, as I had, whether she could bring herself to shoot a deer. “If, at the moment, you don’t want to,” I said, “don’t. This isn’t for everybody.” All the lead-up, though—packing gear, studying maps, learning regulations—she enjoyed. She drank bourbon with the rebs in hunting camp and rose the next morning in the dark without complaint. We trooped farther into the woods this time, to get away from the gunfire, and found a couple of spots along a narrow creek. It was a cold morning; I kept my ungloved hands away from the rifle’s metal parts as I waited for dawn. I blew on my fingers to keep them warm and ready, until finally, orange sunlight caught the frosted tips of the tall grass.

  Gunshot. Gunshot. I took off running. As I approached, Margaret called through the forest, with an admirable lack of euphemism, “I killed a deer.”

  She hadn’t—yet. The deer, which lay about fifty yards from where she had hidden, raised its head and looked at her. Beyond, frozen in wonder, stood the deer’s fawn. For the first time, Margaret was upended. “Which do I shoot?” she asked, her voice trembling.

  “Finish the one you shot,” I said, and lifted my rifle to shoot the fawn, which to my great relief bounded off into a motherless future. Hurrying, Margaret fired. Her deer kicked around in the leaves and sat back up. I aimed at the deer’s head, but Margaret said, “Let me.” She stepped in closer, held her rifle out in front of her with two hands like a pistol, looked the deer right in the eye, and fired again. The deer went over and didn’t move.

  “Whew,” Margaret said, panting clouds of steam, openmouthed and wide-eyed. We stood for a long moment saying nothing, then she sighed, jacked the remaining shell from her rifle, knelt beside the deer, and drew her knife. She ran her hand along the doe’s flank and said, “Soft.” She lifted its hind leg to roll it onto its back and began the incision. “Look,” she said, “she’s lactating.”

  Margaret worked with single-minded concentration, taking as long to gut her dead doe as it would have taken to perform a heart transplant on a live one. With her hands deep in the steaming cavity, she asked questions about the butchering. But when I
moved to help, she said, “I’ll do it. It’s kind of nice. She’s warm inside.”

  She’d had the same reaction I’d had on my first hunt. After she’d waited, listened, and watched, unmoving forever in the cold, something primal had taken over when the prey stepped into view. For better or worse, we of the twenty-first century are held to a much narrower range of animal emotion than our forebears. Few of our stresses involve death. When you shoot a mammal as big as you are and bury your hands in its hot viscera, your spiritual-emotional seismograph swings like crazy: raw, chest-beating triumph, horror, gratitude, pride, shame … It is a brief and tiny taste of what it means to be a link on the food chain. A mammal’s open eyes going cloudy as the life drains out, piles of steaming entrails on golden autumn leaves: Hunting is in a different category from tennis or windsurfing—or even other gun sports. You know you’re really into it when you walk up on your dead animal and your stomach rumbles.

  Thus did my childhood fascination with guns become my adult fascination with guns. I didn’t yet understand the many ways that hunting—and the guns essential to the enterprise—moved other people. But for me, guns had become entangled with death and the outdoors and the woman I eventually married.

  Mostly, I’ve hunted with a guy who doesn’t care much for guns at all. Craig Menteer was raised in the dark woods of Washington State by a logger father so strong, stocky, taciturn, and stubborn that behind his back his stepsons called him “the Stump.” He taught them everything there is to know about the woods—particularly how hard a man has to work to make them mean anything. Hunting trips with the Stump were businesslike affairs. The purpose was to gather meat, not clown around, drink, or show off. It wasn’t about the guns, either; it was about the woods—understanding them well enough to navigate without getting lost, finding animals, surviving the unexpected, taking home the bounty. Craig also earned an Eagle Scout badge, expanding his familiarity with ropes and tools and the ways of Northwestern nature.