We woke up Christmas morning and began attempting to decipher exactly what grandpa wanted to do that day. A lucid 83 years old and ex-politician, he certainly could have been more clear about his plans and desires. His nephew had heard him mention something, an aunt and uncle agreed, Brenda’s dad contributed his concurrence; unfortunately it was all the same one-word clue: “doves”.
Gradually, a mini-legend formed—I’m not sure who planted the seed—that there was some place in the surrounding mountains, some unknown sanctuary, where doves were aplenty. People began to agree that they had all heard of it at some point in the past. Maybe he wanted to go see them… or hunt them? I began to picture some sort of majestic cliff face where we would arrive after a drive along secret mountain roads, and be engulfed in flocking, swirling, cooing Mother Nature.
As morning wore on to afternoon, the legend remained a legend and the plan evolved into driving out to grandpa’s sugarcane ranch (a huge vast thicket of impenetrable sugarcane bounded by dirt roads and irrigation ditches) to hunt doves. The men began to prepare: disassembled pistol in its little suitcase, .22 rifle in a zippered leather sheaf, shotgun with a throw rug wrapped around it, all loaded into a minivan from the early 90’s. We were 6; five ranch-raised Mexicans—grandpa, son, son-in-law, two nephews—plus a gringo. I did my best to silently feign the appearance that I too was raised on a ranch, that I had possibly killed and eaten (or at least harvested) a majority of my meals, that I believed sunrise-to-sunset backbreaking work was the only way to make a living, that my earliest memory as a child was of firing a gun—and striking my target. I also tried not to bite my fingernails on the way over.
At one point they asked me how many doves I thought we should bring home. I think I revealed myself as a novice when I replied that since doves are quite small we would probably need two apiece, so that’s 12, and then if we happen to kill more we can share them with the family.
For the record, 83-year-old grandpa is STILL a prizewinning pistolero. Apparently he enters this citywide contest every year and shames the latest generation of cocky young guns. I personally saw his trophies from last year. His specialty is a contest where they put live chickens, bound by ropes that are tied to posts in the ground, which serve as targets at certain distances. As the story goes, grandpa then comes home with a whole bundle of dead chickens, drops them on the ground at the women’s feet, and mumbles something like “we eat at seven-thirty”.
So that’s the set-up. I can summarize the whole dove-hunting experience in one sentence: we didn’t even SEE one, not one damn dove.
However, birds galore. At one point one of the cousins shot one out of a tree just for the hell of it. I ran to it and watched it flounder around for a while, picked it up and inspected it; it appeared that it would continue to fight for survival for some time. We left it where it fell, declaring a guilty man’s justification for the senseless killing: since something’s going to come along and eat it, it really isn’t that bad. Feeling like I too could now kill with a clear conscience, I took up the shotgun and decided that I’d give my mark a sporting chance and try to pick a bird out of the air, hit one in mid-flight. After multiple do-or-die moments in which the safety was on or some other thing got locked up (etc) I finally fired erratically at what appeared to be a swallow swooping low over the sugarcane. For the record, I’m 99% I didn’t even come close to hitting it, but I nevertheless returned with the news that I may have killed a bird but there was just no way of knowing since it would have fallen into the untraversable sugarcane.
The real hunting began on the ride home.
A feeling of unsuccessfulness hung heavy as we piled into the minivan for the ride home, in which we would drive mostly along dirt roads that border irrigation canals, much like those in the delta farmland of California. The discomfort of failure meant that we naturally had the windows down; the desire to redeem ourselves conceived a complementary and growing desire to kill something—anything; and as it was now late afternoon, these black, somewhat evil-looking iguanas had come out of their burrows to sun themselves. The first one we saw was on our side of the drainage ditch and a mere 6 feet from grandpa’s passenger side window. He hurriedly opened his little pistol suitcase, assembled, loaded, aimed, and fired point blank out the van window. There’s no doubt that he hit it, but his bullet was merciful and allowed the iguana to at least scurry back into his hole. The next one we saw was a bit farther away, and on the driver’s side. Luckily our driver, Brenda’s cousin, preferred to drive with a shotgun over his lap in place of a seatbelt. This made it quite easy for him to park, take aim, and fire (again from within the car); despite my resolution to appear manly, I jumped when the shotgun discharged about 2 feet from my face. This time our prey died more or less instantly if you don’t count the ten minutes of reptilian, involuntary twitching. I put the moving carcass in a plastic bag and returned it to the minivan where we gleefully discussed how we were going to cook it and eat it. Images of the show “Eaten Alive” began flashing through my mind, where a first-world traveler either eats third-world food or some undercooked wild animal and finds out years down the line that a whole plethora of parasites have been feasting on his insides ever since. I played along, honestly curious about exactly how this would go down, but determined that wild iguana flesh was not going to come anywhere near my mouth. We never cooked it, never even touched it after returning home. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the iguana carcass is rotting away, still in the grocery bag that’s hanging from the tree in the middle of grandpa’s courtyard.
