Sports Night — The Hungry and the Hunted
Isaac: What the hell happened out there?
Jeremy: It was nothing.
Dana: It was not nothing.
Jeremy: I got sick, I threw up.
Dana: They took you to a hospital. You passed out.
Jeremy: I told them they didn’t have to take me to—
Dana: Bob Shoemaker said you were sweating and hyperventilating.
Jeremy: It was hot outside.
Dana: Not in the Adirondacks in October.
Jeremy: Look—
Isaac: Tell us about your hunting trip.
Jeremy stands silent for a long moment. Dana and Isaac wait.
Dana: The first day you were going after New England Blue Mallard.
Jeremy: Yeah. Bob and Eddie were using the IR-50 Recon by Bushcomber. It’s got a sixteen inch microgrooved barrel with 30-30 mags, side-scope mount, wire-cutter sheath, quick-release bolt, mag catches and a three pound trigger. So I figured we must be goin’ after a pretty dangerous duck.
Isaac: You can wise-ass all you want, you’re gonna tell me what happened.
Jeremy: We shot a deer.
Dana and Isaac wait for more…
Jeremy (cont’d): In the woods near Lake Mattatuck on the second day. There was a special vest they had me wear so that they could distinguish me from things they wanted to shoot and I was pretty grateful for that. Almost the whole day had gone by and they hadn’t gotten anything. Eddie was getting frustrated and Bob Shoemaker was getting embarrassed. My camera guy needed to re-load so I told everybody to take a ten minute break. There was a stream nearby and I walked over with this care-package that Natalie made me. I sat down and when I looked up I saw three of them; small, bigger, biggest. Recognizable to any species on the face of the planet as a child, a mother and a father. The trick in shooting deer is you gotta get ‘em out in the open. And it’s tough with deer, ‘cause these are clever, cagey animals with an intuitive sense of danger. You know what you have to do to get a deer out in the open? You hold out a twinkie. (Beat) That animal clopped up to me like we were at a party. She seemed to be pretty interested in the Twinkie, so I gave it to her. Looking back, she’d have been better off if I’d given her the damn vest. Bob kind of screamed at me in whisper to move away. The camera had been re-loaded and it looked like the day wasn’t gonna be a washout after all. So I backed away, a couple of steps at a time, and closed my eyes when I heard the shot. Look, I know these are animals and they don’t play bridge and go to the prom, but you can’t tell me that the little one didn’t know who his mother was. That’s gotta mean something. Later, at the hospital, Bob Shoemaker was telling me about the nobility and tradition of hunting and how it related to the native American Indians. And I nodded and said that was interesting while thinking about what a load of crap it was. Hunting was part of Indian culture. It was food and it was clothes and it was shelter. They sang and danced and offered prayers to the Gods for a successful hunt so that they could survive just one more unimaginably brutal winter. Things they had to kill held the highest place of respect for them, and to kill for fun was a sin. And they knew the Gods wouldn’t be so generous the next time. What we did wasn’t food and it wasn’t shelter and it sure wasn’t sports. It was just mean.
