Is this how it feels to take a life? Guilt. Remorse. Regret. Yet… given the same circumstances, I know I’d do it again? In my mind, the scene is replayed over and over. Her death cries cackle in the dusk of night. It’s the sound of resignation. She knows she’s dying and she is calling out to her friends. Where is her protector? Scared away. She was left alone. Cornered. Left to die by my vile hands and the untrained hands of my kin. I feel pretty bad about killing that chicken. I imagine I would feel mortal guilt had I really murdered a human being.
The fighting cock and his harem of hens were just being what they were. By that I mean they roamed from yard to yard and pecked at whatever morsel they could find. This usually meant they ate at my mom’s plants. Annoyed, my mom requested “hired guns”. This meant my little cousin with his BB gun. Yeah… premeditated murder with a BB gun. It would be hilarious if we hadn’t shot so many pellets into that defenseless hen. Oh, we got that rooster good, too. But, in the end, it was one of the three hens that ended up being cornered. It tried to hide in my orange trees, but it kept on crowing. So, we could locate its position. We shot, recocked, and shot again until the hen couldn’t crow anymore.
The worse part about this situation wasn’t that we killed a chicken. It was how we went about killing her. With a BB gun. How can anyone kill anything with a BB gun? Getting shot over fifty times, some at point blank, might do the trick. It was immoral.
Asked again, I probably would not do it. However, after that first shot… fuck. After that first shot, I got the kill frenzy in me. Adrenaline was pumping through my veins and there was that high… that thrill of the hunt. And, I just could… not… stop… until that damn hen was dead. Like Lord of the Flies, where the band of kids with their thin little pricks, cornered and poked at the female boar until she died. In this case, we kept on shooting our load into the hen until she couldn’t take it anymore.
What a weekend. Something that was supposed to be fun turned out to be an event that reserved me a spot on the first level of Hell.