“The Trail to Pulliam Peak”
"Man is the only animal who causes pain to others with no other object than wanting to do so."
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788- 1860)
It’s a cold, foggy and misty December morning just after daybreak in the deep brush country of Southwest Texas on the old Walcott Ranch in Webb County. A young deer hunter is slowly walking down a cow trail in the Mule Pasture. He is hunting the way he has been taught by slowly and silently walking in the sand of the trail. As he comes to a clearing in the brush and cactus, he stops behind a bush and waits while watching the clearing. He knows that wild animals watch for movement, so he waits motionless behind the bush waiting for an animal to move before he does.
Nothing moves, so he moves on across the clearing and works his way to the next clearing. A coyote barks and then howls just ahead beyond some mesquite trees.
The young hunter walks even more slowly and cautiously. The cow trail winds its way through a dense whitebrush thicket. As the young hunter comes to the next clearing, again he stops behind a bush and waits. It is so quiet; he can hear his own pulse in his ears. He waits and watches.
After waiting a few minutes, he sees a slight movement ahead in the fog. He watches and the movement becomes a coyote trotting down the trail toward him. Just after the coyote becomes clearly visible, he stops to smell a small bush beside the trail. Probably another coyote had left his scent on the bush.
The young hunter watches the coyote intently. He is making a god-like decision. He is deciding whether or not this coyote will live or die in the next few moments. For no other reason than that deer hunting this morning had been fruitless and he wanted to do something, he decides that the coyote will die.
As the coyote concentrates on the scent on the small bush, the young hunter raises his Winchester Model 94 .30 / .30 and quickly puts the front sight, a pearl bead, in the grove of the back sight. Quickly the pearl bead is lined up with the back sight grove and the spot just behind the elbow of the coyote’s shoulder and the hunter squeezes his finger and “KABAMMM!!!!” the rifle kicks into his shoulder.
The young hunter is a good marksman and seldom misses. The coyote is knocked down on his side and his feet are kicking trying to run, but he can’t.
The young hunter walks slowly up to the dying coyote and watches. He had shot the coyote just where he had aimed. Bright red oxygen-rich blood is oozing out of the bullet hole. The coyote’s mouth is wide open as he gasps for breath. His eyes are staring straight ahead. He continues to gasp and is choking in his own blood.
He is no longer kicking to run; the gasping and choking slows and then stops. The coyote is dead. The bright red blood continues to ooze out of the bullet hole.
The young hunter looks at his victim and admires the beauty of the coloring of its fur. The different shading of yellows, reds, browns with accents of white and black. He thinks about what he has just done. He has just killed a fellow creature on this earth. For the first time in his young life, he questions whether or not he should have shot this animal.
All the people that he knows: his family and friends will endorse what he has just done and pat him on the back. All the magazines that he reads, such as Outdoor Life, in their stories and advertisements, promote the killing of predators such as coyotes. The federal, state and county agencies have programs that promote the killing of coyotes. His Sunday school teacher at The First Baptist Church had taught him that God had made all the animals on earth for the use of humans, the children of God.
Yet as he looked at the dead coyote, he began to look at the things the coyote had that he also had. They both had a nose with two nostrils, a mouth with lips, teeth, a tongue, two eyes, two ears, a skull, a brain and thinking system, a neck, skin and hair, a back bone, a very similar skeleton, a heart and blood system, lungs, stomach, kidneys, liver, entrails, four limbs, two elbows, two knees, toe nails, an anus and genitals.
The only differences were that the coyote had a tail and he didn’t and he had fingers and thumbs that the coyote didn’t and he walked on two limbs instead of all four limbs.
The image of that coyote gasping and choking for breath would live on in the mind of the young hunter and would be replayed countless times throughout his life. The last time, was sixty years later after that fateful cold foggy morning, when he was drawing and painting the two coyotes in the painting above, titled The Trail to Pulliam Peak.
The young hunter slowly matured and began to question whether or not, he, as an animal on this earth, had the right to kill another animal just because he wanted to. With time, he came to the conclusion that he did not have that right and furthermore, he, as an animal with the ability to reason and blessed with thumbs, had a responsibility for the other animals and creatures on this earth.
Cheers,
Acree
P.S. I have been invited to give a talk on my drawings, paintings and writings at the Flower Mound Public Library, in Flower Mound, Texas , on Saturday, May 30 th, at 1:00 PM. Y’all come.
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