Last Hunter: An American Family Album

Chapter Five

34 35 Chapter Four T he possibility of shooting accidents are part of the territory of gun ownership. However, for people who grow up with guns and know how to use them, the chance of a shooting accident is on the order of drawing a royal flush in a poker game. Which happens. When I was eight or nine, I was snooping in the bottom of my father’s little red-­ cedar handkerchief box, where I found a small, misshapen slug. It looked like a squashed cricket. The flattest side of the lead had a fine, thread-­ like pattern. Curiosity ruled, and I took it to my father. My father looked up (he was working or reading the newspaper—doing something). He squinted. “That’s a .22 slug,” he said. “Your uncle Emery shot me in the knee with it. Not his fault, though—it ricocheted off the railroad tracks.” I held the slug closer to my eyes. “You can see the pattern of my pants in the lead,” he said. It was true—the tiny weave of threads. “Did it hurt?” 36 will weaver “Not that bad,” my father said, returning to his business at hand. “Though he had to carry me home, and then we both got a whipping before we went to town. Dr. Higgs took it out. It was stuck under my kneecap.” I would guess that he also got a whipping for the time his own .22 rifle went off in the house. The bullet hit the glass eye of a taxidermy deer head hung high on the wall, then glanced across the room, narrowly missing my grandmother . Boys playing with guns. The old, twice-­ shot buck hangs in the mudroom of my house, banished there by my wife, who has set an upper limit of deer heads (two) in our living room and who finds the one-­ eyed deer slightly creepy. I have found it useful to show to small boys wild to shoot guns and kill things: the blank eye always gets their attention. My second cousin David was less fortunate than my father. David’s gun accident involved a shotgun that slid off a tractor he was driving; the gun detonated and blew a hole in his side. The shotgun was a .410, the smallest bore, with shells about the size of a man’s pinky finger. David had loaded his gun with light bird load, or “fine shot,” which in the end might have worked against him; a single bullet, his doctor said, is always easier to deal with. Everette Duthoy, md, is a silver-­ haired, soft-­ spoken man, a doctor’s doctor, now retired. He did various stitchings on me when I was a boy, and in our small town we all knew him well. After speaking with David, I wrote Dr. Duthoy about the mishap and what he remembered—what, professionally speaking, he could tell me. He quickly got in touch. “What do I remember about Dave’s accident?” he replied by letter. “Well, just about every­ thing. Those kinds of cases do not come along often in the practice of a country doctor. Thank goodness.” the last hunter 37 He wrote about David’s “acute belly, indicating peritonitis and ruptured internal organs.” How he operated as soon as an anesthetist could be found and worked on the “lacerated right kidney, penetrating wounds of the liver and diaphragm with multiple foreign bodies impregnating the liver and abdomen.” How there were bile and blood filling the abdominal cavity, and how he had to remove clothing and other foreign bodies from the wound, stop the bleeding, and repair the holes in the diaphragm, liver, and kidney, “which was no small task for a small town GP surgeon.” How it was lucky that Dave was young and healthy to begin with, because post-­ op he had a stomach tube, antibiotics, and ivs, and ten days later a sudden high fever from an infection. “He lost about 30 pounds,” Dr. Duthoy wrote, “and was hospitalized for a month. Our bill for the surgeries and hospital care was $350. His mother came to the office to thank me and write a check for the total amount. I thanked her and stated that I lost a lot of sleep worrying about Dave.” And then there was my great-­ uncle. Below is his obituary , which I include here both for its cautionary tale (fences...