The next time I went out shooting with my father I pulled the head off a wood pigeon.
Snap.
Its bones didn’t so much as crack as sort of just tear. Skin mottled under feathers jostled by my pubescent, bloody fingers, inexperienced but determined to prove that I could do other things besides piss the bed. A cute trickle of blood courted its beak while its eyes bulged in terror and anticipation. It was only a little thing. But then, so was I. My shotgun, smaller size, still managed to shoot this pigeon out of the sky as it tried to come in to land amongst the decoys my father had set out, after perusing his shooting textbook for twenty minutes.
‘We won’t throw it in the bag,’ my father told me. ‘We’ll keep it out there, ready.’
‘Why?’ I asked him.
‘To lure others in,’ he said. ‘We’ll hold him up in the cradle.’
“The first time I held you, when you were born,
you were perfect: so sweet and so pure.”
‘But, you see,’ said my father, not quite the same colour as a tree, ‘You’ve not quite killed it.’ The bird was flopping around in the stubble. ‘Do you think it’s a boy or a girl?’ I asked.
‘Doesn’t matter, just grab it.’
I climbed out of the hide we’d spent the last hour constructing in the far northern hedgerow of one of the fields behind our house, about two-and-a-half miles from the barn my brother and I had burned down. ‘Wait,’ said my father, double barrelled, pointing to my .410 while I was halfway out of the entrance, ‘break that first, young man.’
So I broke it, passed it to him, walked out into the field, which we chose because it had been recently harvested, twenty yards, feeling naked without the gun and wondering if my brother was watching me from somewhere through a telescopic sight.
‘When you kill a pheasant this way,’ said my father, ‘it’s quicker to grab it round the neck, just below the head, with your thumb and your forefinger touching, then spin the body round sharply. Its own weight will snap the necessary vertebrae in its neck. Much like that rabbit you killed the other day.’
‘Okay.’
‘Except a pigeon is much smaller. Put your hands together around its neck so that they’re touching, then twist as you pull them apart.’ This only seemed to strangle the bird, slowly. Its eyes bulged garishly, blood rejecting the beak and escaping to the ground. When the head came off my father said, ‘Well,’ in a shrugging sort of way. ‘Don’t worry about that.’ Then he took the corpse from me, attaching it to the cradle (head included, though strangely inclined). After breaking his own gun and passing it to me, he climbed out of the hide, walked twenty yards back into the field and placed the cradle in the decoy formation we’d already laid down. The cradle had a long string attached to it which, when pulled from a distance, flapped the bird’s wings for it.
‘That should bring more in,’ said my father.