After we satisfy ourselves with a thorough exploration of the church, we descend the stairs and get moving again.
The morning is well advanced by now, and the sun is hot on our bare arms as we move up the road. Cars occasionally roar past us, stirring up clouds of dust, and we wave at them with our thumbs out.
No one seems interested in picking up six barefoot boys with BB guns. I’ve calculated that it’s probably about a two-hour walk to Rosena Lake, and it’s a constant challenge to keep my fellow hoods focused on the mission. Squirrels lope across the road, provoking fruitless pursuit. Glass insulators need to be shot. Or sometimes it’s a big wasp nest. Wedged in the crook of a tree, like a lady’s hat, a wasp nest is a provocation that can’t be ignored. When the first BBs hit the nest, the wasps come boiling out. It takes them a few moments to determine why little holes are being punched in their structure. But then they send out scouting parties, and even if you’re a hundred feet from the nest, you’re going to be sorry when they find you.
Farther on, there’s a bend in the road where, many years ago, someone spilled a trailer load of rotted lumber or plasterboard. Instead of loading it back onto the trailer, he just flung the trash into the ravine. Eventually that particular bend in the road became an accepted place to jettison garbage and is now known as the dump. There’s no official sign indicating that this place is a dumping site. But when you get within about fifty yards, the bad smell floating up from the ravine lets you know you’ve arrived.
The dump is such a compelling spot that our mission to Rosena gets delayed while we check it out. It’s usually deserted, with no signs of life except a few ravens flapping around in the pit. With our guns resting in the crooks of our arms we stand in silence on the lip of the pit for a few moments, soaking up the atmosphere. A few garbage bags are lying on the very edge, left there by people who are too frightened of bears to walk to the edge and throw them in. We throw the bags two-handed to get maximum destruction as they crash down the slope. Then we climb down after them. The sun is high overhead by now, and the motionless, super-heated air of summer is so fouled with the smell of decomposition that we have to screw up our faces to breathe.
Down in the ravine the ground is drenched with chemicals, pools of green fluid scummed with dead insects. Ravens fly overhead, croaking in alarm. Walking around, we look for things to shoot. The dump is a target-rich environment, littered with unbroken windows, whisky bottles, and tin cans. The best target of all is the Franklin’s ground squirrel. The Franklin’s is a tough and resilient little animal, and a direct hit in the body isn’t enough to disable one. They know us, and it’s hard to get a shot at them because their sentries issue a shrill warning call as soon as they spot us. As we stalk through the ravine, the gophers scold us from their hiding places, making high-pitched hysterical titters.
All summer we’ve been trying to bag a gopher. Sometimes we encircle the dump in a pincer movement, communicating with each other with birdy whistles and hand gestures. The suspense heightens as we draw closer, belly-crawling through the rusted cans and straggly weeds. At the very edge of the crater, we mount our guns and scrutinize the detailed walls of the pit, watching for any tell-tale movement that might, with the blink of an eye, magically transform itself into the slinky body of a foraging gopher.
Inevitably, something goes wrong. In the relationship between hunter and prey, the odds overwhelmingly favour the prey. According to my library books, wolves have the devil of a time bringing down a moose. African lions fail nine times out of ten. Human hunters are even less effective, and feminist anthropologists like Adrienne Zihlman have proven that hunter-gatherer cultures relied less on hunting, which is done by men, than on gathering, which is done by women. The Indians who used to live around here probably wouldn’t have wasted their time hunting at all if an occasional kill didn’t yield such a bounty of protein. Five hundred pounds of moose meat, cut into thin strips and dried in the sun, would feed an extended family for months.
Even gophers exceed our ability as hunters, and most of the time a snapped twig or an incautious whisper triggers a mad chorus of warning calls. Our stalks fail in curious and hard-to-predict ways, and the manner in which they fail is almost as interesting as the stalk itself. On one occasion, for example, we make it all the way to the garbage pit without triggering a warning call. With anxious hearts, we take up sniper positions on the edge of the pit and lie in silence, waiting for an unsuspecting gopher to show itself.
Finally, on the garbage slope below me, a gopher slinks out from underneath a broken railway tie. Standing upright in that oddly serpentine way, it searches the area for danger. As I carefully take aim and squeeze the trigger, a paper wasp – probably one of the same wasps whose nest we destroyed a week ago – lands on my neck and decides to sting me. As the wasp pumps venom into my skin, I’m slowly pulling the trigger. The BB is already travelling down the barrel at 450 feet per second when the pain receptors in my neck light up. The barrel twitches and the BB flies a few inches astray and strikes the railway tie head-on. The tiny metal spheroid pushes into the tar-saturated fibre of the railway tie for a millisecond or two, rebounds, then flies back towards me at near-full velocity, striking me in the centre of the forehead.
Yelping in pain, I clutch at both injuries, on my neck and forehead. The forehead wound is worse and produces a wee spot of blood. If the pellet had hit me an inch or two lower, it would have embedded itself in my eye and blinded me for life, a fact that everyone in the gang finds hilarious, including me.