Last Day on Earth by David Vann Read Free Book Online Page A

father’s boat, trapped and shot. Antlers I found in the rain forest behind our house, moose and mountain goat and Dall’s rams that my father felt were too small to keep. Running through that rain forest at four years old, I imagined I was being chased by bear or wolf, sometimes falling through the false second floor of branches and ferns and decay, disappearing completely, climbing back out in panic. Always holding a toy gun or even just a piece of wood shaped like a gun.
    At six or seven, in Northern California, my father finally gave me a Sheridan Bluestreak pellet rifle, powerful enough to kill squirrels if I hit them behind the shoulder. The giving of the gun was a ritual, my father’s pride and pleasure as he showed me how to pump the gun, how to pull back the bolt. He even read a poem from Sturm, Ruger & Co. about a father and son, used it to teach me safety: never point a gun at anyone, always assume a gun is loaded but never leave a gun loaded, always keep the barrel pointed down. This was very soon after he and my mother had divorced, and we had only the weekends now. Roaming his ninety-acre ranch near Lakeport, California, one of those weekends, I didn’t realize the rifle was pumped and loaded, and it firedas I walked. Luckily the barrel was pointed at the ground. But my father turned around, the disappointment clear on his face, and my shame was nearly unbearable.
    The next year, when I was eight, he gave me a 20-gauge shotgun for hunting dove and quail. It made the squirrels easy, too, though I had some bad moments, shot a squirrel high up in the trees once, only wounded, and it actually screamed as it leaped from branch to branch. I shot twice more, but the single-shot gun was slow and the squirrel kept getting farther away and just kept screaming, in terrible pain. For some reason, though, this didn’t turn me away from guns but felt like part of the grim reality of growing up, inevitable, as if this type of experience were a given that couldn’t be turned away from. As if we were put here to hunt and kill, and the only true form of a day was to head off with a gun and a dog, hike into the hills for ten or twelve hours, and return with meat and stories. That shotgun became an extension of my body, carried everywhere, the solid heft of it, cold metal, a sense of purpose and belonging. I gazed at it in the evenings, daydreamed of it during the week at school, looked forward to when I’d head out again.
    When I was nine my father gave me a .30-.30 Winchester lever-action carbine, the rifle used in all the westerns, and he went down on one knee when he presented it to me, holding it in both hands, as if it were a ceremonial sword. “This is the rifle I learned on,” he said. “This is what we pass down through the family. The rifle I hunted with when I was a boy, the rifle I shot my first buck with, the rifle you’ll shoot your first buck with. It’s a good gun, an honest gun, with only a peep sight, no scope. You won’t be shooting long range, and you’ll need to hit the buck behind the shoulder.”
    He moved back to Alaska then, and when I visited, we flew into a remote lake by float plane, camped on a glacier, and slept with our rifles loaded, a shell in the chamber, beside our sleeping bags. “If a bear comes,” he told me, “the bullet from a .30-.30 will only bounce off his skull or bury in his chest and not do anything. You’ll have to hit him in the eye or in the mouth if he roars.” There was no moon. We were the only humans for a couple hundred miles, and I lay awake imagining the bear attacking my father in the middle of the night while I tried tosight in on an eye in the darkness. This felt like the nature of our relationship: I saw him only during vacations now, and he would give me tasks that felt impossible, including making up for lost time. We were supposed to cram half a year into a week.
    I shot my first buck at eleven. A rainy weekend in September 1978, on the White Ranch,