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As I sat in my recliner with a murder mystery novel open in my hand, a gnat landed on the page. I hesitated slightly before squishing it. In that tiny moment I weighed the transgression, passed judgment and ended its life.
"It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have," spake Clint Eastwood's character in the classic western film "Unforgiven."
A gnat is not a man. But it is a life.
Thinking about the moral and practical implications of taking or sparing lives is not new to me. What's new is I've taken it down to the gnat level. Is this a function of growing old, or just of me growing old?
The Robinson boys and I perpetrated acts of youthful cruelty such as cooking crawdads in coffee cans over campfires just to see them turn red. When I was in 4-H, I felt some remorse when catching and killing butterflies, moths, beetles and other beautiful, interesting insects for my 4-H entomology projects. I excused myself on grounds that I was learning identification. In a few short years tiny beetles found their way inside the display boxes and ate the bodies of their fellow insects, leaving nothing of my marvelous collections but dust and empty pins.
When I was a boy I got a Daisy BB gun, and of course I wanted to shoot something. After holding a few dead sparrows in my hand, soaking in their beauty, thinking of how they dance through the air, and feeling the warmth fading from their bodies, I gave up shooting birds. I never shared that story with my father-in-law. He was an avid "birder" who taught me bird identification and made me a birder, too.
When our children were small we took them to state parks and viewed picturesque herds of whitetail deer, but when I began serious gardening and pumpkin farming I bought a deer rifle. Our home is up a holler on the ancestral Miller farm, and I hunt from the porch. My brother-in-law, the missionary who hunts deer in the normal way, told me, "You're not a hunter, you're a killer."
He's right. I do not stalk deer. I care not whether it's a buck or a doe. I get no joy from killing them. I pull the trigger knowing this deer, at least, won't be devouring my crops. I hate it when a deer is only wounded and lays there looking at me, its eyes seeming to say, "You're going to kill me now, aren't you?" I feel guilty, but answer, "Yes, I am."
In the opening scene of the film "Last of the Mohicans," the Indian Chingachgook asks forgiveness from the elk just killed, calling him brother, praising his strength and courage, and explaining their need for food. I have apologized to deer I killed, and, so long as they looked remorseful, to raccoons live-trapped in my sweet corn patch.
The other day I apologized to a nest of wasps I sprayed, near where I was working on my house from a ladder. They had not offered to sting me, but were watching. I of course have no qualms in killing mosquitoes, ticks and other pests, and praise the cats when they show me a mouse or chipmunk they captured around the house or barn. Yet lately when I see a field mouse run for its life in the path of my lawnmower, I steer away from it, when in the past I might well have steered to kill it.
Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote "To a Mouse" after his plough turned up its nest: "Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim'rous beastie, O, what a panic's in thy breastie!. . . Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin . . . An' weary Winter comin' fast, An' cozie here, beneath the blast, Thou thought to dwell."
These days I collect butterflies with a camera, and teach the grandsons their insects by photos and catch-and-release. I stop and stoop to help woolly bear caterpillars across the driveway, and box turtles across Gas Valley Road.
I should state I am in favor of capital punishment. A U.S. Army major killed 13 fellow soldiers in an act of terror, violating his sworn oaths. He took everything each of these people had, and everything they were ever going to have. He wants to be a martyr. I say help him out. Death by firing squad is better than having prison medicos botch a simple drug overdose. My wife, a retired veterinarian, put down many pets with a compassionate needle, and cried with the owner every (almost every) time. She can't understand how prison executioners flub the job. Last year 70,000 people in the U.S. died from overdose, most probably unintentional though not really a surprise.
However, these are human lives, and the how and why that they are cut short is tangled up in law, ethics, conscience and religious beliefs, much bigger questions to ponder than the squishing of a gnat.
Still, each is a life, and to take or to spare when it is within my power increasingly causes me to hesitate.