After dark one late Summer evening when I was 22, my live-in girlfriend burst into the kitchen via the back door as she arrived home from work and then beckoned me to come quickly. She led me to the road. Just past our driveway and down the road, there was an injured pheasant hen on the pavement. I approached it. There was no reaction. The bird looked ruffled and sort of pathetic. It seemed to be in shock. Familiar with handling chickens from when I grew up, I picked it up and recognized that it was paralyzed from the neck down. When we figured this out, my girlfriend said we needed to put it out of its misery. I felt her panic and somehow sensed compassion in her eyes. She asked me to follow her with the bird, then ran into the house where she grabbed a small paper bag. She returned to me and put the bag over the bird's head. Then, she asked me to kill it and turned to go back into the house.
The bag made the bird go even more calm. I quickly wrung the pheasant’s neck. It was one of the hardest things I'd ever done. A pheasant is an invasive species, but that's beside the point.
Mercy
Killing something with my bare hands. I'll never forget that feeling.
Compassion and confusion
We wrapped it tightly in a sealed bag and put it in the freezer. Even if there was nothing we could do to save it, we could donate it to a fisherman. The feathers were valuable for fly tying.
Waste not
While she was waiting to turn into our drive, an on-coming car hit the bird and proceeded on its merry way.
Aftermath
A few weeks later, I quit my job. I had money saved, so I could still pay my share. Then, my car died. Two months later, we broke up. A couple weeks after that, just as my savings were about to run out, I found a much better job. We never found a home for the carcass. I moved out.
At 22, it’s easy to think crazy things: This is just a spat. I don’t need a new job before I quit the old one. This doesn’t have anything to do with the bird. The stone tool artifacts we found lying around were from chert quarries hundreds of miles away. The paleontology survey team found no evidence of native occupation on the land where our rented house sat. The broken stone artifacts were collector’s discards, worthless, and haunted as is their wont from being disturbed.
Mercy for me would be long in coming.