Who knew removing creatures from our earthly
kingdom could be so much fun!
It’s a hair past five in the morning and I’m crouched
behind a cinder block wall on my back patio waiting for a
rooster to step out from the cover of our lychee tree. By Kauai
standards it’s freezing, hovering somewhere in the low sixties, but
I’m shirtless, being eaten alive by mosquitoes.
My shoe-less feet squelch in unidentified muck (I really need to
clean up out here) and a pair of too-big shorts, hastily pulled
from the clothes hamper in my mad dash to kill this fucking bird,
are falling off my ass, revealing more succulent flesh on which the
hovering skeeters can feast.
I’m hunkered down on the balls of my feet, calves starting to
scream, barely able to make out the silhouette of the bird over the
lip of the wall. The shadow hops to a branch above, seeking a
higher vantage point from which to watch over its harem. It
freezes, alert to the fact there’s a predator somewhere nearby. I
slowly drop behind the wall and count to thirty. My six-month
campaign to murder every crowing nuisance with the temerity to set
foot on my property has done little to reduce the local rooster
population. The sheer number of feral fowl means that killing one
only serves to open new territory for landless adolescents to
seize.
Perhaps my efforts only serve to cull the dumb. Maybe I’d be
better off leaving a single rooster to establish a domain within my
yard, patrolling its boundaries and driving off interlopers. Maybe
I should just learn to live with a tiny dinosaur that spends its
days screaming its ownership of my domain. Maybe.
I’d much rather sit in the cold and wait for it to turn, to
present an opportunity at either the head or the area between its
shoulder blades, to drop it in a single shot. Failing that I’ll
hurl this .177 cal hollow point pellet at 1200 feet per second
through the center of its body and leave it to die a slow death in
the underbrush. Not exactly humane, but I’m far past such concerns.
Dead is dead, and the local environment will break it down into its
constituent parts before it has a chance to stink.
According to local lore the feral rooster population on Kauai is
a result of Hurricane Iniki, which in 1992 tore through the
Hawaiian archipelago doing nearly 2 billion dollars worth of
damage. The majority of devastation was on Kauai, thousands left
homeless and the entire island forced to live without electricity
for months. The hurricane also freed countless roosters, bred for
local cockfighting rings, into the verdant wilderness that
comprises the majority of the land. They reproduced at an explosive
rate and nowadays it’s impossible to set foot anywhere on the
island without seeing a dozen of them running around, standing
watch over their hens and chicks or fighting for dominance in a gas
station parking lot.
With the exception of exceptionally courageous feral cats and
the odd pig-hunting dog lost to eke out an existence in the hills
until it’s killed by starvation and parasites, the birds have no
predators. Further exacerbating the situation are soft-hearted
fools who would seek to protect the birds, claiming that they add a
quaint charm to the island. Which I suppose they do, if your only
exposure comes during the three weeks a year you spend in your
Hanalei vacation rental.
But those are the type of people who feed feral cats at a local
park, the kind who ask, “Why don’t you just trap them?” as though
tricking a large vicious bird into a cage somehow eliminates the
need to wring its neck and drive its corpse to the dump.
I know that I have no real chance of victory, that every rooster
I kill just allows another to thrive. I’m little more than a
sanguinary Sisyphus, following Camus’s exhortation and reveling in
my pointless task. The struggle itself must be enough to fill my
heart.
So, slowly, I raise my head, peering through the scope of my
rifle at a living being I’m about to remove from this earth for no
other reason than that it has annoyed me. It shifts on its branch
and in that moment I have my shot. I squeeze the trigger and put a
piece of lead through its body.
It is not a clean kill. The rooster drops from the tree,
squawking and thrashing in a hopeless effort to rid itself of the
pain. The hens and chicks scatter. In its panic the rooster runs
toward me, then turns and makes a crippled hopping effort to find
the safety of cover. It drags a wing, dripping blood in the dirt. I
have time to reload and take another shot. I’m rewarded with a
burst of feathers. The rooster’s struggles slow. I fire once more
from close range, an easy shot to the head.
I head back inside, wide awake, and crack a Pacifico before
dawn. The corpse needs to be picked up, but still doesn’t mean
dead, and I have no desire to have a spur slash me open. I drink
the beer, letting the rooster bleed into the dirt. Garbage
pickup is tomorrow so I can skip the drive to the dump.
The corpse gets double bagged and tossed in the trash.