Smoking Ants

It was one of those languid, midsummer days when dungaree pockets were made for skate keys, big, fat pieces of colored chalk, and  a couple of pieces of Bazooka Bubble Gum.  Kids spun in Hula Hoops, fat Robins hopped and paused in the small patches of New York City grass that passed for front lawns, and the smell of red ribbons of caps in Roy Rogers pistols wafted through the air.  Dads mowed lawns, moms hung wash on clotheslines to dry, and the droning hum of a distant Piper Cub dodging woolen clouds in the blue sky set countless imaginations soaring.   Baseball cards clipped on with clothes pins made countless Schwinn’s sound like motorcycles.

Billy MacAfee was the “old man” of our gang—at least a year older than we six-year-olds.  Matches were forbidden us, so Billy held an enthralled court when he made dry leaves smoke with a large, round magnifying glass.  “Hey! Watch this,” said Billy as he turned to face an anthill of soil where workers were busily laboring to push sand grain boulders to the edges of the growing Lilliputian pile.  Billy focused the needle beam of sunlight on one hapless ant that instantly made a small puff of smoke and curled into something resembling a poppy seed.  A chorus of “Wows” rose as the magnifying glass was passed around.  We each took turns frying a half-dozen or so ants before passing the magnifying glass on.


No one noticed my mom, still in her laundry apron leaning down and watching us wreak havoc with the newly arrived soldier ants searching for an unseen attacker picking off the workers.  “What are you all doing?” came the voice that froze us into a huddle.  Billy almost boastfully replied that we were “smoking ants.”  I knew well enough to hope that Billy would continue to draw fire. 

My mom, who I already suspected was a closet Buddhist-Lutheran bent down and picked up the remains of one of the ants.  She took my hand and turned it over.
  

“Take this.” She said as she put the seed-like remains of one of the ants in my palm and closed my hand over it. 

I looked at her. 

“Make it live again.”  Open mouthed, I scanned my small cadre with questioning eyes. 

“I can’t,” I replied. 

“Try,” said mom. 

“I don’t know how.  It’s impossible.” 

“Remember that,” smiled mom as she turned back to hanging bed sheets on the clothesline.

Three decades later, I was driving an old pickup truck through the alpine heights of Colorado with the carcasses of a half-dozen field-dressed Pronghorns partially covered by a tarp.  One of them was mine, my first big game kill.  I had my bead on a young buck, aiming just behind his right ear.  That would kill him instantly.  Suddenly he had turned and appeared to put one big, brown eye directly against mine through the scope. I gulped and jerked the rifle just a tad to the left and knocked the still breathing buck to the ground. I wished I had missed.


I drove the 150-yards to the hyperventilating buck who sat motionless regarding me with two huge, round eyes.  “I’m sorry that I shot you, but I will eat you,” I whispered as I fired another round behind his right ear.  After field dressing my buck, I loaded him in the truck with the others bagged that day in the sage perfumed plains of Wyoming, just outside of Lander and headed for the ranch near Granby, Colorado.


As the truck wound its way though the heavy forest of pines, I cranked up the music on the radio, still pumped with lingering “dear fever.”  The words of the next song crept into my consciousness as the familiar tune tapped on my head.  “…Bless the beasts and the children; Give them shelter from the storm; keep them safe; keep them warm.”  The song continued in Karen Carpenter’s lilting voice and dulcet tones.  The image of somebody’s buck filled the rear-view mirror.  I apologized to my buck repeatedly as I drove deflated to the ranch.  I looked into my buck’s eyes as I hoisted his carcass into the outside shed where the animals would await their trip to the processor.  I apologized once more. I ate a good part of the animal, my first and only hunt.


Now two decades after that, I started raising laying hens in Africa to nurture moms too malnourished themselves to nurse their babies.  Last week a hen died from a broken shell in her oviduct.  The African vet said nothing could be done as she suffered.  Shortly after that she died.  About the same time, another hen somehow injured a leg.  We could not find any injury or broken bone.  She could only eat and drink.  


Here you don’t spend more than a chicken cost to heal it.  After spending a few days watching her eat, drink, and hobble a little, I decided to give her to one of our guards who never seems to have enough to eat.  Knowing her looming fate that night, I recalled the advice of a farmer friend—you don’t name animals you’re going to butcher.  I should have remembered that when we bought the flock with “Baby.”


I was six-years old again.