Gun Guys (37 page)

“You need a hunting license; a five-day will cost you forty-eight dollars.”

“What’s the season?”

“Year-round.”

“What’s the bag limit?”

“Ain’t none. Shoot all you want.”

“Males? Females?”

“Take them all, big and small.”

“Wait. Have I reached the Texas Department of Wildlife?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any restrictions on what kind of gun I can use?”

“Nope.”

“Do I have to wear orange?”

“It’s a good idea, but not required.”

“Time of day?”

“Jack them at night with a spotlight for all we care. As long as you shoot a lot of them. What you want to do is take and shoot the sow first. The piglets will stand around for a minute, and you can pick all of them off, too.”

She directed me to an online pamphlet called “The Feral Hog in Texas.” It read less like a wildlife primer than a multicount indictment in a death penalty case. It established straight off that hogs had no business running wild in Texas in the first place. They’d descended from barnyard stock that first escaped from settlers’ pens three hundred years ago. The malevolent DNA of Russian boars, imported for hunting in the 1930s, had seasoned the stock, making them big, mean, and wily.

The result: as many as a million and a half feral hogs rampaging through Texas, growing as big as sofas, tearing up farmland and creek bottoms with their root-rooting snouts. They gobbled up baby lambs and caused car wrecks. They carried pseudorabies, swine brucellosis, tuberculosis, bubonic plague, tularemia, hog cholera, foot-and-mouth disease, kidney worms, stomach worms, liver flukes, trichinosis, roundworms, whipworms, dog ticks, fleas, hog lice, and anthrax. Their tusks were “razor sharp,” the pamphlet said, and their gallop as fast as “lightning.” Lest some shred of sympathy stay my hand from indiscriminate slaughter, the pamphlet threw in the lurid detail that feral sows had been known to eat their own young. No spirit-worshiping, tobacco-rubbing sanctimony here. By the time I finished reading about Texas feral hogs, I was drooling on my shirt and growling, “Lemme at ’em.”

Until the early seventies, a banner hung over Stonewall Street in Casey Gunnels’s hometown:
WELCOME TO GREENVILLE. THE BLACKEST LAND, THE WHITEST PEOPLE
.

“That’s how it was,” he said as he steered his car through town on the way to his grandpa’s land. “I’m not sure if I remember seeing it with my own eyes, or if I just saw pictures and heard stories.” Casey, a twenty-four-year-old high school Spanish teacher, was broad-shouldered, with a substantial belly he’d acquired in college and hadn’t yet gotten around to losing. He had a round face, almond-shaped eyes, and spiky black hair. “People always ask me, ‘You Asian?’ I know there’s Indian or a Mexican back there somewhere,” he said. “That must be it.”

Casey invited me down after we met through
TexasHogHunter.com
, and I figured that as we drove to his family’s hunting cabin, he’d teach me tricks for finding wild swine. Instead he wanted to talk about the Church of Christ, in which he’d been raised, and detail the rigors of a faith that took the Bible literally. No alcohol, no instrumental music in church, and no church suppers—for didn’t Paul ask in Corinthians 11:22, “What? have ye not houses to eat and drink in?”

“We’ll have whiskey at the cabin, don’t worry,” he added with a quick laugh. “I believe the Bible forbids only drunkenness. It’s full of references to wine.”

He lapsed into a pained silence—it was his opinion about alcohol that had set off a recent swivet at church, and I got the impression that one reason he’d brought me down was to process it with someone from outside—an agnostic East Coast Jew seemed to fit that bill. The civil war at church had touched off when he taught his interpretation of the alcohol question to a Sunday school class. The congregation, already divided over whether God used the terms “thee” and “thou” when addressing mere humans, had blown up over Casey’s apostasy. His parents, disgusted by the vitriol of the anti-Casey and pro-thee-and-thou factions, had decamped with half the congregation to another church, many miles away. Casey’s wife, Megan, though—whom he’d known from church since they were four years old—wanted to stay put with
her
parents. Sundays were excruciating. I told him the joke about the lone Jew stranded for years on an island, whose rescuers can’t understand why he’d built two synagogues. “That’s the one I go to,” he tells them. “And that’s the one I
don’t
go to.” Casey laughed and laughed. “That may be the first Jewish joke I’ve ever understood,” he said, wiping his eyes.

As Casey piloted the truck through the rolling East Texas country between Greenville and Cooper, he tried to play the redneck he figured I’d expected. He told me stories about dipping snuff, driving big trucks, and shooting guns, but his heart wasn’t in it. The cantankerous intellectual in him kept rearing its head. The master’s thesis on which he was working posited that football was ruining high school education in Texas, a topic that was likely to get him tarred and feathered. At a gas stop, he took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeve to reveal a big tattoo:
NOT ALL WHO WANDER ARE LOST
, from
Lord of the Rings
. And he kept bringing up Dante’s
Inferno
, which he’d first discovered in ninth grade and devoured. “Being a hell-bound sinner is a big concept in the Church of Christ,” he said.

Casey was a living, breathing exception to the rule laid out in the
Industry Reference Guide:
an enthusiastic young shooter unlikely to lose his firearms ardor. He’d fallen for guns when visiting his Uncle Charles in Amarillo as a little boy. He would disappear for hours into the attic, where he pored over fragrant and tattered back copies of the
American Rifleman, Shooting Times
, and
Guns & Ammo
. Even before he could read, he loved sitting cross-legged on the floor in his short pants, leafing through 1950s ads for Marlin rifles and Colt revolvers. Everything about the shooting world appealed to Casey long before his dad let him hold a gun. Firearms were for serious, virtuous, and technically competent adults of the type Casey wanted to be—like his dad. The men who smiled at him from the pages were rugged and wholesome. The accounts of hunting and target matches were stirring and cinematic. And the guns themselves, rendered in crisp black-and-white photos, were complex, elegant, and manly.

Dad kept a loaded five-shot .38 Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special in the house. He showed little Casey where it was—on top of the bottom pair of blue jeans on Dad’s closet shelf—and while Casey was forbidden to touch it on his own, he had only to tell Dad he wanted to look at it and Dad would stop what he was doing, unload it, and place it in Casey’s small hands. If Casey wanted to shoot it, Dad would take him out behind the barn and let him knock cans off a fence. There was no fear attached to the gun, and no taboo. It was a piece of equipment, like the cream separator or the baler, and Dad was happy to have Casey know how to work it. He drew the line, though, at letting Casey join Grandpa in the ramshackle trailer he kept as a poor man’s hunting cabin. It wasn’t the guns that bothered him; it was the thought of Casey’s young lungs cooped up in that little trailer with the thick miasma of cigarette smoke that followed Grandpa everywhere.

“Grandpa drove a truck for Safeway his whole life, and saved a little bit out of every paycheck to buy land. He had parcels all over,” Casey said as he turned off the highway onto a long dirt road. When, at age eleven, Casey was finally allowed to join his grandpa on a deer hunt, it was like being baptized all over again. They stalked the woods as the sun rose and returned to the trailer for a big breakfast of bacon, eggs, biscuits, sausage gravy, and coffee, which they ate standing outside under a cottonwood. It was Casey’s earliest lesson in what it meant to be a man in Texas: to lean your rifle against a tree at dawn and, in reverent silence, sop gravy from a tin plate with other men.

Casey received a Remington 870 shotgun for his twelfth birthday, then bought with his own money a sporterized 1891 Argentine army Mauser that he used to kill his first white-tailed deer the following year. He waited until ninth grade, though, to buy his first handgun: a stainless-steel Smith & Wesson 686 .357 Magnum revolver. He was too young to buy it himself, but Dad was willing to do the paperwork and buy the gun with Casey’s savings—a violation of the “Don’t Lie for the Other Guy” rule, but hell, this was Texas, and Casey was a responsible boy. Dad imposed no rules on Casey when he handed him the revolver. He didn’t order him to lock it up or shoot it only under adult supervision. A man’s guns were his own business, Dad believed, and caring for them safely was part of what it meant to be an adult in a free country. One day, a kid announced in class that he’d captured a wild hog, and the class decided to barbecue it. Casey brought his .357 to school in his backpack the next day to dispatch the pig, and though it was only a year after the Columbine High School massacre, in Colorado, it didn’t occur to anybody to draw a connection. This was Greenville, Texas, after all—a million miles from places where teenagers misbehaved with guns.

Casey said he saw no contradiction between his love of guns and his love of Jesus. Portraying Jesus as a skinny little pussy was a lie, he felt; a first-century carpenter would have been a big, strong man accustomed to felling trees with an ax, splitting them with a hammer and wedge, and sawing them into boards by hand. Jesus understood the uses of violence; he’d chased the money changers from the temple with a whip, after all, and, according to the Gospel of Luke, he’d told his apostles to prepare to defend themselves. “He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.” Turning the other cheek, Casey was convinced, didn’t mean letting people beat you up; it meant moving into a defense posture.

The cabin stood in a clearing at the end of a muddy driveway—one room, with a sheet-metal roof and, inside, unfinished plywood walls. Casey lent me a lever-action .44 Magnum carbine that his grandpa had given him. It was no longer than my arm; it had a shockingly big bore; and its cartridges were as plump as baby carrots. He shouldered a scoped AR-15. “I’m trying this out,” he said with a sheepish shrug. “I’m still not sure about these things.”

As we stepped outside, Casey inhaled deeply. “Smell them?” he asked, waggling his fingers in front of his nose. “Nothing else smells like that.” I smelled nothing.

The land around Grandpa’s cabin was a lovely expanse of open oak-and-hackberry forest, but the trees were laced with thorny vines that tugged at clothing, at exposed skin, and, I feared, at the exposed triggers of firearms. We hadn’t walked a hundred yards when four dark shapes sizzled through the fallen leaves to our left. My heart burst through the roof of my mouth. By the time I recovered, the monsters were gone.

Casey was in full stalk, crouched forward, gun up, urging me forward with commando hand gestures. He froze and passed me his rifle. “Use this one; they’re about sixty yards out,” he whispered. I raised the scope to my eye, but with all the foliage, I couldn’t find the pigs.

“Come on, come on,
Jesus!
” he whispered as I feverishly tried to place crosshairs on swineflesh. The pigs vanished with nary a rustle. As I handed back the rifle, I expected Casey to unleash that vilest of Texas insults—
For Christ’s sake, you’re hunting like a middle-aged Jewish man from New Jersey!
—but he was a paragon of politesse. “Not a problem, not a problem. I just want to get you one.”

The pigs may have vanished, but their handiwork was everywhere. Great swaths of forest looked stomped by giants, the earth so thoroughly churned that small trees had toppled. “They can tear up a ten-acre cornfield in a single night,” Casey said. “They’ll kill this forest if we let them. My grandmother’s hiring a guy with a helicopter next week to come shoot as many as he can. Last year, he got twenty-four.” He smiled, his round face lighting up like a little boy’s. “I imagine it would take a very long time for
that
to get boring.”

Casey jerked to a halt and pointed at a swishing stand of ragweed canes about fifty yards ahead. A sow and half a dozen hefty piglets emerged, sunlight glinting off their backs. “Nice blond one,” Casey whispered, taking a knee. “I’m going to count ‘one, two, three,’ and we’ll shoot on three.” But there was a tree blocking my shot, and then a tree blocking his. We waited and waited, and finally I landed my sights on a tan flank. I pulled the trigger and up went a squealing like old truck brakes. Pigs exploded in every direction. Casey leapt to his feet, ejecting brass shells into the blue sky
—Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam
!—as a huge, shovel-faced black sow made the fatal mistake of dashing across a clearing to Casey’s left. He followed her with his rifle and shot once. The sow shoulder-rolled beside a big oak and didn’t move again.

All God’s children got wings, but this one also had brush-bristle fur caked in mud and crawling with bugs, jagged three-inch tusks emerging from a ripply grimace of a mouth, and the aroma of a musk-and-feces milk shake.

Of the pig I’d shot, the only sign was a tablespoon of blood on crispy leaves. I began walking in outward concentric circles, searching. “They’re not like deer,” Casey said as he got down on one knee beside his pig. “They’ve got a layer of fat that seals up the wound and makes them hard to track.” I kept at it, loath to let a wounded animal get away, while Casey did something that nobody I knew would dream of doing with a dead deer. He used his dead sow to test ammunition.

Standing over her, he shot several bullets into her flank, then several more, of various types. “Nice,” I heard him say as he dug with a knife through the meat of her hip. “That cheap Russian hollow-point fragmented like I wanted her to!”

I was relieved to find my pig, a young male three feet long, about a hundred yards away, dead of a lung shot. He was proportioned like a smallmouth bass—about one-quarter head—and heavy as a sack of Quik-rete. Casey estimated he was two months old. I’d have gutted, skinned, and hauled him out, but Casey said not to bother. “If you want meat,” he said, “just take the backstraps.”