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up in the suburbs. We had a family dog and got our meat from the supermarket a mile or so from our house. The closest I had ever been to a pheasant was seeing Funk’s G seed signs on the ends of cornrows when driving out to visit my grandmother near Mason City. We had a clock in our basement, a wooden clock with the Funk’s G logo on it, and burned into the face was the image of three pheasant rising from a row of corn.
    Understanding this, you can probably guess what an anxious afternoon that was, walking through a cornfield. Every step tightened my intestines, every footfall shrunk my sphincter. I wanted to leave and go back to the car, but I was afraid that, if I did, Uncle Mark might mistake me for a deer and blow me away. He wouldn’t have, of course, but I was young and my youthful imagination often got the best of me, so I pictured my family standing around my lifeless carcass, staring curiously at my body and then silently and collectively coming to the conclusion that, “Well, it would be a shame to let this meat go to waste . . .”
    My second experience hunting was around the same time, perhaps even on the same trip. Dad and Uncle Mark colluded and decided it was time for me to go deer hunting. I don’t remember being excited, but I wasn’t opposed to the idea. Not at first, anyway. Mark and I got bundled up into thirty-five layers of clothes and drove to a nearby wood abutting a cement plant, where we ensconced ourselves atop a ridge looking down through trees to a shallow ravine.
    â€œGreat,” I said. “What’s next?”
    â€œNext,” Mark said, after giving me instructions on where and when to shoot a deer, “we wait.”
    And so we did. For what felt like hours. We waited as the sun began to go down in the winter sky and the woods took on a cool, gray look. We waited, sitting on the hard ground in zero-degree temperatures. We waited and waited, then waited some more until it got dark, too dark to hunt, and time to go home. When we got back to my grandmother’s house, my dad asked how I liked deer hunting and, though my opinion on the sport had been murky prior to going out with Mark, it had begun to crystallize after. “It sucks,” I said. “I don’t ever want to do that again.”
    And so it was. I was never again invited and never asked to be.
    My third experience hunting was significantly more recent. I was in my late twenties and already a father. I was visiting my folks in Cleveland for a weekend. Dad told me he had been asked by a client to go pheasant hunting at a private club twenty minutes away. He took me and my little brother, Kosta, with him. I don’t want to take away from the experience—especially because I did actually get three or four birds—but this club was the perfect combination of country club and petting zoo. There was a clubhouse, complete with requisite mounted animals and card tables, a bar, and photos of victorious men bearing arms.
    The pheasant were kept in a pen, a low-ceiling chicken-wire circus tent. You tell the man at the front desk how many birds you’d like to shoot, a transaction is made, and you are given a field assignment. While you, the hunter, are sorting out your gear and, perhaps, enjoying a drink from the bar, workers from the club place your prepurchased birds in the field. I can’t be sure, but I suspect this involves dosing the pheasant with adult-sized portions of NyQuil, then laying them among the scrub grass of the football-field-sized hunting lanes. Then, mighty hunter, you go out and wake the birds enough for them to jump in the air and, following a deft maneuver with your shotgun, die. It was not perhaps the most sporting of efforts, but I did manage to get a few birds, all of which were defeathered and prepared by the same club staff that placed them in the field while I toasted with a posthunt beer.
    Those were my experiences with hunting to this