The cacophony raised by the
flock of sparrows drowned all other trivial sounds. The birds were busy
pecking at the grain, oblivious to everything, even to the boy sneaking
up on them. The boy had eyes only for the birds, tensed as he moved with
infinite patience to get within range of the birds.
There was a strange look of grim determination on the boy’s young face,
finding the right spot, he stealthily armed his slingshot and froze,
eyes scanning the flock for a target, an arm drawn back to stretch the
slingshot to its limit, he let fly the stone. The whirring sound of the
slingshot alerted the sparrows as they took off. One flew right in the
path of the stone, a burst of feathers and the sparrow crashed to the
ground, thrashed for a while and lay dead.
The boy grunted in satisfaction, glanced at the dead bird and walked
away, he never went near his kill. The thrill and the joy of the hunt
didn’t last long, he was soon caught up in other activities and totally
forgot about the kill he had made, but then it was nothing new to him.
He knew he was an expert with that slingshot and had snuffed out many a
sparrow before its rightful time. He was considered the best shot among
his peers, cruelty, pain, death were not factors which were considered,
seven year olds do not think much on those lines. What mattered was how
many birds one had killed.
The boy was very possessive about his slingshot, he had made it out from
the strongest fork he could find and had spent hours scouring the
garages for the right kind of rubber strips. He even went to the extent
of creating small mud balls and drying them out in the sun, so when he
shot with them they would be lethal as they burst on impact showering
their shrapnel. Oh yes!!!! He took great pains to be good at that,
practicing hours on end shooting at fence posts from 20 yards.
It was evening that day, the boy walked cockily about, with the
slingshot strung around his neck, scanning for something to shoot. He
froze. Within 10 paces was a squirrel foraging in the grass. The boy had
never managed to shoot a squirrel before, they were too fast and alert
for him, and this was like a gift had been delivered to him at his
doorstep. It was all over in a moment. The mud ball flew like a bullet,
hit in front of the squirrel and burst like a mortar shell and the
squirrel lay writhing in agony and bloody.
A deep gash had opened up on its head by a splinter. The boy gave a
shout of glee as he rushed to that squirrel he had brought down, he had
at last bagged a squirrel. Bending down as he picked up the thrashing
animal, something strange happened, maybe the squirrel in his death
throes reached out to him. Maybe the tiny paws with their tiny nails as
they dug in the boy’s small hands communicated the pain. The boy didn’t
know what happened but all he could feel was that he had done something
terribly wrong, something nobody would punish him for but still it was a
feeling of deep pain as if somebody had hit him hard and the pain was
unbearable.
Clutching the furry bundle in his hands, he ran home to his father and
burst out crying ‘Daddy, save it, I am sorry, please make him live ’.
The father looked at the boy and at the tears streaming down the face
and sadly shook his head ‘Son, I wish I could do that, but its dead, its
dead’ ‘but Daddy, YOU can do anything, you CAN, I promise I wont ask for
anything else again’ blubbered the boy wiping his tears. The father
hugged his son and in a soft voice said ‘Son, in my wild days I too used
to hunt for sport and one day I shot this deer and I looked into its
soft brown eyes as it died. I gave up hunting after that. It took me a
long time but you are lucky you have seen it when you are just 7 years
old. You have felt the pain and suffering of the animal you have killed,
felt a life ebbing from a body. Son, in a way I am glad that you are
hurt and in pain, cry if it makes you feel better, cry for yourself and
that tiny dead squirrel in your hands. Now you will truly know that you
have no right to destroy something that you cannot create.
Small hands patted the loose earth back into place on the mound. A pearl
of a tear was wiped by the back of a hand, another fell on the mound of
earth.
A broken voice murmured – I have destroyed what I had created … and
there buried in the earth lay a tiny, curled up dead squirrel and a
broken slingshot.
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