It’s early morning on Freedom Hill. The sun is just rising, the sky is clear and the heavy frost glistens on the grass, a cold but enchanted world. The air is still for a change, the only sounds the soft crackling of the fire and the steady thumping of the axe as the day’s firewood is chopped in the still, early silence of the new day. These are natural and comforting sounds, the kind of sounds that speak of home and hearth, the kind of sounds that make you feel as if all is well with the world.
It is a tableau that makes you want to breathe the sharp, clean day deep into your lungs and spread your arms in worship and gladness, where the forest beckons you to wander amidst its towering giants, immersing yourself in the slowly awakening woods, absorbing and being absorbed by the raw, life-inspiring beauty and peace of the natural world.
But then another, less homey sound shatters the scene and splinters the primal magic of the morning. The reverie is lost as a gunshot rings out over the wildwood, waking the forest abruptly and putting an end to a fragile and rare moment. The world hangs motionless for an interminable few seconds, as do I in midstride, and then the birds flare up from the trees as another shot echoes, signalling another end.
There is nothing surreal about the stalker with the gun, and I have images of the frightened, wounded, dying beast pleading with its eyes as the hunter finishes it off with savage glee, his own heart racing with another, less empathic emotion than my own. I have a moment of savagery myself then, wanting to turn the hunter into the hunted to see how he likes the feeling of surprise and terror, to watch his eyes as he stares, helpless, down the length of his own, unnatural death.
But there is nothing I can do to change this reality, nothing I can do to prevent my neighbour’s killing for the sheer joy of it, nothing I can do reverse the moment, to bring back the magic or the life that has been lost.
I dare not venture out now; it is not safe to walk with nature this day, and so I turn my steps toward the house once more with a heavier heart, carrying there the sad, burdening truth that escapes the shooter—that man will win…and lose…in the end.