FIRST BLOOD

First Blood

     As a kid I loved Indians. It started with some illustrated books in the school library. One book about the Iroquois tribes became especially totemic for me. There were earth-toned renderings of the insides of longhouses, with sleeping platforms of poles lashed together with sinew and piled with robes of animal skins, with the space and the duskyskinned people and the implements of their lives - the beaded moccasins, the deerskin leggings, the obsidian knives, the stout bows and hide quivers of feathered arrows - lit only, but magically, by firelight. I began to live in a fantasy world. I wanted to wear those skins, carry those weapons, live in a space as richly textured, as warm, as right as the interiors of those longhouses. I wanted to be one of those people.
     I saved the cardboard cards out of Nabisco Shredded Wheat boxes, the ones that separated the layers of biscuits. Each card had instructions from the comic-book character Straight Arrow on how to make some kind of Indian artifact: how to lash on a flint arrowhead, or how to carve a spearhead out of wood and harden it in fire.
     I made my own bow out of a seasoned branch and some heavy string, and it worked pretty well. Arrows were a different matter. I searched every tree in my life - there weren't many, there in the project - but couldn't come up with a single stick straight enough to fly at all true.
     I saved my allowance and collected pop and beer bottles till finally I could afford a storebought arrow. I shot and shot. I got to where I could hit with some regularity a pretty small target, if it wasn't too far away.

     One day I took my bow and arrow outside and started for the end of our building, to shoot in the sagebrush out along the railroad tracks. I saw a robin hopping on the grass in our yard. It was hopping away from me with its head down, absorbed with whatever it was trying to catch to eat. I stalked it from behind. It never saw me. I got close enough, aimed, let fly. The robin screamed, a sound I had never heard a robin make, and ran clumsily along the grass, dragging the arrow which had entered its ass, right under the tail. It screamed and ran, wobbling desperately until the arrow dropped out on the grass. The robin hopped and finally flew weakly out of sight. My heart pounded; I felt blood pulsing in my throat and head. I didn't understand what had happened. I didn't understand why I had shot at the robin - people didn't eat robins - or why I had hit it, or why it didn't die, or what I would have done if it had died.