Near Death Experience

Near Death Experience

It was a warm fall day in early October, a day that I recall quite vividly. The smells of the transition from summer to fall were in the air, accompanied by the sounds of birds singing and the wind blowing through the trees. It was on this beautiful day that my existence was almost terminated. A quick hunting trip could have ended my life.

After school on this day, a friend and I decided to go hunting before our evening basketball practice. I really don't know why we called it hunting, because we didn't have an idea exactly what we were hunting for. We had forty acres of my backyard to do our merciless killing of defenseless animals. We were two ignorant kids with semi-automatic and lever-action .22 caliber rifles. As we strolled into the woods to see what terror we could create for the creatures of the forest, we noticed a large abundance of squirrels. They seemed to be dancing around as if they were gathering there before us in groups--laughing at us, begging us to shoot them. We had to keep walking, for we were still too close to the neighboring houses to be shooting these rifles. So we trudged along, occasionally commenting on how the leaves crunching beneath our feet would scare off the squirrels, as if we were some fierce snipers in desperate need of stealth.

At last we made it to an area far enough from the houses. My friend was the one with the semi-automatic, and he immediately started unloading his clip on everything in sight. The sound of the bullets being propelled from the barrel echoed throughout the woods. After his barrage of shots, I noticed a large oak tree with squirrels in it. Immediately we ran to the tree, firing our guns as if we both were in an infantry fighting a battle. One, two, three squirrels were dropped out of the tree by our deadeye-aimed shots. As we gazed over the dead corpses, we contemplated the need to shoot these animals for no obvious reason. Was it our insatiable compulsion to shoot the guns or a morbid goal to shoot the squirrels on the run? Apparently it was an odd mixture of both cases. As guilty as we might have felt for shooting them, we searched for more life to murder.

Soon enough, however, we seemed to become bored with our adventure and decided that our excitement for the day had ended, so we began our short journey back to my house. On the way back, we stopped briefly by the tree that supplied the three squirrels we killed previously. I then continued walking, but my friend had noticed a squirrel clinging to the trunk