Up the street from our house in Chula Vista was the high school, and behind the high school was undeveloped land. It was a place of sand and clayey soil, tumbleweed and manzanita, rattlesnakes and rodents and small birds.

This was the early to mid 1960s and we neighborhood kids used that backcountry for our private meeting places and our climb-and-jump activities, and it’s where the boys hunted.

Every household had guns. They were just air rifles and pistols but they could dent a can, put out an eye, mortally wound a small creature. My brothers and the neighbor boys would file out there, followed by pet dogs and sometimes by me with a notebook, and they took aim at whatever flew or scrambled past them.

I hated it. As I recall, they usually tried to find what they shot, the rare times they hit anything, and put it out of its misery. But they never ate what they killed or used it in any way, and they didn’t always find the victim.

Recently I found a poem I composed about it. I called the piece “Vanity,” and dated it July 5, 1965:

Shining feathers ruffle softly
As the bird swoops through the skies,
While the wind is whistling past her,
Singing songs with even sighs.

All below is lulling quiet,
Soft and green and bright from peace.
Nothing harsh or loudly clashing,
Nothing meant to make this cease.

Now the bushes rustle warning –
Next a twig cracks, sharp and clear.
In the clearing stands a hunter.
Unlike others, he brings fear.

Then he scans the land for targets.
Soon he sees the bird above.
He is just a boy with rifle,
Still, he has to get that dove.

She is quite a moving target,
Quite a beauty, is she not?
So he killed to feed his ego,
And left an ugly corpse to rot.